Times 25970 – Staines-upon-Thames: from Ghetto to Cathedral Town?

Having come a cropper on Dean’s puzzle yesterday by dint of my shaky Dutch, I was glad to be back in the company of Classical deities today and thought I was on for a time that might frighten a few of the championship folks. Sadly that was not to be, as I struggled with a couple of riverine clues in the bottom half, not to mention a couple of crossing answers neither of which I was familiar with.

And that is not even to mention a 110-year-old song clued by a German song that I can never spell right, even though I know the phonological rules. It’s just like Riesling, except, in addition to being unable to spell that one right, I can never say it right either.

Which reminds me of my most embarrassing moment of the weekend. I have recently been watching a few films by the French auteur Loius Malle, and this emboldened me to hold forth about his work at a party I attended on Saturday. Having caused several sets of eyes to glaze over as I contrasted the darkness of Le Feu Follet with the lyricism of Les Amants, I moved on to a critical consideration of his favourite work, Phantom India, a series so accurate in its depiction of rural India that the BBC was barred from filming in India for several years after its release. I was in ‘le zone’, as the French say, but destined to come to earth with a bump when I was told that his name was pronounced Malle, not Mallé.

37 minutes (the puzzle – not writing all that).

ACROSS

1. QUADRUPEDS – An anagram* of SQUARED UP + D[ukes].
6. HEMP – HEM + P[atrol] for the plant which has many (legal) uses, including making rope and fabrics.
9. ATTACHMENT – cryptic, kinda double, definition.
11. ZING – N in ZIG.
12. WELLINGTON BOOT – the literal ‘rainwear’ is easy enough but the wordplay is quite cunning given the presence of TOO: WELLING (‘surging like water’) + N[ew] in TO BOOT (‘also’).
14. RUSSET – RU’S + SET.
15. FOREBEAR – FORE (warning heard regularly when I play golf) + BEAR.
17. SHOP TALK – literal ‘chat about working’; HOP (‘brewer’s plant’) in STALK, where the insertedness is indicated by the word order and the instruction to bring the S[mall bit] to the front of the answer.
19. DEMISE – hidden; literal is ‘end’.
22. PHOTOSENSITIVE – in case you have forgotten your O-level Science, this means ‘having a chemical, electrical, or other response to light’; PHOTO (‘still’, as in photograph) + SENSITIVE.
24. TWIN – T[emperature] + WIN for ‘double’; nice clue. The sort I can’t write, as the Turkey will make manifest.
25. JOURNALIST – with no first letter checked, this was quite tricky, until JOT for ‘write quickly’ emerged from the mists created by scrawl, scribble etc. The clue is a kind of semi &lit… possibly, I think, with the wordplay bit being JOT about URN (‘vessel’) + SAIL*.
26. HANK – a HANK, besides meaning a ring on a stay and a length of cloth or yarn, is also a coil or LOOP of hair/rope/yarn. De-tail a HANKY (‘square cloth’) to get it.
27. NELLIE DEAN – this song, written in 1905 and sounding rather like ‘Keep the home fires burning’, is here sung by some Poms under the shadows of the pyramids. It’s a bit indistinct at first (possibly an advantage) but warms up and is quite moving in a this-makes-you-proud-we-colonised-half-the-world-but-never-impacted-on-their-culture-very-much kind of way. NE + LIED (der deutsche Gesang) in LEAN (‘list’).

DOWN

1. QUAY – sounds like ‘key’.
2. ARTLESS – SALTS’RE*; not ‘realest’ as I had at first…
3. RE(-)COLLECTION – a tongue-in-cheek reference to passing the collection plate round at church – again.
4. POMONA – mmm, I’m not sure about this tipping of the cap to the Antipodeans, who took to referring to those who refused to emigrate with them from Britain/England by this epithet and then repeating it ad nauseam. Well, it’s that followed by ON (‘under the influence of’ – the hemp, for example) + A. POMONA was the Roman goddess/wood nymph of fruitful abundance, married to Vertumnus.
5. DONATION – DO + NATION; a denizen of the Antipodes might say that even a semi-4 could get this one. Whether he could get it himself, of course, would be the ‘1d’ question…
7. EPITOME – E[uropean – as far as I am aware, E is used to stand for ‘European’ only before numbers, to indicate the standardized EU system] + PI (Greek letter) + TO ME.
8. PAGE TURNER – PAGE (‘summon’ as in North by Northwest, where an innocent page started all the trouble for Cary Grant) + TURNER (as in JMW, whose biopic is just out, I believe – his work received the mother and father of shots in the arm from Ruskin’s masterly Modern Painters; the best line in the Hawking biopic A Brief History of Everything is given to Hawking’s dad, who says Turner’s paintings look as if they’ve been left out in the rain).
11. INTEREST RATE – INTER (‘bury’) + R[ex] inside ESTATE (‘grounds’). The king is kind of buried twice, which is rather neat.
14. CROSSPATCH – I know we’ve had this before, but I had completely forgotten it, it not being in my idiolect; CROSS (‘to reach other side of’) + PATCH (‘manor’ – as in ‘turf’).
16. BLUE NOTE – new to me: it’s ‘a minor interval where a major would be expected, especially in jazz’. Another tongue-in-cheek crypticky one.
18. OXONIAN – and there was I trying to think of all the cities on the Thames, apart from London. Henley – no; Goring – no; Addlestone – no; Staines – certainly not! Reading – not yet, despite its best efforts. Oxford, of course, but it doesn’t fit. But ‘from city on Thames’ does, d’oh! The parsing is a wee bit convoluted – not to mention Yodaesque – with O (‘ring’) + NI (‘Northern Ireland’) stopping (i.e. blocking up) O (‘old’) + X (‘times’) + AN (‘article’).
20. IN+VOICE
21. ASTRAL – AS (‘like’) + R[iver] in TAL[e], where the story is shortened rather than intrinsically short. Nice stuff!
23. STUN – my last in (‘hit for six’ as in shock with incredible news); S for SON is easy enough, but TUN for ‘butt’ as in beer or wine cask is a usage that will sort out the afore-mentioned championship types from, well, me.