Sunday Times 4587 – Nice and Easy Does It

Posted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
A group of us are taking over the reins here in the Sunday slot while Dave is convalescing. This is about as close as Dean Mayer gets to a simple puzzle – simple, but elegant and most enjoyable. 34 minutes.

ACROSS

1 HECTIC – ‘furious’ sounds like HECK and TICK (beat as in tick tock).
5 SOFT SOAP – ‘flannel’; OFT in SS followed by OAP.
9 OPEN UNIVERSITY – ‘home studies’; found (initially) in favOUr.
10 TENNYSON – sounds like ‘tennis on’. The kindest thing I can say about this clue is that it’s a bit like one of my backhands.
11 WHENCE – ‘from which things’ (as a consequence of which) ; W[ork] + HENCE.
13 PATISSERIE – ITS PIES ARE* (anagram).
15 ALSO – ‘further’; a hidden answer
17 WEAN – ‘child’; E in WAN. As well as being what you do to a child, ‘wean’ can be a child itself in northern parts.
18 ANY OLD IRON – a music hall song first recorded more than a hundred years ago that cries out to be parodied; artists that have obliged include the Muppets and the Beatles in the excellent animated film ‘Yellow Submarine’.
20 TROWEL – ‘one spreads’; R in TOWEL.
22 RADIALLY – ‘turned inside out’ (‘diverging in lines from a common centre’ – like radii or indeed rays); (L[ake] + LAID) reversed (‘turned’) – on edit with a nod to Nonnie in RAY.
24 FAIR TO MIDDLING – ‘not bad’; FIDDLING around AIR TOM (‘imaginary cat?).
25 WHODUNIT – ‘detective story’; W + HO[o]D + UNIT.
26 SONATA – ‘piece of music’; NOT AS A*

DOWN

2 EXONERATE – ‘pardon’; EX + ONE (‘a certain’, as in ‘one John Smith accosted me’) + RATE.
3 THE ANCIENT WORLD – ‘what used to be’; CERTAIN WHEN TOLD*.
4 CLUBS – a double definition: groups of people with shared aims + the suit in a pack of cards.
5 SPINNER – ‘[a type of] bowler [in cricket]’; INNER (deer, as in ‘the inner, more profound meaning’) after S[li]P.
6 FREEWHEEL – ‘coast’; REEL (air – as well as being a dance, a reel can be the tune to which the dance is danced) around WHERE* [on edit: FEEL = air, in the ‘distinctive quality’ sense)
7 SYSTEMATISATION – ‘process of organising’; TEAMS I SAY ITS NOT*.
8 ATTIC – ‘room’; A + TT + I +C.
12 EGO – ‘I’; the second vowel E followed by GO (‘become’).
14 SMALL-TOWN – ‘narrow’ (parochial, provincial); MALL in ST + OWN. My COD.
16 SPOTLIGHT – ‘put in the public eye’; POT in SLIGHT.
17 WIT – ‘repartee’; WIT[h].
19 YORKIST – the clue is the definition; RISKY TO*. I defer to others with better historical knowledge than me, but I think the idea is that within the loose dynasty called Plantagenet, there were a number of different Houses (Wikipedia gives Angevins, Plantagenet, Lancaster and York), so a Yorkist might be dangerous to a Plantagenet who was of the House of Lancaster, say, although the way those chaps intrigued, he was probably at as much risk from one of his own House.
21 ROACH – ‘fish’; [b]ROACH (as in ‘broach a subject’).
23 DADOS – ‘wall sections’ (lower parts of an interior wall that is decorated differently from the upper part); SO+DAD all reversed.

11 comments on “Sunday Times 4587 – Nice and Easy Does It”

  1. Dear Sirs,

    Grateful if you would pass on my best wishes to Mr. Perry for a full recovery.

    Regarding 6 d: it’s not reel around where but feel. Can feel = air?

    Thanks,
    Adrian Cobb

    1. Thanks, Adrian. A victim of the one-week gap between solving and blogging! Feel = air, in the ‘distinctive quality’ sense.
    2. I suppose it’s in the way of “This pub has a nice feel/air about it.”

      And, of course, Phil Collins could feel it in the air, but that’s irrelevant.

  2. Beautifully economical cluing and a downright pleasure to solve.

    The image for FAIR TO MIDDLING caught my imagination, and the PATISSERIE clue is a cracker.

    A very enjoyable 37:35 here. Thanks, Dean.

  3. No time for this, partly because I got interrupted a lot, and partly because I made a complete pig’s ear of it.
    I got to the end and couldn’t make head or tail of 22ac. In the end I just bunged in the only thing I could think of that fitted the checkers, which was RADIALLY, and submitted. I wasn’t particularly surprised to see that I had an error, so I spent the next twenty minutes or so scratching my head and trying to find an alternative. I made liberal use of aids, and even considered the possibility that one of the crossing answers might be wrong (although they all looked right), but to no avail. Completely baffled, I gave up.
    When I came back to the puzzle a couple of hours later I immediately saw that I had put in SONAJA, which also gave me SPOTLIGHJ.
  4. Most enjoyable.

    ulaca, you don’t mention it (presumably as it is too obvious) but 19dn is an anagram.

    Edited at 2014-05-04 09:11 am (UTC)

  5. 36 minutes for one of Dean’s puzzles is pretty good for me. I struggled with SYSTEMATISATION and didn’t understand how 6dn worked but otherwise it was reasonably straightforward.

    FAIR TO MIDDLING was a bonus as it also turned up in last Sunday’s Everyman which I solved immediately before tackling this one. It was clued there as: About average on violin, having committed tune to memory originally.

  6. Fine effort from Dean.. 13, 15, 18 and 24ac are all fantastic clues. 13ac best clue of the year so far, for me
  7. This puzzle was in yesterday’s Vancouver Sun.
    As a minor point re your explanation of answer to 22 ac, Isn’t it the words “inside out”, not “turned inside out”, that provide the definition of “radially” (from the inside out)? I believe “turned” is an instruction to reverse L and LAID.

Comments are closed.