Category: Daily Cryptic

A slight tweak for the new year, with the blog being posted at 8am UK-time, following a recent e-conclave of bloggers. A few reasons for this – actually  a reversion to the days when I … Read more “Times 28801 – Happy New Year!”

I’m glad for another on the gentler side for Friday, as I’m fighting a cold and not in the mood for thinking too hard. Lots of witty clues, but I really liked 17ac.

  Not that difficult until I froze with my last three in the Kent area, pushing up my time by a good 5 minutes to 16.35. 22d could really only be one answer, but I … Read more “28798 Arsenic ’as as many as you could want”

The third and last of the semi-final puzzles from the TCC in October, and in my view the easiest.

I found this mostly straightforward but I lost time over the Scottish team.

This was a relatively mild crossword for skilled solvers, but there were a few I had to think about.    Fortunately, I have the skill to handle words I never heard of, whether in the definition, the cryptic, or the answer.

23:15. This was a very fine puzzle, with some real head-scratchers for me. I feel I was at a definite disadvantage being from the US, so I’m interested to hear how you all got on.

Time taken: 10:06. I thought I was going to race through this one, but it turned out that the answers I did not see immediately took a fair bit of sorting out. Checking the early … Read more “Times 28792 – A Shropshire Lad”

The second of the TCC semi-final puzzles, and I didn’t find it as hard as I’d expected, although there were two rather clumsy unknown words I had to construct and guess were correct.

I would  have finished this well within my target half-hour but for the fruit at 13ac which added a good 6 or 7 minutes to my solving time.