Times 27397 – The Last Savages?

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Some of you reading this may remember two time-travelling tales I was importuned to bring you a while back. While those of us who were privy to the remarkable events of those days knew that one story still remained outstanding, it wasn’t until last week that this tale – more incredible even than the others – was forwarded to me by Galspray, who used the pretext of making a comment about the Cricket World Cup (which may yet come back to haunt him) to send me an encrypted version, which after much effort I am finally able to bring to you. Without further ado:

“Having finally managed to shrug off horryd, even though one of his goats had found its way onto the ship – a happenstance which was to reap benefits in terms of a fresh milk supply – we travelled peaceably above the great ocean of the Indies for some time. Suddenly, however, a monstrous wind forced us to seek the shelter of land and we made a bumpy landing in a god-forsaken landscape filled with decaying circular metal objects inscribed with the letters XXXX – clearly a totem created by this savage people to ward off sinister events.

Scouring the horizon for dwellings, I could see but a single place that might warrant that description – a forelorn pile in the midst of the inhospitable desert. Approaching it with caution, I came upon a rickety door, on which had been daubed the message DOGS AND POMMES ONLY. The use of an admixture of English and French puzzled me greatly. How could it be that a place so evidently lacking in civilisation could support natives fluent in two tongues?

Belonging to neither of these two categories, I made my way to the front portal, upon which, having tried the bell and found it not to be working, I rapped with a certain vigour. A half-dressed personage (at this point I was uncertain as to its gender), holding in its hand one of the afore-mentioned totemic tins, flung the door open and addressed me in tones that I found impossible to comprehend. My conclusions about this people’s linguistic ability had clearly been formulated too rapidly and in the face of all the evidence.

‘My good fellow,’ I hazarded, correctly discerning his orientation from the depth and nasality of his voice, ‘I was blown off course in my travels and seek harbour for the evening.’

‘That’ll be the Fremantle Doctor, mate,’ the savage sounded, whether in response to my utterance or in reference to a forthcoming consultation with the local surgeon.

Before I could clarify, his visage becoming suddenly more pained, he continued in a heightened tone, ‘Mate, can’t you read? Pommes need to come in the back door.’

Nonplussed momentarily by the idea he could have somehow mistaken me for a greencrocer, I fell back on the humour that had served me so well on previous journeys, especially when dealing with horryd and his goats.

‘Next time, I will be certain to bring you some supplies, I assure you, but we are clean out of Granny Smiths at present.’

The man, who wore a sleeveless vest stained with all manner of nutriments and potations and a pair of shorts that had seen better days, beckoned me inside his abode, muttering something about needing to change ‘that bloody sign’. Then, he called out to an unseen person inside the dank dwelling, ‘Raelene! Put the billy on. We’ve got a visitor.’

‘Roast goat!’ I thought. I was doubly pleased that I had not led horryd’s goat a sacrificial lamb to this pagan shrine.

‘A cup of tea would suit me fine, I assure you,’ I said, following him down an unlit passage on which old photos could faintly be discerned, with large signs scrawled in a childish hand proclaiming ‘RABBITOHS YOU BUTES!’ and ‘COME BACK WHEN YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH POMMES!!’ resolving them into two apparent classes.

‘That’s about all you’re getting mate,’ my interlocutor responded gruffly. ‘The old woman will see to it.’

While I was contemplating the likely appearance of his mother, for whom he appeared to have not the slightest regard, he shrieked, ‘Raelene, you gone walkabout again?’

It was not long after we had entered a kind of parlour, in which I had declined the offer of a seat, owing to the less than hygienic appearance of the cushions, that a fine looking woman whom I took to be the man’s daughter or younger sister entered with a tray of tea things. I have to confess I was not surprised that his mother would decline to respond to a summons delivered in so uncouth a manner.

Having finished the tea, which was quite tolerable given the circumstances, the man, who had gone outside for a few minutes, addressed me again. ‘Mate, I reckon you’ll be needing the dunny. Stay there and I’ll get you a pair of thongs.’

To say that I was terrified is no exaggeration. I had attended lectures at the Royal Geographical Society at which explorers had given reports of the deviant sexual behaviour of savage tribes of the Amazon basin, but I had never heard of such perversions in the lands east of the Indian seas.

‘My good fellow, I assure you that I am quite comfortable in these britches.’

‘As you like, mate,’ he responded, ‘but it gets a bit spicy out there and I wouldn’t want you to get your Uggs dirty.’

Following him through the kitchen area, where Raelene was doing her best to remove the stains from one of his vests, we entered a kind of yard at the bottom of which was a dilapidated hut from which emanated as rank an odour as I have ever encountered on all my travels. When I espied the word DUNNY above the door, I made a break for it and, after briefly losing my bearings in the tin-infested undergrowth, finally came via the other side of the dwelling to the back door. Glancing back one last time, I noticed that he had had changed the sign intended for the greengrocer, presumably in order to prevent misunderstandings of the kind that had arisen that afternoon from ever arising again. In place of POMMES, he had daubed NO POMMEE BASTERDS!

What a race, I thought! Enough material for several world tours. Stanley, eat your heart out!”

ACROSS

1 Rich eccentric given kind of gun to attach handle to (8)
CHRISTEN – anagram* of RICH STEN
5 Those in class about to err (4,2)
SLIP UP – PUPILS reversed
9 Announcement at table which rules out seats (2-6)
NO-TRUMPS – NOT RUMPS (seats as in bums)
10 Animal crossing big road shows caution (6)
CAVEAT – AVE (avenue) in CAT
12 One probing affair with politicians where records are kept (6,7)
FILING CABINET – I in FLING CABINET
15 Ship’s labourer losing face (5)
OILER – [t]OILER
16 Old degenerate relies on plant extract (9)
OLEORESIN – O (old) RELIES ON* (degenerate is the anagrind)
17 Very bad or good Latin man translated (9)
MALIGNANT – G LATIN MAN*
19 Captain sending off very quiet sportsman (5)
SKIER – SKI[pp]ER
20 Person succeeding with one kind of clue gets award (8,5)
VICTORIA CROSS – VICTOR I ACROSS
22 Gold twice casing right area for skylights? (6)
AURORA – R (right) in AU OR (two words for gold) A (area)
23 Sloth, say, in garden with place for art (8)
EDENTATE – EDEN TATE
25 Cruelty from low lives and leader of Mob (6)
SADISM – SAD IS M[ob]
26 Recommend dropping ecstasy, swallowing a liqueur (8)
ADVOCAAT – A in ADVOCAT[e]

DOWN

1 Toilet from German city which shouldn’t be opened (3,2,5)
CAN OF WORMS – a kind of intersticed double definition; with CAN standing for a toilet and WORMS a German place more normally associated with diets
2 Cut price for person doing shopping (3)
RAT – RAT[e]
3 Peach stone borne by topless athlete (7)
STUNNER – ST [r]UNNER
4 Imagine speaker is one hawking (12)
EXPECTORATOR – EXPECT ORATOR
6 Left person bringing home the bacon who needs plates (7)
LEARNER – L EARNER
7 Rapid playing is to impress (11)
PRESTISSIMO – IS TO IMPRESS*
8 Loaf, or something to put on it (4)
PATE – double definition
11 Inattentive, lying about dispatched object (6-6)
ABSENT-MINDED – SENT (dispatched) MIND (object – verb) in ABED (lying)
13 Weak girl survived, holding on (4-7)
LILY-LIVERED – LILY RE in LIVED
14 Consider oneself beginning school without pressure (10)
INTROSPECT – INTRO P in SECT
18 Wheel turned by star changing vehicles (2-5)
GO-CARTS – COG reversed STAR*
19 Work hands perform almost fixed US home (7)
SECONDO – SE[t] CONDO; secondo is the second part in a duet
21 Family member with two sons I don’t know (4)
PASS – PA S S
24 Dry people around golf range (3)
AGA – G in AA

56 comments on “Times 27397 – The Last Savages?”

  1. A nice leisurely start to the week. I wasn’t quite sure about OLEORESIN but it seemed plausible and the letters all seemed to be there. Not too much crosswordese. Sometimes a puzzle is easy if you know all the three-toed-sloths and Beerbohm Tree and SA=it and so on. But it is better if it is the same level even if you don’t.
  2. 30 minutes but cheated on the unknown plant extract which I had thought would end in -SIL for some reason.
  3. That was I.

    ‘Evenincks, mornincks I drink Warninck’s!!’ Double Dutch!

    Edited at 2019-07-08 08:11 am (UTC)

  4. Thanks for the entertaining yarn, U. I didn’t know that sandgropers drank banana-bender beer. But I guess Galspray would know.

    Mondayesque puzzle for me, with OLEORESIN the likely arrangement of vowels for my DNK. ADVOCAAT was dimly remembered from previous puzzles as, clearly, we only drink XXXX in Oz 😉

    1. They don’t call it the “Fremantle Doctor” either Starry. It’s the sea breeze, strangely enough.

      Still, I wouldn’t want to discourage our young blogger. You have to admit he’s always trying.

      1. He certainly is that!

        And I did wonder about the breeze – it did seem a tad formal.

        BTW, you’re welcome back any time. I beat his time less often than he used to beat yours, so we can always use a better native Oz solver. It would keep him on his toes.

      2. G welcome back. I miss your cracked bottom (hope the pool’s repaired?). Not sure what you call Ulaca’s tale Down Under – dodgy shag story? Daggy shog story? His wit is certainly ‘dry as a dead dingo’s ……. ‘ as Barry M said.
      3. Nice to see you drop by G. We can always rely on Ulaca for a bit of entertainment 🙂
      4. West Australia is famous (to West Aussies) for it’s Fremantle Doctor and the term is often used. And understood.
        1. I’m well aware of the term and as you say it’s widely known. It’s just not the term that locals generally use to describe the refreshing south-westerly. They call it the sea breeze.
  5. I note Lord Galspray, Les Patterson, Norman Gunston and crew have safely made land.
    Please might I have my goat back? And how are Smithy and The Boys?

    39 minutes for a Monday, so a little more time consuming than usual.

    FOI 21dn PASS

    LOI 8dn PATE

    COD 5ac SLIP UP

    WOD ADVOCAAT Anyone else remember the Warninck’s ads? Bizarre!

  6. This felt like slow going for some reason, partly because very few of the clues were solved on first reading; I think SADISM was my FOI. I spent too much time taking ‘sloth’ to be SIN, and on trying to make sense of SECONDO (LOI), which I finally just put in because I couldn’t think of anything else.
  7. I completed this very quickly by my standards so I expect to see some fast times today. I might have managed sub-10 if I hadn’t been held up by my LOI CAVEAT. Annoyingly I thought the animal was most likely CAT and I thought the big road could be AVE but it still took me about 2 minutes to put the two together!
    1. I forgot to say that I’m not entirely convinced by ‘big road’ as a definition of ‘avenue’ as, for example, Metroland where I was born and raised is full of ‘avenues’ that are not particularly big but their most consistent feature is that they are, or were originally, tree-lined. It occurs to me now that the setter might have put ‘small road’ referring cryptically to the abbreviation for avenue that’s needed in the answer.

      Edited at 2019-07-08 07:14 am (UTC)

      1. The usual dictionaries all define an avenue as broad or wide. Having said that I live on one and it’s not particularly wide… but it is lined with trees.
  8. Comfortable Monday puzzle. OLEORESIN the only one I wasn’t sure of, but with checkers in place, it seemed like the best arrangement of the letters.
  10. I struggled to get going with this puzzle, probably due to being half asleep, as I only got up to bring the milk in, then made a cup of coffee and fired up the laptop, instead of going back to bed. Anyway eventually things came together and I was left with O_E_R_S_N into which I dropped the remaining bits of the anagrist in what seemed like a feasible manner. It took me far too long to see PATE and CAVEAT. CAN OF WORMS also needed all the crossers. Definitely a case of somnambulant solving methinks. 27:18 so could have been worse. Thanks setter and U. Been on the absinthe U?
  11. 13:40. I was ready to get cross about the unfair anagram at 16ac until I suddenly realised it ended with RESIN and all became clear.
  12. Finally here to make my comment having sailed too close to the southern edge of the world. 26 minutes with LOI SECONDO. I spent too long constructing OLEORESIN too. Do they sell it in Holland and Barrett? Not a shop I frequent. At least I knew EDENTATE. I tend to see avenues as smaller roads, but I guess Fifth Avenue could be called big. No other problems. COD to CAN OF WORMS, an interesting diet. As Martin said to Mrs L on the crowded tram on their way to the Diet: ” Here I stand. I can do no other.” I’ve used that joke in my next novel so please don’t repeat it. I don’t suppose you were likely to. Nice puzzle. Thank you U and setter.
    1. Not sure how wide Rue Morgue Avenue was, but clearly wide enough to accommodate some hungry women.
        1. I was singing Bob’s version as I read this, John. I think Highway 61 is a bit long to call an avenue.
  13. 25 mins. Took ages to get introspect, for some reason. Otherwise no dramas.

    Edited at 2019-07-08 09:37 am (UTC)

  14. This, I promise you, is the Wiki entry on OLEORESINS:
    “Oleoresins are semi-solid extracts composed of a resin in solution in an essential and/or fatty oil, obtained by evaporation of the solvent(s) used for their production.
    Naturally occurring oleoresins are also known as balsams.

    In contrast to essential oils obtained by steam distillation, oleoresins abound in heavier, less volatile and lipophilic compounds, such as resins, waxes, fats and fatty oils. Gummo-oleoresins (oleo-gum resins, gum resins) occur mostly as crude balsams and contain also water-soluble gums.

    Oleoresins are prepared from spices, such as basil, capsicum (paprika), cardamom, celery seed, cinnamon bark, clove bud, fenugreek, fir balsam, ginger, jambu, labdanum, mace, marjoram, nutmeg, parsley, pepper (black/white), pimenta (allspice), rosemary, sage, savory (summer/winter), thyme, turmeric, vanilla, West Indian bay leaves. The solvents used are nonaqueous and may be polar (alcohols) or nonpolar (hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide).

    Oleoresins are similar to perfumery concretes, obtained especially from flowers, and to perfumery resinoids, which are prepared also from animal secretions.”
    So now you know.
    Apart from that, I whizzed through this one, only extended by the above, SECONDO (which I nearly spelled with a U until I worked out what a US home was), CAVEAT (is a big road the same as a wide one?) and unaccountably SLIP UP, where my dodgy pupils couldn’t make out the dam’d obvious.

    Congratulations to the American women for showing the American men how real football (and an actual world series) is played, and for their fabulous Megan’s cry of 9ac.

    And (in deference to today’s extended narrative) congratulations to the Rooettes for trouncing the England women yet again.

    Oh, 15 minutes.

  15. Twenty minutes for this one, held up for the last three as I tried in vain to find an alternative to CAVEAT. Having mis-divided my CAT, I was skeptical that a VEA was any sort of road.

  16. I was heading for a sub 10 minute but was stumped by 1 ac. I finished in 11:34 but stuck in Cardsten for Christen with severe doubts and also had a misspelt Inerespect where I had intended Interspect for what of course was Introspect.

    COD: ABSENT MINDED.

  17. I can’t tell you the certainty with which I entered PRONTISSIMO, a word which clearly should exist but doesn’t. This made 10a unsolvable, though in the end I decided it must be a word I’d never heard of so I came here for enlightenment.

    There, don’t you feel better now? You’re welcome.

      1. I was also in the Pronto club and ironically not in PrestoNorth End. David
      2. Sadly, I solved the QC AFTER this one, which was clearly the wrong order!
  18. DNF. Couldn’t get CAVEAT. Biffed OLEORESIN and SECONDO. GO-CARTS ? Never with a C in my world !

    COD FILING CABINET, nothing else relevant.

  19. 39 minutes, so perhaps a pleasant weekend away near Abergavenny (where it was warm enough to swim in an unheated outdoor pool, which I wasn’t expecting!) has blown some cobwebs out.

    FOI 1a CHRISTEN. It was 10a CAVEAT that held me up at the end, as I was still trying to cram in the A1 rather than an AVE, and I wasn’t completely sure that “loaf” and PATE were equivalent, either, the former seeming more brainy and the latter more external to my mind.

    OLEORESIN wasn’t too hard if you spotted the RESIN bit and either know a bit of Latin or know that Apple (and presumably other manufacturers) use an oleophobic coating on their touchscreen devices to reduce the effects of greasy fingerprints…

  20. My Nan drank a Snowball at Christmas, Advocaat and lemonade.

    18′, with CAVEAT LOI.

    Thanks ulaca and setter.

  21. After a very slow start getting all the way down to MALIGNANT before finding a toe-hold I was pleasantly surprised to clock in at 14.03. The one that gave me trouble was CAVEAT because I was sure there must be a motorway in there. The Trump condo is on Fifth Avenue and you might find buying one in that building to be hedged about with caveats.

    Glad to hear that Robinson Ulaca’s shipwreck came out ok. Did you conclude that the natives are ready for self-government?

    1. Put it this way: de Tocqueville’s tome on that country would have been pretty slim.
  22. Not much more to add here. A nice Mondayish puzzle with two bogglers at the end in PATE and CAVEAT which entirely escaped me. At least I did get OLEORESIN (and no, they don’t sell it in Holland and Barrett) and the weird GO CARTS.
  23. Slow on the QC today but quite quick on this. My last two were 14d and 16a. I had to get INTROSPECT to allow me to construct the unknown OLEORESIN ( I had assumed it would end in IL).
    An enjoyable puzzle, liked the humour -Can of Worms etc. David
  24. No problems with this one. I couldn’t have defined OLEORESIN before today (and probably after today either – great memory, eh?). I also didn’t know a SECONDO. But both clearly seemed to be the answers, that they went in straight away. Regards.
  25. I liked Pupils and No Trumps, and I have a vague memory of seeing that for Pupils before, and also of liking it then, too.
    At 18 I slowed down as I am only used to the cog being the tooth, not the wheel, and I wasn’t sure that ‘turned by’ could do double duty as the reversal and also the wheel turning motivator..

    Does the preamble mean that Ulaca is now back in Asia, and we in America and Europe are safe for the time being?

    Edited at 2019-07-08 08:28 pm (UTC)

  26. Sailed through this quite quickly and then came to a grinding halt on 10ac “Caveat” which took me ages. I got it in my head that it was a 5-letter animal with A inserted.
    I remember the bottle of Advocaat on the table at my parents’ parties. Was even allowed the occasional taste therefrom.
  27. 24:05, bit of a slow start but the grid filled up steadily after a while. It took me ages to see the rich eccentric in 1ac and I had to reverse engineer 10ac from the definition to get the parsing because I couldn’t see past M1 or A1 for the big road.
  28. It should be Go-Karts. Always. I think in the Northern Lights context, it should be ‘Sky Lights’. I still don’t understand how the ‘Se[t] in Secondo works? Loaf is ‘brain’or ‘nous’ isn’t it? I wouldn’t say it’s the physical head which is what ‘pate’ is. ‘Imagine’=‘expect’ is a bit loose too. Mr Grumpy
    1. I was appalled to find, when I finally located a local in Perth while visiting some years ago, that they had Greene King beer… the Greene King brewery is in smelling distance for me at home when the wind is in the wrong direction!

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