Times 25553: Anything but a 1dn

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 18:08

Phew! Got an easier one on blogging day after harder than usual puzzles on Monday and Tuesday. A pretty standard effort I found with a few bits of tricky wordplay holding me up in the NE corner. Only two bits of vocab were unknown (25ac, 4dn), but the wordplay landed them.

Across
1. BUSHCRAFT. Reverse CH (Companion) inside BUS and RAFT.
6. ANGUS. ANGUIS{h} minus the I (one needing release).
9. SUNLESS. {spiceles}S + UNLESS (if not).
10. WALPOLE. Reverse LAW + POLE (European). Def = PM many years ago.
11. A,LACK.
13. STEAMSHIP. S (second), TEAMS (side’s), HIP (bit of a cheer). S.S. Great Britain is now a major tourist attraction in Bristol.
14. DIS,CUSSED. DIS is a standard for the underworld.
16. BASS. Two meanings: the singing voice and the fish.
18. HIND. Two meanings: the female deer and the adjective (as in ‘hind leg’).
19. OLD MASTER. Anagram: art models. What Romanian mothers burn in their ovens when the police arrive.
22. THE SOLENT. SOLE (fish) inside THEN (after that) + T{rawler}.
24. ADD-ON. AD (notice), DON (member of university, aka JAFA).
25. PAISANO. AS (when) reversed inside PAIN (agony) + 0 (love). Even the US Oxford doesn’t give this meaning of the Spanish for ‘peasant’. But it’s in Chambers: someone from the same town … hence a friend.
26. TOADISH. A DI (little woman) inside TOSH. Did try to justify ‘toryish’ as our annoying Shadow Treasurer was screaming his box off, as always, on the radio during the solve.
28. RUMMY. Two rather obvious meanings. Paradoxically rummy is one of the least peculiar card games. Makes cribbage seem like quantum mechanics.
29. DEMEANOUR. {hostil}E and MEAN inside DOUR. The def is ‘look’.

Down
1. BASTARD. STAR inside BAD. May have offended some solvers, though it’s a term of endearment down here.
2. SIN. SI{g}N.
3. CHECKOUT. Two meanings, the first usually split into two words.
4. APSIS. A, PS (note at end of letter) IS. I quote: “either of two points on the orbit of a planet or satellite that are nearest to or furthest from the body around which it moves”.
5. TOW-HEADED. Anagram: dead hot we.
    “And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
    Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
    His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay …”.
6. AFLAME. A, FAME inc L (litres). ‘Drinking’ is the indicator of inclusion.
7. GOOD-HEARTED. Because it’s found in the centre of {din}GO OD{dly}. Bet I wasn’t the only one looking at the letters from DiNgO.
8. STEPPES. STEPS (walks) inc PE (exercise).
12. ABSENTEEISM. Anagram: it means bees.
15. STONE COLD. TONE inside SCOLD.
17. MAHARAJA. Reverse: a jar, a ham.
18. HOTSPUR. HOUR (time) inc TSP (teaspoon, a little medicine). Another drink-type inclusion indicator. Sir Henry Percy, aka Harry Hotspur. Well known from Henry IV Pt 1.
20. RANCHER. RAN (controlled) + {ar}CHER. Ref to the long-running radio series The Archers, the theme from which every English person of a certain age can hum at the drop of a hat.
21. ROTARY. ROT + {v}ARY.
23. TOTEM. TOT + reversal of ME.
27. I,DO. This was in a fairly recent Graun puzzle where I learned that it’s a development of Esperanto.

28 comments on “Times 25553: Anything but a 1dn”

  1. Got delayed by putting FLAMED (famed with an L in, reasonable fit to both literal and wordplay) until I realized WALPOLE had to be right. Also spent time trying to justify TRADISH (which isn’t actually a word) before I realised it was TOSH not TRASH. And you have to have lived a very sheltered life, whatever your age, not to have heard the theme from the Archers many a time. I just looked on Wikipedia to see that it started in 1951. Wow, that is long-running, over 60 years.
  2. Mostly a straightforward and enjoyable solve, but at 16ac DAIS seemed more plausible than BASS. (I am familiar with the Welsh love of singing, but largely ignorant of the aliases of freshwater fish.)
  3. I echo what McT says – doesn’t one always? – coming home in 38 minutes with ‘toadish’ (which sounds as if it’s missing something) last in. Thought ‘bushcraft’ was very nice, today’s speedster shibboleth being getting 1ac on the first read through.
  4. 44 minutes without attempting to hurry. 25 and the 18s occupied the last 10 minutes of the solve which had been smooth and steady to that point.

    Not offended, but a bit surprised by 1dn where I lost a few minutes making absolutely sure it wasn’t the somewhat more likely “dastard”. Enjoyed the reference to the farming family, and indeed its two leading members, Dan and Doris, have been absent now for many a year.

    Never heard of PAISANO since the last time I said I never heard of it.

  5. ‘American friend’=PAISANO? News to American me. Of course I’d seen/heard the word, but, like many (probably not most) Americans, recognized it as Italian. I suppose the setter would accept ‘landsman’ on the same sort of grounds? Was going to animadvert on TOWHEAD, but Vinyl beat me to it; and anyway it wasn’t a problem. I did not know APSIS; there, I said it.

  6. … and that one was TOADISH, where I had tradish, and sadly didn’t have Paul’s confidence that it wasn’t actually a word…!

    Didn’t know of the SS GB, nor that PAISANO meant American friend (or does it…?), APSIS, Sir Henry Percy or the language IDO, although I’m sure it must have come up before, but the cryptics for those seemed pretty unambiguous.

    Can’t believe I didn’t stop to parse RANCHER – am a big fan of the goings on in Ambridge!

  7. I only knew tow-headed as a reference to colour, thought IDO must be a Japanese dialect, don’t remember coming across APSIS before, and had only encountered “paisan” without the O (and vaguely thought it was a racial slur rather than a term of endearment). I also spent some time trying to work out which 4-letter word could represent “n” in front of hearted, which was indeed a nice bit of misdirection. As it happened, none of this spoiled my enjoyment of the puzzle or my ability to finish it, which makes it a decent puzzle in my book.
  8. 23’42”, which makes it on the sticky side, even though the early clues went in without much trouble. I did wonder how anybody wanting a prompt on Answerbank for 1d would get a response, as it’s usually censored.
    I knew I should remember who the famous Percy was, but couldn’t while Tim McInnerny’s immaculately gormless version kept intruding. And I was at White Hart Lane on Saturday.
    I don’t think of the Solent as being particularly narrow – last time I needed a hovercraft to cross it – and it was big enough for the Navy to display in when the Navy was really big. But Wiki says it’s a strait, so I suppose that counts.
    DKK (OHF) IDO, APSIS, BASS as perch, and PAISANO, which is quite a high concentration; cryptics meant BASS was the only one that felt like a pure guess given the numbers of words for fin and feather.
    CoD to BASTARD for chutzpah.
  9. 19.43, year of one’s birth. I remember the Archers starting and being outraged at an everyday story of country folk replacing Dick Barton, Special Agent, a sentiment echoed by the singer Tommy Steele several years later in a letter to the Times. Everything seems fair enough today except maybe the slur on the poor old toad. Unlikely word, come to think of it, as trampish the other day; legitimate, yet not entirely satisfactory.
  10. 13 mins so very much on the setter’s wavelength.

    We have had a few words recently that don’t look like they should be real words, and TOADISH is another, but I decided to trust the wordplay.

    I might have been a little quicker but the SW held me up slightly. There was a clue somewhere very recently that contained Percy (nice Blackadder reference by the way) and the answer was Shelley, although I didn’t enter it here because of its complete lack of parsability. However, it put me off enough for me to not be able to think of the HOTSPUR Percy until I got the H checker from HIND. I then saw THE SOLENT, PAISANO and ROTARY, and then I went back up to the NE for my LOI, AFLAME.

    And yes, I know parsability isn’t a recognised word, but it should be.

  11. Smooth sailing today until the last four which I just could not get (Toadish, Walpole, Hotspur, Hind). I had one wrong too (Two-Headed not Tow-Headed) so that scuppered the PM.
    Shakespeare is a blind spot of mine and I’d never heard of Sir Percy.
  12. Congratulations to those who sped through this one. I found it tricky, eventually creeping across the line in 28m 30s.
    Thanks to Jack for the chuckle about ‘paisano’ – I know the feeling exactly: now, where did I leave my glasses?
    George Clements
  13. Spent a while looking for TRAVISH. also trying to get from ‘dingo’ to KIND. Needed Bradford to remind me about Percy, knowing that Barry Humphries’ one was irrelevant. Having been evacuated to the Island, I never think of the Solent as being narrow.
  14. 30 minutes, but with a wrong answer for 26, TRAVISH. Convinced that rubbish had to be TRASH, I decided that this was one of those neologisms that I’d not come across. ‘Travish’ seemed more likely than ‘tradish’ because it might have been derived from ‘travesty’.
    At least the wordplay to PAISANO, an unfamiliar word, was transparent, so no error there.
  15. Nice enough puzzle, maybe with a few dodgy entries, i.e. yours truly didn’t know them, but The Times so rarely falls into obscurity they’re hardly worth the mention. 27 minutes with mishap on TOADISH.

    Chris.

  16. 20m, with a long time at the end hesitating over TRADISH, which just didn’t look right. I got there in the end, but it was all to no avail because I got 4dn wrong. Obviously an astronomical term I’d never heard of, so I constructed it confidently from wordplay: A, R (end of letter), SO (note), S (is). Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that it’s wrong.
    My first thought for “Percy” was THROWER.
    I thought IDO was an African language, but that’s Ibo.
    No problem with the definition for 22ac. Narrowness is relative, of course, and the narrowness of THE SOLENT relative to the English Channel is the reason for dramatic tidal patterns that make sailing in it a lot of fun.
    1. Thrower! I though you were too young. I had Ibo in the Guardian the other day and not only remembered the right word this time but also that it was a riposte to Esperanto. Pretty chuffed about that. Your ‘arsos’ sounds like it belongs in the Guardian too. In a Paul puzzle maybe.
      1. He was on Blue Peter until 1987, so would be familiar to people younger than me.
        ARSOS doesn’t look very likely, does it? I just followed the wordplay and didn’t really think about it very much. In my defence, “arsis” is a word. Guess what the plural is…
  17. About 25 minutes ending in TOADISH, after like others being stuck on ‘trash’, and not convinced that ‘tosh’ exists. Didn’t know the farming family in 20D either, but the answer seemed pretty clear. APSIS was also new, but as McText says, definitely an easier go than the others this week. Regards.
  18. Logged in expecting a raft of horror stories….no, it was apparently just me who struggled. After averaging under 10 minutes over the previous 8 puzzles, this one was the beast I expected a week ago. Well it was for ME anyhow ! 56 minutes, never heard of PAISANO but parsed it, had to check BASS to be sure it was a perch (beautiful freshly caught in Portugal with salad, potatoes, wine, and more wine later). Took me ages to get BUSHCRAFT. As one born out of wedlock, I object to BASTARD being defined as “scoundrel” ! An excellent puzzle, and well worth the effort. COD to STEAMSHIP.
  19. A disastrous 21:11 for me, with about half of it spent agonising over PAISANO (the first thing I thought of) since I don’t recall coming across the word before (I have read The Godfather but it was 40-odd years ago). Among other things I was worried that “friend when twisting” might lead to IMA (if the setter was in a particularly evil mood). Tiredness meant that I kept reading the enumerations wrongly, which slowed me down a bit, and (like others) I wasted time pondering TRADISH and TRAVISH (and TRAFISH).
  20. Got 1 ac immediately on finishing reading the clue, from def and “seeing” HC in the middle.
    Time? Usually similar to you and jackt, 30-40mins but today a DNF. Needed aids for ROTARY, PAISANO, HOTSPUR (not much in Shakespeare is well-known to me) and then HIND fell.
    Rob

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