Times 26,921: Down At Heel But Shabby-Genteel

59 comments on “Times 26,921: Down At Heel But Shabby-Genteel”

1. 25 mins with porridge and banana – and another confidence booster.
   A really enjoyable one today I thought – with some smooth surfaces and neat wordplay. Admittedly, 4dn sounds ugly, but ‘Search on the ground’ is great. Likewise ‘hundred euros in change.’
   DNK Long Ton – but did know Long On.
   Mostly I liked: Liberal ‘dons’, Mince Pies, Winds-wept (COD), Thatching and the two great anagrams lauded above.
   Thanks very clever setter and V.
2. 19:45 … almost half of the time spent on HYADES, SHEET ANCHOR and the long forgotten LONG TON.

   Some very nice stuff, with the mince pie judge getting my vote for the festive giggle.

3. Sunday Times crossword editor and TfTT site founder Peter Biddlecombe has kindly volunteered to blog this year’s puzzle again, aiming for some time around the middle of next week — when the hangovers have worn off and the resolutions perhaps haven’t.
   1. Looking forward to it.
   2. Thanks Sotira. Enjoyed this year’s turkey, looking forward to the blog.
4. 35 minutes, with a bad back, having slipped and nearly killed myself on black ice during my morning walk. COD LONG TON, long-on being the fielder I used to give catching practice to with insufficiently LUSTY shots. DNK HYADES but cryptic straightforward. CHIVALRIC similarly fell out easily. I’m certainly not UNDERNOURISHED and there’s much more Hotel Chocolat to go yet..A nice puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
   1. Commiserations on your mishap. Hope the back recovers quickly. Slipping on black ice is once of the things I worry about a lot. I’ve tried various types of footwear, but none of the fancy soles grip well on ice, so I’ve acquired some slipovers that are studded with short metal spikes to dig into it. Looks like I’m going to get the chance to try them out very soon.
      1. Thanks John. The pain’s coming out everywhere now ; back, ribs, wrist, legs etc. It was pouring down with rain and I was a fool to go, but we were meant to be out for the day and it was the only chance of a walk. Couldn’t spot the ice. My wife’s cancelled our day out to my protestations but she was quite right. There’s no way I could drive or even be a passenger. I’m lucky my head didn’t hit the concrete. Best wishes for a Happy New Year
         1. Happy New Year to you and yours too. I hope you’re able to anaesthetise yourself enough to enjoy it!
5. I found this fairly taxing, finishing with the unknown HYADES which I was far from confident about. I didn’t know OUT AT THE ELBOWS and assumed that ‘worse for wear’ referred to drunkenness so well done to the setter for the misdirection. There’s typically one clue a day I manage to biff wrongly and I almost managed it with SHY where I was tempted by sky, reasoning that it could refer to a skyward throw, but for once I hesitated long enough to come up with the correct answer.
6. Usual time but had never heard of LONG TON. Like Sotira I enjoyed the mince pies reference. Probably being thick as a brick but I saw the anagram and knew about the last resort but what is ‘brick’ there for in 4d?
   1. The way I saw it, if you think about what a sheet anchor does in keeping your boat from drifting, a brick (a very big one) would do: nice idea, imaginative way of describing a brick. But Chambers has “a chief support; a last refuge”, which I suppose a brick (as in “he’s a brick”) would also do, and is probably where the setter was heading.
      1. Thank you. I see it now. Even better clue than I originally thought.
         To misquote Ian Anderson, ” ….. my deafness, a shout.”
   2. Collins online has: “a person or thing to be relied upon in an emergency”
      1. I’m going to have to admit that, in the actual solving, I just thought “ooh, if you wanted to stop a groundsheet from blowing away, a brick would do at a pinch”! I’d never heard of the phrase SHEET ANCHOR until today but it does seem to be quite a wondrous and useful phrase.
   3. I knew SHEET ANCHOR for its BRICK connotations, as in playing the SHEET ANCHOR role at cricket, the batsman who wouldn’t score quickly but who would bat right the way through the innings. It used to be Alastair Cook. Let’s hope he’s at it again.
      1. Was a good knock BW. Haven’t seen him bat like that for many a year, and frankly I doubted that he still had it.

         Well played him.

7. 40 minutes despite several unknowns including LONG TON and HYADAS. Not sure I’ve met OUT AT THE ELBOWS before. Still slightly bemused by 25ac and 4dn.
8. A steady 23.22, getting a start in the NE corner and recognising that, with “judge of mince pies” we were in for something witty and slightly off the wall.
   I knew the term “LONG TON, but assumed it was in the same category as the baker’s dozen. Apparently it’s really the British ton made up of ounces, pounds, stones and hundredweights in their peculiar quantities, as opposed to the American short ton of a more prosaic 2000 pounds.
   SHEET ANCHOR my last in needing all the checkers, though I think I got the definition wrong but rather quixotic (vide supra).
9. Not as taxing as a usual Friday but enjoyable. Done in 23 minutes without realising 4d was an anagram, and HYADES from wordplay but sounded likely stars given PLEIADES and HESPERIDES were the sisters.
   Mrs Pip had to confirm the ELBOWS thing I’d not heard of.
   CoD JOCULAR.
   1. HYADES was familiar enough to be a write-in, though I must confess that I don’t know much about them except having some kind of inkling that they have something to do with rain…?
10. This was a peach – I simply concur with the good Lord Verlaine.

    FOI 5ac/dn JOCULAR/JOT

    LOI 1dn BYWORD

    COD is unquestionably 4dn SHEET ANCHOR – The Riddle of the Sands!

    WOD 21ac CHIVALRIC with hon. ment. to 17ac OUT AT THE ELBOWS!

    The NW Passage was where I drifted – but once 1ac BELARUS came into sight, I was home and dry.

    My only differing with LV is the time of 8 minutes! Mine was to a factor of ten – but I had 72 minutes of extra pleasure whilst he was
    bogging!

11. There’s probably a specialist term amongst setters for the sort of clue which uses a word like “resort” in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to get away from seeing it as an anagram indicator, while simultaneously directing your attention as far as possible from the real anagram. Cunning and entertaining all round.
    1. I hadn’t spotted it before now, but if “resort” is a decoy anagrind, it’s very clever to have made BRICK IN LAST the requisite 11 letters long to keep the solver busy wasting time!
       1. ..which is precisely what I did.
12. Ten hours and six minutes for this one, but only because I left the timer running overnight. I think my actual time was somewhere near the half-hour mark.

    Like our esteemed blogger (to whom thanks and season’s greetings) I wasn’t at all convinced by “word=express”, and I am still not. Can anyone clarify this equation?

    OUT AT THE ELBOWS gave me pause, as I am only vaguely aware of the expression. ACUTE ACCENT was my LOI and also my COD. 27ac made me pause to wonder how the famous Mrs. TRELLIS of North Wales is getting on in these cold, dark days.

    1. I think tringmardo has already answered below, but express as in “how should I word this letter, so that the recipient will understand my intentions” or the like…
       1. Ah, yes, now it makes sense. Thanks to tringmardo and to you, verlaine.

          I really must get a bigger brain one of these days.

          1. In your job, that shouldn’t be too hard i would have thought, Thud?
             (JerryW, not signed in)
             1. Bear in mind that I’m in East Anglia, Jerry.
13. Took a while but all sorted apart from not understanding how ‘word’ and ‘express’ can be equivalent. Help?
14. I’ve just worked it out: to word it and to express it.
15. V, I think that you have answered your own question on 25ac. McCarthy was SEEING REDS (under the bed etc) so with the ‘mostly’, the final S goes.
    1. SEEING just seems a bit weak for McCarthy’s turbulent relationship with the reds? But hey, what the clue is driving at is fairly unmistakable, so not too much to worry about really!
       1. Bob Dylan:

          I wus lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere
          I wus lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair
          I looked way up my chimney hole
          I even looked deep down inside my toilet bowl
          They got away . . .

16. Happy new year, G. and well played the Aussies.
17. No trouble with the mince pies and the cricket (for once) but WINDSWEPT took a very long time. Which was dense of me because I’m sure we’ve had a similar one more than once before. Notwithstanding his under-caffeinated state Verlaine clocked in ahead of both Magoo and Jason (although it’s always possible that the former took a phone call in the middle of solving). 20.08 and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all.
    1. I can see Magoo posted an unusually sluggish time, but I can’t believe I came in ahead of Jason as well, I had registered him on about 6 minutes? Good speedy time for the estimable first-division solver Aphis99 as well…
       1. Magoo was doing the “Cracking the Cryptic” video on YouTube, where he says that he found this genuinely hard. So well done on a creditable win to you (and Jason and aphis99, of course, who have both done well on their personal NITCH scores).
          1. It’s funny, my average times have improved since the SNITCH came into being. I think having an additional target helps. For this one a couple of the answers were far from the top of my idiolect (OUT AT THE ELBOWS, LONG TON) but some of the trickier clues were on my wavelength.
             1. Thanks – it’s good to know the SNITCH might be providing some motivation.

                Looking at your results, you might be right. Your times have steadily improved since April 2017, your monthly average dropping from 10:57 in April to a flat 10:00 this last month. And the overall average solving for the reference users has been increasing (from around 20 mins to up around 22 mins), so your time as a percentage of the average has decreased from 54% to 45%. This is very impressive on all accounts and I remain in awe 🙂

                I hope 2018 treats you well, in crossword solving and in other ways!

18. 14 mins, so I was pretty much on the setter’s wavelength again. The HYADES were vaguely familiar and I was reasonably confident about it because Hades/last place looked like a good fit. SHEET ANCHOR was my LOI after THATCHING, and it certainly took me a while to see how they both worked.
19. The NW kept me guessing right to the end, with WINDSWEPT and BELARUS finally yielding and giving me the way into BYWORD and my LOI, LONG TON. Sadly I’d mistyped JOCULAR as JUCULAR so my 37:51 was a fail. My FOI was RATEL. Didn’t know HYADES, but Hades was a better option than cobblers, and the Y from LUSTY clinched it. Lots of enjoyable penny drop moments here as the misdirection was finally seen through. Thanks setter and V, and a Happy New Year to all.
20. ….as I struggled to recall ‘Hyades’, but otherwise was pretty much in on the required knowledge. I was even vaguely aware of the possibilities of ‘brick’/’sheet anchor’, but didn’t waste a lot of time over contemplating them.
21. A stumbling 31:24 for me, maybe due to a 3 1/2 hour drive before attempting – in retrospect there is nothing too difficult. I was, like others a bit dubious about 1d, so thanks for explaining that, and hadn’t hear the worse for wear expression, needing the WASTREL to convince me of the ELBOWS, and only then parsing it. I liked 25a.
22. 32:36 for me, mostly a pleasant stroll but wandered into a bit of a thicket in the NW where the penny took a while to drop on the cracking “liberal dons” in 1ac, finding the longer “silent” as opposed to “ma”, or “sh” for mum in 3dn, hitting and hoping that “word” in 1dn could be used in a sense, now clarified, to mean express and only being able to think of mid-on for the fielder at 2dn. Also held up at the end by LOI 20dn which I entered without any real confidence, wondering like John Dun if the last was referring to cobblers (my unknown answer certainly looked cobblers after I had entered it). Lots of pleasing stuff, I particularly enjoyed “judge of mince pies” in 5ac.
23. I was with horryd at just over 70 minutes. I saw some of the tricky ones – jocular, thatching, Belarus – right away; then was perplexed because espalier (backwards edges of stone, plus paler) had one too many letters and didn’t show up in any of the dictionaries as an alternate spelling without the i. Like others, wasn’t familiar with out at the elbows, and tried lots of out of this and out of that before I gave up and waited for more crossers. Nice puzzle, nice blog. Best for a good New Year
24. Even after getting 1a I had to spend over 5 minutes on the NW corner. DNK either LONG ON or LONG TON. So 2d was the last to fall. Fortunately my wild guess was correct. A lovely puzzle. Just what I needed after a night of revelling. 32 minutes Ann
25. Unlike our stalwart blogger, I was up unusually early, and it took me a while to hit my stride, even with coffee. I thought I might do badly when my FOI was the somewhat obscure honey badger at 11a, but with ten minutes left of my hour it only took me another five to decide that 20d HYADES was plausible enough for my LOI.

    Luckily we had KILOTON a while back, and at the time I was surprised enough by the mix of the SI prefix “kilo” with the non-metric spelling of “ton” that I went and looked tons up on Wikipedia and remembered the LONG TON today from there. Vaguely remembered OUT AT THE ELBOWS from somewhere, but not SHEET ANCHOR.

26. Messed up on this one, was way too tempted by SLY for backwards.
27. Nice fun puzzle, THATCHING being my last entry, and like others finally filling in the NW area. I remembered the LONG TON from the rear cover of my elementary school workbooks, where there was a conversion between US measures and others. I still remember something about ‘avoirdupois’, however it’s spelled or pronounced. Didn’t remember the HYADES from anywhere, but the wordplay was clear. Regards.
28. My final entry was SHEET ANCHOR (never heard of it). Penultimate was WINDSWEPT. First one in: UNDERNOURISHED, which got me off to a good start. Glad I remembered LONG TON and “mince pies.”
29. I managed to string this out for 21:34, mainly due to dithering over SHY. I wasn’t 100% happy with the McCarthy clue (is seeing red really the same as thirsting for blood?) and had to do a sort of exponential alphabet trawl for letters 1 & 2 before I saw the light. I’ve never come across the elbow expression either.
30. Can someone help me sheet anchor? Don’t see it.
    1. See comments above posted by:
       z8b8d8k timed at 10:06
       boltonwanderer timed at 10:34
31. What is the ‘if’ doing in 23ac? How does it help the surface? ‘Vigorous: in need of …’ seems perfectly OK to me.
32. After 35 minutes, had nothing in NW, though rest complete. As first thought at 11ac was LEMUR, obviously wrong, I got mentally stuck on L first, and likelihood of 2dn being some MAN. Eventually got RATEL, and so LONG TON (20 cwt)at once – then stuck again: ILLINOIS won’t fit at 1ac, and there didn’t seem to be any variety of snake able to start 6ac. Finally realised the state was elsewhere, so was done just as the hour came up on the timer – and did remember to check for typos before submitting!
33. Honestly, with coffee and no distractions, might you get to three minutes??
34. I struggled with this. 44 min 55 secs and two wrong. Land Ton for Long Ton and Sienna Red for Seeing Red.

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