Times 25,486 – Next Week The Flying Scotsman

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 25 minutes

A puzzle that required steady application to mainly sound if unspectacular clues. There’s one US usage of a term that has a rather more literal UK meaning and one clue I’ll be amazed if anybody managed to work from cryptic to answer rather than reverse engineering from answer to cryptic.

Across
1 LANDMARK – LAND-MARK; lumber=LAND; a chap=MARK; piled up=padding; The Shard is an eyesore in London;
5 HICCUP – HIC-CUP;
10 FIGHT,ONES,CORNER – FIGHT(ONE-SCORN)ER;
11 OUTFIELDER – OUT(FIELD)ER; a ring on a dartboard or archery target=OUTER; the outfield is where the non-sporting types were usually banished to – so that they could drop skyed catches and be humiliated;
13 BRAD – BR-AD; old railway=British Rail=BR; a BRAD is a nail;
15 FLEMISH – FLE(MI)SH; MI from M(a)I(d);
17 BAND-BOX – B-AND-B-OX; B AND B=Bed & Breakfast; neat=OX; US term for neat and tidy;
18 MALLARD – MALL(A)RD; a duck or better a wonderful steam engine, holder of the world speed record, that can be seen at York Museum;
19 ELECTED – EL(E)CT-ED; key=E (music); the definition is “in”;
21 TOGO – TO-GO; if it’s still “to go” it currently remains here – bit weak;
22 TARADIDDLE – TAR-A-DIDDLE; what politicians specialise in;
25 EXCLAMATION,MARK – EX-C-LAMA-(into)*-MARK; chapter=C; the definition is !;
27 SOLELY – SO-LELY; reference Peter Lely 1618-1680 Dutch portrait painter;
28 WOODSMAN – WO(OD(d)S)MAN;
Β 
Down
1 LIFT-OFF – cryptic definition – the Marmite of the crossword world;
2 NAG – N(A)G; hack=broken down horse=NAG;
3 MATRICIDAL – MA-TRI(CID)AL; what Lizzie Borden wasn’t;
4 RENAL – (near)*-(chape)L;
6 IRON – chemical symbol for iron=FE=F(alang)E; a golf club;
7 CONTRIBUTED – (on credit)* surrounds BUT=only;
8 PARADOX – PARA-DOX; DOX sounds like “docks”;
9 ASSEMBLE – ELB(MESS)A all reversed;
12 THEOLOGICAL – THE-O-LO(GI)CAL; what I’m not;
14 UNDESIGNED – UNDE(r)-SIGNED; classic example of a clue that has to be reverse engineered from definition to cryptic;
16 HIDEAWAY – H(IDEA-W)AY; W from W(elcomed);
18 MOTHERS – M-OTHERS; M from M(ites);
20 DOESKIN – DO(E-SKI)N;
23 AMIGO – AM-I-GO;
24 DAIL – DAIL(y); “read” is padding; the Dail Eireann is the lower house of Republic of Ireland;
26 ARM – (h)ARM; Albert Square is fictional East End of London location;

35 comments on “Times 25,486 – Next Week The Flying Scotsman”

  1. Found this harder than yesterday. Probably because my solve was pretty much as Jim describes it in terms of trouble. Hence: much pondering over the “piled up” at 1ac. (In fact, I didn’t even know what the Shard is.) No idea how “like this” could be the def for BANDBOX — and it wasn’t!* And last to go were that (BANDBOX), ELECTED and UNDESIGNED (Jim spot on again with his prediction there).

    * Strange that NOAD (std US reference work) doesn’t have that meaning of BANDBOX. Though Collins has a “neat” example:

    “She emerged from the bedroom fifteen minutes later, smiling and looking as if she had stepped from a bandbox”.

  2. Very similar to jackkt in time, last in (by miles) and bandbox comment; but I don’t mind the weak humour in 1D – after all, it’s only an example in relief so to speak of what we crossword mugs spend our time on all over the shop.
  3. Despite taking half as long as yesterday’s, I thought this was still quite hard. Hadn’t heard of BANDBOX or TARADIDDLE. Possibly didn’t help myself by assuming that 3D was going to be MET plus an anagram of HEARING, leading to expectations of a homicidal student I’d never heard of.

    Apart from Mallard, the National Railway Museum in York also includes instructions on how to make a British Rail sandwich.

  4. 56 minutes with OUTFIELDER last to fall and COD to DOESKIN. Loads I’d never heard of – BRAD, BANDBOX, TA RADIDDLE – but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the solving difficulty.

    I love Marmite but I thought 1dn was weird and weak. Wouldn’t a defective elevator be a ‘lift-out-of-order’, anyway?

    Oh, and I spotted your deliberate error, Jimbo – 20dn.

      1. I must have missed that one! I meant the ‘s’ at the end of DO(E-SKI)NS.
  5. Not too hard, last in 14dn like most, not much more to say, really..
    Oh yes, I quite like the Shard. Though every time I see it, I think “It’ll be nice when it’s finished..” Even though it apparently is.
    1. I actually said this to someone a few months ago. I was very disappointed to hear that it’s supposed to be like that.
      1. It’s exactly 50 years ago, when courting my first wife, we used to sit atop Hampstead Heath and look out across London to Crystal Palace without having to cope with the plethora of awful buildings that have since been erected in the City – happy days.
    2. I gather exterior shots of the Shard have now usurped exterior shots of the ‘Gherkin’ in the opening sequence of The Apprentice. The BBC have rung the changes so that, as one wag put it, whereas Lord Sugar’s boardroom used not to be in the Gherkin, now it’s not in the Shard.
  6. 23 minutes, one of those which had only scattered solutions, and nothing in the NW, until FLEMISH seemed to produce a rapid collapsing of the house of cards. UNDESIGNED last in for me too, and certainly not from the wordplay – too right, Jim.
    Liked !, though I don’t doubt it’s been done before.

    “Mallard” at York is fine and shiny but sadly dead – to get a proper feel, try the North York Moors railway which has “Sir Nigel Gresley” in full steam, alive and well. Or wait until July 3rd, when all six surviving A4’s will be reunited at York, three of them still living and breathing.

    1. I heard yesterday that the surviving steam railways are about to run out of their supplies British coal and their future looks uncertain as apparently the stuff imported from Eastern Europe is no good for producing steam. Another “wrong sort of” in the tradition of UK railways, it seems.
  7. 34 minutes with UNDESIGNED as the last in. Didn’t know BANDBOX but it was easy to work out. I agree with ulaca that the second part of 1dn doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
  8. 21 mins but one wrong, having gone for MAIL rather than DAIL. The ‘read’ padding completely threw me, and I actually thought a word was missing from the clue and it should have read “Paper briefly read back in parliament”. I should have remembered I wasn’t solving the Grauniad ……..

    BANDBOX, OUTFIELDER and UNDESIGNED must have taken me over five minutes at the end.

  9. ! to clue exclamation mark is almost a chestnut. Whenever I see (11,4) and ! at the end of the clue I immediately look to see if that’s the answer.
  10. 25:56. Another tricky one. I haven’t come across BANDBOX in any context but BRAD has bothered me in the past (in the context of Bradshaw, for instance) and I remembered it this time. Likewise “hack” = NAG.
    My last in was DAIL, which I wanted to be MAIL: it’s included in “parliament”, just the wrong way round. Fortunately I thought again.
    I couldn’t parse UNDESIGNED at all: I just bunged it in.
    1dn is a bit cheesy but it makes perfect sense to me: a lift can be turned off.
  11. No trouble with BANDBOX and TARADIDDLE (though I tend to think of it as a fib) thanks to the always reliable Georgette Heyer. The removal of the subscriber’s right struck a chord, though around here I doubt it was unintended. 24.49, held up far too long by the duck because as a US based solver I associate malls with shopping.
  12. I put bandbox in. Still had to google “neat ox” to find out that a neat is a hoofed oxen.

    Keriothe, a hack is a type of horse, nag is a slang word for a horse.

    Cheers,

    M

    PS steam engines are wonderful, but not better than ducks!!

    1. Remember “neat”, it’s extremely common.
      Yes, I did actually remember this meaning of “hack”… this time. It’s caught me out in the past.
      I agree with you on mallards. The birds taste much better.
  13. bandbox is used in Ireland – mainly by those who use banjax (broken) in Dublin urban patois

    maybe came back across Atlantic from Irish emigrants?

  14. 26:18 .. found this rather easier than yesterday’s but was still much delayed by the unusual suspects.

    COD .. MALLARD

  15. Same time as yesterday – 19 minutes – but this one seemed much harder work. Taradiddle was one of my late mother in law’s favourite words so that one just wrote itself in.
  16. Three missing today – Hiccup, Undesigned and the unknown-to-me Bandbox – and a wrong guess at Tarafiddle for Taradiddle.
    Didn’t quite get how Landmark worked so thanks Jim for clearing that up. I rather like the Shard, unlike an aunt of mine who used to work at Southwark Towers which was demolished to make way for it.
  17. Solving time actually about 30-40 min: I failed to stop the clock when I went out shopping this morning before finishing. πŸ™
    At 14dn, after a superficial glance at the clue, started to write in UNDERSIGNED, found I had a letter over and then saw what was needed.
    I do hope that Flying Scotsman will eventually run again, though at the present rate of progress it may not be in my lifetime! (see http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/2013/damning-flying-scotsman-report-issued-by-nrm/ )
  18. Jimbo, thanks for the blog as usual. In defence of 21ac, I took “remaining” = “to go” in the sense of “three balls remaining”.
    (Was it Brian Johnston who famously described a batsman who had been struck in the groin:
    “Turner to bat on, one ball remaining”?)

    Edited at 2013-05-28 02:23 pm (UTC)

  19. DNF, missing UNDESIGNED and ELECTED.
    Regarding padding in clues, I thought every word in a cryptic clue had an importance/meaning. Am I wrong in this or is this allowed?

    regards
    Adrian

    1. Many would say that but there is no actual rule to that effect. words are often put in simply to improve the surface reading, for example
    2. Personally I think it’s poor practice. Good setters don’t need to indulge in it and can mislead solvers in far more sophisticated ways.
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