Times 24808 – Tinker, Taylor, soldier, sailor…

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 45 minutes

Not a stinker, but a thorough workout for my besieged little brain on a Monday… no, that’s the Times 24796 report… no, it’s this one. Well, c’est la même chose only a bit more non plus on my part. Off diagonal corners were easy to middling but I struggled down the main diagonal, for reasons not altogether clear to me in retrospect. The clues seemed to lead me down all the wrong paths. That can’t be fair, can it?

Across
1 Deliberately omitted. I could be shot for that, or maybe swing.
3 SPARE for “don’t dispatch” + STRAP for “band”, reversed = SPARE PARTS
9 CHAFFER = CHAFF for “kid” (as in josh) + tERm. The hyphen just about excuses the liberty. Not a word I’ve previously encountered, but it sounds like sumfing you’d do with an odd-job man in certain parts of Larndin.
11 SH for “say nothing!” + I DIG for “understand” around Nationalist = SHINDIG, my favourite for today.
12 (TOTAL MAINLINE)* = IN NO TIME AT ALL
14 NIT for “fool” + RE for “about” = NITRE
15 UNFLEDGED, double definition or cryptic clue?
17 RAINWATER = RAINIER for “prince” with the (second) I for “one” replaced by W for “with” and ApartmenT. I had to get him in somewhere (see also 23d and 5d).
19 RATE for “think highly” + L for “large” = RATEL, our by now surely familiar badger friend.
21 YELLOWHAMMERS = YELLOW for “scared” + HAMMERS for “beaters”. A disambiguous bird whose “somewhat monotonous, song … is often described as A little bit of bread and no cheese“. I couldn’t find that one but here’s How I Got My Gal from the Georgia variety.
24 HElLO for “heartless greeting” + IS + romancE = HELOISE. That would be Héloïse d’Argenteuil earliest recorded victim of the invidious practice now known as “A for a lay”.
25 gUNNER for “soldier no good” + V for “very” + E for “English” = UNNERVE. Hands up who thought the spook was a spy?
26 (BEN + DORMICE)* = RECOMBINED
27 COPT = Pray inside COT

Down
1 LECTIONARY = (ON LITERACY)*, a book about ‘lections. Those of you who have been following the NSW elections (see Times 24796) will by now know it was the biggest rout of all time, anywhere.
2 AGAINST, double definition
4 PARA for “soldier” on top of MOUNT for “horse” = PARAMOUNT
5 RASTA = RAITA with a “heart” replacement. Raita is that cucumber and yoghurt dish which comes with curries, allegedly having magical oesophageal and tracheal restorative powers. Time for another song?
6 PRIVATEERSMAN = PRIVATE for “soldier” + ER’S MAN for “one serving the Queen?”. I quickly wrote in PRIVATEER and then wondered what to do with the blanks. Anyway, another jolly song.
7 DER for “German article”, reversed + FLAG for “mark” (as in email) = RED FLAG. No, that song would be too obvious.
8 SIGH = SIGHt
10 (MEAL WITH FRAIL)* = FATHER WILLIAM. That would be a literary allusion.
13 ADOLESCENT = DOLE for “benefit” in ASCENT for “rise”, the opposite of what’s stated. Why did that take me so long, even with all checkers in place?
16 (FRAU’S HOME)* = FARMHOUSE
18 IDYLLIC = LYDIa for “girl almost”, reversed + L for “left” + I for “this writer” + C for “cold”.
20 THEORBO = OR + B for “book” all inside THEO, the other van Gogh brother. The theorbo is a stringed instrument for four hands. Is that Don on theorbo?
22 OBELI contained backwards in VILE BOdies. Daggers to you.
23 Deliberately omitted, although I could get burnt at the stake.

37 comments on “Times 24808 – Tinker, Taylor, soldier, sailor…”

  1. 28 minutes, with the right half going in much quicker than the left. 10d and 20d were lovely clues, I thought; 20 especially took me a while before I remembered the other van G. It took me ages to parse 17ac; once again I didn’t get the point of ‘for’ in the clue. Does anyone mind that there are two I’s, hence two ‘one’s that could be replaced by ‘wat’?
    1. I shared your trouble parsing 17ac, thinking I had the ATER in AT(eli)ER, but that would be only slightly more than half empty. I also share your misgiving that somebody else might mind the second I; I don’t myself. It’s not as if the alternative was a viable contender and in any case, alternatives are what these puzzles are about, n’est pas?
      1. Actually, I didn’t see the two I’s as a problem, either, for the reasons you give; I mentioned it to see if anyone did. I also thought it was nice, as Barry mentioned, to have a prince other than you know who.
  2. OK, I’m the laggard today at 54 minutes. Such was the elliptical nature of the clues. I mean … 21ac … there’s room to drive a truck through there at first blush. And it’s not Robinson Crusoe!
    Didn’t know ‘kid’ = CHAFF or that ‘haggle’ = CHAFFER. So I was pretty much stuffed in that area.
    Guess who’s going to lament the inclusion of not just a painter but his lesser-known brother?

    Ta for the JT clip, Koro. I remember wandering through those chords a million years ago.

  3. Not up my street at all. There were so many obscure references that I felt like a spare part at a shindig. Sigh. “The other van Gogh brother” just about says it all.

    61 minutes, which seems to have become par for me over the last few days. My times have been getting steadily slower this year; has anybody else experienced similar difficulties, or is my brain disintegrating?

  4. Right up my street, this puzzle, harking back to an IDYLLIC worlde of nature, literature, art and the church. All the unknown words (CHAFFER, RATEL, PRIVATEERSMAN and THEORBO, with LECTIONARY unfamiliar) were eminently gettable from the wordplay. I especially liked the elegance and cheek of two of the shorter, better known words, NITRE and CHAR.

    I was interested to learn from Wikipedia that Carroll’s “Father William” was a parody of a Robert Southey poem. The Poet Laureate was also a target of Byron,

    ‘Europe has slaves, allies, kings, armies still,
    And Southey lives to sing them very ill'(Don Juan)

    being representative of the type of treatment he reserved for his contemporary.

    While on the subject of books, D.M. Field’s excellent Van Gogh examines in some detail the close relationship between Theo and Vincent, as well as providing very decent reproductions of his paintings. 49 minutes.

  5. A prince not HAL and a van Gogh not Vincent, so CHAR is forgiven. Tough for a Monday, as ever when I’m in a hurry.
  6. I found this tough but satisfying, about an hour. There was a lot I didn’t know here, so some of my satisfaction came from getting to the answers through wordplay and checkers for LECTIONARY, FATHER WILLIAM, THEORBO, snd PRIVATEERSMAN, which I thought was the ship rather than the sailor. RAINWATER wasn’t any bargain either, but quite clever, so I’ll throw the COD nod its way. Well blogged, koro, so thanks for that. Honey Badger is a much nicer description than RATEL, my penultimate entry before THEORBO. My long ago art student wife was no help on the identity of the other Van Gogh brother, so that last was a guess from T_E_R_O, and the only likely possibility (to me) with the given wordplay. Regards to all.
  7. Found this hard going, and resorted to aids after an hour and a half to get PRIVATEERSMAN and YELLOWHAMMERS. Also had to get confirmation for RATEL, CHAFFERS and THEORBO, so some satisfaction in finding that they actually existed.
    Will make a point of memorising Vincent’s entire family tree. Cheers.
  8. Too many unknown words and obscure references for me. After an hour I used a solver to get 6dn which I might have stood a chance at if I’d had the ‘I’. SHINDIG and RASTA were my last in. I think ‘Indian cooler’ cluing ‘raita’ is simply awful.

    Today feels more like a bad Saturday than a Monday morning. Put it down to the lost hour.

    1. Thanks for the heads up on the UK Daylight Saving, Jack; it means we get the crossword an hour earlier here. Every cloud…
  9. 40 minutes, held up for some time at the end by lead, lectionary (annoyingly) and chaffer. Satisfying puzzle. COD 26 merely for the surface nonsense value.
  10. Enjoyed this one, even though I found it a little too literary for my taste.
    Strange that both ratel and char were in yesterday’s T2 jumbo. Same setter perhaps?
  11. 22 minutes. Quite pleased with that, what with all the unknowns: HELOISE, FATHER WILLIAM, LECTIONARY, OBELI, COPT. I was surprised not to have any mistakes, because THEORBO didn’t look like a real word to me. However at least I could construct that with a degree of confidence from wordplay, whereas 9ac was a pure punt, as I was not familar with either “chaff” for “kid” or CHAFFER for “haggle”. At least the honey badger has become familiar from past outings.
    1. The 13d device is fairly common, in the tradition of “… Yes and no”. I would venture to say it’s one of the classic clue types. Have you not encountered it previously?
      1. Not like that, no. Fine if there was something apposite about the “opposite” being invoked – as when the surface of the cryptic suggests one thing but the actual answer is the reverse, but that is not the case here. I can’t see how the clue is better than, say, “Youth sees benefit in climbing”. The current construction just seems pointlessly convoluted and in my – admittedly limited – experience of Times clues that is unusual.
  14. I found this tough-going towards the end, finally being left with 9, 10 and 17, where I was looking at the wrong end of the clue for the definition and wrongly assumed there was a jumble of PRINCE in there somewhere. In the end I used an aid to get 17, which then enabled me to get 9 and 10, though I was not familiar with CHAFFER. A rather lengthy 50 minutes in all.
  15. Lots to enjoy in this – including the mischievous cluing of Theo – although I thought 13D was decidedly odd. Unless I have missed something, it seems a rather strained way of smoothing the surface of the cryptic. Quite tough on the whole. 54 mins.
  16. We thought this was a bit tough for a Monday, with a number of unfamiliar words. We missed the reference to Prince Rainier in a solve that took us about an hour, with a couple of assists. We took the Theo van Gogh to be the Dutch radical film maker assassinaed in 2004, who it turns out was Theo the painter’s great grandson.
  17. 20 minutes for what was a bit of a joyless slog at times. For too many obscurities. I’m with Jack on the “Indian cooler”, solved from checkers + definition. Detest Theo and its use in what is an obscure word anyway.
  18. An enjoyable 26 minutes today. There were a couple of words I’d never seen before. I didn’t know CHAFFER=haggle but guessed it easily from the cryptic. Like the blogger, I put in PRIVATEER and had to wait for the rest until I had all the checkers.Have never seen PRIVATEERSMAN before. THEORBO I first met in a poem by Robert Browning that I did in school. It’s in the last line of a poem about a woman throwing her glove into a lion’s arena and asking her swain to retrieve it. In later years I slept with a theorbo in my cousin’s spare room. Her husband is a musical intrument maker. A strange looking object (the theorbo – not the husband)
    1. What the video in the blog doesn’t quite manage to portray is the enormous length of the theorbo. Perhaps this one’s better. I’d say a goodly 6ft. I can only imagine the swain used it as a pole to retrieve the glove.
      1. An interesting clip. I’ve never before heard one played. The neck is so long I was expecting to hear really deep bass notes. However he only seems to be using the notes on the frets. Maybe a couple of the long strings are drones and permanently tuned. You’d need arms like a giraffe to play them in the conventional manner. (Or 2 players!) Slightly off topic – I was once taken behind the scenes at the V&A to see a monstrous double-bass. I think the player would have had to stand on a chair to play it solo.
        1. The long strings are played open, which means they aren’t fingered (by the left hand) and must be tuned to the key you’re playing in, which must make modulation tricky, but there are quite a lot of them, so I guess you could be across a couple of keys. You can hear the occasional deep dong on them in the piece, but it’s hardly a walking base. There’s enough strings on fretted bit to keep many more than 5 picking fingers occupied full time.
    2. I’ve just checked the (online) OED and, as I suspected there might be, there’s a citation for “privateersman” from one of Patrick O’Brian’s novels (The Surgeon’s Mate). Splendid stuff.
      1. Yes, I agree. I’ve read the entire series but that word must have failed to register. Arcane vocabulary so typical of O’Brian. But what wonderful writing!
  20. Thanks for a great blog, Kororareka. Loved the links, especially “Fire and Rain”. I just love sad songs and that is one of the best, especially with the cello accompaniment. Back in my yoof, Top of the Pops was required viewing and I clearly remember, among all the preening and posturing, J.T. sitting on the studio stage, just with his acoustic guitar, singing that song. Memorable. Oh, the crossword! Testing for a Monday; I learnt 6 new words today, CHAFFER, NITRE, RATEL, LECTIONARY, THEORBO and OBELI, although I quite quickly solved all 6 from the clues. Didn’t like 5d as I kept trying to make PUNKA fit. Same with 18d where I was obsessed with ANGELIC. COD for me was 13d. I like clues that make me smile when I get the answer. Theorbo makes me want to re-read Van Gogh’s letters. How nice to have a brother like that!
  21. …Mention of Vile Bodies reminded me that this painting which is by my wife, and is called “The Dance”, adorns the cover of a French paperback edition of “Ces Corps Vils” by M. Waugh. Thought you might like to know…
    1. Just googled the book out of curiosity and because I wanted to see the picture full size. It’s a great cover. She must be very talented. Read the book (in English!)years ago.
      1. That is very kind, falooker. Sue will be thrilled when I tell her. Alas, she stopped painting 4 years ago when the muse left her. That painting hangs in our dining room. She is an interesting case: very talented scientifically (Phd) and artistically but no good at languages nor at crosswords! Again, thank you so much for those kind comments.
  22. 8:25 for me for a most enjoyable start to the week. I take some comfort from the fact that although I’m no longer as fast as I used to be, I’m old enough that by now all the words and references were entirely familiar. Like david_ch I was amused by the mischievous clueing of Theo.
  23. I’ve been chipping away at this all day, on and off. Eventually filled in CHAFFER, RATEL, PRIVATEERSMAN and THEORBO in desperation (with some hints from wordplay). Amazed to see I’m ‘right’.

    Thanks for a great blog and stimulating comments and links. There are advantages in coming here late at night ….

  24. At one point I had
    P_I_A_E_ _ _ _ _N
    for 6 down. Thinks… Ah! could be
    PHILADELPHIAN

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