Sunday Times 4680 by Dean Mayer – awe and loathing

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
33m. Unusually for a Dean Mayer puzzle I didn’t enjoy this one much at the time: I found it hard, and a bit of a slog. Looking at it now it doesn’t seem that difficult, and this pattern (hard at the time, looks easy in retrospect) is one I usually regard as a sign of a very good puzzle. And there are some excellent clues in here, as usual with Dean.

My problems were at least partly self-inflicted: I bunged in SCATHING at 21ac, which caused my an almighty problem at 17dn. Eventually I sorted that out, but even once I’d realised that 17dn was TALIPOT (a word I vaguely recognised) it took me several minutes to see the (very clever) wordplay and put in the answer with confidence. I also took forever to see 3dn, for no good reason.

So I’m going to ascribe my failure to enjoy this properly to my own clumsiness and perhaps a bit of grumpiness after a lateish and quite boozy evening last Saturday. I never drink in January, and I think my hangovers are always worse in February as a consequence.

I don’t understand 1ac, so grateful for help. I stand ready to kick myself.

Across
1 Past caring for sick relative?
PHYSIC – I don’t understand this. PHYSIC is an archaic word for ‘the art of skill of healing’, but I don’t see what the relative has to do with it.
5 Check for allergy in bust, mostly?
SKIN TEST – or SKINTEST.
9 Split in cloth so short I am not worried
THE REFORMATION – THEREFORe (I AM NOT)*. Nice definition. Nice clue, in fact.
10 A tiny amount writer takes up?
PENNORTH – or PEN, NORTH. A tiny amount that usually comes in twos, given whether requested or not.
11 Around small bit of intestine, rejected cereal
MUESLI – reversal of ILEUM around S.
12 First to observe a twitch of the ear
OTIC – Observe, TIC.
14 One’s horrid, horrid wife
HER INDOORS – (ONE’S HORRID)*. Another great clue!
15 Talk about fear over moving foam
WHITE WATER – WHITTER containing a reversal of AWE. I bunged this in from the definition and checkers, but I was completely baffled by the parsing for ages. Eventually it occurred to me that one might spell ‘witter’ with an H. Not a variant I have ever come across, but it’s in Collins.
18 Thick black sludge turned over
DUMB – reversal of B, MUD.
20 Bishop given hot drink
BRANDY – the obligatory saucy clue in a Dean Mayer puzzle.
21 See an object as an abomination
LOATHING – LO, A THING. Not SCATHING.
23 Racehorse or show dog?
POINT-TO-POINTER – a POINTER is a dog, and if you POINT TO it you’re showing it. Have you ever seen a pointer in action? They’re amazing dogs, and what’s even more amazing is that the behaviour is innate. They are born with an urge to stand stock still pointing at quarry. I’m not sure I’d call a POINT-TO-POINTER a racehorse, but I’m no expert on such matters and it’s undoubtedly a horse that races.
25 Wrong category for a London hospital?
GREY COAT – (CATEGORY)*. The question mark is presumably there because the GREY COAT Hospital isn’t a hospital, but a school. A very prestigious state school attended by the progeny of our Prime Minister and Justice Secretary. I have no doubt that their usual entrance procedures were followed scrupulously in both cases.
26 Tensing and Hillary’s feature film
GANDHI – contained in (a feature of) ‘Tensing and Hillary’.

Down
2 Keen to get behind leader’s position
HOT SEAT – HOT (keen), SEAT (behind).
3 Film about start of early flight
SKEIN – SK(E)IN. This one took me ages to see, for some reason, even though it’s a word I am perfectly familiar with.
4 Soil we turned into ceramic block? No
CLEAR THE WAY – EARTH and a reversal of WE contained in CLAY.
5 Oddly, same alternative put out
SMOTHER – the odd letters in ‘same’, then OTHER.
6 Belief in one officer
ISM – I, SM (sergeant-major).
7 Shot, say, opening mobster up
TO THE GOOD – TOT (shot), H(EG)OOD.
8 It reveals part of wing
SPOILER – the first, slightly more oblique meaning referring to being told that Dumbledore dies before getting to that bit.
11 Spymaster at home, afraid of telepathy?
MIND – M, IN, DREADING.
13 Living together in shelter, a place Lorraine has
CO-TENANCY – COTE (shelter: think dovecote), NANCY (a city in Lorraine).
16 Bear heading for his shelter
HARBOUR – H, ARBOUR. Two things you might do to a grudge.
17 Clay vessel supporting bottom of coconut palm
TALIPOT – ALI (Muhammad of that ilk, aka Cassius Clay), POT beneath (supporting) coconuT (bottom, because this is a down clue).
19 Tramp closes in on butterfly
MONARCH – M(ON)ARCH.
22 Think of a welcome style
HIT ON – HI (greeting), TON (style). TON for fashion, or in this case style, is one of those things that is common in crosswords but nowhere else.
23 Tip of tooth that hurts around brace?
TWO – Tooth, then a reversal of OW.

15 comments on “Sunday Times 4680 by Dean Mayer – awe and loathing”

  1. 1ac and 3d did for me; I can’t make sense of ‘relative’ any more than keriothe can, and I never would have come up with SKEIN=flight. Which makes me feel a bit better about getting 2 wrong. Never heard of GREY COAT. When I was a boy, we had an Australian silky terrier that pointed, specifically at our parakeet whenever one of us went to tend to the cage.
    1. SKEIN has come up a few times in the last couple of years, but usually with a kinder definition.
      You’re at a disadvantage on the school: it’s been in the news here because of the children of our politicians going there. Sending your kids to a state school to burnish your man-of-the-people credentials is easier if you can get them into one of the most sought-after schools in the country. I will leave you to decide whether you think that being Prime Minister or Education Secretary helps with the entrance process.
      1. Signs of changing times. At the time my mother went there (see below) both her parents were in service!

        Edited at 2016-02-14 02:20 pm (UTC)

        1. And in those days no member of David Cameron’s family would have dreamed of sending their children to a state school!
    2. 37 minutes, so on the wavelength, even if there were a few biffs. I think talipot was the only unknown, and fortunately I was onto the Louisville Lip as fast as you could say Sonny Liston.

      Thanks to Dean for the puzzle and K for saving me the trouble of parsing them. Well, it was Lunar New Year’s Eve, which is celebrated with possibly the biggest dinner of them all. Today is ‘Everyone’s Birthday’ – another excuse for a good nosh.

  2. I have a horrible feeling this may be intended as a tongue-in-cheek homophone of “for sick” with ‘relative’ as the indicator (as related). The straight definition is then ‘past caring’ along the lines explained in the blog.

    Hope I’m wrong!

    Edited at 2016-02-14 05:47 am (UTC)

  3. And so to the remainder of the puzzle and ‘slog’ was the first word that sprang to my mind too. I needed around 90 minutes to complete it but got there eventually without resorting to aids. I completely failed to parse 15ac so thanks to our blogger for coming up with the WHITTER/AWE explanation. I knew GREY COAT Hospital as my mother attended there c1920 I’d guess. It’s actually a school for girls in Westminster founded in 1698.
  4. I’ll take the rap for the relative – an editorial idea that seems to have caused too much bafflement. It’s just an example of who might get the physic, which was intended to make the surface meaning a stronger story.

    Edited at 2016-02-14 07:04 am (UTC)

    1. Egad. I am disappointed that there was nothing more to it, while also glad that there was nothing more to it that I missed, and, most of all, mightily relieved that it wasn’t the “sounds like” clue that seems to have been the only thing anybody anywhere was able to come up with. Whew.
    2. Thanks Peter. I actually thought of that but decided there must be more to it. I suppose it’s a kind of cryptic definition by example!
  5. Same as others on PHYSIC – thanks to PB for the explanation. I knew the definition from Macbeth where he sends Macduff to “wake” Duncan, knowing he’s dead, and “apologises” to him for the trouble. To which Macduff replies “the labour we delight in physics pain”. Ditto on the H in WITTER. I believe those V-shaped groups of migrating geese are known as SKEINS. I enjoyed this one, 1a notwithstanding. 20.52
  6. Didn’t think much of 1a if the above explanations are correct. 15a: I have never seen witter with an H in it but I do concede that it’s in Collins and probably others.
  7. I thought this was quite outstanding. How can people can be so lukewarm about it as to call it a slog? Anax/Dean Mayer has managed time after time to produce clues that are very good and very short. I haven’t worked out the average number of words in each clue, but I attempt various clue-setting competitions and struggle to get my clues much below ten words. Here hardly any of them are even that long. In fact I don’t think any are.

    And 9ac is absolutely brilliant.

    1. Brevity in clues may be a desirable characteristic in itself, but sometimes it forces the setter to use obscure words or oblique definitions, so that the reaction on solving the clue is a bit more ‘oh I suppose so if you really insist’ than ‘Eureka!’. There’s a bit of that in this puzzle, but much less than I remembered, so as I said I suspect my somewhat negative reaction was as much a consequence of my mood as anything else. But the fact remains that at the time I found it a slog, and I don’t see much point in lying about it.

Comments are closed.