Saturday Times 24825 (16th April) – Times for The Times

Solving time 14:04 – not a particularly difficult puzzle, but great fun to solve. My one complaint is that there were too many double/cryptic definitions. Some of the others more than made up for that though, with special mentions for 12, 21, 25, 27, 4 and 13D.

Across
1	ESTATE CAR – RACE reversed around STATE.
6	GORGE – double definition.
9	COUNTER – triple definition. Chip / against / (the) bar.
10	BROWSER – another double definition, surfing of the electronic kind.
11	LOOSE – 0 inside LOSE. One of my biggest annoyances is when people write LOOSE when they mean LOSE. Probably the most common misspelling in the English language.
12	LYONNAISE – L(iver) + (is anyone)*. Definition is just “with onions?”, with “going to order” as the anagram indicator. Great clue.
13	SUSPENSE – PENS inside USE after S(hilling).
14	KNOT – cryptic definition. A granny bond used to be an index-linked National Savings certificate that was only available to the over-50’s.
17	MILK – double definition.
18	TAXONOMY – TAX ON O.M. (Order of Merit) + (disma)Y.
21	FLUMMOXED – FED (given bottle) around LUMMOX (dummy). Definiton is “thrown”, i.e. perplexed.
22	FOLIO – OIL + OF all reversed.
24	NIRVANA – IRAN around V(ery), all inside N(orth) A(merica).
25	NOTATES – NATES (behind) around O.T. (books). “So writes music” = “makes notes” = NOTATES. Ho ho! NATES is the anatomical name for the buttocks – comes up occasionally in crosswords, so worth making a note of (pun intended).
26	LUCRE – C(ooks) inside LURE (carrot).
27	LOONINESS – NINES (figures) inside LOOS (ladies and gentlemen).

Down
1	EXCEL – EEL around X (ten) + C(aught).
2	TOULOUSE-LAUTREC – TO + [OUSEL (a bird) inside (a culture)*]. I saw “artist” and (8-7) and stuck him straight in. Wordplay worked out later.
3	TETHERED – THE RED underneath T(re)E.
4	CARELESS – CARLESS (having to walk) around E(ast).
5	RIBBON – RIB + BON(e). A bit unsatisfactory to have a particular bone followed by the word bone minus its last letter. Easy enough to solve though.
6	GROUND – ROUND (generous) supporting G(ood).
7	RUSSIAN ROULETTE – cryptic definition. “Quick” as in “alive”, as the losers would be dead!
8	EARNESTLY – EARLY (primitive) around NEST (home).
13	SEMIFINAL – (Families)* around (televisio)N.
15	FANDANGO – [FAN (cool) around AND] + GO (energy).
16	CONFETTI – cryptic definition.
19	IMPALE – I’M PALE.
20	OXTAIL – (f)OX TAIL.
23	OASIS – OA(p) + SIS.

4 comments on “Saturday Times 24825 (16th April)”

45 minutes, so quite straightforward for a Saturday puzzle. 3 and 9 were the last to go in, for some reason.

62′, with too much time taken to realize, say, that 12ac and 13d were anagrams. 12 was especially clever, with the anagram indicator being so straightforward (‘order’) yet hard to spot, like Poe’s purloined letter. Never heard of a granny bond, but it had to be KNOT, so I didn’t give much thought to it. 3d was one of those that the enumeration almost gives away; ‘artist’, ‘a culture…promiscuous’, I didn’t look for the bird until afterward. As linxit says, there were a lot of good clues. And none of them iffy; I ought to have been quicker.

I can’t understand why this took me almost an hour to complete. I did it in dribs and drabs on Sunday while clearing up after a party. Maybe I was distracted by the piles of washing-up. Anyway, there were a lot of nice surfaces. I particularly liked the quick winners at 7d, the granny bond at 14a and the clever anagram at 12a. There was much to savour here, with or without the onions!

10:29 here – exactly the same as for last Saturday’s puzzle, so at least I’m consistent, if not particularly fast. Nice puzzle.

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