Times 25503 – Hail England’s Rose!

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Buoyed by getting up to watch an Englishman win a Major for the first time in years, I found this nice number waiting for me at the office. With England through to the semis of the World Underwater Cricket Cup, what more could a man want? Well, if Australia could beat Sri Lanka and thus guarantee England a semi against South Africa, that would be nice. 32 minutes.

Across

1 STARCH – ST+ARCH; ‘especially good chap’ for St (saint) is very nice.
4 IMPAIRED – AKA ‘I’m paired’; another good clue.
10 SCOUNDREL – DR in counsel* [anagram].
11 UNAPT – NAP (‘sure-fire winner’) in TU (‘in Paris you’) reversed for the lesser known variant of ‘inapt’; there’s actually a big difference between a nap and a cert, as the former is merely a tipster’s prediction of which nag might win a race, so a question mark or a ‘perhaps’ is really needed.       
12 EARTHENWARE – we hear arent*.
14 RUN – aRgUiNg.    
15 SHAMBLE – SHAME around B[ritish] L[ibrary].
17 DECENT – DENT (dip) around CE[p], a mushroom I have only tasted in crosswordland.
19 HAIR+DO
21 C(L)EMENT – straightforward definition well disguised by a smoothly deceptive surface; the 21s were my last in.
23 PAD – PA+D for the soft underpart of an animal’s foot.
24 APPARATCHIK – rat pack a hip* for the faceless people who inhabit crosswordland HQ.
26 RANCH – [b]RANCH.
27 PORTFOLIO – PORT + F[ollowing] + OLIO (a dish of many ingredients – a new one on me).
29 UNDERARM – UNDER (hypnotised) + ARM; according to tradition, it was the ladies who first bowled ‘overarm’ – as everyone except the odd Australian facing the Beige Brigade does today – on account of the voluminosity of their skirts. If you enjoyed the first clip, this one where Richie Benaud launches a thousand impersonations is solid gold.
30 EX[P]ERT       

Down

1 SUSPENSE – PEN (‘pen’ and ‘pound’ are both places of confinement) inside SUSSE[x]; nice clue.
2 AMOUR – A[r]MOUR.
3 CON – C[oat] + ON; smooth as silk.
5 MA+L+LARD – about the only duck I know.
6 ACUTE ACCENT – A + CUTE + ACCENT; yes, it’s so simple in retrospect…my COD. (I was showing off to myself by working around Gide.)
7 REAR+RANGE 
8 DATING – DA + TIN + G[rate]; I’m at that stage of my crossword development where I see ‘see’ and only about the fourth thing I think of is ‘date’.
9 F(RING)E
13 HABERDASHER – had her bears* for a word I associate with Mrs Slocombe and the camp one whose name escapes me. 
16 ABANDONED – AD (‘trailer’) around BAND ONE [‘opening group’ – groan :)].
18 STAKE OUT – STOUT (‘porter’ as in beer) around a fish I have heard of, [h]AKE.
20 ON PAPER – propane*; ‘theoretically … 2,5’ – must be ON PAPER.
21 CURARE – ‘curate’ (‘serviceman’ – superb) with R[ight] instead of T[ime] as the fifth letter; curare, a resin obtained from some South American trees, can be either a medicine or a poison, as indeed can most such things. The Greeks, who knew everything, knew this, their word ‘pharmakon’ meaning both medicine and poison.
22 APERCU – APE + RC + U.
25 HALVE – an easier hidden you will not find. Um, do I mean that?
28 FOX – double definition.

24 comments on “Times 25503 – Hail England’s Rose!”

  1. A nice Mondayish puzzle. I only noticed when coming here that I’d not tried to parse 11ac; which was just as well, as I couldn’t have: never heard of NAP in this sense. Curare, incidentally, back in the 1940s was used experimentally as an anesthetic in surgery, with ghastly results, as the patient could feel everything but was unable to indicate his agony. When the patients complained after the curare wore off, the doctors, of course, refused to believe them.
    1. I had a similar experience when having my wisdom teeth removed (they only told me afterwards, when I was able to describe the entire procedure in excruciating detail, that a few people are resistant to the lethean qualities of the sedative they used) but after reading your revelation about CURARE I’m grateful it was just my wisdom teeth!
  2. This was very welcome after the trials of the weekend (I had to abandon both Saturday’s and Sunday’s puzzles and return to them later) but even so, it was not all straightforward as the 21s added 10 minutes to my solving time changing 36 minutes to 46.
  3. Have to note here that this was my first “sub-20-minutes” puzzle so I am HAPPY HAPPY! Bit pathetic, I realise, when I see such fast times posted on the board – but I must enjoy my moment of ecstasy. FYI I am another who never heard NAP used that way but found it in the end – a betting term!
    1. Not pathetic at all, but was it really necessary to fly off to the sun to celebrate? (Or is that just a flooded field somewhere in the UK?) 🙂
    2. Congratulations indeed. I expect even the fastest solvers remember how delighted they were when they broke 20 minutes for a Times crossword for the first time.
  4. Yep, quickie for me too, with just over 30 mins. Would have been a good few mins quicker had I not put in ‘havle’ at 25dn.

    I didn’t know NAP, and tried unfit and inapt before surrendering to the, frankly wrong-sounding, UNAPT.

    Nor did I know CURARE, but liked the cryptic.

  5. I wonder whether an alternative parsing might be STAR (‘especially good’) + CH (‘chap’)
    1. The main problems with that would be that it takes no account of the word ‘knowing’; also, I don’t think CH is a recognised abbreviation for ‘chap’, unless he is a Companion of Honour!
  6. 13m. Straightforward apart from a few at the end.
    Part of the reason this is quite easy is that many of the cryptics are old standards, which makes for relatively few blind alleys. Knowing = arch, locks = hair, lake = L, pawn = P, resistance = R, mother = ma, can = tin, Roman Catholic university = RCU…
    I got stuck at the end for a few minutes on CURARE/PORTFOLIO/FOX. I was sure that 27 was going to start PER (“a”), and I’ve never come across OLIO (and I’m usually fairly good on foodie stuff). Once I’d got FOX (which took a while but seems very obvious now) I managed to unlock it.
    No other unknowns today, which also helped.

    Edited at 2013-06-17 12:20 pm (UTC)

    1. OLIO is another NYTimes chestnut, one that even by their lax standards is well past its sell-by date.
  7. 16 minutes,with an uneasy feeling that I was making heavy weather of it. Agree with Keriothe on the number of “standards”, though that didn’t help in 1d where pound ≠ L. I also made a shambles of SHAMBLE by looking to insert BL into the wrong bit of the clue.
    I liked ACUTE ACCENT, simple enough but fun and not the French phrase expected from “André”, and CURARE for the other, nearly traditional use of “serviceman”
    APERÇU I knew from its sense of insight but not as outline. That’s my one new thing learned today, then.
    1. It’s cropped up fairly recently, I think in its ‘summary’ sense. A quick search shows that it appeared in Jumbo 928 last year clued as ‘Intuition a section of orchestra has been halved’.
      1. I see I had “Rimless vending vessel requires a brief explanation (6)” as my CoD around 2 years ago, so I obviously have a very slow memory processor. But I think you’re right in that it turned up much more recently, presumably in one that is yet to be blogged.
  8. 12 mins post-lunch, so definitely on the setter’s wavelength although it didn’t feel like it for the first couple of minutes.

    When I got to 21dn I already had both ‘r’ checkers so CURARE went in from the definition alone, which is a shame because it was a very good clue.

    IMPAIRED was my LOI after I finally saw the amusing A CUTE ACCENT and what should have been the much more obvious REARRANGE.

  9. A kind Monday offering which allowed me to speed along, with nice touches that are usually well documented above by the time I get here.

    Thanks both, a nice puzzle today.

  10. 13:19 .. and a welcome relief after Sunday’s brute (3 sessions, careful checking, and I still got something wrong, apparently).

    Main hold-ups were in parsing SUSPENSE and UNAPT.

    I also solved this after watching Justin Rose hold his nerve. Well done, young feller.

  11. 15 minutes while watching the cricket (hope never dies). Fun puzzle liked ACUTE ACCENT and SUSPENSE a lot. UNAPT from definition and APERCU from wordplay
  12. 20 minute stroll in the park with no queries, quibbles or hold ups. Standard Times puzzle.
  13. About 25 minutes, ending with IMPAIRED; I suppose I was looking for something more devious than ‘paired’. Didn’t know of the ‘nap’ meaning, but everything else want in without much trouble, but not many were just write-ins, either. Nice puzzle to start the week. Regards.
  14. 7:26 for me, making rather heavy weather of some easy clues in a nice, straightforward Monday puzzle.

    That meaning of “nap” used to come up quite a lot in crosswords at one time, but perhaps it’s been rarer in recent years.

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