Since coming back from my holidays, I have struggled with barred puzzles, and this continued with this Mephisto, which I spent ages on. I don’t think it should have taken me so long to finish it, but it did.
Actually, I didn’t complete it. There are two (or three) clues I haven’t solved yet, and a few others where I can’t work out the wordplay. Sorry!
ACROSS
1 SUBNIVEAL – (abuse in vl)* (A ball (A & O) dropped from Oval) – SUBNIVEAL means beneath the snow
11 PAN-DOWDY – in the US, a PANDOWDY is a deep-filled apple-pie
12 M-ONDEGREEN – (homophone of ON DE (for the) GREEN) – a (sometimes) hilarious misquoted song lyric (for example, in Bad Moon Rising, “There’s a bathroom on the right” instead of “There’s a bad moon on the rise”)
15 ?TON? – haven’t a clue – ATONE?
17 RULE-RING
18 CHI(c)K – not keen on “a bit of cord” for C; a CHIK (or chick) is a bamboo hanging door-screen
19 (d)O-BIT
20 S(EAC(h))-UNNY – a lascar sailor
25 PROMO – I can see “encouragement”, but haven’t a clue thereafter
26 EREMETIC – and again, I can see some of it, but not all
27 TR(AVERT)INE – TRINE is an obscure word meaning “to go”, and TRAVERTINE is a limestone deposit
28 GA(MINES)S – MINES as in “bombs”
29 (h)OLM
30 TORT-URERS – not sure about the wordplay of URERS
DOWN
1 S?M??R – dunno, sorry
2 BAND-0-LINE
3 NA(DEN)E – NA-DENE describes a range of Native American languages
4 V-A-G-ARIES
6 LOESS – (loses)*
8 EDUTAINMENT – (innumerate student – tuner)* – I need to lose the S of student as well but don’t know how
9 R(eall)Y-PECK – a pole for mooring a punt
10 CON-TUB(e)-ERNAL (learn)* – a china (mate) offers companionship, but a China doesn’t (the capitalisation doesn’t work in this clue, in my opinion)
14 ICHNOLITE – (Neolithic)*
16 SNARIEST (or is it SNAKIEST?)
18 OVER-GO
21 URETER (RE in (true)*
22 YOKELS – (olk yes)* – “rustic” is doing double duty here
23 A(MR)IT – sacred sweetened water used in Sikh baptisms
24 PIANO (roll)
1dn is SUMMER, being SLUMMER without the L (no end of hell). One of the meanings of summer in Chambers is “a year (poetic)”.
26ac is actually EREM,ITAL – MERE (rev) is a Maori war-club.
Then 16dn is A,NAP,AES,T – the wordplay something like T=it, after (SEA,PAN,A=absent) all rev.
25ac – I think this is PRO=for, MO=half of mogs. Didn’t like the definition of this one. PROMO is short for promotion, which can mean encouragement, but promo itself is only ever used to mean a promotional video etc.
8dn – I think the anagram is formed from (innumerate student – s tuner), the s being short for is. Only thing I can think of that works…
30ac is TORT,URE,RS – ure can mean practice, RS is S(i)R reversed.
Nasty puzzle, this. Took me well over an hour too, with Chambers and Bradford’s used from the beginning.