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.
My honorable co-tenant seems to have neglected the cryptic for ‘clement’, which of course is ‘c(l)ement’.
Edited at 2013-06-17 02:09 am (UTC)
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.
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)
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.
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.
Thanks both, a nice puzzle today.
Main hold-ups were in parsing SUSPENSE and UNAPT.
I also solved this after watching Justin Rose hold his nerve. Well done, young feller.
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.