TIMES – 24711

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time taken to solve: 45 minutes but I spent longer checking the wordplay as I went than I would on a day when I was not preparing the blog. I’d class this as another quite lively puzzle that doesn’t require much in the way of specialist knowledge though the reference to the churchyard in 9a may cause some problems overseas. Also just possibly the sugar magnate in 4ac. I had most difficulty in the SW with 21ac and 22dn which were my last in. Off we go…

Across
1 SOAP
4 TARTE TATIN – TATE,TRAT (all reversed),IN – The ‘sugar magnate’ is Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle, also founder of the Tate Gallery. TRAT, short for ‘trattoria’, is not listed in my COED or Collins but it’s in Chambers and the SOED. I take the apostrophe S to stand for ‘has’.
9 STOKE POGES – (breaK GOOSE-STEP)* – This is the country churchyard that inspired the famous Elegy by Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771). If one knows the poem one is likely to think of it as a place of tranquillity so the surface reading here is somewhat alarming.
10 Deliberately omitted. It should be no big deal.
11 STAPLE – Double definition.
12 SPECTATE – S(PEC)TATE
14 ONER – O,NERo
15 SWELTERING – S(WELTER)ING – SING and ‘grass’ are two of many slang terms for informing on some sort of criminal activity. I didn’t know WELTER meaning ‘roll’.
17 AIR HOSTESS – (SHE IS A SORT)*
20 COIN – CO,IN
21 AGRARIAN – A,GR,ARIAN – One who stood for redistribution of cultivated land though the term has come to have wider meanings. An ARIAN is one who denies the divinity of Christ.
23 BEHOLD – B(EH)OLD
24 LAND – Double definition.
25 PERPETRATE – E.T.,ART,E,PREP all reversed.
26 BUCKET SEAT – BUCK, ESTATE* – I’m not quite sure how the definition works here. I can only imagine that a bucket seat is supposedly comfortable so it would be ‘welcoming’ if one needed a sit-down. I’m sure it would be more welcoming than my original thought which was BULLET SEAT. I may be missing something…
27 ERSE – …and here too as I can’t see what ‘bitten’ is doing. The clue works perfectly without it and if it’s intended to indicate the removal of letters from ‘Peter Sellers’ to leave the hidden word then isn’t it in the wrong place?
 
Down
2 OUTSTANDING – Double definition.
3 PIKEPERCH – PIKE,PERCH – I didn’t know the combined fish, nor PIKE as a diving term.
4 TOPPERS – sTOPPERS
5 REGISTERED NURSE – (TENDER,SURGERIES)*
6 EASIEST – sEAt,SIESTa
7 TRA-LA – TRAm-L.A. – In music a TRA-LA can be a melody or a chorus amongst other things. Possibly the most famous use of Tra-La is in the song ‘The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring’ from ‘The Mikado’.
8 Deliberately omitted. Give us a prod if you need help with it.
13 TONSILLITIS – T, ON,SILL,IT,IS
16 RACEHORSE – RACE,HORSE – Yet more drugs slang, HORSE meaning ‘heroin’.
18 SNIPPET – PINS (reversed),PET
19 SUBJECT – SUB,JE(C)T
21 AD-LIB – A,Daughter,LIBeral party
22 RUNIC – CUR (reversed) around morNing,1

60 comments on “TIMES – 24711”

  1. A protracted struggle lasting well over an hour with lots of problems in the neighbourhood of SPECTATE, TONSILLITIS and SWELTERING, my last in. Second Jackkt’s misgivings about BUCKET SEAT and ERSE.
  2. 9:37. This felt a bit tough. I thought of Tate straight away at 4A, but I couldn’t see the answer until I had all the checking letters. Apart from that, the south east corner took me longest. Favourite clue the &lit anagram at 5D.
  3. Put BARGE in immediately and confidently sans thought at 8 ie BARE for uncovered around G(ood) = elbow, and didn’t think to check it. Thus 4a and 10a impossible. The rest of it was a struggle so a bad end to the week for me.
  4. Congratulations to Jack on a fine time. Predictably enough (theres’ always one), I failed to get the easy clue at 10ac, entering ‘dair’ in despair (which, cruelly, turned out on checking to be ‘the Irish name of the seventh letter of the Ogham alphabet’). Given that I was onto Mr. Tate (my mental restaurant catalogue stopped after cafe, diner and eatery) and ‘in’, I should have got 4ac, but failed because I put BARGE in at 8dn (‘g’ in ‘bare’). Kicking myself now for not having the gumption to realise that even a pudding from the French Levant could hardly be ‘tarte aftab’.

    Found the whole thing a (pleasurable) slog. COD to BEHOLD.

  5. Made life very difficult by putting in BARGE, GALE(N) and BILLET SEAT.I don’t really have a problem with the ERSE clue. My thanks for the blog.
  6. 11:30 so made rather heavy weather of this (I think Richard used to reckon on taking my time plus about 50%). I’ll blame my inability to solve 4A or 5D without some checking letters – either would have got things rolling rather quicker. Made up for it at the end by resisting the rather tempting TOPLESS for 4D.

    Commiserations to red-herring sufferers at 8D.

    An extra verse for Gray’s Elegy, adding the missing goose-step, might make a nice competition of the kind they used to have in the New Statesman. (Remembered not because I’m particularly left-wing but because the entry for their Salamanca crosswords was small – I think I won twice).

    1. What the heck, it’s Friday. I rewrote the epitaph…

      “The next with dirges due in sad array
      Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.
      Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
      Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”

      The Epitaph

      Here beneath this twisted briar I lie,
      My one request in this simple epitaph:
      That you goose-step away to the lych-gate nigh.
      Go on, you bugger. I could do with a laugh.

    2. I’m afraid that I am not of a poetic bent, but I do remember a re-write of verse 1 encountered many a year ago:

      The curfew bells dismally tone
      The cows wander homeward alone
      The ploughman he plods
      From his freshly turned sods
      Leaving darkness and me on our own.

      Quite a snappy re-encapsulation of the original, which rather tickled me as a tweenager.

    3. Well, if Sotira’s done for the epitaph, I’ll mangle verse one:-
      The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
      The lowing herd goose-steps across the lea,
      “What a preposterous thought!” I hear you say;
      Blame Peter Biddlecombe for that, not me.
  7. I made as heavy weather of this as the Australian batsmen did the English bowling. I fell for the BARGE trap and would like to say that that’s what held me up in the NE, but my progress wasn’t much faster when I corrected it. Last in SPECTATE, which was precisely what I was doing at the time. TATE was a complete mystery, but not STOKE POGES. COD to TRA-LA.

    I also had question marks at BUCKET SEAT and ERSE.

  8. About average difficulty today, c20mins with only one coffee.
    No problem with ERSE since I just take bitten as a containment indicator, and something of the sort is obviously needed.
    Less sure about bucket seat definition, but I did find the word, after all..
    1. Yes, I’m starting to see this now. I wonder if we can take the unwritten apostrophe S into account and read the clue as “Peter Sellers’s tongue bitten” interpreting the S as ‘has’. That would make sense to me but I’m not sure it’s permissible to do this.
  9. Tough stuff for me at 35 minutes, with NW and SE proving recalcitrant. One of these where, once the answers were in, I couldn’t see what the difficulty was (apart from roll – welter, which was an unknown), SOAP, PIKEPERCH and STAPLE being particularly irritating from that point of view. SOAP was unaccountably my last in.
    Despite the relative difficulty, I didn’t spot any stand-out clues: a hard work puzzle rather than an engaging an amusing one.
  10. I thought it was a good puzzle and a tough one, nearly taking a quater of an hour. I thought the clues were fine and 8d is COD for me. I like it when things like that happen.
  11. Really slow today – 26:32 after I BARGEd in. Eventually spotted error after digesting Tarte Tatin
  12. I thought this the hardest of the week – about 30 minutes to solve. Most of it is very good stuff but I share Jack’s reservations about the definition of BUCKET SEAT. I think the anagram at 5D is a beautifully constructed clue. Nice blog Jack (and I got SOAP – wow!)
  13. I agree, the toughest of the week. About 1 hour for me. Unfortunately, I carelessly entered theTOPLESS that Peter B resisted at 4dn, so blotting my copy. The anagram at 5dn was indeed very good, and PERPETRATE an unusually good reverse clue. AD-LIB and TRA-LA also ingenious. I too took “bitten” to be the container indicator for ERSE. I agree that “welcoming structure”=BUCKET SEAT is a bit of a stretch.
  14. I think a bucket seat is welcoming is so much as it grips one in a reassuring hug as one is thrown around the corners at speed.
  15. What a change from yesterday’s! Found this really tricky, and only managed about three quarters without succumbing to aids. Corrected BARGE only when the pudding went in, but still found the rest a struggle. Lots of unfamiliar vocab (WELTER, ERSE, AGRARIAN…) and, for me, complicated word play ensured this was the most difficult in some time.
  16. 41 minutes. Concise clues, clever anagrams; enjoyed this very much. Always associate TRA-LA with Louis Macneice’s haunting poem The Taxis. Following on from PB’s suggestion about Gray’s Elegy, one of the best parodies I know is Sir John Squire’s If Gray Had Had to Write His Elegy in the Cemetery of Spoon River Instead of in That of Stoke Poges . Here’s one verse to give you a flavour:

    There are two hundred only: yet of these
    Some thirty died of drowning in the river,
    Sixteen went mad, ten others had D.T.s,
    And twenty-eight cirrhosis of the liver.

  17. Unlike some, I found this the 6dn of the week, though I was slow to get going, putting nothing in until I reached 17. Twenty-two minutes in the end, with the four-letter answers, CARD, ONER and SOAP being the last entries. I didn’t know the verbal meaning of ‘welter’ and was fairly sure initially that ‘Roll’ was an anagrind for INGRASSHOT, which wasted some time.

    I’ve enjoyed the clues this week, and this had some good ones too – 4ac, 5, 15, 21, for example.

  18. 12:13 A mixed day for me.SOAP and STOKE POGES came quickly throught a first time guess and knowledge of the poem but I didn’t know what Arian meant so was a bit hesitant on 21 and like dyste I was looking for an anagram if INGRASSHOT.
    All in all, to me, a typical Times puzzle (which is meant as a bit of praise)
  19. 30 minutes, of which 10 staring at 10ac for some reason. Given my recent record I was determined to get it.
    I didn’t help myself by confidently writing the answer for 2dn in at 4ac. It’s lucky it didn’t fit or I would have been really stuffed.
    I wondered about BUCKET SEAT. In my experience they’re far from welcoming, particularly for those of us whose girth is a little fuller than it might be.
  20. I avoided the ‘barge’ trap but carelessly entered AD HOC in the opposite corner – which in turn led to the highly improbable COCKET SEAT. Managed to sort it all out, eventually, in an hour and a minute – so about par for me this week.

    Am I the only person who thinks the definition for STOKE POGES is rather inadequate?

    1. No, you’re not alone, and if it hadn’t immediately clicked with me I’d have been very annoyed about the loose definition.
    2. I guess it’s a question of familiarity. I have four cemeteries that come immediately to mind: Pere Lachaise (Oscar Wilde); Highgate (Marx); Arlington; and Stoke Poges. If it’s not one of those I could be struggling!
        1. Fair enough. I’ve actually been to Kensal Green so should have remembered it without prompting.
            1. Didn’t know this one John – the grave of a dog buried in Edinburgh near his long deceased owner (according to Wiki)
              1. Greyfriars Bobby was the hero (and title) a saccharin-laden Disney film in the 1960s, surprised you’ve never been subjected to it Jimbo..
                1. After I’d left home and before my children were old enough to be into these things I guess. The only two dogs I recall from back then are Lassie and Dougal of the Magic Roundabout.
  21. I didn’t enjoy this much. Maybe my miserable cold was getting me down. Anyway, finished at 39mins but it felt longer.
  22. Definite lack of knowledge here, as after 18 minutes I was left with just 4 across. I could figure out the TARTE part from TRAT reversed, but that left me with _ _ T I N and wordplay clearly indicating someone I’ve never heard of. TARTE MATIN was what went in (first cake of the morning?) and then I went to look it up.

    Rarely call out a clue, but unless that’s a really common dessert I’ve just never come across we have a case of obscure word clued by obscure reference.

    (since Jimbo was gentle today thought I’d have a little rant).

    1. Pretty well known over here George – a bit of a French classic. Its a sort of upside down apple torte so you may well have it over there but call it something different. Good to see somebody else getting things off their chest!!
  23. 44 minutes, so about par for me. Perhaps the goose-step in 9 is a reflection of the classic schoolboy howler “Gray’s Energy in a Country Churchyard”.

    Thought the lack of a hyphen in 3 was a mistake until I checked Collins’ Online Dictionary (I gather Collins is the authority for this crossword) and found that it only lists PIKEPERCH. Chambers only has PIKE-PERCH. A Google search of U.K. sites found a ten to one preference for the hyphenated version, so it looks as though Collins is out on a limb here.

  24. a pikeperch is actually a zander (sometimes sander), an alien species introduced to our waterways by the same breed of idiot responsible for the grey squirel. They look a bit like a cross between the two but have got nothing to do with either. Fernly-duckingstool has a go at eating them in one of his shows, as he does.

    Anyways, point is, definately not a European fish.

  25. Good crossword, slightly above average difficulty. Very much liked BEHOLD clue. Often interesting when comparing times with other solvers, to find, for instance, his/her tough is my moderate and vice-versa. 26 minutes.
  26. Struggled again today and can’t even blame it on a hangover from TFTT’s 5th birthday party last night. Admitted defeat with six left, two of them the pesky four-letter words CARD and ERSE.

    The rest of my undoing was in the SW corner where I’d put in BILLET SEAT early on. A quick Google search suggested such a seat exists which was good enough for me. Wouldn’t have got AGRARIAN in a month of Sundays and would have fallen into the BARGE mantrap too but for thinking of NUDGE first and moving straight on.

    Got STOKE POGES from the wordplay and suspect I’m one of the few in this learned company who didn’t know what it had to do with churchyards!

    1. Perhaps one of few but you’re not alone. I got it from wordplay too.
      From this and a couple of other references recently I feel I need to get to know Gray’s Elegy. I somehow escaped it in three years of an English Literature degree.
  27. A quite spectacular failure on my part. Only managed 10 unaided after an hour and a bit, so resorted to aids to nudge me along. And even then I couldn’t get 4ac, which still remains a mystery to me – I obviously don’t eat out enough. I must have been a bit dim today, though, as 1ac was one of the last to fall, so perhaps a long week has just finished me off. And one day I’ll remember King can = GR…
  28. I made a mess out of this, falling into both the BARGE and GALE(N) traps and not sorting them out for quite a while. A bit over an hour to end with the elusive SOAP, but along the way I resorted to aids to find the TARTE TATIN. This item may be ‘world famous’ to Jamie Oliver, but it is completely unknown to me, as was the fact that Mr. Tate had anything to do with sugar. I hadn’t heard of STOKE POGES, either, but pleased with myself to have got it through the anagram. Welter as ‘roll’ is also new. Obviously, much of this was very elusive to me, so a bow to the setter, and regards to everyone else.
    1. The association between Tate and sugar is very familar to me and I suspect everyone else over here from the sugar brand Tate & Lyle. The company is still going strong but sold its sugar business earlier this year, which was a bit like Ford selling its car business.
  29. Took an age to get 1 across, even longer to get 4 across. Not helped by also putting Barge in 8 down. Had never heard of Stoke Poges but got there eventually. If the South East hadn’t come quite easily I think I would have given up quite quickly!
    Louise

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