Times 25724 – Love is just a one-letter word

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 11 minutes

Music: Finzi – A Severn Rhapsody, Introit, Nocture, Prelude, Three Soliloquies, Romance, The Fall of the Leaf, Boult/LSO

Please take note of today’s musical program. Excuses will no longer be accepted! Since this is a UK puzzle, knowledge of British composers is likely to be useful. I listened earlier in the week to the Clarinet Concerto that deezzaa suggested, it is really quite a nice piece. I have the Thea King on Hyperion, with the Stanford piece on the flip side.

Now for the puzzle. As we know from know from Mr Mayer’s productions, it is very feasible to make an extremely difficult puzzle with terse clues, so I was a bit alarmed when I first printed this off. However, it proved to be quite a doddle, as I recorded my fastest time by far. It took me two or three minutes at the beginning to study the style, and three minutes at the end for the stubborn last four words, so I did the bulk of the puzzle in less than seven minutes. Naturally, I didn’t pay much attention to subtle beauties, but just wrote in the answers as fast as I could go. This is close to the limit of my solving speed.

I don’t know how beginners would react to such a puzzle. It is full of cryptic cliches that an experienced solver can handle easily, but they may not be so easy if you’ve never seen them before.

Across
1 SHORTFALL, SHORT + FALL, more or less, not very Ximenean.
6 RECAP, RE + CAP.
9 OPEN OUT, OPEN + OUT, where ‘old hat’ = ‘passé’ = ‘out’.
10 BROWNIE, BR(OWN)IE. A brownie would not be called a cake in the US.
11 TRIAL, double definition, and a very feeble one.
12 FRUITCAKE, anagram of FREAK I CUT.
13 TIE UP, TIE + UP.
14 AGINCOURT, AGIN COURT.
17 TEST PILOT, a not-so-cryptic definition.
18 ADDER, [l]ADDER.
19 ASCERTAIN, AS + CERTAIN.
22 AORTA, hidden in [chin]A OR TA[iwan].
24 REAL ALE, anagram of ALL ARE + E[nglish].
25 IMAGINE, I(MAGI)N E[ast].
26 MUSTY, UM backwards + STY.
27 THE SCREAM, T[itian] + HE’S + CREAM. The world’s most-stolen painting.
 
Down
1 STOAT, S[mall] + TO A T. I nearly put ‘snail’ but thought better of it.
2 ONE LINERS, ONE(LINER)S.
3 TOODLE PIP, Spoonerism of POODLE TIP. The literal is cleverly hidden in ‘take care’, so this was the only one that really gave any trouble.
4 ACT OF PARLIAMENT, anagram of AFTER A COMPLAINT. I did not use the cryptic in either of the two long answers down the middle.
5 LABOUR INTENSIVE, LABOUR (the party) + INTENSIVE.
6 ROOST, R + O,O + S[cheld]T.
7 CINNA, sounds like SINNER if you speak a non-rhotic dialect of English.
8 PRESENTER, PRESENT + E.R., as in a TV host.
13 TETRAGRAM, MARGAR(T)ET upside down, just banged in from the literal here.
15 CHARABANC, CHAR + A BAN + C[aught], cryptic not needed by me.
16 UNDERMINE, anagram of MEN RUINED – yep, I never saw the cryptic as I solved.
20 CLASS, C + LASS.
21 READY, READ + [waverl]Y.
23 A-TEAM, A(TEA)M.

88 comments on “Times 25724 – Love is just a one-letter word”

  1. Sorry to see that nobody else got off to a good start with snail at 1ac -s ‘on the nail’?. Works better to my mind!
    1. Me too! In fact so sure was I it held me up for 4 minutes at the end trying to get 9 and 11 across!
  2. Saved this for an afternoon trip out on the far reaches of the Metropolitan Line, and completed well before Finsbury Park … Mostly write ins, with the parsing lolloping on behind like a friendly dog, starting in the NE with RECAP and proceeding clockwise until I finally had to think about STOAT (my CoD) and OPEN OUT. Even for a Monday, 4DN was disgracefully easy – and we’ve had 5DN before. Many times. Many many times. Never mind. Enjoyed TOODLE PIP and FRUITCAKE. And remembered the unfortunate CINNA.
  3. Very tame even by Monday standards. Have to admit to not having come across the Roman polititian though, but straight in from cryptic after the ‘A’ checker.
  4. 20.18 so quite straightforward by my standards. I scuppered the sub 20 which is always an event to celebrate here in Darlngton by being so darn sure about SNAIL for 1d – agreeing with the parsing just above. Hey ho – always tomorrow!
  5. Happy Bunny with my time, but a pretty vanilla puzzle. Stand out clue for me 13d.
    Re. thud_n_blunder’s unfortunate patient, the thought occurred to me that olfactory super acuity would be a real problem for those with flatulent dogs (inter alia).
  6. So the new crossword editor has let us off lightly with the first puzzle of his reign.

    However, I still managed to screw things up by rashly bunging in AURAL at 11ac (an over-elaborated attempt at using “hearing” both as definition and for ‘sounds like’ “oral” (= “test”)). I then had a brainstorm at 1dn, thinking of S = “small” and the old chestnut TO A T = “exactly”, but failing to put the two together and wasting ages trying to think of a 5-letter animal beginning in S and ending in A. It was only when I got to the next old chestnut at 2dn (which really had to be ONE-LINERS) that I realised that AURAL was wrong. Eventually I got going, but struggled to a disappointing 6:09.

    I think I must be missing something obvious at 9ac, as I don’t really understand OPEN OUT = “unpack”.

    1. I took it in Hamlet’s sense of ‘must I like a whore unpack my heart with words’; at the time I was glad to get this one as I realised that SNAIL for 1d was wrong, but on reflection perhaps OPEN UP would be more synonymous. Also there is the sense of unpacking a complexity such as a poem or an exam question: ‘there’s a lot of ideas to unpack in Yeats’s The Second Coming.’

      Edited at 2014-03-04 07:45 am (UTC)

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