Times 27417 – back with a whimper

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Having relocated reasonably smoothly to the Land of Hope and Glory, I was ready for a tough challenge and hoping to produce a witty, erudite blog, up to the standard of my excellent locum of last week, Olivia. Sadly, I found this puzzle eminently straightforward and uncontroversial, and am struggling to say anything very witty or erudite about any of the clues. Parsing 14a held me up for longer than writing the rest of the blog.

Now back to opening those boxes and wondering why we have all this stuff.

Across
1 Old Irishman briefly attached to pub belonging to a peer (8)
BARONIAL – NIAL(L) an abberviated Irish first name, is attached to BAR (pub) and O for old.
5 He left by public transport, getting measure of grain (6)
BUSHEL – BUS has HE and L added.
10 Country district to west lacking the ultimate in brio (5)
NIGER – REGION is reversed and has its O (end of brio) removed.
11 Take back City, overcome by ecstatic delight (9)
RECAPTURE – EC (City of London) is inserted into RAPTURE.
12 Part of Jersey, say — and Bath once, I suspect (9)
AITCHBONE – (BATH ONCE I)*, part of a cow one assumes. Not part of a sweater, anyway.
13 Magistrate’s point accepted by minister at conclusion of case (5)
REEVE – REV (minister) has E (point) inserted and E (end of case) added.
14 Intrinsic feature of enclosure being put about (7)
ESSENCE – The best I can do to explain this is to say it’s ENC for enclosure inside ESSE which itself means ‘essence’ or essential nature, it being the Latin verb ‘to be’. The surface doesn’t make much sense.
16 Stumble over second Cambridge honours exam (6)
TRIPOS – TRIP (stumble), O(ver), S(econd).
18 Part of cannon soldier finally found in tree (6)
BREECH – R (end of soldier) inserted into BEECH tree.
20 Yokel’s plight at first, restricted by useless family (7)
BUMPKIN – P (plight at first) inserted into BUM KIN = useless family.
22 Where gladiatorial contests took place a long time back (5)
ARENA – AN ERA all reversed.
23 One antagonises a retired man, backing duty list (9)
ALIENATOR – A, NEIL reversed, ROTA reversed.
25 Restricted by petty rules, like badly fed cattle? (9)
HIDEBOUND – I supposed a double definition, the second one literal, if a bit strained. Bound by hide, a badly fed cow?
26 Small island administered by a king or queen? (5)
ARRAN – A R (king or queen) RAN the island. I don’t see the need for small, Arran is 432 sq. km., not that small.
27 Male, culturally pretentious Republican, one who died for cause (6)
MARTYR – M(ale), ARTY (culturally pretentious), R(epublican).
28 Fail to take in variable poem about aquatic creatures (8)
CRAYFISH – CRASH (fail) has Y (variable) and IF (poem) reversed, inserted.

Down
1 Embargo judge removed, destroyed by incompetence (8)
BANJAXED – BAN (embargo) J(udge) AXED (removed). An odd word which I heard used a lot when I lived in the Emerald Isle. Etymology seems unknown.
2 Correct ceremonial for listeners (5)
RIGHT – Homophone of RITE.
3 Poor boy near the barn digesting start of great novel (10,5)
NORTHANGER ABBEY – Think of a famous novel with 10, 5, then unravel the reason why. (BOY NEAR THE BARN G)*, the G from beginning of great.
4 Publicise complete-sounding aid to ventilation (7)
AIRHOLE – AIR = publicise, HOLE sounds like WHOLE = complete.
6 Rule man in a party breaks, being this? (15)
UNPARLIAMENTARY – &lit. anagram; (RULE MAN IN A PARTY)*.
7 Keep last of water in cooking pot for domestic chores (9)
HOUSEWORK – keep = HOUSE, look after; WOK a cooking pot has R the end of water inserted.
8 Songs principal first violinist talked of (6)
LIEDER – Homophone of LEADER of the orchestra.
9 Stress that may be acute? (6)
ACCENT – may be an acute accent, or grave accent, as you wish.
15 Give in and give up (9)
SURRENDER – Double definition.
17 Dig in in French river, disturbing fish (8)
ENTRENCH – EN = French for in, TENCH a fish, insert R for river.
19 Greeting coming in our direction in break (6)
HIATUS – HI, AT US.
20 Brilliant piece of play demanding drunken celebration (7)
BLINDER – Play a blinder, go on a blinder.
21 Old lady on edge about youth leader’s state of chaos (6)
MAYHEM – MA (old lady), HEM (edge) insert Y (youth leader).
24 Bones seafarers found on island (5)
TARSI – TARS = seafarers, I(sland).

42 comments on “Times 27417 – back with a whimper”

  1. I looked up BANJ… rather than going through the alphabet, where I know I would have forgotten, or never reached, X. I was lucky in remembering AITCHBONE from a recent cryptic, when it was a DNK. I couldn’t make sense of 14ac, although ESSE appears frequently in the NYT. Biffed 3d, of course; never did bother to parse it until after submitting. I wonder if the setter was confusing his island with the Aran Islands? They’re small, anyway, although none of them is named Ar(r)an.
  2. We had AITCHBONE not so long ago (thank goodness). The lone word “demanding” between the two definitions of BLINDER looks a little forlorn…  I had, finally, to resort to an aid to find my LOI, BANJAXED.
  3. My grid was missing two intersecting answers after only 20 minutes and I had two answers in mind that I wasn’t totally sure of, but in view of my excellent time so far I decided to bung them in and take a punt and they both turned out to be correct: BLINDER and ALIENATOR.

    AITCHBONE is a cut of steak. ESSE clued as ‘being’ has come up before.

    Hope you will be happy in your new home, Pip.

    1. As Pip said, a straightforward puzzle, in which I was helped by seeing both of the long ones early on.

      AITCHBONE puts me in mind of the many people who think there’s a letter pronounced “haitch” (fools!).

    2. In case you’re wondering Jack, my post wan’t intended to be in reply to yours!
  4. 25 mins with yoghurt, granola, blueberries, etc.
    Neat and tidy. DNK Blinder as a bender, but it had to be.
    I know size doesn’t matter, but Arran is bigger than the Isle of Wight.
    Thanks setter and Pip.
  5. 17.29 (I knew BANJAXED from good ol’ Terry Wogan). I think if I had been conscientiously parsing (well played Pip) I’d still be going on account of the second definition of HIDEBOUND. As it was, I didn’t notice it, since it rather fell in on the first, but here’s the second from Chambers: “(of animals) having the hide attached so closely to the back and ribs that it is taut, not easily moved, as a result of incorrect feeding”. Any dairy farmers out there?
    ARENA, though it did have a cryptic element, might just as well not have.
    A vaguely irritating puzzle.
  6. I was slow getting into this and took 31 minutes. LOI was BANJAXED where I needed all the crossers to persuade me to follow the instructions. It’s as well too that we had AITCHBONE somewhere recently. I parsed ESSENCE as you did, Pip. COD to BUMPKIN. Thank you Pip and setter.
  7. No problems. I thought wrongly that AITCHBONE was two words and wondered about the ‘small’ reference to ARRAN (… though compared to Greenland?).
  8. I thought I was solving the QC for a while as I got the majority of the answers reading through the first time. Like Pip I had a MER at Arran being called a small island. 11:33.
  9. Glad your move seems to have gone well, Pip. I have my fingers crossed that when my house in France sells, the new buyers will want the furniture so I don’t have to pay to ship it, only the personal stuff.
    Thanks for ESSENCE in this puzzle.
  10. HIDEBOUND in second sense unknown, does it mean not enough food or the wrong sort? REEVE and LIEDER, at least, belong in the QC. Welcome back Pip, but I hope your locum does more. 11′ 19”, thanks pip and setter.
  11. Yes, very easy .. I tried to picture hidebound, badly fed cattle and didn’t much like what I saw ..
    I also note that REEVE = magistrate has turned up three times in the last week or two. I was all set to complain, on the grounds that the word is medieval and nobody has used it in centuries; but I find that it is in fact still in use in a few places. Eg according to the OED, Bungay has one ..
    Arran is not only bigger than the IoW, it goes up a fair bit higher as well. It has four Corbetts!
  12. 11.30 but a careless momble of TRIMOP kind of spoiled it. Sounded vaguely like the sort of thing those Cambridge types would have.
  13. D’oh! Got through this one in 37 minutes, stumbling over several of the same blocks as others, only to find that BARONEAL isn’t a word, of course. If I’d thought about it for more than three seconds, or noticed the “briefly”… Oops.

    I definitely wasn’t awake for that first row, as it took me ages to get 5a, having to come back later despite thinking “HELBUS? That’s not a word, is it?”

    LIEDER will always have a crossword-related resonance for me as I first learned the word from the sleeve notes of the first Inspector Morse TV music CD, which included Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte op. 67 no 6…

  14. Wended my way through this in 22:10, but being a Durham man had never heard of TRIPOS, and derived TRIPOA from second letter of Cambridge. Drat! AITCHBONE remembered from a recent puzzle. BLINDER and ALIENATOR last 2 in. Had no idea what was going on with ESSENCE. Thanks setter and Pip. Glad the move went well!
  15. is the bullet proof bus that used to take tourists round Harlem in the seventies.

    FOI 24dn TARSI

    LOI 5ac BUSHEL!

    COD 12ac AITCHBONE

    WOD 1dn BANJAXED as per Zed’s mention of Terry Wogan

    Time 24 minutes and Pip, my regards to Rutland.

    Edited at 2019-07-31 09:08 am (UTC)

  16. ….raspberry ESSENCE. I’m blowing a raspberry at the clue, which I biffed, along with my LOI. At least that one was parsed post-solve, so thanks Pip.

    An otherwise overly straightforward puzzle, which was vaguely unsatisfying.

    FOI BANJAXED
    LOI CRAYFISH
    COD BUMPKIN
    TIME 6:09

  17. Very much held up by the last few, which turned out to be straightforward. LOI ARRAN which doesn’t need further comment. Good in parts.
  18. 22’40. Mildly irritated by the easy use of the esoteric esse.
    It occurs to me a lot of surfaces in the clues of most puzzles work after a fashion but lack that nifty sense of surprised appreciation when solved; and there might be a case for TfTT contributors naming their rare favourites as they come up, and someone – not myself as can’t handle the tech. side – compiling a list of same at regular intervals every now and then. This would both offer a selection of unforced delights and give an opportunity for clue(s) of the year by voting, say, to keep the setters on their toes. Just a thought – and possibly against the spirit of TfTT somehow – but there just may be something in it.
    1. Esse is familiar to me, though exclusively because of previous crosswords.

      You mean, a list of favourite clues? I never think that works, they are fish out of water. A bit like test match highlights, which only serve to show that a test match can’t successfully be reduced to 30mins of boundaries and wickets..

      1. Yes, with an accent on favourite surfaces. So often setters make them work in a literal way, but somewhat splutteringly. It’s a question of evading execution by the rapier or the blunderbuss.
  19. Hooray – Pip’s back! I think he may be understating the difficulty of his “relo” (as realtors around here say). Given that he was doing it in the midst of the great heatwave of 2019 the word “gruelling” from last Wednesday’s puzzle comes to mind.

    I did this one with an eye to having to blog it just in case Pip was still hors de combat but I see that almost everyone here got in ahead of me with the parsing of ESSENCE and the size of ARRAN. I’d been going to say that Manhattan, by comparison, is a measly 33 square miles. 14 and change.

    1. Realtor? A word they invented to make themselves sound, well, less like real estate salesmen–who sell homes, not houses.
  20. I had a DNF on the QC this morning but, refreshed by a dog walk by the sea, I had little difficulty completing this in well under an hour. LOI was AITCHBONE which I did not remember and had to construct from the anagrist.
    FOI was RIGHT then BUSHEL.
    I had stunning views of the Isle of Wight on my walk but it occurs to me I have no basis for describing its size; medium-sized island might do but sounds awful.
    David
  21. That’s fine, p, I hadn’t taken it as such. I’ve often posted something as a reply when not intended.
  22. Clearly I don’t know enough about Cambridge – I had a stab at TRIMOP, which seemed unlikely, so failed at this one. 10 and a half minutes to get there, so this one wasn’t a walk in the park, but not too tricky (apart from the error, of course).

    I don’t think I’d come across BLINDER in the drunken binge sense, but it was pretty clear from context.

    Pleased to see NORTHANGER ABBEY make an appearance, one of my favourite books.

  23. Back with a reasonable time after yesterday’s horlicks. Pretty straightforward, I thought.
  24. MERs as already described by others; also memories of Terry Wogan brought back by 1dn. Hope the unboxing goes well, Pip; the last time we moved, I discovered several boxes which hadn’t been unpacked from the move before that, so whatever was in there, we could clearly do without, and should probably just dispose of before we ended up paying somebody to transport it across the country a third time.
  25. Although this clearly wasn’t a difficult puzzle I struggled to get on wavelength and couldn’t really get into a solving rhythm (if such a thing exists) so took 13:17.

    Starting to write BARNABY RUDGE at 3d gives an indication of how out of tune I was with the setter, likewise not knowing one of each of the definitions for hidebound and blinder.

  26. Having failed dimsally on yesterday’s, I was glad to find this one a bit simpler, though it still took me an unaccountable 31min. I too was unconvinced by ESSENCE but, thanks to my knowledge of the NHS, BANJAXED was no problem.
  27. At 80mins or thereabouts, this was easily my fastest unaided 15×15 solve. A minor miracle given that I don’t think I have ever come across Aitchbone – and I’m pretty sure Blinder for the better known Bender has escaped me as well. Talking of which, perhaps a glass of red with tonight’s meal wouldn’t be inappropriate. . . Invariant
  28. Technical DNF as looked up TRIPOS – as far as I knew, it could’ve bin TRISOP, TRIMOP or TRIPOM.

    Missed the parsing on HIDEBOUND and 4/7 of ESSENCE. Took unfeasible amount of time to get RECAPTURE and UNPARLIAMENTARY both of which I could see the parsing but just couldn’t think of the words!

    Last in, BLINDER and CRAYFISH.

  29. Why cannot Arran be small? The local Tourist Office proudly pronounce, ‘Arran is a small island, 20 miles long and 56 miles round, located off the south-west coast of Scotland.’ They should know their wee small islands.

    And why was TRIPOS so surprisingly difficult for some of our better solvers. Possibly they were Oggsford men?
    The word derives from the three-legged stool occupied by a participant in a disputation at the degree ceremonies.(Merriam-Webster)

    And lastly, I see no problem with the surface of ESSENCE.
    It is not the first time!

    I believe the setter is a Scot who was at Cambridge, and switched from the Classics faculty to mathematics.

  30. 9:56. No problems for me today, and I liked it.
    The alternative meaning of HIDEBOUND is interesting, if not a particularly pleasant concept.
    The size of ARRAN is obviously relative but the curious thing to me is that the word ‘small’ is there at all: utterly pointless.
    ESSE is one of those crossword words.

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