Times 25230: Where to find a salt and battery?

38 comments on “Times 25230: Where to find a salt and battery?”

1. …owing to spending 15 minutes pondering ‘editions’, my LOI. I didn’t understand ‘Derbyshire’ either, but nothing else fit. I also was incredulous that a river could be named ‘Itchen’. But still, all solved and correct.

   There was some very clever cluing and obscure words here. I suspect the less able solvers may get stuck on something.

   1. If so, the surface rather unfairly suggests — perhaps even requires — a wrong part of speech.
   2. The Itchen is a well known fly-fisher’s paradise. It runs through Winchester and then down over chalk to the sea at Southampton. The whole lower flood plain is a site of special scientific interest. Note also its sister the river Test.
2. Somewhat unsatisfying. The Derbyshire and Bors references rather obscure. I imagine 28 Ac will go down a treat in DORSET.
3. 31 minutes for all but 28, 24 and 4 then another 14 minutes to complete the grid.

   Didn’t understand DERBYSHIRE at all so thanks, mct, for that, and I had the same query and reservations as you about 5dn. Also didn’t know the knight at 15.

4. Coming in early since I won’t be available tomorrow. Didn’t understand the ‘garth’, or DERBYSHIRE, but they went in on def’s. About 20 minutes all told, ending with BORSCH, since I don’t know of the knight Bors, and we spell it BORSCHT, or at least I think we do. TERENCE was realy on def. alone also, not being quite aware of ‘terce’. But overall, not too tough. Regards to all.
5. 27 minutes, but with ‘case’ (‘letters together’ maybe, but ‘mould’ hardly, in retrospect) for CAST. LOI EDITIONS without properly parsing it. So thanks to McT for that and the county link.

   Terence and Plautus were Latin A-level texts back in the day, while BORS is known to me from Mallory’s Morte Darthur, read as part of my CS Lewis project. Lewis wrote three essays on the Morte alone. Prodigious output, the man had!

6. Another easy one, c12 minutes for me. Maybe I was lucky with the required general knowledge.
   5dn looks OK to me. I find it hard to explain but a hit is a batter, both being the verb, in a certain sense.
   1. Jerry,
      Not sure what’s at stake here. But I would dearly love to know. How can we be dealing with a verb when there’s an indefinite article in both “a hit” and “(a) batter”?
7. I think the Russian ending is shch (as in pushchair) so I suppose neither (valid) Anglicisations are technically correct
8. A puzzle where it pays to have run into some of these obscurities before such as the well dressing nonsense. If you didn’t know it before then you had no way of solving the clue other than by “county” and checkers. Now you’ve met it, next time you’ll write the answer straight in.

   There’s more obscurity “terce” in the equally obscure TERENCE but these arty setters are obsessed with the ancients and so they crop up from time to time. Likewise “garth” in this setters mandatory painter (who only died 250 or so years ago – wow modern stuff!)

   20 minutes for this less than impressive puzzle

   1. The breeziness from the SW can be over the top if I may say so. ‘These arty setters obsessed with the ancients’ is a tad dismissive considering the work they do. It’s simply a fact of cultural life that poets and playwrights get more of a look-in than scientists; this could be related to something to do with beauty and wisdom. Scientific fact and reseach are absolutely vital and are not ignored in the GK range required of us. And there is much beauty in science. But the crosswording activity I suppose is a leisure activity and more related to the humanities. Anyway I just want to record a slight weariness with the jabs at the Arts and the past. Still, I suppose it adds to the entertainment…

      Slow all round on this one, 39 minutes with a wrong answer – couldn’t see mere and guessed dene. There a nice line by Kingsley Amis (as poet) about the soup:
      ‘Borsch, pate, filthy caviare / say I’ve respectfully declined…’

   2. Jimbo – I don’t know if you watch it, but you would have enjoyed a recent episode of University Challenge. The team from King’s College, Cambridge, had three classicists and a physicist. The very first ‘starter for ten’ involved a quote from Herodotus leading to the answer ‘Thermopylae’. The physicist got it.
9. A decently pacy 13 minutes, but with much the same observations as already noted. With 5 down, you just have to read it as “Something you find in a chippy is also a word for ‘hit'”; if you left out the ‘a’ the surface wouldn’t make sense, so I guess the conclusion we must draw is that not every cryptic clue can be perfect.

   DERBYSHIRE had to be right but I had no idea why till coming here (after which I thought “Ah, yes, it should have been obvious all along…wait, what?”)

   I knew Sir Bors: I’d love to say it’s because of the Morte D’Arthur, but in fact my source is the rather more lowbrow Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which he is played by Terry Gilliam and falls victim to the infamous killer rabbit.

   1. How about: “What the chippy offers is a … hit”? Fill in the ellipsis with the answer. (This really ought not to be bothering me, but it is.)
      1. OK, let’s try this.. if I say “I want to batter someone,” then I have placed a batter in the middle of that phrase, haven’t I? And a want near the beginning? If you see what I mean!

         Edited at 2012-08-01 12:52 pm (UTC)

         1. This is the thought I was trying to express. It’s a somewhat eliptical way of constructing a sentence, of course, but this is why they’re called “cryptic”…
10. Reasonably straightforward puzzle. Around 45 mins. Rather heavy on sometimes obscure literary/artistic references, which happened to suit me, but I can understand why they will have irritated others (see Jimbo’s comment above). However, I’d completely forgotten about Sir Bors, always assuming I’d ever come across him, and BORSCH went in on spec on the basis of the CH=honoured companion and “soup” as the def. I thought EDITIONS was an ingeniously deceptive clue.
11. About three-quarters of an hour, though I might have been quicker had I tackled the clues in a different order and not gnawed at each like my old collie with her bone. A quirky sort of puzzle, wasn’t it?

    Batter: my Shorter Oxford gives batter as a noun meaning “a heavy bruising blow (rare 1823)”, and Chambers also lists it as a noun meaning “the action of or skill at using a bat in cricket or baseball”.

    No problem with Derbyshire well dressing: used to visit Tissington as a child.

    Coincidentally there was something on Radio 4’s Farming Today this morning about the use of a type of ELEPHANT GRASS (Miscanthus) as a biofuel at Ely Power Station.

    Edited at 2012-08-01 10:29 am (UTC)

    1. Phew! A noun at last! Now I can sleep easy. Ish.

       Edit: But are the Shorter and Chambers on THE OFFICIAL LIST these days? If so, I’m calling “obscure”.

       Edited at 2012-08-01 11:11 am (UTC)

    2. That is a definition of “batting” – at least it is in my (electronic) Chambers. The Oxford definition appears to let the setter off the hook though, even if it’s a bit obsure.
       1. My Chambers (11th printed edition) gives batter 3: see under bat 1; and when I did so, I found the definition I gave.
          1. How odd.
             My electronic Chambers (12th edition) has:
             batting noun
             1. The action of or skill or skill at using a bat in cricket or baseball
             2. Cotton wadding prepared in sheets, for quilts, etc
12. 15m.
    Strange puzzle this: full of real obscurities (garth, terce/TERENCE, Barnard, Bors, well whating?), none of which I knew, yet easy. The most difficult clue was 4dn, which took me ages at the end but contains no obscurity at all.
    The Chambers entry for BORSCH says “also bortsch/börch/, etc”, so clearly you can spell it however you like.
    1. I can second all of this (and EDITIONS was also my LOI), but this is the first puzzle in well over a week I have been able to complete correctly, even if it took slightly over an hour. Strangely enough my first in was RAMEKINS, which only sounded very vaguely familiar but otherwise was constructed entirely from the wordplay. Nice puzzle though (even if the Russian corner of my soul winces at BORSCH; after all the SHCH is a single letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, so there must be a lot of use for it. But maybe it is worth 100 points in Russian Scrabble).
13. Just under 15 minutes: the one that I was edgy about was BRIDLE PATH, as I was unsure which bridal to enter – silly really, as the latter doesn’t really make any sense.
    For me, the issue with DERBYSHIRE was that the only cryptic element in the clue was that you had to take “well” as a noun, not an adverb. Once you’d done that, it was just a GK clue with no cryptic merit. Since I already had D?R?Y and was looking for a county, there really wasn’t much choice. I haven’t been able to find it, but I believe Buxton Spring water used to be advertised with reference to well dressing, and certainly that’s what sprang to mind.
    Other than that, of a fairly humdrum bunch, I thought the (?) &lit for DUSTBIN was the pick of the day.
    1. Me, sorry, not logged in.
14. 12 mins with the same ‘batter’ and ‘bridal/le hesitations as others.
15. 28/30 today with Editions and Terence missing. Should have got the former, but would never have got the latter. Held up in the NE corner for a long time until I saw Righteous.

    Derbyshire and Borsch went in without understanding so thanks mctext for explaining those.

    Thought Snowdrift, Dustbin and Abhor were particularly good clues – the latter putting in mind the Olympic swimmers whose toned bodies have been gracing out TV screens for the past four nights.

16. This particular puzzle is more classical maybe than scientific. That’s just the way it worked out when I set it. Curiously my other published puzzle today the Telegraph toughie) has been commented on for its scientific element. I simply don’t believe in the arts/science divide. I’d rather celebrate the wonderful diversity of the creation! DFM
17. 21:14 … no gripes. I vaguely knew both ‘terce’ and TERENCE and the well dressing thing came back to me after I’d solved it by checking letters alone. I just found this quite hard. I’ll try claiming the Badminton Defence – “I wasn’t really trying”. Honest.
18. 39′, the first 15 online, the rest after dinner. 5 LOI, since I had to choose among 4 vowels, going with A only because of ‘hit’. Knew BORS, although like Kevin from NY (home of the Borscht [sic] Belt), I’m more familiar with a different spelling of the soup. Glad to see there were some Brits, too, who only got 8d from checkers.
19. ‘Veg box left outside a B&B’. What is the point of the ‘left’? The clue would have read just as well to my mind if it had been ‘Veg box outside a B&B’.
    1. Maybe the sense of veg. being delivered to a place where they’re needed gives a more natural surface (i.e. more alive, less static). Not much in it.
    2. I took it as adding to the surface reading of the clue. Deliveries of provisions often are left outside shops, homes etc so it made perfect sense to me that a veg box might be left outside a B&B.
20. A clean sweep in 6:58 for me today.

    With B-T— in place for 5dn, I was momentarily tempted by (a chip) BUTTIE, but wasn’t convinced that you could spell it that way and so went for BATTER – with the thought that I could change it later if it the E didn’t fit.

    1. Looking ominous for London 🙂
21. Never heard of this one – I thought it was an informal reference to Mr Rattigan

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