Times 26,009: Thomas Love Peacock’s Holiday Home

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Extremely straightforward today I thought – resulting in a near-PB for me of 8m 47s. Don’t know about the rest of you but I would always rather have more stumbling blocks thrown in my path, more pennies suspended tantalisingly out of reach, than puzzles like this where quite a few of the clues seemed so obvious I hesitated to make sure there wasn’t a trick. Nothing ever makes me happy, is basically what I’m saying here.

FOI-wise, 9A and 11A went in pretty much straightaway. LOI was 22D – having the Y at the end I thought I’d already identified the location of the “unknown” but it was a all a trick! Plus I was determined to find this to be a mathematician’s surname to make this an &lit, and I kept feeling that Stephen HENDRY was possibly not quite a convincing enough answer.

Hardest clue was 18A because I didn’t know the aircraft holding pattern, but the checking letters were kind. For COTD, well, the likes of 24D always raise a smile, and I did like 17D because it’s a lovely word to roll around in your mouth. Thanks setter! Karma is going to result in a puzzle that makes me weeps tears of blood next week, probably…

Across
1 BOMBAST – pompous talk: BOMB AS T [to fail badly | since (having) little time]
5 LUPIN – plant: L UP [left | out of bed] “then put” IN
9 REIGN – “do as the Queen does”: G [good] in REIN [horse control]
10 OVERSPEND – exceed budget: DOVER’S PEN [Kent port’s enclosure] with “front moving to the east”
11 COTTAGE – small living space: OTT [excessive] in CAGE [prison]
12 EDUCATE – school: E DUCAT [European | old money] + E [English]
13 PERSUASION – double def: novel | kind of inducement
15 LENS – optical glass: N [new] “introduced by” LES [the French]
18 TACK – change course: “abandoning top of” {s}TACK [aircraft holding pattern]
20 GENERATION – group of similar age: (ONE TEARING*) [“about”]
23 CONCEAL – keep out of sight: ONCE [one time] “during” CAL{l} [“short” visit]
24 SEALANT – filler: SET [hardened] “around” AL AN [aluminium | article]
25 BROADSIDE – barrage: IDE [fish] beside BROADS [Norfolk waterways]
26 EVENT – “game, perhaps”: E VENT [key | opening]
27 NERVY – close to the edge: NE RY [north-eastern | railway] “crossing” V [very]
28 ENTROPY – lack of order: ENT ROPY [hospital department | of poor quality]

Down
1 BLISTER – result of friction: B-LISTER [second rate celebrity]
2 MONTAGUE – Romeo, say: U [upper-class] in MONTAGE [highly cut film]
3 ADOBE – building: ADO [fuss] over BE{e} [“short-tailed” bee]
4 THEREFORE – thus: TORE [raced] “about” HERE F [in this location | loudly]
5 LASH-UP – temporary arrangement: L ASH UP [large | tree | erected]
6 PRELATE – bishop: P RELATE [pressure | to tell]
7 NUDGE – gently encourage: NUDE [going naked] “around” G [grounds “initially”]
8 CRACKPOT – impractical: combination of CRACK and POT [illegal drugs]
14 SHELLFIRE – “what generates multiple reports”: S HELLFIRE [sulphur (and) infernal flames]
16 SANCTITY – ultimate importance: (CITY ANTS*) [“mutating”]
17 JALAPENO – hot pepper: ONE PAL, A J [a particular friend, a judge] “sent back”
19 CONTOUR – feature on map: ON TOUR [going around] “to south of” C [Cape]
21 IMAGERY – pictures: (I AM + GREY*) [“upset”]
22 HEYDAY – prime: HE’D AY [he had | certainly] “divided by” Y [an unknown]
23 CABIN – modest accommodation: CAB IN [taxi | home]
24 SPELT – wheat: W-H-E-A-T being in the process of being spelt

46 comments on “Times 26,009: Thomas Love Peacock’s Holiday Home”

  1. A very similar experience, my 12.45 reflecting the fact that I started solving this as a Friday brute, before twigging that the clues were as straightforward as I didn’t think they were. By then it was to late to engage stardrive and finish in record time, so this became a pleasant ramble.
    BLISTER and HEYDAY also my last ones in, the former because I had abandoned the NE because the clues were too easy, the latter because I was expecting a number as a result, say 7 or 13, and none of the appropriate numbers I could think of had an X or a Z in.
    I thought SANCTITY had a rather odd definition mitigated by an easy anagram.
    CoD probably for the cheeky SPELT, if only for sanctioning the alternative to spelled – both words look iffy to me.
  2. 22 minutes with an interruption to write a cheque for the man delivering the heating oil; and while watching England’s cricketers struggling again. Nothing contentious except IMO entropy is the measure of the degree of disorder of a system, not in itself a lack of order. Unless they’ve changed thermodynamics since the 60’s.
    LOI HEYDAY which brought a smile when the PDM arrived.

  3. 20 mins for all but HEYDAY, and then, after 10 mins I threw the towel in assuming it was going to be some unknown gk, a mathematician or a historical army leader or some such.

    I agree, mostly easy with lots going in on def (I now realise I hadn’t parsed OVERSPEND, so thanks for that).

  4. Like many others, I suspect, HEYDAY was last in – a really meaty clue in a largely vegetarian offering…apart from, ironically enough, SPELT. 36 minutes, but I offer as mitigation that I was caught up early this morning in a particularly silly dispute between two staff members which has been simmering for some time, telling them, unavailingly, to drop it.
  5. With my level of expertise, the high is in actually completing the puzzle in a reasonable time without aids. Done and dusted in 20 minutes, this is just what I needed after yesterday’s abject disaster.
    I agree with Pip about ENTROPY, but I suspect that our understanding of the scientific definition has been overtaken by it being hijacked in popular parlance, thus losing its precision. Alas, all too common.
    24d reminded me of Puckoon by Spike Milligan: “He walked with a pronounced limp. L-I-M-P, pronounced limp”.
    OK Verlaine: I give up – what is the significance of your heading for this blog? It seems delightfully abstruse.
    2. CRACKPOT CABIN? Or COTTAGE. I don’t know anything about Thomas Love Peacock so this is just a guess.

      Edited at 2015-01-30 11:22 am (UTC)

      1. Quite so! I thought the author of Headlong Hall, Crotchet Castle and Gryll Grange would certainly not be averse to spending some time at Crackpot Cabin, down the left hand side of the grid.
        1. A bit of googling suggests that at least some of these novels involve CRACKPOTs sitting round a dinner table conversing, so it’s very apt!
  6. Yes, easy today but none the worse for that; I enjoy the variety.

    For entropy, Collins gives: “lack of pattern or organization; disorder,” so that seems fine then.. if that is not its strict technical meaning as used by thermodynamicists hard cheese, it is not the only specialist word converted to something different to make it more generally useful..

    I assume the reference to 25dn in your last para. is a typo, Verlaine? The nearest I got to a smile was 24dn, so maybe that is it?

    1. Much as I’d like this to have been some kind of cunning joke about the lack of big laughs from this puzzle, it was just a typo, and I did mean 24D.
  7. An easy paced stroll this one, home in 15 minutes without getting out of second gear. I wanted 17D to be Dorset Naga but couldn’t quite get it to fit

    I’m not over fussed by the loose use of ENTROPY. I’m pleased that a scientific concept has been adopted into the language and inevitably simplified to a degree in that process.

  8. I was snookered by HEYDAY. Perhaps swayed by getting DRAGOMAN from Tony Drago yesterday I went for HENDRY.
  9. No overall time to offer as I wrote in half-a-dozen answers in the early hours and promptly fell asleep. On resumption this morning I took 20 to polish it off so I’d guess I probably met my 30-minute target on this occasion.

    Fortunately this meaning of SPELT has come up quite recently. ENTROPY was last in as I needed all the checkers to remind me of a word which I had no idea of its meaning.

    Edited at 2015-01-30 10:01 am (UTC)

  10. 9 mins. I was pleased to get an easier one after my struggles of the previous two days. My FOI and LOI were the same as Verlaine, and my reason for taking a while to see HEYDAY (the “unknown” Y already accounted for at the end of the answer) was the same as well.
  11. It’s been so long since I PBd at the 15×15 that I’ve forgotten (was it 22?) anyway, today’s 24 minutes is right up there. I also can’t remember seeing the device in 24dn before but worked it out as I’ve baked with spelt. I join the list of LOI 22dn and had just started worrying that it had spoilt my day when light dawned. Thanks to the setter for a good start to the day and to our noble blogger – if the holiday home is a nightmare abbey then do I take it that this crossword caused you some melancholy?
  13. 12m. So straightforward, but not up there with the easiest. Last in HEYDAY for all the reasons mentioned.
    For me STACK will forever be associated with Die Hard 2, and the immortal line ‘stack ’em, pack ’em and rack ’em’. Sometimes it’s a burden being this high-brow.

    Edited at 2015-01-30 11:32 am (UTC)

    1. Die Hard 2… is that some kind of sequel to Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers?

      (I watched John Woo’s Hard Boiled a month or two ago. That’s basically an attempt to do Die Hard in Cantonese as far as I could tell.)

      1. Die Hard has in fact spawned a whole genre of imitators in a variety of locations:
        Passenger 57: Die Hard on a plane
        Speed: Die Hard on a bus
        Cliffhanger: Die Hard on a mountain
        Under Siege: Die Hard on a boat
        White House Down: Die Hard in… I think you can guess the rest.
          1. Back in the day there was a Spectrum game called Die Alien Swine. Always looked like German to me.

            1. Blue-Haired Lawyer: What about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn’t it say die Bart die?

              Sideshow Bob: No, that’s German

              [unveils tattoo]

              Sideshow Bob: for ‘The Bart The’.

              Woman on Parole Board: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

              Edited at 2015-01-30 12:45 pm (UTC)

          2. Bringing to mind the immortal line from the original: ‘Karl. Schiess den Fenster.’
  14. I thought that this one had escaped from a Monday slot as it went straight in, the only hold-up being the annoying bluetooth keyboard that I use with my iPad. (I need to look at the keyboard to type but also at the screen as existing letters are ‘jumped’. Recipe for disaster.

    14:32.

    (keriothe’s comment above on Die Hard goes completely over my head. I will have to wait for one of the children to come home)

  15. A relief after yesterday’s puzzle, which I found tough. This was surely one of the easiest Friday offerings for some time, and only marginally more difficult than today’s Quickie. None the less, enjoyable. I liked 17D (JALAPENO), which I wouldn’t have been sure how to spell without the cryptic parsing.

    I agree with Z8 about the loose and questionable definition of SANCTITY (16D) — but, as he says, the required anagram fodder was clear enough.

  16. Not a PB for me but 9 minutes isn’t bad considering I was solving this with half my mind on the special celebration cake cooking in the oven.
    1. Churchill’s funeral? England scraping past India? Murray doomed to failure now that Djokovic is in the final?
  17. 10:12, no prizes for guessing my LOI which went in just after the pepper and the unknown entropy.

    The definition for 4 surprised me. I’ve long laboured under what now appears to be a misapprehension that it was bad form to say “thus” when you meant “therefore”, with the former reserved for occasions when one wants to say “in this manner” or similar.

    Although I have a nasty feeling it has come up before, I only knowingly knew Adobe as a software wossname.

    2. Sorry to lower the tone (once again) but my knowledge of this came (yet again) from a song lyric. On this occasion from a hit song by Pat Boone:

      It was a moonlit night in Old Mexico.
      I walked alone between some old adobe haciendas.
      Suddenly, I heard the plaintive cry of a young Mexican girl: La la la, la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.
      You better come home Speedy Gonzales, away from tannery row.
      Stop all of your drinking with that floosie named Flo!
      Come on home to your adobe and slap some mud on the wall!
      The roof is leaking like a strainer. There’s loads of roaches in the hall…

  18. Undone by the W-H-E-A-T clue. Annoying as I’m usually quite good at this sort of device, having been an Irish Times solver for many years. That paper’s setter was the same man (John Crozier aka Crosaire) from 1943 until his death in 2010 and he loved this sort of clue. Unfortunately the paper has been unable to find anyone of Crosaire’s calibre to replace him and the puzzle is now terrible, IMO.

  19. DNF again. I am clearly well past my 22dn. 20 minutes for all but that which I just could not see despite the definition being pretty obvious.
  20. 37m here in an irritating way – racing through in 15m with just ENTROPY outstanding. 10m later I noticed I’d put in SPELL. Doh, idiot, I say! 10m later I realise I’ve entered JALAPONE in error. And then I finally got the last one! Thanks for the blog – I agree this was a bit of a stroll especially for a Friday, a stroll I did having tied my own legs together first!
  21. About 15 mins so close to a PB. But now I read the blog I had one wrong. When I got to JALAPENO I had all the checkers, -A-A-E-O, I saw hot pepper and just wrote in HABANERO (and even hotter pepper) without even looking at the wordplay. Who knew that they had exactly the same checkers?
  22. Pretty quick but I didn’t time it, and like our blogger (and others) FOI REIGN, LOI HEYDAY. I was held up a bit by the barrage and only remembered the Norfolk Broads after solving, which maybe makes that my LOParsed. Regards.
  23. A rare crack at a weekday 15×15, and found this one highly attainable – a sort of halfway house between the Quickie and the usual (more rigorous) main cryptics.

    I take comfort from the fact that I seem to have been in good company with my only miss being HEYDAY.

  24. 7:00 for me – a pleasant relief after a couple of tough days.

    The foodie JALAPENO is on my list of difficult words, so that went in straight away without any of those nasty vowels to set off my vocalophobia.

    I’d intended to quote Spike Milligan (which 24dn put me in mind of), but I see deezza got there first.

  25. 3.7 Severs for me, which is acceptable.

    Like some others, I was held up by HEYDAY. I spent some time wondering if HENDAY or HEXDAY were words (which they are, but not necessarily in English). My NTLOI was SPELT.

  26. Agree with Nick. My first attempt at the main puzzle as a novice and gratifying to be able to solve almost all. May be too easy for veterans but good to have occasional ones like this to encourage those of us in training on the quick cryptic to venture afield.
  27. Tipped off by a comment in the QC blog I decided to have a go at this as it’s a quiet Saturday for me. Obviously very much easier than normal but I was delighted to finish. I refused to give up on HEYDAY and got there in the end. No doubt I’ll struggle next time I give the 15×15 a try but I’ll enjoy this for a while.

    Edited at 2015-01-31 02:26 pm (UTC)

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