TIMES 25657 – Bit of a stretch?

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This took me 45 minutes parsing everything as I went and some of the wordplay was not immediately apparent. There were no actual unknowns today except perhaps 4dn where I knew the engine part but not exactly what it is called. I had a few problems getting properly under way but having solved 16dn, my eighth answer in, things started to fall nicely into place and I gathered momentum. There were only two names on the Leaderboard at 1AM and only seven now, an hour later, so perhaps it’s a bit trickier than I first thought.

* = anagram

Across
1 FELT-TIP PEN – FELT (considered), TIP (advice), PEN (shut up)
6 ASTI – Two lots of sex appeal, IT & SA reversed
10 CAVER – CAVE (mind, as in mind out), Roam. Cave! is old schoolboy slang from the days of Bunter.
11 SCHINDLER – CHILDRENS*
12 FORWARD-LOOKING – FORWARD (lock, as in lock forward, a position in rugby), LOO (toilet), KING (powerful draught, making a change from chess pieces)
14 ABASHED – A, BASHED (hit)
15 NOT A BIT – O (old) + TAB (bill) inside NIT (fool)
17 AEROBIC – BORE (pain) reversed inside AI (first-rate), C (constant)
19 SEMI-PRO – SEMI (house), PRO (backing, as in “I’m pro something or other”)
20 KEEP ONE’S HAND IN – ONE (1) inside KEEPS (guards), HAND IN (surrender)
23 BURSARIAL – RA’S (artist’s) reversed inside BURIAL (funeral)
24 TEMPO – OP (facelift, for one) + MET (police force) reversed
25 ROTE – Sounds like “wrote”. How I learnt my multiplication tables at a very young age.
26 THE RED FLAG – (FLED GATHER)*

Down
1 FACT – F (following), ACT (routine, as in Music Hall, Variety etc)
2 LIVE ON AIR – LIVE (as it happens), ON AIR (broadcasting). What I’d have to do to lose weight.
3 THROW THE BOOK AT – THE + BOOK (work) inside THROW AT (shy / shy to)
4 PUSHROD – P (pressure), SHROUD*
5 ECHELON – EC (city), HE (gent), LOaN (borrowed money)
7 SOLTI – Lightning inside SOT (one often wasted), I (current). Sir Georg, the conductor of that name.
8 IRRIGATION – IRRITATION (bother) swaps its first T (time) for a G (gallons)
9 UNCONTAMINATED – CON (opponent) inside (AT MAN UNITED)*
13 KARAOKE BAR – rocK, A-OK (just fine) inside ARE (live), BAR (except)
16 BAPTISMAL – BAP (bun), then an anagram of MALT’S + I (one)
18 CHERISH – C (around), HER (woman’s), IS (island), H (hour)
19 SCHOLAR – CH (chapter) inside SOLAR (coming from our star)
21 EGRET – Hidden and reversed
22 LONG – Double definition

49 comments on “TIMES 25657 – Bit of a stretch?”

  1. Very challenging puzzle. Nothing really straightforward. And especially perplexed by the TEMPO/LONG pair.

    Jack: the grist at 26ac is “fled gather”.

  2. 58 minutes for a most enjoyable pipe-closer to the week, even if for some odd reason I put ‘not a but’ at 15 with a question mark, when a question mark was the least of the things I should have put there!

    Many Great Egrets can be seen from the window of my box overlooking the Shing Mun “River” in Shatin. Since they are always perching in trees or standing on walls when I see them, I’ve never thought of them as waders, but, of course, they are, if they can ever find a piece of unpolluted shoreline to stand about in in these parts.

    I wonder if I was the only person to have three stabs at 1ac, essaying ‘ball-top pen’ and ‘roll-top pen’ before stumbling on the correct answer. And of course I was using one to fill the answers in with…

  3. 22:13 … definitely not straightforward. Last in, after some head-scratching, were FACT and LONG – two sleekit, wee devils.

    Nice to see Oskar Schindler getting a clue (his first in The Times?). I was reading the other day about another, equally extraordinary man, Giorgio Perlasca. His story is summarised in a recent Telegraph obit, of one Suzanne Gelleri Dear, who owed him her life. It’s well worth reading. So many amazing stories …

    Edited at 2013-12-13 03:36 am (UTC)

  4. Some meaty stuff here so thanks Jack. Scribbled in KEEP ONES HAIR ON which slowed things down. CAVE (pronounced cayvee) rolled the years back to my Greyfriars-like education.
    1. If only Crassus had listened to the old hag selling figs and shouting out her wares (‘Cauneas!’), which just happened to be a dodgy homophone of ‘Cave ne eas!’ (‘Don’t go, you fool!’)

      Seriously, stories like this give a guide as to how the Romans pronounced their lingo.

      1. No idea how the Romans pronounced it but it was certainly KV at school. Equally, if I had to pronounce ‘cave canem’ it would be ‘carvay’ to go with the ‘carnem’. Inconsistent I know. Incidentally, I have never been one of the ‘weni, widi, wici’ brigade
        1. Fascinating insight to your school days. Battersea Grammar specialised in more Anglo-Saxon constructions.
        2. I had a really twee Classics master who insisted on calling Scipio (and there were quite a few of them) ‘Sipio’…..
  5. 23 minutes of the good and challenging kind, and I never did get the parsing of FORWARD LOOKING, so thanks and congratulations to Jack. I got stuck on ward as being at least a bit of a lock, and couldn’t work out where the powerful draught was coming from.
    BURSARIAL was my LOI: I knew I knew a word for college treasurer but couldn’t remember what it was, nor could I figure which way round the clue worked. Finished when I wrote the checkers for KARAOKE BAR out flat and twigged what on earth that was. Both good clues.
    Second the motion welcoming SCHINDLER. And the wonderful SOLTI – such a useful conductor for filling unpromising spaces in the grid!

    Edited at 2013-12-13 09:19 am (UTC)

  6. Great effort Jack – can’t have been easy under pressure

    Difficult puzzle and even now I’m not sure I understand 3D – where’s the containment indicator?

    Some great wordplays that caused much head scratching after guessing an answer from checkers and presumed definition. Many thanks to the setter.

    1. Good question. Might the setter have been thinking of ‘punish’ = ‘lock up’, or something on those lines?
    2. I wonder if it’s just a sort of cryptic definition rather than a container. ‘Throw the book at’ = ‘the work shy’, as in ‘the coconut shy’, though my analogy isn’t very good because with the coconut shy you don’t throw the coconut.
  7. One of those where breaking 20 minutes felt like a good effort. No gimmes, and lots of clues which required a second or third look.
  8. 14 mins. I have to admit that I found this an unsatisfying puzzle because I saw too many answers from their definition and enumeration where applicable, and I didn’t bother to parse them properly. 1ac, 12ac, 20ac, 23ac, 26ac, 3dn, 9dn and 13dn all fell into this category.

    The only clues that really held me up were the CAVER/FACT and TEMPO/LONG crossers, the last of which was my LOI.

  9. As others have mentioned, quite a few answers that jumped out from definition/checkers, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

    Looks like Richard Rogan has been appointed the new Times crossword editor. I always really struggle with his offerings in the Independent (and no doubt also the ones he has set for the Times) so it will be interesting to see how much of a stamp he puts on the Times puzzles from the editor’s position.

      1. Do you know the Crossword Centre run by Derek Harrison (crossword dot org dot uk)? An e-mail comes out every so often regarding new puzzles, clue competition deadlines, etc, and he mentioned the appointment in the latest one sent out this morning:

        “Congratulations to Richard Rogan who has been appointed as editor of the Times
        crossword. And also to retiring editor Richard Brown for the excellent job he has done in the post. I wish Richard the best of luck.”

          1. (I’m guessing that) I get the e-mails because I signed up for the clue-writing competitions, for which a login is needed.
  10. Not quick, but at least I managed to avoid daft errors like yesterday’s. It also took me a long while to sort out the parsing of 12a: I was another one who tried to accommodate ‘ward’ as part of a lock, and failed to see draught as a game piece for ages. I thought that 23a was a clever clue, even if the adjective has rather limited use.
    Not so keen on the clue for 24a: if ‘facelift’ is to do duty for ‘op’, I think it should, at least, have a question mark at the end of the clue.
    1. The wordplay for op is “Facelift for one”, not just “Facelift”.

      Edited at 2013-12-13 11:54 am (UTC)

  11. 40 mins. A slowish but steady solve, with no real hold-ups, but I didn’t get 8dn and 20ac for some time, and several answers went in without fully understanding the wordplay (12ac, 2dn, 7dn). I like “one often wasted” for SOT.
  12. Like others had a time with tempo/long, and having had no schoolboy Latin, cave (and its fellows) always take me some time.
  13. 29m – held up for a while in SE, as had -ING at end of 8d, and was trying to include ‘bun’ in the anagrist at 16d. Hence 24 was LOI. I never did see how to parse 12a, so thanks for that.
  15. 26/28 today with the Tempo/Long pair missing. I thought of Tempo from the checkers but couldn’t fathom the wordplay.
    No major hold ups with the rest which I picked away at all morning and into the afternoon. COD to the Schindler clue.
  16. No time as in bits and pieces again but a reasonably fluent solve if not fast. No-one’s mentioned as such the delightful ‘so long’ switch to the elastic from the valedictory. On ‘cave’, there was a master at school, one Horace Elam, who when at his approach someone yelled “Cave Elam!” came charging in and in apparent horror and fury spluttered,”Don’t you know it’s ‘Cavete’ if you’re addressing more than one person?” and charged out. A good man.
    1. Not sure he is correct Joe. If we were all shouting out ‘cave’ it would indeed be ‘cavete’ but one person shouting is still ‘cave’. Happy to be corrected by someone who did not jack in latin 45 years ago..
      1. “Cavete” is used in Latin when telling more than one person to beware, it is the imperative plural.

        However I think that whenever we adopt a foreign word we should be able to use the word as we see fit: once it is in our lexicon then there is no need to follow Latin rules. So unless the boys were trying to speak Latin, they are quite right to say “Cave” to a group.

        After all when at the end of the opera the English crowd shouts “Bravo” whether praising the soprano, or the ensemble, when an Italian would say “Brava” or “Bravi”.

        Edited at 2013-12-13 08:47 pm (UTC)

        1. Killary,

          Thank you for the clarification. I have to admit that the world of Latin imperative plurals is long long ago but it is good to be reminded.

  17. About 40 minutes for a puzzle I found pretty tough. Like others, I ended with the TEMPO/LONG pair. COD to the very nice clue for SCHINDLER, loved the ‘children’s novel’, a brilliant spot by the setter. But I totally missed the ‘forward’ rugby reference, and still have no idea why ‘bun’=’bap’. Nevertheless, regards to all.
    1. One of the (many) ways England divides itself is according to how locals refer to a bread roll. Bun and bap are both popular, but depending on where you go, you’ll also find cobs, teacakes, barmcakes…when I was growwing up in Coventry, it was always a batch, which is a very local usage indeed, I think.
      1. Tim, thanks very much. I’d certainly never heard of the baked bap, and my suspicion actually drifted toward the idea that a bap was some kind of bun-like hairstyle. You’ve saved me from that. Thanks again and regards.
        1. You never know when it might come in handy, Kevin. In the Midlands, referring to a batch as a cob might see a pitchfork-wielding mob at your door wanting to know who the stranger is and why he talks so funny 🙂
      2. I guess that down here in the South, buns and baps are wildly different things. One is hard whereas the other is soft.
  18. Around half an hour, in three goes. It just seemed longer. This is one which gave up its answers grudgingly, and much remains murky and imprecise – I LONG to THROW THE BOOK AT the setter.

    The word BURSARIAL is ugly and unnecessary, and I suspect its natural habitat may be among “education professionals” in local authority bureaucracies rather that in Oxbridge colleges.

    Nice for the late Sir Georg to get a look in – I remember his Covent Garden tenure with great affection. His valedictory Tristan, with that other great star of that era, the late Birgit Nilsson, will never be forgotten.

  19. …Sir Solti would have been wealthy enough to have afforded the second “e”. Ah well.

    About an hour for me and, like yesterday, a steady slog. Spent a while trying to justify “SAKE” for 6ac, it being a wine from the East and having an SA in it. Wasn’t convinced by 15ac – “not a bit”, to me, doesn’t quite equate to “in no way” – more like “not at all” or “to no extent”. Nor would I have equated “semi-pro” with “part-timer”: several of the surgeons here are part-timers, but I would never call them “semi-pro”, however much they may aspire to be so.

    I did like the clue for “SCHOLAR” – clever, I thought; and also for “CHERISH” (which I am sure I have seen clued somewhere as “Love, like an American singer.”)

    On the subject of Latin pronunciation, I had three years of Latin with Mr. Baden, an elderly English gentleman long since departed, to whom I am indebted. It never occurred to me to wonder whether the Romans actually sounded like James Mason. On reflection, I suppose it’s unlikely.

  20. 13:33. Been away for a couple of days without internet access, so only just got to this and yesterday’s. I seem to have been on the wavelength for this one, and off it for the other.
    Thanks for explaining FORWARD LOOKING: I missed the rugby reference and just bunged it in from definition. There were a few like that.
      1. Hi Sotira,
        Yes I did, thanks. Haven’t had a chance to look at it properly yet but will do this weekend.
  21. As a child I used to visit an aunt in Deal, Kent, and a treat (as a Londoner) was to go to the local shop for ‘huffkins’. Doubt that they will appear in crosswords though.
  22. 15:11 for me. This was one of those days when I thought I’d been faster, but I probably spent too long making sure I’d parsed some clues correctly and not missed an alternative – with TEMPO holding me up unnecessarily for far too long at the end.

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

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