Times 24470: a warm place for a vacation

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 16 minutes, though I think it would be considerably faster if I was working from the printed version, I’m doing it online. Seemed a little more straightforward than the last two days, and some very nice clues, a couple of words I needed wordplay to get (looked like words I recognized but couldn’t quite put the meaning to), and I’m always happy to see checking Qs. My thought for a theme here is warmth and holidays, which sounds good to me, it’s snowing outside. I’m also glad to see some tasty food in the crossword, makes me want a curry (and not a crappithead or saloop or whatever else is being served in the Mephisto)

Across
1 SUN-KISSED: (DUSKINESS)* warmth #1
6 ROSES: double definition
9 A,PING: that’s new wordplay to me for an old word
10 deliberately omitted
11 BESPEAK: ESP in BEAK – got the ESP part first
12 AVAILED: sounds like A, VEILED, and still does when I say it
13 ECONOMY OF SCALE: (COLONY FACE SOME)* – I’ll admit I only knew the phrase from a parody in a rather fun online game (any KoL players do crosswords?)
17 PACKAGE HOLIDAY: back on the theme – I put this in from definition and just figured the wordplay for the blog, it’s PACKAGE then I in HOLD, (s)AY
21 OMINOUS: O, then O in MINUS, convoluted wordplay, but works
23 LEANDER: (LEARNED)* good thing it’s an obvious anagram, I’d not heard of the Leander Club
25 REQUISITE: SIT in REQUIE(m)
26 deliberately omitted
27 SIEGE: I and G alternately in SEE, not wordplay often seen
28 GWENDOLEN: WEND in GO, LEN(t)
 
Down
1 SHAMBLES: (LAMBS HES) – got this from the anagram, didn’t know it was another word for abbatoir
2 NAILS: double def (hard as NAILS)
3 IN,GLEN,(r)OOK: more warmth and niceitude
4 SLICKLY: L in SICKLY
5 deliberately omitted
6 RAITA: AIT in R.A. – yum
7 STABLE LAD: STAB, then L in LEAD
8 STEADY: double def
14 O,DALI,SQUE(EZES): got this from the wordplay, and what wordplay it is! O DEAR
15 COLLAPSED: LAPSE in COLD
16 HYDRO,GEN: HYDRO pops up in barred-grid crosswords more often than here
18 GASPING: SPIN in GAG, nice surface
19 HELLENE: HELL, sounds like EEN, I don’t think I’ve ever said EEN deliberately, but I guess it sounds like this
20 M,ORRIS: another one from wordplay, didn’t know William Morris
22 O,NICE: tee hee #1
23 DR,ILL: tee hee #2 to finish

37 comments on “Times 24470: a warm place for a vacation”

  1. Some interesting wordplay – ‘decline to visit’ is nice for a nestled LAPSE, and 27a was most unusually expressed. Best clue for me was 23d – lovely surface. About 10/11 minutes.
  2. A rather plodding 33 minutes here. Never raced away, and didn’t stall until 4 left in the SW. (14,20,21 &22). A loooong pause then a snort for O NICE. Last in OMINOUS. Some nice clues. Rather liked SUNKISSED, but joint CODs to ON ICE and DRILL. Oh, and having a long pleasant spell of wall to wall sunshine in the mid to high 20s (Just to rub it in).
  3. I might be the slowest contributor today at an hour (despite getting 1ac and 1dn straight away) but I really enjoyed working my way through this. Nothing obscure, no need to consult the dictionary afterwards, and some cracking clues – DR ILL in particular made me smile. Although I guess some of the answers are rather Olde English – INGLENOOK, SHAMBLES and DINGLE.

    George, a couple of minor edits needed at 13ac and 14dn.

    1. oops – thanks for picking those up, I even tried to put the S on the end of ECONOMY OF SCALE in my grid.
  4. Took 19 minutes at home but minus 27ac — which I tried to work out during yet another boring lecture. It had to be SIEGE from the wordplay but I was blowed if I could see the definition. Still can’t. Blame semidiotics. Anyone want to enlighten me?
    1. Investment as in invest a city, besiege it.

      Just over 100 minutes for me and failed to get 14, 21, 24, 28 and, most unforgivably, 25.

      COD to STABLE LAD and ON ICE.

      I knew Morris immediately because I must be one of the few people here to have read his monumental Earthly Paradise. There’s even a reference to Morris in the film version of The Time Traveler’s Wife. (I haven’t read the book – that’s more my teenage daughter’s domain.) More here (http://ulaca-es.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-william-morris-cannot-save-time.html).

        1. ulaca,
          Thanks for the enlightenment: even if the usage is pre-Enlightenment! I shall note this for future reference.
          1. I was puzzled by this but I had a dim memory from last year. If you use Peter’s excellent custom search tool, you find frequent references to siege = investment. The most recent in this blog was Oct 30, 2009 “Astonished that sabine hasn’t noticed investment=siege from previous Times puzzles – an old favourite.”
  5. 20:30.. thanks to a real struggle in the Scouse corner. APING and NAILS had me foxed for a long time.

    I’d have said a little harder than average.

    One Across Rock:
    Hackney mariachi octet Swing, Seige & Shambles and their difficult second album – “Sink Estate? Sunkissed 8”

  6. A steady 30 minute solve until I got to the SW corner with only PACKAGE and the G from GWENDOLEN in place. I then ground to a complete halt, entering only SIEGE and GASPING in the next 15 minutes. On arrival at work I used aids to polish it off.

    Earlier I had got as far as considering ODALI- something at 14 but I didn’t know the word so it was no help and I only worked out the wordplay having found the answer using a solver. I think that was the key to the SW for me and if I had been able to solve it the rest would have followed on, but as it was I failed.

  7. Had very little trouble doing this while watching Olympic hockey. Guessed siege
    from the wordplay. When the game ended I had ON ICE and STABLE LAD to figure out along with RAITA which I had to look up. On the whole I’m very pleased with myself. And now I am also enlightened by this definition of siege.
  8. I thought this was not so hard, but quite amusing in places.

    The wordplay for GWENDOLEN took a while, and SIEGE=investment was new to me (but what else could it be?)

  9. DNF – 4 in SW corner:
    MORRIS (groan) – Was just convinced after getting REQUISITE that it must end RED, ergo the impasse elsewhere.
    OMINOUS – grotesque construction.
    SIEGE – the investment definition.
    ON ICE – a joke I still don’t get. Is it irony?
    Didn’t know the SHAMBLES meaning and worried that there just might be a fast LYN? but stuck with LEN.
    Otherwise a steady solve. COD to SUN-KISSED. Do setters have a list of apposite anagrams I wonder?
  10. 13:20 here, although quite a few answers were stuck in from the definition without bothering to decipher the wordplay. SHAMBLES was the other way around however. COD to DRILL, really good surface.
  11. About 45 minutes with SIEGE being the last in. I convinced myself in the end that I knew about the investment meaning, but I could have been mistaken. I quite liked that clue, and the SHAMBLES (one of York’s famous streets that isn’t a gate) but had question marks against O=dear at 14 and NAILS in general. COD to REQUISITE with DRILL a close second.
  12. finished without aids for second day running in about an hour. last two in ominous then morris – curiously hydrogen was clued as hotel information in yesterday’s grauniad cryptic, so no problems there. cod 1ac superb anagram though it did go in on first read through.
  13. In addition to Leander being a rowing club, Leander was the young man in the Greek myth, Hero and Leander. He and his lover, Hero,lived on opposite shores of the Hellespont. Every night he would swim across to visit her, guided by the light she set out for him.
    One stormy night the wind blew out her light, and Leander got lost and was drowned.
  15. A nice puzzle, taking me 30 minutes. I found the lower half trickier than most of the top. Several question marks against clues whose wordplay I didn’t fully understand. 21a was certainly convoluted, but it does work. I didn’t understand ‘string’ in 7’s definition, but assumed it meant a group of horses. When I checked later in Chambers I found it could refer to other animals, such as camels, so the definition in the clue is somewhat vague. I haven’t come across Hydro for ‘hotel’ even though I tackle barred cryptics.

    For many editors 3d would be a no-no, since it reverses the convention, from wordplay X comes answer Y. I’m less bothered about it since I don’t see why you cannot have wordplay derived from the answer. But I am dubious about ‘headed off’ to indicate loss of the initial letter. ‘Heading off’, yes, but ‘headed off’?
    One other quibble I had was the use of ‘Dear’ for O in 14. The apostrophic O doesn’t really mean ‘dear’ (cf ‘O come all ye faithful’).

    27 was a very nice clue.

  16. A very enjoyable puzzle coming in at under the hour. Apart from southwest corner where I was foiled. I do tend to give the setter a lot of poetic licence so it was with confidence that I inserted NOISOME at 21 across with **i*o** (noi = in love, disadvantage; being old = and some; worrying = noisome). After that I never recovered.
  17. dyste: My Chambers (2003 CD version, really useful when I need to cheat a bit) gives: hy’dro (pl hy’dros)a hotel (with special baths, etc, and often situated near a spa) where guests can have hydropathic treatment. Dunblane’s got one http://www.rampantscotland.com/stay/bldev_stay_dunblane.htm which looks really nice.
    I guess I was just lucky that string in 7 took me straight to racehorses.
    I agree that O=dear is a bit dodgy, even for those of us who remember the vocative case from Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer (O table)
    I share your appreciation of 27 for its exceptionally good surface reading. COD for me RAITA, just for the whimsy of a Christo-esque vision of a yoghurt covered Isle of Wight
  18. Like others I raced through 75% of this and then struggled with the SW corner. 25 minutes to solve. Luckily knew “hydro” having once been treated to a long weekend at The Peebles Hydro. I wonder if those who know what it’s all about might crib at HYDROGEN being described as “bomb-maker”? I think OMINOUS and SIEGE are very tough wordplays to untangle.
  19. Very similar to everyone else it seems. 38 mins for me with COD to 24 which made me laugh out loud. I was reading ‘siege’ as ‘siège’ until just before coming on this blog when the penny dropped. Couldn’t work it out till then!
  20. About 30 minutes for me but I had to use aids to confirm MORRIS at the end; I didn’t know who he was. In the US, the Soviet crsftsman would be ‘Debs’. Other than that, nice puzzle, and I particularly enjoyed the clever clueing for SIEGE. Regards.
  21. I enjoyed this, there was lots of clever wordplay, mostly already mentioned. I think the wordplay for Ominous is too clever and it does not work for me.

    Sadly, one mistake today, bringing to an end a good run. I had Hoards for millions at 20. This, of course, requires there to be a verb to ho, meaning to root for and also a socialist craftsman named Vladimir Ilyich Ards. Some people found this clue easy. I knew Morris’s wallpaper but not his politics

  22. Have just done this quickly (out today before paper came and only just back) in front of TV with supper in about 15 m. Felt like too many anagrams, no hold-ups till ominous and siege. Now must unpack car.
  23. There’s a famous street in York called the Shambles. I believe Guy Fawkes was born there.
    1. According to Wikipedia he was born in High Petergate – about half a mile from “York Shambles” as shown on Google maps.
  24. 7:41 for this, with 24 and 28 the last two to go in. But now see that I have a sloppy PAGKAGE as the first word of 17, so bottom of the class.
  25. It took me all day to complete this annoying puzzle! I’ve only recently started to do crosswords again, now that I am commuting a lot.

    SIEGE was my last answer. The Times crossword seems much harder than I remember. Some of the clues were really weak compared with clues from the past. But at least I finished it!

    Time: about 6 hours total! 🙂

  26. This was surprisingly quick, for me; which is to say a bit under 30 minutes. And I never did figure out why ‘Gwendolyn’, for the very good reason that it’s ‘Gwendolen’, a spelling that for some reason never occurred to me.
    One doubt: Does anyone actually pronounce ‘even’ as ‘een’? Aside from reading old verse aloud.

Comments are closed.