Thank you to Peter for taking the register, I am here now, courtesy of a coffee shop in Skipton, having a break from walking up hill and down dale. Glad to find that today’s puzzle was not the sort of horror which would have kept me here till lunchtime testing the battery level on the laptop! Time around 25 minutes, a lot of which was in the NW corner (not just me, going by early comments…) If the blog stops mid-sentence, please be reassured that means the computer has given up the ghost and not me (I hope).
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | COLLIERY – CRY round OLLIE: last time a setter used the nuts = coal definition, I thought I’d learned something new (and mused how many people today would get the reference when everyone has central heating instead of a coal delivery), but it obviously didn’t stick, as it took ages to remember it today. I imagine I wasn’t alone in looking for a word meaning “hardy” which was made up of ‘N’ inside an illness. The other question would be whether OLLIE is sufficiently distinctive to be Hardy, as, say, Sherlock would be taken to indicate Holmes? My view is that it’s stretching a point, but any misleading that was done here was the perfectly fair sort. |
| 5 | COMBED – M.B. in CO-ED. |
| 10 | CANNA – C(ape) + ANNA gives the tropical plant, which, as usual, I deduced from wordplay, rather than knowing from gardening experience. |
| 11 | APOSTOLIC – POST + (OIL)* in A.C. |
| 12 | SHORTHORN – Though I missed the “nuts” for coal, as soon as I saw “neat” I was looking for cattle. The second cape in three clues is a little jarring, even though they’re used differently. |
| 13 | CHASE – Double def, “pursuit” and a frame used in printing. |
| 14 | REAGENT – Ronald REAGAN with the A replaced by E, plus a T(ime). |
| 16 | TALLOW – as in a “tall story”, so a “tall Ow”. |
| 18 | RECESS – double def. |
| 20 | ECLOGUE – EC + LOG + U + E. |
| 22 |
ALTER – ( |
| 23 |
UNDAUNTED – UN + AUNT inside DE( |
| 25 | SLUMBERER – S(ingular) LUMBERER i.e. feller – we’re getting some good concealed definitions today. |
| 26 | INNER – INN + E.R.; in archery the rings on a target include Inners and Outers. |
| 27 | ANKLET – cryptic def. |
| 28 | BEANPOLE – BE + A N(orth)POLE. |
| Down | |
| 1 | COCKSURE – COCKS + (River) URE. |
| 2 | LENTO – LENT + ‘O’, &lit. – this is the musical direction for “play slowly”. My own slowness in the NW corner was not mitigated by initially writing in LARGO, a classic case of seeing something which superficially works with the surface, and fits the space, without thinking it through. |
| 3 | IVAN THE TERRIBLE – (RELATIVEINBERTH)* rather leapt off the page. |
| 4 | READ OUT – REDOUBT, minus the B(achelor), plus an A. |
| 6 | OPTICAL ILLUSION – cryptic def., a fancy is an illusion which might deceive the viewers = eyes. |
| 7 | BILLABONG – great one for cricket fans, doubly so for Australian cricket fans; amongst the “extras” you can score in cricket are NO BALLs, here reversed in BIG to give the water course famously mentioned in “Waltzing Matilda”. |
| 8 | DOCKER – double def. |
| 9 | BONNET – cryptic def (unless you’re American in which case presumably it needs to be HOOD to work locally… |
| 15 | AWESTRUCK – WEST IN A RUCK: unusual to see the bridge player spelled out in full. |
| 17 | GENDARME – GEN (dope as in “information”) + R(esistance) in DAME. |
| 19 | SQUARE – redolent of the 1950s, this clue, when hep-cats would have been deriding squares, while people on National Service did square-bashing at Catterick. The finest example of marching up and down the square can be seen here. |
| 20 | ENDORSE – (DON)* in ERSE. |
| 21 | NAUSEA – (UNA) + SEA (= “main”). |
| 24 | TONDO – (policeme)N in TO DO; I have an odd feeling I may have blogged about this artistic feature before… |
Special apologies for any errors or omissions in today’s post, as I am returning to my internet-free and mobile-phoneless wilderness for the rest of the week and shan’t be around to find out about them, never mind make corrections…
So I enjoyed this puzzle after the easier one yesterday and got it done in 51 minutes including making two espressos and a plate of toast and Vegemite. So a few minutes less than this.
Also tested the punctuality of the on-line puzzle. It wasn’t there at 6:59 (23:59 UK time), but it was right on the dot of 7:00 (midnight).
Infer from above that 1ac is COLLIERY in which case it gets my COD. From that I guess 4dn is READ OUT but don’t know why.
Much more challenging than yesterday and enjoyable as a consequence.
Amazing what you can learn from xwds. In the course of failing to solve 1ac I reminded myself of all the novels of Thomas Hardy and that he died of pleurisy (ie not something to do with colic).
I didn’t understand BILLABONG before I read mct’s comment above, but this was mostly a straightforward puzzle which I was just unable to close out in the time available.
Last two solved were 1ac which I thought was brilliant and 14ac which, for ages, I was convinced was sure to contain ABE.
anyway – enough nostalgia – it looks as if this week is going to be slightly more palatable than last weeks hard stuff. this was a slow plodder, but nothing horrible. That said, two went in without a clue as to why. 1A had to be COLLIERY from the checkers, but even though I now see the word play, why nuts? Also I assume 19D is SQUIRE, but again not sure why.
19D is SQUARE, as in “square bashing” (soldiers drilling) and a square can be an old fogey.
Or am I just being slow as usual?
I was dubious about Billabong being a watercourse as I had always thought of it as still water but no Antipodeans have complained so I must be wrong.
The clues, at least the ones I understood, were great.
My last in was ‘colliery’, which I did not understand but that’s what it must be. I had a lot of trouble with the left side, which yielded all too slowly. ‘Reagent’, ‘shorthorn’, and ‘nausea’ were very clever, but ‘square’ is my COD.
Fortunately I looked up “chase” yesterday, so the printing reference was at the forefront of my brain. The guides at Pompalier House in Kororareka, (whose window you see at left) which houses the oldest mobile printing press in New Zealand (used by the Roman Catholic Church to print scriptures and other texts in the Maori language) assured me that “cut to the chase” was a printing term referring to paper being matched to the chase. I thought that rather dubious, but was prepared to accept upper & lower case (where the type was selected from) as genuine and skiving (splitting the hides into thinner slices and the least physically taxing job in the hide preparation room, albeit the most skilful) as a possibility. “Quoining a phrase” also reputedly stems from printing, as a means of securing a block of text in the chase.
COD – BILLABONG, although reading the comments perhaps I should withdraw that given that water doesn’t course in a billabong. Agree that 6D was a bit weak. I seem to remember AWESTRUCK in last year’s championship, with a similar clue.