Times 24164 – tough but good

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
15:21 for this – quite a tough challenge, with plenty of original wordplay and not too much of a knowledge test. My first answer was 15A, and the hardest part was the NW corner, with 9 and 3 the last two to go in, and 4 and 11 also taking a long time.

Across
1 WELL-ADJUSTED – which on reflection is a possible guess from “stable” and (4-8). LAD,JUST,E = “boy and fair lassie finally” in WELD = bond
9 UNTIE – alternate letters in tUrNs – TwIcE. I wasted at least half a minute trying to get ULTRA to fit – as usual with such wild goose chases I should have decided that the def. wasn’t really there.
10 GIFT HORSE = (forge this)* – “hack”=”inferior horse” is not quite checkable with COED or Collins but the implication is there in the saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth
11 DO LITTLE = “loaf”. “He could have used ox tongue” is a description of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting’s character who could “talk to the animals”, portrayed in films by Rex Harrison and (in a loose adaptation) Eddie Murphy. Most memorable animal character was probably the pushmi-pullyu, an antelope with a head at each end. Here’s Rex in the best song from his version. The books were later considered racist and apparently still appear but in bowdlerised versions. If you think it should be Doolittle, that’s Eliza and her dad in My Fair Lady.
12 A,M(I)ENS (stag = “men’s”) – I thought this town had been used very recently, but I think it was in a Jumbo left over from a month or two ago, tackled at the weekend. One of those places in Northern France that we Brits ignore as we fly past on the Autoroute des Anglais.
13 EGGPLANT = (gang pelt)* – should probably have been a first-time answer, had I believed there was an anagram to be found in those letters
15 BROODY = “wanting children” – DOOR rev. (“back entrance”) inside BY = near. Maybe not the clearest cryptic reading but the surface is quite fun.
17 BR=British,EAST=card player (from bridge descriptions). Def. based on “beating one’s breast”. Nicely disguised as B,E,(one’s)* = “to beat”
18 DOG LATIN – clever CD based on 11 = Dolittle, “man’s best friend”, and prescriptions traditionally being in Latin (hence r=recipe=take and other wacky stuff in barred grid puzzles) – and from doctors, of course.
20 C(inem)A,NADA=nothing (Spanish) – more difficult than the usual bits of foreign language.
21 BLENHEIM – a particular colour of Cavalier King Charles spaniel, with Blenheim Palace connections. Anag. of (been, him) and L = “his tail” – i.e. the tail of “spanieL”
24 GREAT-AUNT – (RE=touching=concerning,AT=heart of mate) in GAUNT = lean.
26 THE GODFATHER – TH.=Thursday,EGO=I (a bit more Latin),D=start to Draw,FAT=rich,HER=girl’s. I toyed briefly with TH.+ EGO + BETWEEN
 
Down
1 WOULD-BE = aspiring = “wood bee” = small forest insect
2 LITTLE GREEN MEN – green = “caring for planet” in “little men” = short race
3 AVERT – aver=declare,T= “it having cut one”, “head off” being the def. “having cut one’s head off” is a very good bit of misleading wordplay.
4 JUG=prison,GLING = going, with L=pound for O=nothing
5 SIFT – hidden – riddle = sieve = sift (all verbs)
6 EPHEMERAL – ME = “writer” in (A helper)*
7 ORDER=requisition,OF THE BAT=cricketer’s,H=horse. “Knights” defines this British order of chivalry.
8 JERSEY=”channel land” Stop here and read Barbara’s triple def. explanation in the comments. My idea kind of works but it’s at least 10-1 that the triple def. is what the setter meant. – the rest being a cryptic def. relating to Jersey cattle and their milk’s high fat content and/or their high number of milking cows per unit area (or maybe just top = the “gold top” of fond memory.
14 LAST=survive,DITCH=axe. I don’t know whether last-ditch = desperate is from horse-racing, trench warfare, or something else.
16 PO(LL)UTED – “LL=lines in something” was easy, but the right face-pull took most of the checking letters.
17 BOCAGE = “French fields” (pastureland in small hedged fields) – AGE = “turn yellow” (old newspapers and so on), after rev. of COB=corn=maize
19 NIMBLER = “lighter moving” – M in Berlin*
22 NETTA – diminutive of Annette or other names ending -nette. Rev. of “at ten” = “rather late”
23 BUN=cake,G=good. Def. is sweetener=bribe. “bung” is Brit. informal for bribe, most often as an illegal and unrecorded part of a football transfer fee.

32 comments on “Times 24164 – tough but good”

  1. I got to 23 before writing in my first answer!

    Another puzzle of two halves for me, but this time the split was diagonally with the RH going in quite easily after the slow start. LH top was a real battle.

    Never heard of BOCAGE or NADA but everything was solvable one way or another and I have no complaints today.

  2. I think this is a triple def:
    1.Channel land = Isle of Jersey
    2.A jersey is also a type of top (garment)
    3.Jersey is a breed of cow which is a producer(of milk) for farming business
    Barbara
  3. Crikey, this was a bit of a stinker! 40mins for all but 11, 21 and 22. I looked at it again later and saw 21 and 22 straight away, but even with the checking letters and the “help” of 18 could make absolutely nothing of 11ac.

    The rest was all decipherable in the end, although I have never heard of anyone called Netta.

  4. On a poor run of form at the moment, and haven’t completely finished a puzzle without aids for about a week. Managed the bottom half of this one but gave up after about half an hour with four clues in the top half unsolved. Until a few days ago I was optimistic that I was getting better at these, now I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been deluding myself. bc
    1. I’m sure we’ve all had bad runs – I’m making a few more errors at the moment than I’d like. The confidence you get from doing well on a few puzzles (or the converse) makes a lot of difference.

      1. I’m also failing to solve them at the moment. Not sure why, it just seems to happen for a while. I thought this was a very good crossword, however. Some of the clues didn’t quite work for me, but there’s lots of originality.

        Tom B.

  5. An excellent puzzle, about 40 minutes to solve with the top proving harder than the bottom. I also thought 8D a triple definition as explained by Barbara above. Typical of this setter to throw in that little word “top” as a good definition beautifully disguised in the wordplay.

    It must have been very difficult knowing what to leave out of the blog, so many excellent clues. Some would not be out of place in a Mephisto and would certainly be good for Anax’s new “in between” offering. Congratulations to the setter.

  6. I echo Jimbo’s sentiments. Solved in several sessions. BUNG was my first in and probably the last clue I solved at first reading. Excellent surfaces throughout, some of which I now see I didn’t properly appreciate at the time. (Thank you, Peter & Barbara.) No COD necessary. I thought at many points that the solutions must involve words or people unknown to me, but in the end, not one did. DOLITTLE was the last in, having been variously an unknown botanist, excommunicated priest, and who knows what else.
  7. About 20 minutes today on the train, but that didn’t feel too bad. Loads of misleading wordplay, and several times I got the answer from the definition but struggled to justify it. Luckily I knew BOCAGE and got it with just the C in place. SE corner was the last to fall, with NETTA/TRAIL the last two in.
  8. I also found this tough (particularly the NW corner) and almost gave up after 40 minutes with about 10 clues still to solve, but GIFT HORSE, which for some reason I didn’t see for ages, got me going again. A shameful hour in all. Lots of clever and devious clues and neat surfaces.
  9. I had a lot of trouble with this and was well over an hour…anyway great puzzle…just too hard for me…ended up a few short of the whole with no time…
  10. I didn’t time myself, did this in-between improv games at a show last night, but did like it. Last two to fall were the DOLITTLE/DOG LATIN pair. BOCAGE was new but wordplay left little doubt, NETTA also came from wordplay alone. I really liked the triple def of JERSEY and some very fun surfaces such as 15, 16, 25, 20, 14. Winter hat tip to the setter.
  11. I raced through this, and after ten and a half minutes I had just four clues left to solve. Twenty minutes later, I had four clues left to solve. I didn’t get them until I’d slept on it, so no time recorded. The pairings that did for me were BROODY/JERSEY and NETTA/TRAIL.

    Lots of fun, though. Loved the ‘ox tongue’ gag. Dr Dolittle was racist? Blimey! There’s another retrospective blot on the rose-tinted landscape of my childhood.

  12. This was tough – 50 minutes, with 18ac wrong (I went for PIG LATIN – wasn’t one of 11ac’s friends a pig?), which kind of put the kibosh on 16d. COD 11ac.
  13. I finished the LHS before I got anything on the right. Finally got everything on the right apart from Blenheim, despite having a discussion with my wife less than an hour ago about visiting Blenheim Palace. I think I new bocage from reading Manon des Sources in French, lots of rural vocabulary. I didn’t know it was an English word though.
    1. I got it from the French too – it is trees in the English, and really means the type of countryside with enclosed fields and woods like Normandy in the French – I found “French fields” a bit iffy.
      1. “trees in the English”: only according to Chambers, which equates it with boscage. Collins and COED have something like “countryside with hedged fields interspersed with trees”, which matches Wikipedia and my memory from (I assume) some long-ago geography lesson. (They both have boscage defined separately as something like “mass of trees or shrubs”, as in Chambers).
  14. 37:12 for me with the SE corner the last to fall.

    Excellent clues throughout especially those where there were 4 or more component parts put together seamlessly in the clue. It was a joy to solve a puzzle where you just knew each answer was right as you put it it in.

    I was into the downs before I solved one clue; fortunately it was a biggie – LITTLE GREEN MEN – and that got me going with some intersecting acrosses.

    It’s always interesting to compare experiences in solving clues. Some that other people didn’t solve till last, I got fairly early on and vice versa.

  15. I’m very glad to see that everyone had a bit of difficulty with this, since I clawed my way for about 45 minutes but ended up with two wrong, having fallen for the Pig, not DOG LATIN ruse, so 16 couldn’t be solved, either. I had assumed Dr. Dolittle’s best friend must be a pig! I agree that this puzzle has a load of very clever clues with no real quibbles, except perhaps for DOG LATIN, which I had never heard of until today. BOCAGE was familiar from military history accounts of the 1944 Normandy battles, which describe Normandy and the Cotentin as bocage country. Regards all, better luck for me tomorrow, I hope.
    1. I must have had a deprived childhood – I had never even heard of the Dr Dolittle books.
  16. Past couple of weeks have been grim as far as Xword solving goes. Managed about 2/3 of this which is more than I have done for a while. Found LH side easier (though got rocket for bocage). Have nominated bocage as my “new word of the day”! Good to see the explanation for Canada – hadn’t heard of nada.
    Fran
  17. Bung was the last to go in for this American. Never heard or read it used in the “swetener” context.
  18. Tough but fair. Even so, I finally resorted to the cheats to finish in 36 min. Only bocage was new, but well clued. COD? Take your pick!
  19. I was blissfully unaware of PIG LATIN – I have looked it up hence the title. Having done so I think I recognise it from some dialogue in the Lion King movie between Zazu and Simba? Explained after all these years!

    DOG LATIN fitted the clue though at 18a – as in Man’s Best Friend. I was also unaware that Dr Dolittle had a porcine friend but have to admit to not knowing what Dog Latin is. It does at least require some knowledge of Latin vocab. Pig Latin, of course, does not.

    Just the one omission from the blog – perhaps not on purpose?

    25a Drag queen put in shadow (5)
    T R AIL

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