Sunday Times 4670 by Jeff Pearce – when a plan doesn’t quite come together

DNF. I did most of this very quickly, but then came to a grinding halt at 8dn, where I didn’t know the word and the clue contains an error that makes it unsolvable. Rather annoying, but thankfully this sort of thing is extremely rare.

Other than that, this was a fairly straightforward but very enjoyable puzzle with just a couple of obscure terms to test your vocabulary and/or wordplay skills.

Sorry about the strange gap between the acrosses and downs. I’ve no idea what’s causing it.

Across
1 Expecting trouble?
MORNING SICKNESS – CD.
9 Attempt to deceive an unknown person during short interval
TRY IT ON – TR(Y)ITONe. A TRITONE is a musical interval, aka augmented fourth, diminished fifth, blue note, the ‘Sim’ in ‘The Simpsons’. I think the question of whether Y can be an unknown person (as opposed to just a thing) has come up before. It’s supported by Collins: ‘any unknown, unspecified, or variable factor, number, person, or thing.’
10 Write a crushing remark
PUT-DOWN – DD, although the first is very mildly cryptic in the sense that it wouldn’t normally have a hyphen.
11 Strong drink at Horse’s Head
HALE – Horse, ALE.
12 Loved piece about early form of transport
VELOCIPEDE – (LOVED PIECE)*. An early form of bicycle, apparently.
13 About to carry Spanish beer back to sink
RELAPSE – RE (about) containing a reversal of SP ALE. SP for ‘Spanish’ isn’t an abbreviation you see very often but it’s in Collins.
15 Locks around our entrance
ENAMOUR – reversal of MANE (locks), OUR.
17 Roman is trapped in expensive French city
CHESTER – CH(EST)ER, where CHER is ‘expensive’ in French and EST is ‘is’ in Latin.
19 Leader departs citadel and is replaced by German troublemaker
GREMLIN – G (German) replaces the first letter of KREMLIN.
20 Stole, say, good snack
POACHED EGG – POACHED (stole), EG, G.
22 Ointment used in herbal medicine
BALM – contained in ‘herbal medicine’. I love the smell of lip balm in the morning.
25 Carry out ice
EXECUTE – DD.
26 Dish made from butter by English people
RAMEKIN – RAM (butter), E, KIN.
27 Being basic geezer I try arm wrestling with dockhand
TOM DICK AND HARRY – (I TRY ARM DOCKHAND)*. For the definition to work doesn’t this have to be OR not AND?

Down
1 Tie and hat required to go round church
MATCH – reversal of TAM, then CH.
2 Two guys down a shade
ROYAL BLUE – ROY, AL (two guys), BLUE (down).
3 Old letter in audiotape
IOTA – contained in ‘audiotape’. In the daily puzzles no more than one containment clue is allowed, but this isn’t the daily puzzle.
4 Scots not taken in by silly people like Columbus
GENOESE – GE(NO)ESE.
5 Pick up note about show
IMPROVE – reversal of (do re) MI, then PROVE (show).
6 Young cat heard to stir bird
KITTIWAKE – homophone of ‘kitty’, then WAKE (stir).
7 Horny beast wants hill-dweller to run off
ELOPEantELOPE.
8 Council fix drains and head off
SANHEDRIN – I didn’t know this word, and it is not solvable from the clue. As verlaine pointed out on the club forum, it should probably read ‘fix drains then head off’, which would indicate an anagram: (DRAINS tHEN)*. Even with the correct anagrist I’m not sure I’d have got the right answer, rather than (say) SINDEHRAN, but I’ll never know.
13 Person getting “How to cook” books takes in first of instructions
RECIPIENT – RECIPE (how to cook), NT (books) containing Instructions.
14 Chat-up line I love about perfume
PATCHOULI – (CHAT-UP, L, I, O)*. I remembered this word from past crosswords.
16 Crack finally found aboard suspicious oriental ship
OIL TANKER – (ORIENTAL)* containing cracK.
18 Bigot’s angry pet
REDNECK – RED (angry), NECK (snog, pet).
19 One in the navy pursuing nutty circumnavigator
GAGARIN – GAGA, R(I)N. Yuri of that ilk. I’m not sure how much navigation is involved in orbiting, but you get the idea.
21 Crack unit drink in the morning
A-TEAM – A(TEA)M. Cue happy childhood memories of watching complete rubbish.
23 Well contains joke coins
MONEY – M(ONE)Y. ‘My’ as in ‘well well’, ‘one’ as in ‘do you know the one about the rabbi, the fortune teller and the pterodactyl?’
24 A hospital takes in post-grad nurse from abroad
AMAH – A is A, hospital is H, post-grad is MA. Construct accordingly. Another crossword word.

17 comments on “Sunday Times 4670 by Jeff Pearce – when a plan doesn’t quite come together”

  1. Fortunately, I knew SANHEDRIN, and flung it in thinking I had the anagram right; it was only after someone on the Forum pointed out the problem that I went back to it. Where I come from (but before I was), a VELOCIPEDE was a tricycle. I remember the stench of PATCHOULI from the hippy 60s; along with bell-bottoms, a fad I fervently hope won’t be revived in my time.
    1. SANHEDRIN was so familiar I didn’t bother to look at the grist. In retrospect, interesting to see the error.

      Ditto with PATCHOULI: hate the stuff. As late as the 80s, I had a “friend” with a bit of a hippy complex who knew of my dislike for the stench and insisted on putting a few drops into my nylon watch band from time to time. Took me ages to discover why the pong was hanging around. With friends like that, who needs enemas?

      Couldn’t parse 9ac despite knowing TRITONE. “MA-RIA … I’ve just met …” etc. No idea why, say , c to f# should be so castigated.

  2. Keriothe

    If you look at the html coding after 27ac you have nine < BR > instead of one. If you delete eight of them it will come right. P.S.I have added spaces in my example to prevent LJ reading it as code and hiding it.

    Edited at 2015-12-06 06:24 am (UTC)

    1. Now I’m just completely baffled because when I look at the HTML I don’t have a single < BR >, never mind nine! In fact that isn’t a piece of code that appears at all in the template I use (which I got from Andy). Usually when this sort of thing happens I find a stray or missing angle bracket but I haven’t managed to find anything this time.
    2. See below: I can’t find anything wrong here, although in my experience the HTML error often isn’t where you’d expect it to be.

      Edited at 2015-12-06 10:42 am (UTC)

      1. Having looked at this again, the rogue hidden coding appears between

        < /table > and < table cellspacing=”3″

        which in your version above appear on different lines and I wonder if this could be a factor.

        You might try placing the cursor after < /table > and pressing Delete until < table cellspacing=”3″ > comes up to join it …><…. Then separate the two items by putting one < br > (but without spaces) between them.

        Edited at 2015-12-06 05:14 pm (UTC)

        1. I had a look, and that’s not it. There aren’t any stray spaces in there, and this HTML code is identical to every blog I have done. Never mind, at this stage I think I’ll just accept it and move on, but thanks for your help.
  3. My enjoyment of this was spoiled by two careless errors, one on my part (not checking the anagrist carefully at 14dn and ending up with POTCHOULI), the other on the part of the setter or editor or type-setter or any combination thereof, at 8dn. Both are examples of the growing trend for having anagrams of foreign words, which I’m getting a bit tired of.
    1. I agree about anagrams of foreign words, although much the same objection could be made to native but arcane words. But, Sanhedrin aside, surely ‘patchouli’ is as nativized by now as, say, ‘ambergris’ or ‘passacaglia’? Maybe UK hippies didn’t wallow in the crap like their US counterparts.
  4. All you need for Sanhedrin (a correct anagrist apart, which I also didn’t spot) is a fairly passing knowledge of the New Testament, which The Times has traditionally expected of us. Since it appears regularly throughout the King James and all subsequent editions of the bible it is stretching a point to describe it as a “foreign” word, any more than Maoist or Trotskyite are foreign words. We could have a separate discussion about whether it is still appropriate to assume bible knowledge!

    I enjoyed this crossword, either Jeff Pearce has upped his game in recent months, or I am coming to appreciate his talents more, take your pick!

  5. Kevin and Jerry, by ‘foreign’ you have to appreciate I mean words I don’t know! I led a sheltered existence during the hippy era which accounts for one of my examples but since I was pumped full of religious stuff from an early age I’m not sure how SANHEDRIN has escaped my attention. Maybe I knew it and it’s since fallen out my brain.

    Edited at 2015-12-06 08:03 am (UTC)

  6. It was a pity that the Jewish Council clue should have the error, as it was such a fine clue, evoking memories of Jesus’s “trial” before that body, which is recorded in one way or another in all four gospels, alongside the better known story of Peter’s denial of Jesus.

    Patchouli and velocipede were two “foreign” words that gave me far more trouble, never having come across either in the real world and only the latter in the mental one.

    A challenge, and an enjoyable one in toto.

    Edited at 2015-12-06 08:17 am (UTC)

  7. Mr Pearce is certainly turning out some good Sunday cryptics lately. MORNING SICKNESS and OIL TANKER are very neat. A pity about what looks like an editing problem at 8dn.
  8. I was also undone by SANHEDRIN. When I eventually looked it up it was familiar, but no way I was ever going to call it to mind unaided.

    Which is a shame, because as I was closing in on my last few clues in the NE I was thinking “This might be JP’s best puzzle yet”. It’s full of concise, pithy clues and is just gnarly enough for a Sunday.

    VELOCIPEDE, ENAMOUR, ROYAL BLUE, OIL TANKER and GREMLIN .. all terrific.

  9. SANHEDRIN is a word that pops up in various places and as I happen to frequent/remember some of those places, this was a write in. Had much more trouble with VELOCIPEDE which really takes me back to my youth.
  10. I have to take the rap re SANHEDRIN – an “improvement” to the original clue somehow became a replacement rather than an insertion.

    Edited at 2015-12-07 09:24 am (UTC)

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