Times 26349 – a curate’s egg – Times for The Times

Apologies for the slightly late blog. A gentle 25 minutes to solve and parse this offering, with concentration hampered by the cleaning lady vacuuming around me (not on her usual day this week). Then the gas man arrived (Señor Repsol) so I was delayed twenty minutes sorting that. I thought it was generally easy and amusing but with a couple of words (6d and 28a) which I had to get from wordplay alone and check afterwards. Oh, there’s GK in cricket, and chemistry, and history and geology, so Jimbo and I should be content.

Across
1	BABY GRAND – Amusing cryptic definition for instrument.
6	CABOT – OB reversed in CAT: D one of two explorers. I briefly invented a chap called LEBOO until I found he was not yet a famous explorer.
9	IRON OUT – Cryptic DD, evening as in pressing flat.
10	SEALANT – SEA = water, L = leak’s beginning, ANT = worker; D &lit; nice surface.
11	DEBUS – DEBUTS are first performances, T out; D leave the coach. Presumably originally an American military word; those chaps specialise in making verbs out of nouns.
13	CARTOUCHE – CAR = vehicle, TOUCHE(D) = affected, shortened; D panel. Not the usual meaning of the word, but an acceptable one.
14	ECCENTRIC – D odd; EC (old EU) centric countries were dominated by Brussels, is the idea.
16	PUNY – PUN = joke, Y = ultimately silly; D feeble.
18	MONS – Back to work on a Monday; site of WWI battle.
19	DEDICATES – Insert EDIC(T) into DATES; D sets aside.
22	HOME TRUTH – HO (house) MET (faced) RUTH (David’s GGM): D unpleasant fact.
24	LARDY – LADY = noblewoman, around R for queen; D like some cakes; I am not a fan of this stodge.
25	CUE BALL – CUE help the actor, BALL = dance; the white ball in snooker, one of eight colours used.
26	RETICLE – Hidden in HE(RETIC LE)FT; D lines for reference, like the grid on a rangefinder.
28	NISAN – NI (Belfast, N. Ireland) SAN (hospital); D month. I know nothing of Hebrew months, but apparently it’s the first one.
29	SANDSTONE – (AS TENDONS)*: D rock.

Down
1	BRINDLE – N (nag’s head) inside BRIDLE; D streaky.
2	BOO – I assume this is BOO(K) = work never ending; D I don’t like that, boo!.
3	GROUSING – GROU(P) = band without piano, SING = perform number; D grumbling.
4	AZTEC – Insert Z into A TEC; D one of the old people.
5	DISGRACED – Insert IS GRACE (Dr W.G. Grace) into DD (middle of fiddle); D shamed.
6	CRATON – Insert RAT into CON; D piece of crust, a craton is a chunk of the lithosphere.
7	BEAN-COUNTER – A(nxiety) in BEN (man), COUNTER = man on board, D man (on board) who worries about finances. Seems a duplication of the use of MAN but that’s the answer.
8	TOTTERY – TOT TEARY would be baby getting weepy; leave out the A(nswer); D unstable.
12	BACK NUMBER – Witty DD.
15	REDOUBLES – ED in ROUBLES; D increases bid, e.g. in backgammon.
17	ACOLYTES – COL (pass at high level) inserted into (AS YET)*; D attendants.
18	MOHICAN – MOAN (complain) about HIC (Latin for ‘this’); D hairstyle.
20	STYRENE – STY = part of farm, RENÉ = a Frenchman; D chemical; phenylethene, used to make polystyrene; if you used to make Airfix models (or still do!) you’d recognise the pong of styrene from the cement.
21	STRAIN – Double definition.
23	HERON – R, O (river, duck) inside HEN; D another bird.
27	COO – DD; Bill and coo go together, COO! = gosh.

42 comments on “Times 26349 – a curate’s egg”

A whisky under 40 minutes for me, with the NE corner taking the longest.

I’d heard of CARTOUCHE, but didn’t think of it as a “panel”. CRATON was sitting in a trunk marked “misc – useful?” tucked in between the Christmas decorations and the water tank in the dusty attic that I use as a memory – it was probably left over from O-level geology. NISAN was new to me, and I was contemplating picking any one of the 36 possible combinations of vowels or ys before I saw the parsing.

The LARDY cake was no problem, and brought back fond memories of the same, from my younger (and inexplicably slimmer) days in Hampshire. A local bakery used produce lardy cakes that were to die both for and from. They were so dense that, in weather cold enough to harden them, they could be thrown through a plate glass window if the whim took you.

12:07 for me, with the last few minutes spent trying to see if there was an alternative to CRATON that I’d actually heard of. No probs apart from that.

The answer to 12D is of course BACK NUMBERS and not BACK NUMBER. Just completed this one in one of my fastest times… about 20 minutes. It was today’s (18th May) crossword in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong).

Jezz

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