Saturday Times 24903 (16th July)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 12:29. Starts off with a geography lesson, then we get a whole load of double and/or punning definitions in the middle. Quite enjoyable – BULLDOZER brought a smile – but a bit on the easy side for a Saturday.

Across
1 HERMIT CRAB – (birth came)* around (Septembe)R.
7 WICK – double definition. Wick is in the far north of Scotland, just a few miles south of John O’Groats.
9 BRIGHTON – BRIGHT (smart) + ON (working). Now all the way down to the south coast!
10 LITTER – double definition.
11 ALBANY – A LB + ANY, capital of New York State.
13 OLD FRUIT – OLD (rotten) + FRUIT (apple, perhaps). How you might be greeted by Bertie Wooster.
14 ON THE HORIZON – double definition.
17 OFF THE RECORD – double definition.
20 SICILIAN – CILIA (a number of lashes) inside SIN.
21 SINEWY – IS reversed + NEW (improved) + (therap)Y.
22 ASPIRE – A SPIRE
23 ARTESIAN – (isn’t area)*. A type of well.
25 TALC – alternate letters of “Tea, black”.
26 SHEARWATER – SW(e)ATER (top with 3rd letter removed) around HEAR (try). This one has to take the prize for trickiest wordplay!

Down
2 EUROLAND – O (nothing) inside (rule)* + AND (with). New word for me – I’d heard of Eurozone (and stuck it in from the definition at first) but then had to work this out from the wordplay.
3 MUG – double definition.
4 TATTY – TAY (banker=river) around T(ar)T.
5 RANCOUR – “ranker”.
6 BULLDOZER – double definition, sort of – a bull that’s asleep won’t charge.
7 WATERING CAN – (wanting acre)*
8 CREDIT – C(ompetition) + RED (half the cards) + IT.
12 APHRODISIAC – cryptic definition, a tiny bit risqué.
15 HEFTINESS – (seen shift)*
16 BROWN ALE – BROW (where headlines appear) + “nail”.
18 HENBANE – (t)HEN (next with its head cut off, so “executed”) + BAN (injunction) on (judg)E.
19 FIESTA – FIST (firm hand) around (min)E + A.
21 SITAR – STAR (the hero in a film) around I.
24 SKA – hidden in “Das Kapital”

9 comments on “Saturday Times 24903 (16th July)”

  1. Exactly one hour; tough but enjoyable, although I wasn’t keen on ‘new’=’improved’ (why not ‘worsened’?). I, too, tossed in ‘eurozone’, even though I had doubts from the start; never heard of EUROLAND. Fortunately, words seem to get repeated in weekend puzzles, and SHEARWATER had made a recent appearance; even with all the checkers, I don’t know how long it would have taken me had it not been in my memory. And I never would have parsed it; thanks for the explanation. CODs to 12d and 18d.
  2. Agreed on SHEARWATER. A parsing nightmare. Interestingly, BRIGHTON appeared the day before in the Guardian Weekly (25,367) with a very similar clue: “Clever and working on this place on sea”. That helped!
  3. A rare excursion sub-30 minutes for me these days. 25 in fact and would have been 20 but for 20ac, 24dn, 26ac and 18dn putting up some last minute resistance. Never heard of SKA. I thought 12dn was brilliant.
  4. Thanks for the explanation of SHEARWATER.
    A very enjoyable 49 minutes, but I do have a couple of niggles with 14. If something is on the horizon, it is a long way off, so “not imminent” would seem more accurate. And shouldn’t it read “sunsets are like this”?
    1. The setter is vindicated as Collins has ‘Likely or about to happen’ and COED has ‘Imminent’ so any complaints should be addressed to the dictionaries.

      I wondered if the clue might have read ‘sun sets like this’ but I’m not about to complain having had my best solving time for ages!

  5. Thanks, linxit, especially for 26ac. I also had queries on 11ac, 8d,12d and 18d which you answered. It must be slightly galling to blog a Saturday prize crossword as most people have moved on from last week’s. Can’t remember my time but I think I would have BULLDOZER as my COD.
  6. I had all this in about 20 minutes but didn’t notice the CILIA part of SICILIAN and spent ages trying to fit in DON as the Mafia reference. Also couldn’t work out APHRODISIAC until I had all the checkers. I put SHEARWATER without understanding how the cryptic worked. Thanks, Linxit, for your excellent blog which explained all! 26 minutes.
  7. 11:55 for me. Like kevingregg I wasn’t too keen on “improved” = NEW; I don’t recall coming across EUROLAND before either, but I resisted the temptation to bung in the more familiar EUROZONE. For some reason I took a long time to come up with OLD FRUIT (my LOI).

Comments are closed.