ST 4395 (Sun 22 Aug) – Clueless

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 4:36

By the time I’d solved this I’d already seen a comment on last week’s puzzle pointing out a mistake at 26ac (‘Remainder left inside – one of 28 here’), which I therefore ignored until the end. This knowledge probably actually hindered rather than helped me, because I assumed that the misprint was the ’28’ which should have been a clue number, whereas in fact ‘Remainder’ should have read ‘Reminder’ (‘one of 28 here’ was the definition, to give the answer CLUE).

That aside, this was an odd puzzle in that some of it was very good, e.g. the anagrams at 12dn and 14ac, while other bits were amateurish, e.g. three words starting ‘RE’ (RESORT, REFRESHMENTS and REPORTER) all clued using the same initial breakdown and two of them with ‘about’ indicating those letters.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
Across
1 CLOVE HITCH – ‘to hitch’ meaning ‘to thumb (a lift)’.
7 BAR + D
9 S(AU)TERNE – with the ‘R’ in place I pencilled in ‘OR’ for ‘gold’ which held me up.
10 P + RAISE – ‘raise’ = ‘institute’ as a verb, which I missed until I spotted the answer from the definition and checking letters.
11 OFF ICE – clever.
13 TACITURN; TURN after (I ACT)* – also nice.
14 COMPOS MENTIS; (COMMON PEST IS)* – good anagram.
17 REFRESHMENTS; RE (= ‘Note’) + FRESHMEN + T[asteles]S
20 RE + PORTER
21 SUPERB; SUP (= ‘Drink’) + E.R. (= ‘The Queen’) + B[inge]
22 STRAIN; RAIN (= ‘natural water’) after ST[one] (i.e. ‘small stone’)
23 HOMEBREW (cryptic definition)
25 CLUE; CUE (= ‘Reminder’) around L
Down
2 LEAPFROG; (ROPE + FLAG)* – I missed the anagram here and was looking for a two-part answer made up of (word for) ‘Rope’ and (word for) ‘flag’.
3 VET (2 defs)
4 HORSE (3 defs) – slang for ‘heroin’, an animal and a piece of gymnastics equipment on which Daniel Keatings became Britain’s first ever European gymnastics champion earlier this year.
5 THEATRE (hidden) – a reasonable &lit.
6 HOPSCOTCH; H[our] + OP[us] (= ‘work’) + SCOTCH (= ‘put an end to’)
7 BEAUTY SLEEP (cryptic definition) – I liked this one.
8 RE + SORT
12 IMPERSONATE; (NO SPARE TIME)* – excellent.
15 SAFETY NET (cryptic definition) – a pun on ‘top’ meaning ‘big top’, i.e. a circus.
16 STURGEON; ST (= ‘Way’) + URGE ON (= ‘encourage’)
18 EARSHOT; (HORSE + A + T[emperature])*
19 LENT + I + L
21 [con]SOMME
24 BOO[r]

3 comments on “ST 4395 (Sun 22 Aug) – Clueless”

  1. 22 minutes which is about as good as I get. Don’t really understand how ‘from’ works into 22ac indicating that ‘RAIN’ goes after ‘ST’, assuming that’s intended to be its purpose..
  2. 6:36, so once again not a disaster but hardly a triumph. I found this one pleasant enough, with nothing to object to, particularly as the clue to 25A had been fixed by the time I tackled it – at least I didn’t notice anything wrong with it at the time and it’s certainly OK now.

    I thought “from” in 22A was pushing things a little but not enough to be objectionable – I read it as “starting from”.

  3. 7:35 here, which is very quick for me. I didn’t notice anything wrong with 25A when solving, and read the first word as “Reminder”, but checking my printout again now it did say “Remainder”. The wrong word makes a lot more sense in the surface reading though, so maybe it was deliberately edited like that until somebody realized they’d broken the clue.

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