Times 25,343 – Architecture from Birmingham To Bath

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 15 minutes

I had no problems with this and expect some fast times.

A puzzle with an arts leaning and two reasonably obscure plants. We have “Albert Square”, an imaginary place from a TV soap set in the East End of London, used to indicate the dropping on an “h” – not sure what problems, if any, that might cause. At least I’d heard of it!

Across
1 GIVE,UP,THE,GHOST – GIVE UP – THE(G)HOST; a phrase coined in the King James Bible;
9 OUTRIGGER – OUT-sounds like “rigor” as in mortis; from ghosts to corpses!;
10 STRIP – two meanings 1=sports wear 2=(tear off a) STRIP;
11 HUMAN – HUM-A-N; living hopefully;
12 TATTOOIST – cryptic definition, member hopefully meaning limb;
13 MENANDER – ME(N)ANDER; N=knight (chess notation); long dead Athenian comic – they’re in short supply currently;
15 ZINNIA – Z-IN-N-I-A; Mexican long-stemmed flower named after dead botonist Johann Zinn;
17 UNREST – UN(RE)ST; about=RE; “a” in Paris=UN; not a bad prediction given state of French economy and politics;
19 BIENNIUM – sounds like “buy any”-U(nsettling)-M(aths); US two-yearly budgetting period – fiscal cliff here we come;
22 ESTABLISH – (shes a bit + l=lake)*;
23 DEGAS – SAD reversed contains EG=say; sad looking French Impressionist;
24 LINER – hidden (Istanbu)L-IN-ER(ror);
25 CRESCENDO – CRESCEN(t)-DO; such as The Royal Crescent in Bath;
26 LADY,WINDERMERE – virtually straight definition – weak clue;
 
Down
1 GOOD-HUMOUREDLY – GOOD(HUMOUR-ED)LY; shades of Robert Maxwell perhaps;
2 VITAMIN – (Im in a TV)*; pass the Sanatogen;
3 UNION – (b)UNION; from Sanatogen to Dr Scholl;
4 TOGETHER – TO-GET-HER; a slightly unpleasant clue;
5 EGRETS – (h)E-G(R)ETS; resistance=R (physics); the setter has an obsession with propositioning women;
6 HISTORIAN – HI-S(sounds like Tory)AN; back to the dead people;
7 SERBIAN – SE-man=BRIAN then move the “R”=”rent at first”; Pavle Savic perhaps (got to get a scientist in here somehow);
8 OPHTHALMOSCOPE – OP-(the school map)*; look into my eyes…;
14 NASEBERRY – NASEB(E-R-R)Y; fruit tree found for example in Jamaica;
16 WITHHELD – WIT-H-HELD;
18 ROTUNDA – (d=daughter ran out)*; Birmingham is perhaps the most well known;
20 INGENUE – honest=GENUINE then move “IN” to the top; Doris Day;
21 LITCHI – L-ITCH-I; LI from (p)L(a)I(n);
23 DECOR – DE(CO)R(by);

25 comments on “Times 25,343 – Architecture from Birmingham To Bath”

  1. I had a few problems that took me over the half-hour yet again. OUTRIGGER wouldn’t come to mind, I never heard of NASEBERRY and as someone with a lifelong interest in theatre I’m ashamed to say that the playwright MENANDER has somehow escaped my notice until today (or my brain is completely shot and I’ve forgotten that I knew of him!)

    Jim you have a typo at 11ac.

    Edited at 2012-12-11 09:06 am (UTC)

  2. Well I had a lot of trouble with this. I’ve never heard of MENANDER, so although I saw the wordplay I hesitated, which made 14dn difficult. Actually as it turned out 14dn was impossible, because I’ve never heard of the battle or the fruit. Harrumph.
  3. A somewhat tricky 37 minutes. Just slow. The wording of 4 with its half-repetition seems casual and the sleaze in the surface as noted above makes it less than charming. Also agree about 26 being far too easy. Otherwise pleasant enough.
  5. 27 minutes, LOI WITHHELD which just looked odd with two H’s together, guessed NASEBERRY from knowing the battle and MENANDER from the word play and checkers but otherwise a stroll today. Don’t see any problem with 4 dn although we’ve had similar before.

    Edited at 2012-12-11 09:33 am (UTC)

  6. Decided not to panic about time and take it easy. 26ac in straight away. (I was conceived in Windermere, so 22ac may well have described my old Mum shortly thereafter. And Windermere was just on an old episode of Eggheads along with other personal overlaps: Tranmere/Prenton Park and “A Groovy Kind of Love” — don’t ask!)

    8dn was also pretty obvious, though I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one to mis-write it into the answer squares. From here, the bottom left was quickish.

    Then a fair bit of time for the rest. LOI was EGRETS. In this case ’e didn’t get it at all. Thought the other cd (12ac) was weak too.

  7. 30 minutes online, deducting 2’50” for accidentally uncabling the laptop. On the wavelength with this one, with a Greek poet and a Greek eye machine. Despite never having watched Eastenders, I’d heard of Albert Square (with Dirty Den – that’s the sum of my knowledge). The hardest one was the botanical litchi – for me either lychee or lai chi, as rendered from the Cantonese.
  8. About 40 minutes (including time for a refill of strong tea) so I didn’t find the puzzle that easy. Everything went well till I reached the bottom left. Why did I think Naseby was spelt with a Z? Perhaps I’m thinking of Walton-on-the-Naze, or Castle Naze.

    I was also determined to fit “Rue” into 17.

    ROTUNDA: I was living in Birmingham when planners completed what the Luftwaffe had failed to achieve. The locals were not impressed and one of the many wry jokes about the redevelopment was

    Q. What is ROTUNDA the ROTUNDA?
    A .This way up.

  9. Got MENANDER, NASEBERRY and BIENNIUM purely on the wordplay. Fortunately we had ZINNIA a couple of months ago – I think the (unchecked) Z was clued in the same way then too, which I remember had me considering ninnia, xinnia, and yinnia before deciding that ZINNIA just “looked right”.
  10. 15 minutes, naseberry from wordplay with fingers crossed. My main hang-up was a complete inability to spell the name at 26, the instrument at 8 and the second word of 1 down. I’ve been living in the us way too long!
  11. I’m not sure if it was the vocab. selection or the clueing style but I found this far from easy. In fact, I felt so far from the wavelength last night that I gave it up with half a dozen unsolved and came back to it this morning. I still struggled to finish it. I thought the battle was ‘Nasebury’. I’d never heard of MENANDER. I’d forgotten ZINNIA and I can never spell TATTOOIST or LITCHI, none of which helped.

    Time unrecorded.

  12. Well, today I didn’t have a problem, unlike yesterday’s. Got through in 20 minutes, LOI being WITHHELD. I trusted to wordplay for the vaguely familiar MENANDER and the totally unfamiliar NASEBERRY. I only know the Naseby battle through these puzzles, but I now do know it, unlike other things that appear here. Some I remember, some not. Lucky today, I suppose. I also saw to ‘drop the h’ via ‘Albert Square’, but I had no idea it was fictional. Regards.
    1. I was feeling quite grumpy about this clue, but had to admit to myself that this was in the “shoulda known” category. The fact that you know it from puzzles past confirms this, in a strange but somehow important way. Harrumph, a bit less. Thanks.
        1. Thanks. Definitely “shoulda known” territory. In my defence where I was at school (France) the English Civil War wasn’t a big thing. You should see the way they teach the French Revolution though: laughable propaganda!
  13. Didn’t find this too difficult. NASEBERRY previously unknown to me but get-able from wordplay. Similarly with the unfamiliar spelling of lychee (LITCHI) at 21 dn. Can’t make up my mind whether the Albert Square reference at 5dn is a refreshing change from the more usual indicators of a cockney’s dropped “h” or slightly ridiculous. Perhaps a bit of both.

    Jimbo, apologies if I have misread your blog, but at 8 dn is not OPHTHALMOSCOPE made up of OP plus an anagram of “the school map” – i.e. “on” merely indicates that the two should be combined and is not part of the anagram fodder?

  14. I was feeling horribly tired and was tempted to leave this puzzle until tomorrow, but I’d posted a respectable time for the T2 quickie and decided to go for it.

    Mistake! My brain refused to cooperate, and I struggled to a miserable 14:15, the last couple of minutes of which were spent trying to get my head round 1dn – for some reason I just couldn’t see GOOD-HUMOUREDLY. I may have come across NASEBERRY before, but I’m too tired to remember. At least I’m familiar with MENANDER though.

  15. I love reading about Tony’s “miserable” score! My time was exactly 30 minutes. But I did start at a gallop and had high hopes of a fast finish. Not being able to spell the optical instrument was my downfall because it screwed up all the RH side of the grid. I’d never heard of the fruit but was fortunate in knowing how to spell the battle so it all fitted in nicely. Ann
  16. Had resigned myself to a DNF, thanks to tunnel vision on a truly epic scale with 16: I took ‘comedian’ as the definition and never let that go, until finally this morning it clicked. MENANDER is a nice example of GK in crosswords: I knew the name, but have never read a word of him, and no doubt never will. Luckily I knew of the battle of Naseby–not sure when it was, or why, but–so figured there had to be a NASEBERRY; and there was. Who knew?

    Edited at 2012-12-12 02:16 am (UTC)

    1. Naseby, which is in Northants (between London and Birmingham) was the key battle in the English Civil War and took place 14th June 1645. Cromwell and Fairfax routed Charles 1 army.

      The US equivalent might be one of those final battles in Virginia circa 1865

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