ST 4380 (Sun 9 May) – S Club 7 x 2

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: About 5 mins (interrupted, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately given my mistake at 7dn)

Struggling for time at the moment I tried to cram this into what I thought was a suitable gap; it wasn’t and I was collared halfway through. Most of the puzzle was fairly straightforward with lots of anagrams, but there were some harder words in DESMIDS and SOLIPSISTS (which I got wrong). I liked the anagram at 15dn but was less impressed that 14 answers ended in S of which no fewer than 10 were plurals and two were inflected verb forms. (IRIS and ABACUS are excused.)

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 ORCHESTRAS; (SCORE TRASH)*
4 ECHO (initial letters) – why couldn’t this have read ‘At first…’, which would have made better (if not perfect) cryptic sense without spoiling the surface reading?
10 BALDERDASH; BALDER + DASH
11 ANTI; ANT + I[t]
13 BROOKED; ROOK in BED
15 A + B.A.C. + US – referring, I think, to the British Aircraft Corporation.
16 REACTS; (TRACE)* + S
17 CARDINAL NUMBERS – ‘number’ as in ‘something that numbs’.
18 ERMINE – which appears on judges’ ceremonial robes.
20 EDICTS; (CITED)* + S[unday]
21 SAUCE(R)S
22 IRIS[h]
25 SLIPSTREAM; (PILS)* + STREAM (= ‘brook’)
26 TEST (2 defs) – a river in Hampshire.
27 DESECRATOR; (DECOR RATES)*
Down
2 RUBY; (BURY)*
3 HOLE; HE around (O + L)
4 S(HEAR)S – ‘ascertain’ = ‘hear’?
5 RADIO TELESCOPES; (OO STAR ECLIPSED)* around E[arth]
6 SISTER; (TRIES)* around S
7 SOLIPSISTS; (SPOIL SIST[er]S)* – not ‘polissists’. No idea why I wrote that, I knew the word ‘solipsism’ even if I didn’t know what it meant.
9 CONSCIENCE – “conscience does make cowards of us all”, from Hamlet.
12 DAIRYMAIDS; (DAI’S MYRIAD)*
13 BUNIONS; “BUNYAN’S” – John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.
14 DESMIDS – types of algae; not a word I can recall seeing before.
15 ALCHEMISTS; (ST MICHAEL’S)* – great anagram.
19 EAGLED – which in golf means ‘played a hole in two under par’, whereas a birdie is one under par.
20 ER(O.T.)IC
23 BETA; “BEATER” – I believe a beater is something used to excite game birds so they can be shot.
24 AMMO; A.M. + M.O. (= ‘medical officer’)

6 comments on “ST 4380 (Sun 9 May) – S Club 7 x 2”

  1. Nearly right – someone whose task is to beat the ground cover used by the birds so that they fly up into the air, presumably a safe distance above the beater’s head.
  2. I kept this grid, rather than binning it with great force as is my regular habit with the ST cryptic, because when I completed it, I couldn’t find any fault with it whatsoever.. a rare experienc,e and all the more welcome.

    It was unusally easy, but I don’t mind that from time to time. I am so unobservant I didn’t notice all the plurals.. though I don’t really see why that is a problem, either. You could call it a theme 🙂

  3. 23 minutes. I assumed there would be a relevant quotation from Hamlet at 9dn and recognise it having read the blog. Didn’t know it was from Hamlet though.
  4. 6:30 for me – but it was so nearly a decently fast time (perhaps sub 4:00, which is horribly rare for me these days). For some reason I made heavy weather of BROOKED (couldn’t think of ROOK!), and that knocked on to RADIO TELESCOPES and SAUCERS. I think I may have come across DESMIDS before, but they were easy to spot.

    All in all a pleasant, straightforward puzzle.

  5. ‘hear’, I assumed, in the sense of ‘hold a hearing’, where one ascertains what’s what, ideally at least.
    I’ve never heard ‘beta’ pronounced ‘beeta’ (in my dialect it rhymes with ‘baiter’ or maybe ‘better’, minus the r), but linguists do speak of the ‘theeta’ criterion; and I couldn’t think of any other 4-letter letters anyway.
    I thought there must be a catch to 19down; take away the ! and you have a straightforward, non-cryptic clue.
    1. I think you can confirm from this page that “bayda” is the North American norm, and “beeta” the British one.

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