Sunday Times 5010 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

13:51, but with one silly error. I know perfectly well how to spell the town on the Isle of Wight but somehow allowed my false assumption about how to spell the golf tournament override (overryde?) that knowledge. Drat.

The usual highly enjoyable stuff though. The trick in 5ac is particularly neat, and 16dn is a typical piece of Dean Mayer brilliance. I slowed myself down a bit by having HOUSE and MATCH at 14ac before seeing the light, and I was a bit unsure about ‘circle’ in 24ac. I think it just about works though, if I’ve understood it correctly.

How did you get on?

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Seaside town churchgoer winning trophy
RYDER CUP – RYDE, RC (churchgoer), UP (winning).
5 Sat on this brick?
FRIEND – because Saturday is on the ‘end’ of Friday. A brick is a ‘reliable, trustworthy, or helpful person’ (Collins), which is also more or less one of the meanings of ‘friend’ (‘an ally… or supporter’).
10 Aircraft transaction, patent discussed?
SAILPLANE – sounds like ‘sale plain’.
11 Parade to show support
STRUT – DD.
12 How do celebrities appear in this?
HELLO – DD.
13 The same ornithologist’s heading off to find bird
DOWITCHER – DO (ditto, the same), tWITCHER. This bird rang a vague bell, perhaps because it appeared in a jumbo in April.
14 Terry’s father?
MAN OF THE CLOTH – Terry is both a man’s name and a type of towelling cloth, so cryptically one of these.
17 I know a little, but emo is complicated
TELL ME ABOUT IT – (A LITTLE BUT EMO)*.
21 Funny bloke eating our dip
SOUR CREAM – S(OUR)CREAM. I wouldn’t call SOUR CREAM a dip, personally. Or at least I certainly wouldn’t use it that way.
23 Ground near a ground?
ARENA – (NEAR A)*. You can also reverse the definition and anagram indicator if you prefer!
24 A circle to draw
LOTTO – LOT, TO. I think is as in ‘circle of friends’: ‘he’s been hanging out with Dean’s lot recently’.
25 Notices a fly going up and down
SEESAWING – SEES A WING.
26 Endeavour heading left a bit
MORSEL – MORSE, L. Endeavour being the famously crossword-loving inspector's first name.
27 Races lost and won for starter in Le Mans
ESCARGOT – (RACES)*, GOT. Yum.
Down
1 Remains in an institution
REST HOME – REST (remains), HOME (in).
2 A bit attached to this private tutor?
DRILL INSTRUCTOR – CD. A DRILL has a bit attached to it and a DRILL INSTRUCTOR tutors privates.
3 Carpeting salesman and what may be pitched
REPROOF – REP (salesman), ROOF (what may be pitched).
4 Enemies variously named thus
US AND THEM – (NAMED THUS)*.
6 Port covering very dry dish
RISOTTO – RI(SO, TT)O.
7 Really big or ground-breaking
EARTH-SHATTERING – er, EARTH-SHATTERING!
8 Old person has to perform with Jack Dee
DOTARD – DO (perform), TAR (sailor, jack), D.
9 Tom’s outburst stifled by homeowner
MEOW – contained in ‘homeowner’. At the exact moment I was writing this one of our cats came down the stairs and made exactly this noise. I’d better feed her.
15 Not winning game, holding a jolly line
CHARMLESS – CH(A, RM, L)ESS. RM = Royal Marine = jolly.
16 Sound sounded sound
STRAIGHT – sounds like ‘strait’. Brilliant! You can reverse the definition and homophone indicator if you prefer.
18 Bring law in to drop sugar
LACTOSE – L(ACT)OSE. I thought of lose/drop in the context of weight and dieting, no doubt there are others.
19 Anthem that’s nothing about nothing
O CANADA – O, CA (about), NADA. No prizes for guessing whose national anthem this is.
20 One year in ghetto shelter
ASYLUM – A, S(Y)LUM.
22 Natural energy wasted, say
EASY – E, (SAY)*.

33 comments on “Sunday Times 5010 by Dean Mayer”

  1. 27:51, of which the last 5′ were spent on LOTTO & HELLO. I never worked out the wordplay in LOTTO, so thanks to Keriothe for explaining. As I was about to give up and biff HELLO, it came to me that there is a magazine of that name (never seen it, of course, knew nothing about it). Luckily for me, we had DOWITCHER (then NHO) recently; I only parsed it after submitting. I liked REPROOF, TELL ME ABOUT IT, STRAIGHT, O CANADA, but COD to FRIEND.

  2. I parsed LOTTO the same as you, keriothe. The clue for ESCARGOT was highly original (afaik) and deceptive. Other faves were REPROOF, O CANADA and DOTAGE. In the latter I thought Dee was straying into Chambers territory, but it’s there in Lexico. Whereas see for C isn’t, go figure.

  3. I wrote “Amazing” next to FRIEND, definitely my COD.
    Sour cream dip is very common over here, with (US-style) potato chips or veggies.
    Neither eyebrow was raised at “circle” for LOT.
    Hey, Dean: an “old person” is not necessarily a DOTARD! (But this puts me in mind of Nabokov’s character Van referring his and the titular Ada’s being in their “dot-dot-dotage.”)

    1. Sour cream dips are quite common here, too, but they are not the same thing as sour cream: they invariably have other ingredients, notably chives.

      1. Traditional in the States was a packet or two of Lipton’s powdered onion soup mix. Less sophisticated than chives, but served us chavs well.

  4. I suggest the blogger try sour cream as a dip with jalapeño corn chips

    I have little memory of the crossword

    1. Of course I’ve eaten sour cream and salsa on tortilla chips many times. We also have burritos quite often and I always put sour cream in those. But I would never use sour cream (on its own – see above) as a dip.

      1. Nope, just a pot of plain sour cream and a bag of spicy corn chips: great snacking at work. But your keyboard may never forgive you

  5. Enjoyed STRUT, SEESAWING, and US AND THEM. Took just over an hour but finally saw DOWITCHER. Needed lots of enlightenment from blog-thanks!

  6. LOI was 5a. With the checkers in place I wondered if an ARSEND could be a type of brick, but thought this might be a bit much even for Dean. FRIEND came to the rescue when I twigged to the clever parsing.
    MAN OF THE CLOTH was brilliantly succinct clueing.
    18:38 – my best ever time for a DM?

  7. I started at 7.25am and finished at 8.25am before brekka.

    FOI 6dn RISOTTO
    LOI 26ac MORSEL I had clean forgotten ENDEAVOUR was his monika!
    COD 5ac FRIEND
    WOD 12ac HELLO! – NB this ‘Royalist’ fanzine comes with a screamer! It clogs up surgeries and dental practices all over Britain and Canada. Rod Stewart frequents.

    I first went to Ryde on the Hover-ferry from Southsea c. 1960. What a thrill!

    1. I went on that hovercraft too. Also the huge ones that used to go from Dover to Calais driving a minibus with a trailer with about twenty canoes, so a vehicle about 40 feet long.

  8. 60m 17s of good fun!
    The DOWITCHER Duchess of Grantham…..well, she is an old bird, isn’t she?
    The only clue that I couldn’t really parse was for LOTTO, so, thanks Keriothe.
    I figured that MORSEl might be difficult for overseas solvers and then there was a perhaps tenuous link in 14ac with ‘Terry’. That made me think first of Terry McCann, Dennis Waterman’s role in ‘Minder’ and then of his role as ‘offsider’ to John Thaw in ‘The Sweeney…who went on to play MORSE!
    I’ve seen FRIEND before, so no problems there.
    So many excellent Dean clues: DRILL INSTRUCTOR (‘private tutor’!), HELLO (‘How do!’), MEOW, O CANADA, ESCARGOT, STRAIGHT and CHARMLESS but COD to MAN OF THE CLOTH. Typically succinct Dean clue.

    PS….What is that ‘floating’ on a cloud in your avatar, keriothe?!

    1. Looks like James didn’t notice your question, Martin. I asked him via email recently, since I hadn’t seen his answer to my asking that on the blog! This was before everyone could get notifications of replies. Anyway, Keriothe said: “It’s a picture of a floating dock in the lake by our cottage in Canada. I took it on a very still day, so it looks like it’s floating on the sky.”

      1. 60m 17s of good fun!
        The DOWITCHER Duchess of Grantham…..well, she is an old bird, isn’t she?
        The only clue that I couldn’t really parse was for LOTTO, so, thanks Keriothe.
        I figured that MORSEl might be difficult for overseas solvers and then there was a perhaps tenuous link in 14ac with ‘Terry’. That made me think first of Terry McCann, Dennis Waterman’s role in ‘Minder’ and then of his role as ‘offsider’ to John Thaw in ‘The Sweeney…who went on to play MORSE!
        I’ve seen FRIEND before, so no problems there.
        So many excellent Dean clues: DRILL INSTRUCTOR (‘private tutor’!), HELLO (‘How do!’), MEOW, O CANADA, ESCARGOT, and CHARMLESS but COD to MAN OF THE CLOTH. Typically succinct Dean clue.

        PS….What is that ‘floating’ on a cloud in your avatar, keriothe?!

      2. Ah, thanks, Guy! In miniature, whatever it is, does look as if it’s floating in the sky. Either that or it’s the cover of a Pink Floyd album!
        PS….Now I seem to have duplicated my original comment and can’t find how to delete it!

        1. Sorry I did mean to reply to this but have been out and about today. The reason it looks like it’s floating in the sky is that the clouds are perfectly reflected on the still surface of the lake. But you are looking at water.

  9. 38 minutes. Fairly gentle for Dean but good fun. I didn’t understand how LOT = ‘circle’ either but your explanation makes sense. Particularly enjoyed FRIEND and the clever STRAIGHT; into the “Best cryptic clues” file it goes. Learnt a new word in DOWITCHER.

    I don’t know how many RC(‘s) are regular ‘churchgoer(s)’ these days after certain revelations of the last few decades.

    Thanks to Dean and keriothe

  10. Pride comes before a fall and all that. Started out great guns, the north-west pretty much a write-in. Look at me, I thought, cruising through a Dean Mayer….until suddenly I wasn’t. A few stray crossers finally kicked me off again, but progress through the remainder of the grid was hard work. I seemed to lose Dean’s thought groove there, yet when the pennies eventually dropped the clues so obviously lead to the answers. So many clever clues, but my COD was 5Ac. So sneaky! Thanks to Dean for the entertainment, and to blogger for explaining 15d and 19d, which I couldn’t parse.

  11. I found this quite tough, taking 41 minutes. Great fun though. I liked HELLO, ESCARGOT, MAN OF THE CLOTH. and FRIEND particularly, as well as learning the brilliant title of Canada’s national anthem. Thank you K and Dean.

  12. A master class in setting. Really enjoyed it. Impossible to pick a COD. Thanks Dean and k.

  13. See that S car go!
    A relatively gentle romp in 15.34, though I’ve no idea why DOWITCHER seemed right: I must have missed its previous appearances. A lot of clever but not impenetrable stuff: the multiple sounds, and FRIEND of course.
    My Tescos sells a SOUR CREAM and chive dip alongside the nachos, but I don’t think ESCARGOTs yet. On which note, I did think even in the most minimalist cousine, a single ESCARGOT might be regarded as a rather mingy starter.

  14. Never spotted the (SAY*) feature in 22d, so put EASE instead of EASY. Doh!
    Andyf

  15. A fun 27-minute romp; FOI 1a RYDER CUP; I imagine childhood memories of both a school trip to the Isle of Wight and my father watching hours of golf on TV helped with the spelling. LOI 24a LOTTO, which didn’t really float my boat. Enjoyed 14a MAN OF THE CLOTH, 26a MORSEL and 8d DOTARD along the way, according to my marginalia.

  16. 14a. Re. FATHER: I think a reference to a priest in the Catholic Church, rather than just a man’s name.

    1. Yes that’s what I meant by underlining ‘father’ as the definition. The man is Terry.

  17. Excellent crossword done in 24:56, but I also put RIDER CUP. Didn’t know the IOW town or the proper spelling for the golf. Drat! HELLO was my starter and I finished with ESCARGOT. Liked MAN OF THE CLOTH and CHARMLESS. Thanks Dean and K.

  18. 33.17

    A bit sluggish (started late last night) and got a bit stuck a couple of times but worked it all out

    Thanks for explaining FRIEND and LOTTO

    Thought the Terry clue was superb. Not so much STRAIGHT but each to their own. A top notch puzzle as ever

    Thanks all

  19. Thanks Dean and keriothe
    A week late from publication date here and 20 days from over there. As has been said, a typically good puzzle from this setter with his neat and clever clues – none better than FRIEND. Needed some online help for the IOW seaside town to make the RYDER CUP, DOWITCHER a new bird and the Canadian national anthem.
    Was pleased to be able to parse all of the rest, including that tricky LOTTO and REST HOME (that took a while to see the component parts, especially ‘remains’ for REST for some reason). Technically a SOUND is similar, but bigger than a ‘strait’, but for the make up of this clue all can be probably forgiven.
    Finished down the bottom, after just under the hour, with ESCARGOT, that STRAIGHT and that LOTTO.

  20. HELLO originally engineered from the “hi” in “this”
    no, that can’t be right; but hang on…

    got “OCANADA” from the wordplay and checked Collins to see if this was some obscure word before looking at the enumeration and slapping head

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