Times 26,123: And So’s My Wife!

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Having a terrible crossword week this week – we’re trying to buy a house (well, this being London, we can only afford 25% of a house, but “we’re trying to buy about three-quarters of a bedroom” sounds less impressive) and have been subjected to so many pointless delays and unnecessary solicitors’ requests across the 12-person chain that exchange still hasn’t happened as of this morning, despite us all set to be homeless circa Monday. Oh well, something will turn up! But it means that solving has been confined to odd and inconvenient times lately, without my mind fully on the job.

To cap all that my internet connection dropped before I submitted this puzzle, wiping out my whole grid! But my time would have been 15 minutes something for what seemed to be a nicely middle-of-the-road puzzle, not too hard but not a doodle either, on the demotic end of the spectrum (“yoof”, “whee”, “barista” etc and no OREADs in sight).

15a was my FOI and in an unusual turn of events I worked my way around the edges of the grid before finishing in the middle. I did myself no favours by temporarily having FIGHTERS at 16d and IN A PATCH at 2d – like I said, this is not being an illustrious week for me! COD to 14d which should presumably be imagined in the voice of Kenneth Williams or the like.

Hopefully next week I’ll be blogging from a different part of London entirely and much more compos mentis, but if I’m in a cardboard box under a bridge… maybe see you all again in July?

Across
1 BLAZERS – garments: LAZE [relax] “wearing” BR’S [brother’s]
5 CROFT – plot: revealed in {suspec}T FORC{ed} “after turning”
9 MARIA – girl: MAR 1 [“date after end of Feb”] with A
10 GRAVELLED – covered with stones: GRAVE [gloomy] + reverse of DELL [valley “to the left”]
11 HASTIER – less careful: AS TIER [like | bank] after H [“end of” {cras}H]
12 TRUANCY – absence from school: TRU{e} [“largely” factual] + AN C Y [article | about | year]
13 SPATCHCOCK – chicken: SCH COCK [school | friend] “stuffed with”] PAT [butter]
15 YOOF – young people humorously: YO O F [greeting, US-style | old | female]
18 SITE – IT [just the thing] in SE [“centre of” {Mont}SE{rrat}]
20 PRESUPPOSE – assume: PREP POSE [homework | set] “about” reverse of US [“revolutionary” American]
23 MUTABLE – inconsistent: TABLE [food served] by MU [Greek character]
24 WARMING – hotting up: WAR [fighting] against MING [dynasty]
25 JOBCENTRE – “workplace”: JOB [patient fellow] + homophone of SENT [delighted, “we hear”] + RE [about]
26 TOAST – T{his} O{ften} A{ccompanies} S{peaker’s} T{hanks} “for a start” &lit
27 RIGHT – accurate: T [temperature] taken by RIG H [doctor | hard]
28 RELIANT – needing help from others: RANT [sound angry] about ELI [priest]

Down
1 BARISTA – waiter: BARI [Italian port] + STA{y} [guy “not finished”]
2 AT A PINCH – in an emergency: (CAPTAIN*) [“treated”] by H [hospital]
3 EAGER – keen: AGE [to be getting on] among reverse of R.E. [“mounted” troops]
4 SPARTACUS – film: SA CU’S [South Africa| copper’s] “landing” PART [role]
5 CHEQUE – means of payment: CHE Q [Red | Queen] + UE [U{s}E{d} “oddly”]
6 ORLANDO – Florida location: OR LAND O [yellow | light | over]
7 TODDY – drink: TY [“extremely” T{ips}Y] with ODD [rum] in, semi-&lit
8 EMPHASIS – stress: E [“first of” E{motions}] + MP HAS IS [politician | experiences | is]
14 CORRECTOR – “this will hide your bloomers!”: COR RECTOR [ooh | vicar]
16 FREIGHTS – transports: (HER GIFTS*) [“abroad”]
17 OPERETTA – show: reverse of AT T{h}E REP O [at | the “empty” | theatre | love]
19 TOTE BAG – carrier: Spoonerised BOAT TAG [name for sailing vessel]
21 OXIDANT – agent: homophone of OCCIDENT [the west “picked up”]
22 ABLEST – like pupils in the top stream: (TABLES*) [“revising”]
23 MAJOR – important: J [judge] “probes” MAOR{i} [New Zealander “failing to reach conclusion”]
24 WHEEL – turn: WHEE [here we go] + L [left]

34 comments on “Times 26,123: And So’s My Wife!”

  1. Ooh, meant to say – we’ve seen 7d, almost word-for-word the same clue, somewhere else recently haven’t we? Was it in another Times puzzle or perhaps the Guardian?
    1. Lost on me, whichever, as I confidently entered ‘totty’, with OTT for ‘extremely’. Cor blimey, guv!
    2. For some reason, Livejournal won’t let me comment separately, either as crypticsue or anonymous, so I’m trying ‘reply’ again as that worked last week.

      Good luck with the move – I wondered why you’d been slowing down.

      You ought to have achieved a 12:07 ish time – but hopefully as you don’t solve on paper you wouldn’t have used a teensy amount of 14d.

      1. You may have noticed a >30m time earlier in the week time from me – a cautionary tale as I finally found myself just too drunk (at 2am or so) to effectively solve a crossword. I think I fell asleep somewhere in the middle!

        Anyway I just got an email from the solicitors to say that, at the eleventh hour, exchange has finally occurred. So we should be moving on Monday and hopefully my head will be back in the game shortly thereafter!

  2. 25mins for me today, so on the easy-ish side, I’d say… yep, demotic’s fine for me! Reading through the blog, I only now realise that I hadn’t actually parsed either TOAST or CHEQUE, but all others ok. I even took time to get the correct spelling of SPARTACUS (I always want to put an I in the middle).

    Good luck with the house move, Verlaine, let’s hope the next one’s your ‘forever home’.

  3. It took just a couple of clues to slow me down to a crawl: SPATCHCOCK, which I thought was a method of cooking birds not a type of bird, and which I finally bunged in from checkers; CROFT, where as so often happens I just couldn’t see the hidden; and LOI JOBCENTRE, a word I’d never seen–I gather it’s a government employment agency or something? I’ll agree with Verlaine on 14d as COD.
    1. SPATCHCOCK is a method of preparing a bird for cooking, usually grilling. However in my experience at least it’s a method most commonly applied to a chicken.
  4. When your FOI (1a) contains a “Z” you are somewhat anticipating a pangram – which is exactly what we got.
    Moreover, if anyone can make anything of PIPE ROAD and LIT TEACH we may have a couple of NINAs as well.
    27 minutes – good end to the week.
  5. 17:35 here, started off slowly but finished at a canter – last two in were BLAZERS and BARISTA, after I managed to convince myself that LOAFERS didn’t work at all!

    Deezzaa, your PIPE ROAD is actually a PIPE RQAD, but LIT PIPE makes more sense (or would if there was a similar phrase crossing in the other corner). Nice try though…

      1. To be honest, I thought the nina was the Spatchcock Blazers, the Stroud folk revival group featuring Orlando Croft and Maria Major.
  6. 49 minutes, but a pretty untechnical Did Not Finish, given I had ‘clout’ for CROFT. I didn’t think Spenser’s Colin of that ilk was a member of the Jesuit Treason, but it’s amazing what you’ll convince yourself of when you want to finish.
  8. 14:09 … solved bottom-up, with quite a lot going in from checkers and defs.

    Lots of nice, succinct clues. COR,RECTOR is my favourite, obviously, but I really liked SPARTACUS, too (like janie, I appreciated the help with the spelling as well as the neat surface).

    These days they all seem to be called JOBCENTRE PLUS (no, I’m not sure, either, but I think it might allude to all the excruciating motivational guff any poor sod needing a job is now required to endure)

    1. In Japan, the equivalent agency is called ハローワーク that’s haroo waaku, i.e. ‘Hello, Work’. I am NOT making this up.
      1. Good grief. Let’s hope no one from the DWP reads this site. They’ll only get ideas. Thank you.
  9. Slow and steady for me, but enjoyable enough and COR RECTOR outstanding. DK the Italian port.
  10. 8:11. Clearly on the wavelength for this one.
    A few slightly loose/oblique things in here: SPATCHCOCK (see above), ‘waiter’ for BARISTA, ‘workplace’ for JOBCENTRE, ‘agent’ for OXIDANT. All on the right side of the line marked ‘taking liberties’ as far as I’m concerned though.

    Edited at 2015-06-12 08:21 am (UTC)

  11. My 5-year-old daughter informed me this morning that if I was a My Little Pony, my “cutie mark” would be a crossword. Seems fair, and would presumably look something like the icon here…
  12. 20 mins. I never felt completely on the setter’s wavelength, and I struggled the most in the SE where my last four in were the OPERETTA/PRESUPPOSE crossers, followed by TOAST/OXIDANT. I thought of Occident almost immediately but couldn’t see the “agent” definition for ages. I thought that CROFT was cunningly hidden and it took a while to see even with all the checkers.
  13. 35;34 for me, so about average and some lovely clues. Not off to the best of starts with 1a by trying to get INHABIT to mean relax, but at least I didn’t write it in. Nice to see St David’s day appearing for the second time this week, but in a different guise. Thanks for explaining a couple I couldn’t quite parse: 5d – I couldn’t see how you got QUE by using queen oddly and, wrongly, thought “Here we go” in 24d referred to the military command. Last 5 clues took me about 10 minutes, but spotting we had another pangram helped me get 1a and 21d.
    Good luck with the house move, Verlaine.
    1. In military terms there is a difference between “turn” and “wheel”, in turn each individual moves to the left or right while in a wheel the whole detachment moves as though rounding a corner. I think the only exception to this is the famous “spin wheel” performed by the band at the Trooping of the Colour where each individual performs his own wheel.
  14. About 20 minutes, once I’d finished all the messing with the Quickie. Mostly enjoyable, not too keen on the CENT(RE) sounds like SENT for delighted, surprised to see that YOOF is in the dictionary (not just the urban one). And COCK for friend seems a bit of a stretch. However, a stretch now and again is not a disaster. GOOD LUCK VERLAINE, never a stress-free time, especially with kids – ours were always asking why we had to move. The next will be our 20th.
  16. 47 min, but with aids for suggestions from checkers – OXIDANT fitted ‘agent’ at once, but took a while to think of ‘occident’ as I’d say -ANT. Didn’t see the hidden, so biffed in CLOUT.
  17. 4 dn put me in mind of my old, fierce cat, long gone now, whose name was of course Spartapus.
    1. Bless him. We have one who came to us on Bastille Day. He is, neither of us being too good on historical details, called Louis (Catorze)
  18. Steady and straightforward fifteen minutes. 28 across “reliant” got me thinking that my old Reliant Scimitar was aptly named——–seemingly always dependent on someone’s help to keep the shed on the road [and capable of moving once it was there.
  19. Another on w/l here at 11:32 and I quite enjoyed the colloquialisms (whee, yoof, yo) and “stretchy” definitions.
  20. I don’t have a time to post, as I was doing this off and on while watching US basketball on television. But I agree it wasn’t flat out easy, and had some good moments. My lOI was PRESUPPOSE, after finally seeing CORRECTOR. SPATCHCOCK from the checking letters mostly. Regards, and I don’t envy you, Verlaine. I hope you’ve lined up a crew of strong young people to haul everything around. Have a nice weekend everyone.
  21. 12:55 for me, never really finding the setter’s wavelength.

    I’m glad to hear that you’ve managed to exchange contracts. Despite our short chain (only three parties, with us in the middle), things have suddenly gone pear-shaped, as our sellers have decided – three weeks after accepting our offer – that they ought to be able to get more money and have put their house back on the market at a higher price. This despite the fact that we offered the original asking price! They’ve clearly been put up to it by another West Ealing estate agent; however, I’m hoping that the buyers they’ve been told would be prepared to pay more are actually us.

  23. Well, for the first time, I am under 2 Severs, with 25:43 on the meter. It felt like longer.

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