Solving time: 10 mins
A very good puzzle, I thought – the surface readings (i.e. how the clues read if you pretend they aren’t cryptic crossword clues) were excellent throughout and the clues were accurate and well-written. For the second week in a row I got horribly stuck on a 9-letter word, this time WASHSTAND at 7dn (along with FATWAS at 5ac) which probably accounted for half of my time.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
| Across |
| 1 |
LADYBIRD – a ladybird would be ‘spotted’ (ho ho) in the garden, and the former US president’s wife is Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson, wife of Lyndon B Johnson. |
| 5 |
FATWAS; WAS after FAT (= ‘big’) |
| 10 |
SEA ONIONS; (SOON ANISE)* – ‘soon get confused with anise?’ requires you to accept that ‘soon’ is plural, presumably by considering the word as a group of individual letters (i.e. ‘S,O,O and N get confused [anagrammed] with A,N,I,S and E’). |
| 11,12 |
COSTA BRAVA; CO (= company = ‘Firm’) + STAB (= ‘ attempt’) + R[ight] + AVA (= ‘girl’) – very good surface reading. |
| 13 |
ANTIPASTI; A + N[ew] + TIP (=’hint’) + ASTI |
| 14 |
THEREAFTER; (TREE FATHER)* |
| 17 |
GASH (2 defs) – ‘gash’ meaning ‘spare’ or ‘rubbish’ is still military slang but I don’t know if it’s any more widespread than that. |
| 19 |
OR (= other ranks = ‘men’) + FF (= fortissimo = ‘very loud’) – Carl Orff wrote Carmina Burana. |
| 20 |
TARMACADAM; rev. of (MAD + A + CAMRA + T[roll]) – a kind of ‘reverse charade’. CAMRA is the Campaign for Real Ale. I had to stop myself writing in ‘tarmacking’ here. |
| 22 |
LARCENIST; (IN CARTELS)* |
| 24 |
C.A.B. + AL – the CAB is the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, i.e. ‘Group advising’; Al is the gangster Al Capone. This word is not an acronym, as often thought; full explanation here. |
| 26 |
AZTEC; A,Z (= ‘Extreme characters’) + TEC (= detective = ‘Dick’) |
| 27 |
GINGER NUT; (TIN + GRUNGE)* – a most underrated biscuit, especially for dunking. |
| 28 |
TURIN + G – I’m not sure I like ‘Italian city with university’ as a definition of ‘Turin’. In a way it’s a clever misdirection, leading the solver to assume ‘university’ will indicate ‘U’. On the other hand it could be considered unfair, since although Turin does have a good university it’s not one of the first things you’d associate with it, nor (as far as I can tell) is it considered to be among Italy’s very top universities. I suppose this would be akin to ‘English city with university’ indicating, say, York or Bristol – not inaccurate but an odd description. The mathematician is World War II cryptanalyst Alan Turing. |
| 29 |
TROMBONE; (ROM + B[aron]) in TONE – I kicked myself over this one, firstly for trying to justify ‘trompette’ which is neither a word nor of 8 letters, secondly for failing to see ‘trombone’ more quickly and thirdly for thinking ‘gypsy baron’ gave ROM. |
| Down |
| 1 |
LAST BUT NOT LEAST (cryptic definition) |
| 2 |
DRAM + A |
| 3 |
BAND AGED (charade) – ‘turned into old rockers’ = ‘became old’ = AGED; it’s a charade rather than a 2-part wordplay because the ‘old rockers’ refers to the ‘band’. |
| 4 |
RIO + JA[r] |
| 6 |
ACCEPT; ACT (= ‘function’) around CEP (= ‘mushroom’) |
| 7 |
WASHSTAND; (ASH + ST[one]) in WAND – gaah. I saw the ASH and the ST[one] and still couldn’t get this, nor could I think of a word meaning ‘staff’ to fit ‘?AND’. I even went through the alphabet on the first letter to no avail. This breakdown is particularly clever because ‘wash’ doesn’t sound like ‘bash’ and ‘wand’ doesn’t sound like ‘band’ which certainly added to the difficulty for me. |
| 8 |
SPANISH OMELETTE; (POTENTIAL MESS EH)* |
| 9 |
I + SOT + HERM – ‘sot’ = a drunk = ‘[a] soak’; Herm is one of the Channel Islands. |
| 15 |
E. M. FORSTER; (FRETS MORE)* – unusual to see initials as part of an answer word, but it seems fair enough when this is how the writer was known. |
| 16 |
FLAMING + O – a somewhat risqué surface. |
| 18 |
ICE CREAM; C.E. in (CRIMEA)* |
| 21 |
DEACON; DEN around A + CO – the second use of ‘firm’ for CO[mpany] in this crossword (cf 11ac), which is slightly unfortunate. |
| 23 |
TENOR (hidden) – nice clue. |
| 25 |
BINGO; BIN (= ‘Can’) + GO (= ‘progress’) – I’m not sure I concur about the ‘little ability’ required. Last time I played bingo I tied myself in knots looking for the numbers and was mightily impressed by the performances of the blue-haired grannies around me. |
The Campaign for Real Ale backwards, eh? No wonder I didn’t get the cryptic. Everything else was OK, and I have the advantage of remembering the Johnson administration.