Sunday Times 4664 by Jeff Pearce – an embarrassment of hitches

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
24:19. I always used to associate Jeff Pearce with straightforward, plain vanilla puzzles. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course: variety is the spice of life, need to cater to all abilities, no-one wants a Dean Mayer monster every week, etc etc. More recently though I have the impression that Jeff has been ratcheting up the difficulty level of his puzzles, and this was certainly a case in point. After my first pass through the clues I only had a handful, and much of the rest had to be painstakingly teased out from the wordplay. Personally I like the new, slightly tougher Jeff: I enjoy a bit of a challenge, particularly on a Sunday when I have a bit more time.

Now that I’ve finished writing up the blog I can’t see why I found this so difficult. As I’ve said before, I regard this is a sign of a well-put-together puzzle.

Across
1 Playing pianissimo soloist covers right damper
SPOILSPORT – (PP, SOLOIST)* containing R. Shades of the indirect anagram here, but perfectly fair.
7 Drummer missing old metal band
RING – RINGo.
9 Fine if caught running this?
RED LIGHT – CD.
10 Here we play or lie about
RESORT – RES(OR)T.
11 Poor attempt to conceal rum
SHODDY – SH(ODD)Y.
13 Cork has a blue cottage
BUNGALOW – BUNG, A, LOW.
14 Bloomer — type of roll round hot dog
IRISH TERRIER – IRIS (flower = bloomer), TERRIER containing H. A TERRIER is ‘a register or roll of a landed estate’, apparently. Fortunately for me this knowledge was not required to solve the clue.
17 Upset girl’s given position
DISAPPOINTED – or DI’S APPOINTED.
20 Put cannabis on slate for joint preparation
POT ROAST – POT (cannabis), ROAST (reprimand, slate). For a long time I thought this would be some sort of cream for treating swollen ankles, until I twigged the right sort of joint. This is a method I associate more with birds, particularly pheasants, which can be a bit dry if you roast them conventionally.
21 Leave pudding after speech
DESERT – sounds like ‘dessert’.
22 Soldier carrying old instrument displays muscles
GLUTEI – G(LUTE)I. I have been seeing a physio recently who has set me exercises designed to strengthen my glutes, so this came to mind quickly.
23 Attractive cockney giving you clues about 6?
INVITING – ‘IN(VI)TING. I considered trying to work 6dn into this but 1) it had too many letters and 2) I hadn’t solved it.
25 Short walk and a hop
PROM – short for ‘promenade’, and also a dance, like it says in the song.
26 Place incense in front of unguarded hives
NETTLE RASH – NETTLE (incense, anger), RASH (unguarded).

Down
2 Earnest request involving god causes embarrassment
PLETHORA – PLE(THOR)A. ‘Embarrassment’ as in ‘of riches’, although bizarrely the example Chambers gives is ’embarras du choix’!
3 Harsh billionaire has it both ways
ILL – contained both forwards and backwards in ‘billionaire’. I wasn’t sure about ‘harsh’ for ILL, but it’s in Collins as one of the definitions with the example ‘ill will’.
4 Wet both sides of grayling in Asian sauce
SOGGY – SO(GraylinG)Y.
5 Boycott and Hobbs regularly seen with Royalty at this time of year
OCTOBER – every other letter in Boycott, Hobbs, then ER.
6 Run down train station loses its awful director
TARANTINO – (TRAIN STATION – ITS).* Does this work? ‘Loses its awful’ suggests that you have to take out an anagram of ‘its’, but there isn’t one. I’m probably just being over-fussy.
7 Stormy Turners combined with awful tat and scribbles primarily — we scoff at these!
RESTAURANTS – (TURNERS, Awful Tat And Scribbles)*. Like others I suspect I thought this was an anagram of TURNERS, TAT and Scribbles. I would never have noticed it wasn’t if I hadn’t had to blog it. Just to be absolutely sure with anagrams I always put the fodder into my Chambers app and in this case it gave me ‘no anagrams found’, so I had to rethink. I confess I thought for a while that it was a mistake. Oh me of little faith!
8 In the end Usain Bolt is fine
NARROW – usaiN, ARROW.
12 Essential fact about deer is badly presented
DESIDERATUM – DATUM (fact) containing (DEER IS)*. I was more familiar with the plural, ‘desiderata’. And by ‘more familiar’ I mean ‘not very familiar at all’. I thought the definition was a bit odd, because it sounds more like something desired than an ‘essential’. But ODO says ‘something that is needed or wanted’, so complain to them if you disagree.
15, 21 Vicious little Aussie prepared vast Indian meal
TASMANIAN DEVIL – (VAST INDIAN MEAL)*.
16 Barges in strange locations
BEARINGS – (BARGES IN)*.
18 New England sportsman gets clap at orgy
PATRIOT – PAT (clap), RIOT (orgy). The New England PATRIOTs are an America Football team based in Boston. A very naughty surface reading that nonetheless sounds plausible.
19 Post cutting directly opposite wood
POPLAR – PO(P)LAR. P is for ‘post’ in p.m., for instance.
24 Go off to climb this?
TOR – reversal of ROT. Semi-&Lit.

15 comments on “Sunday Times 4664 by Jeff Pearce – an embarrassment of hitches”

  1. Weren’t you right the first time? Anagram of TRAIN STATION minus ITS.

    Another enjoyable offering from Jeff Pearce, continuing his run of fine form. I was another to misread RESTAURANTS, and I love the idea of POT ROAST as a treatment for swollen ankles.

    1. That would make the definition ‘awful director’, which is a possibility I am not prepared to contemplate!
      1. I think the idea is that the letters of ITS don’t appear either consecutively or in that order in TRAIN STATION, so the anagram indicator is needed to satisfy those people for whom that would be a requirement.
        1. It’s now a little difficult to understand keriothe’s objection. Pretty clearly, ITS is awful and not the director.
          1. My objection is that an anagram of ITS (‘its awful’) doesn’t appear in the anagram fodder. If it were TRANI STATION there would be no problem with the wordplay.

            Edited at 2015-10-25 10:49 am (UTC)

        2. In this case the anagram indicator has to indicate that the letters are both mixed up and separated, which I’m not sure it does. Like I said I’m probably being over-fussy.

          Edited at 2015-10-25 10:49 am (UTC)

  2. I got this done pretty quickly in two sittings, with a follow-the-clue guess at DESIDERATUM. Thanks, Keriothe, and thanks Mr Pearce
  3. Re 19dn. I have severe misgivings about over reliance on single-letter abbreviations in clues as the possibilities are endless. This one is listed in Collins (alone amongst the usual sources I believe) but without indication of the context in which it is used. If it can stand in its own right then I can see there’s a case to be made in its favour though I remain to be convinced. But if it’s only ‘post’ in ‘p.m.’ as suggested by our blogger then I think it’s a bit much.

    Edited at 2015-10-25 01:43 pm (UTC)

    1. I agree with you to a large extent: I wouldn’t like to see the ‘anything goes’ approach of Mephisto. But where to draw the line is a matter of judgement, and for me at least p.m. is so commonplace that it seems OK. I’m not sure if you’d see this in a daily puzzle, but in any event we’re used to a slightly more relaxed approach on Sundays.
      1. Just recently I realised that puzzles from as far back as October 2000 are available on the Club site. Earliest I can find is 21,548. The odd thing is that they don’t seem to be available via date search, only by putting the puzzle number in (then increment if you want to work through some of them). There are only a handful of names on the leader boards for the ones I’ve done so far.

        Which is a long way of introducing the fact that I’ve been solving a few of them lately, and hugely enjoying them. They seem a little looser, allowing a bit of padding and the odd trick that we now think of as a Sunday thing, but if anything I prefer them for that. I’ve had the odd DNF due to the vocab being a bit more demanding here and there (the sort of thing only Tony Sever refers to as “general knowledge”!).

        Edited at 2015-10-25 04:24 pm (UTC)

        1. The date search thing kind of works but you have to input the date manually (e.g. 16/10/2000) rather than relying on the calendar widget (which refuses to acknowledge anything before 2005).
      2. The Mephisto rule isn’t “anything goes”, but “anything in Chambers goes” – as for the rest of the puzzle. All cryptic crosswords use single-letter and other abbreviations, but their rules about what’s allowed vary. The Times crossword has had a fairly short list for one-letter ones (and AFAIK still does), which is mostly the ones in both Collins and the Concise Oxford. I’m currently prepared to use anything from Collins or the Oxford Dictionary of English (preferably not obscure ones from both in the same puzzle), plus a few from real life – N for no and Y for yes, and the card suit ones – I was surprised to notice that H=Hearts needs Chambers, and with a bridge column on the same page it seems daft to disallow them.
        1. Yes of course, Chambers. But given the number of abbreviations it contains that’s not far from ‘anything goes’!
  4. 28:44 … agree that JP is having a great run now (and has certainly upped the difficulty level). IRISH TERRIER and DESIDERATUM held out for a very long time, as I remember.

    Plenty of smiles, including Usain Bolt’s recovery, the “Vicious little Aussie” and, of course, the New England Patriot’s “sporting injury”.

    Thanks, setter and Keriothe.

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