Championship 2015, Preliminary Two, Puzzle one – cogito, cogito…

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Possibly because I was trying to do all three of this set of Qualifying puzzles in pseudo-exam conditions within a timeframe, I found this a bit of a slog; not especially difficult but with plenty of wordplay and not a lot of joy.
It took me too long – 30 minutes – although now I come to explain it, I can’t see why. Even if you don’t know your Persian kings, play bridge or read Orwell, you can fill in the blanks.

Across
1 DILEMMAS – (MISLED)*, anagrind ‘doctor’, around MA (old lady); D problems.
5 WEASEL – W(estern), EASEL (piece of studio equipment); D sly character.
9 GAG – Cryptic double definition.
10 DECLARATION – (A CERTAIN OLD)*, D profession.
12 SECULARITY – SECURITY (protection) around LA (US city); D lay state.
13 YAWL – WAY = practice, reversed YAW; L; D sailing boat.
15 ALPACA – ALP A = mountain area; insert A C(ape); D &lit.
16 BEACHED – EACH = a head, per person; inside BED = retirement; D like a fish out of water.
18 CONCERN – C = about, RN = service; insert ONCE = previously; D worry.
20 CHATTY – CATTY = spiteful, around H(usband); D prone to gossip.
23 LUTE – Alternate letters of L o U d T h E; D instrument that minstrel played.
24 REVELATORY – REVEL (party) TORY (politician), ‘pen’ i.e. insert A, D spilling the beans.
26 DOUBLETHINK – (KEY UNLIKE BOTH)*, anagrind ‘Brahms and Lizst’; D irrational inconsistency. Originally from Orwell’s 1984. The first time I’ve seen B & L as an anagram indicator, amusing CRS but possibly not to everyone’s taste.
27 OAR – Remove first letters (heads off) of (T)O (W)AR; D member of crew, chap in rowing eight.
28 DEPICT – Hidden word in CELEBRATE(D EPIC T)HEATRICAL; D show.
29 FLANDERS – Double definition; Moll Flanders, 18c heroine, and region of Belgium.
Down
1 DIGEST – ID EST = that is, ‘partly written up’ = DI EST, insert G: D summary.
2 LOGICAL – Insert serving American = GI into LOCAL = pub; D reasonable.
3 MIDDLE AGES – DD = dukes, insert in MILEAGES = figures on clocks; D historical period.
4 ASCERTAINMENT – AS CERTAIN MEN = when particular people; T = fight at the end; D determination.
6 EXAM – EX A.M. could be ‘from the morning’ so ‘current P.M.’ is not so; D testing situation.
7 SPINACH – S(mall), PINCH = amount of salt; insert A: D vegetable.
8 LANDLADY – LY = extremes of luxury; insert AND LAD for youth; D renter.
11 ANTIBACTERIAL – AN, somewhat = A BIT, reversed = TIBA, (ARTICLE)*: D averting complaint.
14 BANANA SKIN – BANANAS KIN is crazy family; fall down on the banana skin.
17 OCCLUDED – (ODD C CLUE)*; D stopped.
19 NO TRUMP – Clue for those of us who play bridge. EDIT see explanation for jackkt below if you are none the wiser.
21 TWOSOME – Sounds like ‘too, sum’, for also (a) problem. D couple.
22 CYPRUS – Insert P (quietly) into CYRUS (Persian king); D ancient Greek colony.
25 BLOC – Initial letters of B eing L eft O f C entre; D political alliance.

48 comments on “Championship 2015, Preliminary Two, Puzzle one – cogito, cogito…”

  1. I found this seriously hard and managed an epic fail, never even getting ANTIBACTERIAL before resorting to aids after the hour.

    Edited at 2015-11-25 07:02 am (UTC)

  2. A bit of a slog but I completed it in 48 minutes without resorting to aids. I know this would also be an epic fail in competition terms but that’s not what I do crosswords for so I was not unpleased with my effort. Pip, would you care to explain 19dn in more detail for non-bridge players?

    Edited at 2015-11-25 07:21 am (UTC)

    1. The clue is written as if it is about football, but it is about bridge, or whist. The top card played wins the trick, unless someone has none of that suit and can then play a trump – a card of another suit designated as trumps for that hand. Except when the contract is “no trumps”, when the highest card always wins. It sounds more complicated than it is!
          1. The variant on these games which is most popularly played in Australia. Although until your question prompted a trip to Google-town, I just assumed it was played everywhere.

            Haven’t played it for ages myself. Must organise a card night.


  3. Almost the same story here – over an hour – with 12 ac initially biffed in as SACRAMENTO which held things up alarmingly!

    LOI 24 ac REVELATORY.

    Looking back on it SW corner just wasn’t difficult but I made it
    so.

    COD 19dn NO TRUMP

    horryd Shanghai

  4. So once again I should be just started on my third one as the cleaners start stacking up the chairs.

    Probably five minutes at the end staring at the checkers before I got REVELATORY.

    Good fun though. Thanks setter and Pip.

  5. Bearing in mind the comments so far, I’m seriously pleased at coming in at 35 minutes. Nevertheless, proof again that I’m not going to worry the championships quite yet.
    Only one temporary slip: DOUBLESPEAK as I didn’t spot the anagram or anagrind but getting 11d made me think again (doublethink?).
    Also I made heavy weather of 19d trying to justify NOT RUMP. I’m still convinced I’m missing something other than it just being a tortuous cryptic definition.

    Edited at 2015-11-25 07:54 am (UTC)

  6. Toughie, but all done and dusted in about 50mins, finishing with SE corner (CYPRUS was LOI due to lack of any historical gk, just after FLANDERS).

    DECLARATION took ages to see… good misdirection of ‘profession’ there. Same with ‘determination’ at 4d. Couldn’t parse BEACHED (how could ‘a head’ = ‘a Che’? I guess he was head of the revolution…doh!). Needed to alphabet-trawl to get YAWL.

  7. I did all three of the 2nd preliminary puzzles under ‘test’ conditions on Sunday afternoon. I had the opposite experience to all of the commenters so far in that I found this one the easiest of the three and completed it in 6 minutes before moving on to the other two. I did finish all three in about 48 minutes so for me the 2nd preliminary puzzles were definitely the harder set.
  8. 15:20 … Went down the same false trail as deezzaa with ‘doublespeak’.

    ANTIBACTERIAL was last in and for a while induced a kind of mental short circuit that was determined to get me to ‘antibiotic’.

    DECLARATION probably the pick of the bunch, and a tricky definition to spot.

  10. A very pleasant puzzle that was interesting, required thought, but was never really taxing. I have no doodles on my piece of paper indicating a clean solve with no queries

    I’m not usually a fan of cryptic definitions but 19D is an exception – beautifully misleading

    1. 19dn was only misleading for me when it came to parsing after the event because I didn’t have the required knowledge to unravel it. However I biffed NO TRUMP (an expression I knew without fully understanding its meaning) on the basis of N? T????(2,5) and the word ‘card’ in the clue, so it didn’t delay my solving it even for a moment.
      1. Such revelations must break a setter’s heart!

        Do you understand it now following Pip’s note or would you like further explanation?

        1. Thanks for offering, but I’ve got the gist of it. I shall learn its every detail if ever I get round to playing bridge, which is most unlikely now I’d say. Actually I’ve trained myself to avoid surface readings altogether, at least when initially approaching a clue, and focus on key words such as may be definitions or indicators. This could be why my solving times have hardly improved over the past 8 years of course!

          Edited at 2015-11-25 11:31 am (UTC)

  11. I think this certainly felt as hard as the hardest puzzle in the first set of three, and definitely had a sort of championship feel to it – not too many write-ins, but nothing that couldn’t be worked out by careful analysis (even if it occasionally took a while). My main hold-up was thinking of entirely the wrong sort of studio, and trying to find a place for a REEL or a MIC or similar.
  12. 25 min with several not properly parsed – e.g. at 16ac, couldn’t see how ‘head’ -> ‘ache’ could work, and didn’t see the anagrammatic part of 25ac. Although I could biff 19dn in from enumeration and a couple of checkers, I couldn’t see why the card had to be red rather than black – it was only on coming here that I saw that was put in to make one think about football, which I avoid unless necessary.

    Edited at 2015-11-25 11:03 am (UTC)

  13. 24:22… which I’m quite pleased with after seeing the comments. I found the long words (i.e. 4d, 11d, 10a and 26a) a bit tricky so didn’t get any quick checkers from them. A good test, I thought. 14d my favourite…. I was glad not to step on any – e.g. I managed to avoid bunging in PRECIS for 1d or SPARTA for 22d.
  14. It all seems like a long time ago now, even though it really wasn’t! I don’t remember this one posing *too* many problems on the day – it was the second one that I found the hardest, unless I’m getting confused with the grand final puzzles…
  15. I feel bad about submitting my revisit of that to the leaderboard now. Have I made a grotesque breach of Times Crossword Club etiquette? Probably.
    1. Just make sure you’re wearing your Crossword Club buttons and epaulettes on the 5th, and I’m sure someone will remember to bring a pair of scissors.
  16. I started off thinking how easy this was, entering several of the answers to the early acrosses and downs in a few minutes, but as I worked down I found it became harder. I spent ages on 26a, then 16a. The NE was the last area to be completed after 42 minutes rather than the hoped-for 25.
  17. This was the one I tackled second on the day itself, having started with puzzle two. In fact, the order I took them on was also the order of difficulty as I found them, and I took a while on DIGEST and SECULARITY in the top left corner. YAWL was my LOI, I think, having trawled the alphabet.
    Overall, somewhere over 15 minutes for this one, I think.
  18. I struggled with this, but persevered and completed in a little more than the total allowed time for all three puzzles – it will be a while before I have a crack at the Championship!!

    My parsing for 13 was different and plain wrong I now see. I read YAW as ‘turned’, ignoring the obvious differences in tense and the redundant ‘in practice’, but at least I arrived at the correct answer, even if it was for the wrong reasons.

  19. Good lord! Either blind luck or an alignment of wavelengths got me through this one in a whisker under 30min without too much effort. I’m usually one of the slower solvers here, so I wasn’t expecting so many to have found this one tough. No doubt the next one will have its revenge on me.
  20. Tricky little fellow this. 24:28 which wouldnt have left me much time fot the other two. Whilst I’m still at death’s door with the lurgy I had to tackle this in two sessions to catch a train and the bits I thought I was going to be stuck on fell into place after the enforced break.
  21. All I have to say is that on successive Wednesday’s at this time of year I get happier and happier that my times are too slow and my error rate is too high for me to ever consider trying to compete in the Championships.
  22. Found it much easier second time around, of course, having seen it at the Championships (when I didn’t finish…..)
  23. About 15 minutes to go through this one, ending with EXAM. Not too much in the way of hold ups, but I biffed ANTI… without stopping to parse it fully. Everything else was OK, though I didn’t think too hard about NO TRUMP either. Perhaps a new campaign slogan over here. Regards.
    1. Like it, Kevin. Europe cringes at the idea, we elect some tulips but nothing on this scale of worldly unwise tulip-ness.
  24. 17 mins. I was slow to see some of the longer answers, although my LOI was actually EXAM after WEASEL.

    Pip – I parsed LANDLADY as L AND Y with LAD inside.

  25. I found this the easiest of the three puzzles on the day, and remember glancing up as I finished to see that 12 minutes had passed. I was a bit worried about YAWL but the wordplay seemed clear and the word sounded vaguely like a boaty thing.
  26. Please can someone explain the Brahms/liszt reference in 26A. I do not begin to understand it.
    1. It’s rather convoluted I’m afraid: “Brahms and Liszt” is Cockney rhyming slang for drunk (I hope I don’t have to spell out exactly what it stands for!) – so this indicates that the letters are also “drunk”, i.e. reeling around.
      Hope this helps
  27. 35m so pleased to pass the test if in a slowish time. Also had .. SPEAK for a while and 11d my LOI as a result – some biffing but mostly understood as I went along. Good puzzle and blog. Thanks, Pip.

    Edited at 2015-11-25 09:47 pm (UTC)

  29. Pleased to get this one right after a debacle yesterday. Glad to see that my completion time wasn’t too dusty, especially as I was listening to a pretty dire football game on the radio as I was solving. I confess to a little biffing on the way, to save time, including ‘no trumps’, an expression I knew – though not its exact meaning – despite a deep loathing of card games.
  30. 10:20 for me, taking simply ages to get going, and then doing a fair amount of biffing along the way.

    19dn was a case in point, since I spotted the bridge reference straight away, but couldn’t see how on earth to derive NO TRUMP from the wordplay and so (with no checked letters in place) moved swiftly on. When I reached it again, the checked letters made NO TRUMP a certainty and I biffed it, but it was a long while after I’d finished before I realised that you were supposed to read the clue as if it referred to soccer and then discover the bridge reference as a cryptic definition. (Doh!)

  31. Apologies if someone has mentioned already, but KEY is no part of anagrist, just represents the ‘D’
    Dennis
  32. This appeared as an anagram indicator a year or so back. I remember because I needed it explained then, and some kind person put me right.
  33. 3dn is I think wrong. The Middle Ages was a historical period, not really a historic period. Not that this made much difference to me. I found this very difficult and am glad I didn’t embarrass myself by entering the championship. Still don’t understand 6dn: surely if it’s ex AM it’s now PM. So why ‘not so’? And 19dn is still rather a closed book to this non-bridge player.

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