Sunday Times Jumbo Cryptic No. 5038 by Robert Price

24 comments on “Sunday Times Jumbo Cryptic No. 5038 by Robert Price”

1. I had to cheat for DERBY WINNER.
   NHO SELLOTAPED.
   The two 15-letter ones were sooo easy… but I hesitated to put in ANGELS again, right below its first appearance.

   1. Happy new year Sandy.

      1. À toi aussi, cher James !

   2. Sellotape is a TM, but tends to be used, like Hoover for vacuum cleaner, for any sticky tape, or indeed to indicate the act of sticking, as here.

      1. You probably know this, but in the States it’s Scotch (brand) Tape – each of the varieties (pull off, clear, frosted, etc) has a different colour plaid on the container.

      2. The BBC wouldn’t (maybe still doesn’t) allow trade names to be used. So Valerie Singleton on Blue Peter in the 1960s would have to say “sticky-backed plastic” when she was showing us how to make something, which I had no idea what she meant since, as pointed out already, in the UK, everyone just says “sellotape”.

2. I’m sorry keriothe but when I saw it was a Jumbo I rather lost interest, even though I completed it; but it did take over 2hrs. After that, any puzzle where I have to wait more than a week for the solution, I lose all interest in. I do hope, though, you get enough responders to make it worthwhile for you to go to the effort of compiling this blog.

   1. Happy New Year Martin!

      1. And the same to you, keriothe!

3. No errors, but a couple of clues I didn’t understand: AUDEN, MINCE PIE (guessed it was CRS), TELEVANGELISTS (guessed there was a composer named VANGELIS; if he’s best known for the theme of Chariots of Fire, I’m not surprised I never heard of him), GIRLFRIEND, DERBY WINNER. The two anagrams are amazing.

   1. ‘Best known’ should perhaps be ‘only known’, but the piece itself is very famous. Still.
      Happy new year Kevin.

      1. And to you, too!

   2. If only I’d needed to work out the anagrams for the two long answers! That would have been fun. Have a great 2023, Kevin!

      1. あけましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願いします。(Likewise to you. I was going to reply, “Thanks, but I’ve made other plans”, but thought better of it. )

4. Super crossword. Too many good clues to mention but I particularly enjoyed AUDEN and GIRLFRIEND.

   Happy New Year to everyone on this site.

   Thanks, as always, to Robert and keriothe

5. This was a pleasant diversion over several days of the Christmas holiday. I did parse AUDEN eventually but not my LOI BAUBLE which I did not equate with TRIMMING; however it turned out to be right and was a better bet than MARBLE which was waiting in the wings.
   Hard to pick a COD, as noted above, but I do like the word WASSAIL.
   HNY to all on this site.
   David

6. Umm, for 19a my wiktionary says AFFADAVIT is a misspelling of AFFIDAVIT so the random girl could have been IDA rather that Ms Ada Lovelace.

   1. Agreed. Surely this is ‘affidavit’ with the girl being Ida. The Latin word concerns a declaration of faith, and comes from ‘fides’.

   2. You’re right, I will amend the blog. I should have realised this because it’s a word I always misspell, and when I’ve been caught out by it in the past I have told myself (without success, evidently) to remember that it means a pledge of faith and comes from the same Latin root as ‘fidelity’.

7. Well, I really enjoyed the challenge of the two consecutive Sunday Jumbo cryptics, both of them easier than I feared, but both solvable with enough time and patience. My first in was PILAFF, which was encouragingly easy, my LOI was 50A, hampered by my stubborn refusal to read the clue in any alternative way. (In fact, I doubt if I would have got it at all if we hadn’t finally bifd DERBY WINNER, impossible to get from the cross-reference if you hadn’t heard of the horse!) That made me look again at short MISE[R] and suddenly the penny dropped. Brilliant. Liked the clue for Part of Cambridge, though COLLEGE was a giveaway. Whenever I see Scientist in a clue I’m like Astro_Nowt is with birds, but fortunately, although I hadn’t heard of the bloke, I did remember Bunsen burners. Everything else was GK though I couldn’t parse AUDEN to save my life, so thanks for that, Keriothe, and HNY to all of you on the site!

8. Happy New Year, keriothe, and all others (including especially the Ed and Mr Price). I got all the way there except for Derby Winner – where I never got around to doing the cheating I personally would have needed to fill in the unchs. The 59/60ths I did properly fill in were enjoyable. I didn’t notice the choir of angels – I did notice a lot of cake in the clues and the answers

9. I never finished this in my first sitting, so put it to one side. But with the holidays and the seemingly endless parade of jumbo crosswords, I forgot to go back. Some of the answers I’d missed seem really obvious now I know them…but isn’t that always the way with crosswords. It is often hard to work out what made it so hard (if it’s not obscure poets or composers where I know just why I failed).

10. Couldnt get ANGELS at the end nor parse a few including BAUBLE but a v enjoyable 90 minutes or so

    Fantastic puzzle as always and agree with all the comments. And a great blog too of course.

    Belated festive and NY greetings to all

11. Thanks Robert and keriothe
    This puzzle wasn’t available here until after the Christmas / New Year period, so had to fit it in to the normal working weeks – spent a bit over 2 hours to complete the grid across 4-5 elapsed days and then a bit longer to make sense of all of the parsing of the clues. There were only three that I didn’t get the word play for – DUO (the cunning hidden), BAUBLE (the cunning substitution in the Book) and PRIMER (got side-tracked with EMIR being a ‘king’).
    Found the rest of the puzzle an entertaining solve with a great mix of clues and some further general knowledge gained in the process. PILAFF was a new spelling, TELEVANGELIST was a new term (a good effort to fit a full composer’s name in), NEWNHAM COLLEGE needed to be looked up post word play, AUDEN had turned up recently elsewhere and was my clue of the day – do especially like subtraction clues and a credit that he was able to have ICE in the correct order and nicely clued as ‘chunks of ice’, didn’t know Michael WINNER and had to remember about SELLOTAPE from deep memory. That was my penultimate entry with that BAUBLE the last one in.
    An excellent holiday puzzle which would have been better had it been available during the holidays.

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