Category: Daily Cryptic

A quirky offering for the start of the working week, and one which was rather more tricky than your average Monday, I think.

I would guess that anybody getting the 1s, 4ac, and 23dn immediately, then relying on checkers to speed things along as I did, will have found this on the gentler side.

  Another short-sighted typo marred my 24.27, which didn’t feel that long and will probably prove to be slower than it should have been. I have the impression of a puzzle with an almost comprehensive … Read more “28750 Blow winds and crack your cheeks”

The 112 of you who entered the Championship (and managed to get there in spite of storm Babet) will recognise this one as the first puzzle of the three in the heat.

The bottom half flew in but I struggled more in the top half.

I thought this was going to be difficult, as I only got four or five across answers on my first run-through, but the downs proved much easier, and I found a lot of gimmes.

DNF. I did well here. Fell asleep at one point, woke up re-energized and finished all but one. Lots of clever clueing here and tasty answers. In the end, I was stumped by a clue where I knew neither the definition nor a relevant piece of wordplay.

Time taken – 6:07. I must be having a good day or the setter wrote this one just for me, since my time appears to be a lot better than solvers who are usually much … Read more “Times 28744 – Whoops”

Nothing too stretchy in this offering, shorter on anagrams than the usual fare.

57 minutes with ages spent at the end on 16dn and 22ac.