Times 27549 – 2020 vision.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Well, if you’re awake and sober enough to read this, on New Year’s morning, I wish you every continuation in 2020. Or maybe you’re in places a few hours west and not yet abed, or down under where it’s nearly bedtime again. Best Wishes to all. Anyway, this little number will tease your little grey cells, for the parsing here and there if not for the right answers. I worked through it slowly, parsing as I went, so no exact time, but I’d expect it to be a bit harder than average, with or without a hangover.

Some smooth surfaces and devious wordplay in here, but I think my LOI 11d gets my CoD in spite of being a rather awkward word. Oh no, I’ve decided it’s 2d, for annoying me until I lifted and separated those battles.

If anyone has all or some of the TCC competition puzzles from 7 December, unfilled, could they please message me or comment here; I’d like scans or PDFs before they get published on Wednesdays.

Across
1 Horsewoman returning a bottle containing dodgy mixture (4,6)
LADY GODIVA – A VIAL is a bottle. Reverse it and insert (DODGY)*. I was prompted to go to Wiki to see whether said Lady was legendary and real or just legendary. It seems she was real, but the details of her ‘ride’ differ in various accounts and may have been fiction. The best bit of the Wiki entry is the Pre-Raphaelite style painting of her on horseback by one John Collier, 1897, he went for the “just the long hair” option.
6 Press person on latest news that’s travelled fast (4)
SPED – ED goes on SP, starting price or latest news.
9 Escape paying extra for unauthorised dispatch (3-7)
FLY-TIPPING – FLY = escape, TIPPING = paying extra.
10 Pair helping one see incomplete requirement (4)
SPEC – SPECS are incomplete.
12 Church occasion created by commercial outlets — and in Germany, indeed! (6,6)
ADVENT SUNDAY – AD (commercial), VENTS (outlets), UND (German for and) AY (indeed!).
15 German host with a bishop following old carriage (6-3)
HANSOM-CAB – HANS (a German) O (old) MC (host) A, B (bishop).
17 Living way east of wine-producing region (5)
CRUST – Earn a crust, make a living. ST after CRU. I had a serious ER at CRU for a wine-producing region as opposed to a single vineyard, but Collins says “(in France) a vineyard, group of vineyards, or wine-producing region”. Endless scope for wine buffs heated discussion on “Cru Bourgeois” and so on.
18 Chap’s moral philosophy greatly diminished (5)
RALPH – Ralph finds himself hidden in MO(RAL PH)ILOSOPHY).
19 Consumption of one interfering with Scandinavian girl’s weight (9)
INGESTION – Inge is a Swedish name for girls, so INGE’S TON weight has one = I inserted / interfering.
20 Smashing large bully, by Jove, all over the place! (6,6)
LOVELY JUBBLY – to quote Mr Derek Edward Trotter; (L BULLY BY JOVE)*.
24 Blade going round front and back of knife (4)
VANE – VAN = front, E = back of knife. As in weather vane for example.
25 Outlaw can, if put on spot (6,4)
LITTLE JOHN – One of Robin Hood’s merry men. LITTLE = spot, as in “a spot of..” JOHN as in men’s toilet or CAN.
26 Tar on road turned grey (4)
DRAB – DR = RD turned, add AB for tar, sailor.
27 Unduly optimistic son to stay and watch daughter (6-4)
STARRY-EYED – S (son) TARRY (stay) EYE (watch) D for daughter.
Down
1 Get a load of paper to send up (4)
LOFT – I’m not sure on this, I suspect the abbr. LO means ‘a load of’ in textspeak, and FT is the paper.
2 Defeated artillerymen originally evacuated Ypres and Mons? (4)
DAYS – D A = ‘defeated artillerymen originally’ and Y S = evacuated Y(pre)S. To give you DAYS, which could be MONS or Mondays.
3 After moving, girl at hand to pack up, finally (5,2,1,4)
GRIND TO A HALT – (GIRL AT HAND TO)*.
4 Party recalled our leading female cellist (2,3)
DU PRE – The DUP being the relevant party, and ER (our leading female) reversed. I’m sure all will be as familiar with the great recordings and tragic fate of Jacqueline Du Pré as am I, but if not, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_du_Pré .
5 Fair name? Appropriate in the case of a woman (6,3)
VANITY BAG – VANITY (FAIR, by Thackeray), BAG meaning appropriate.
7 Background notes in the form of tweets? (5,5)
PIPED MUSIC – cryptic definition.
8 Belittle unusual tip: no good for code breaking (10)
DECRYPTING – DECRY = belittle, (TIP)*, NG = no good.
11 Paceman’s length I recalled extremely unpredictable (12)
QUICKSILVERY – A paceman in cricket is often called a quick bowler or just ‘a quick’. So we have QUICK’S, then LI (length I) reversed, then VERY = extremely. I thought quicksilver was both the noun and the adjective, and it is, but Collins does add QUICKSILVERY if you dig deep enough. Kind of mercury-y.
13 Passing fifty-one volts through caused electrical malfunction (5-5)
SHORT-LIVED – Caused electrical malfunction = SHORTED; insert LI V for fifty-one volts.
14 Play in dirty yard initially covering very small area (5,5)
UNCLE VANYA – UNCLEAN = dirty. Insert V for very, add Y for yard and A for area. Play by Anton Chekov written in 1898.
16 Bar maybe doing its customers punch for sharing (4,5)
CLIP JOINT – CLIP = punch, JOINT = for sharing.
21 Person nibbling tart half-heartedly (5)
BITER – BITTER = tart, half heartedly so drop a T.
22 Spare top is pinched from wood (4)
BONY – EBONY loses its E.
23 The girl in row five standing up? (4)
ENID – I bunged in ENID as a girl who fits. But why? Well, ENID reversed (standing up) is DIN E. So row E is row 5. And a DIN is a row. Can you explain it better?

​

39 comments on “Times 27549 – 2020 vision.”

  1. A good way to start off the New Year – not too hard, not too easy. FLY-TIPPING had to go in from the wordplay and I only half-parsed VANITY BAG. I parsed LOFT uncertainly as ‘Get a load of’ = ‘look’ = LO.

    The ‘Living’ def for CRUST and the wordplay for LITTLE JOHN were good but best for me were LADY GODIVA for the reminder of the Peter and Gordon song and the word of the day QUICKSILVERY (also (or close to it) in the most recent Monthly Club Special).

    Finished in just on the hour.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

  2. LITTLE JOHN took ages, but I got it; and I put in ENID without getting it. But 11d just escaped me; not only did I not know what a paceman is, I’d never heard of QUICKSILVERY and wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years. Also didn’t know CRUST= living, but it seemed inevitable. NHO LOVELY JUBBLY, and never hope to hear of it again; as it was, I looked it up. Not that it matters, but the name of the fair, as opposed to the name of the novel, comes from Bunyan. I read LOFT as LO=get a load of (look at) + FT.
  3. Home in a few minutes short of an hour struggling a bit to parse one or two, and I suppose you might say I cheated by eventually looking up ‘paceman’ to find out what it meant. I’m not sure how much it helped with the solution but I suppose seeing the word ‘fast’ in the definition kick-started my brain into thinking of ‘quick’ whereas ‘pace’ in the clue hadn’t had the same effect.
  4. Interesting that QUICKSILVERY was in the club monthly special blogged by Verlaine…today. But I only read that after I’d finished. But with one wrong, putting in LIFT instead of LOFT and meaning to go back and check since I had a feeling it wasn’t quite right. Bit it felt like a workout and I was pleased to get it done (well, apart from one square) in about 40 mins.
    1. QUICKSILVERISH was the MCS word! A completely different kettle of fish… well, slightly different, anyway.

      Back in Berkeley after a few days away in southeastern climes. Happy new year, everyone!

  5. it wasn’t. It took me an hour with much brain searching.

    I would agree with Our Kev that 20ac was unfair to Brother Jonathan and that Del Boy ain’t universal: Peckhamspeak.

    FOI 1ac LADY GODIVA who also adorns Belgian Chocolate Boxes these days.

    LOI 22dn EBONY

    COD 11dn QUICKSILVERY – I believe cricketing QUICKS/ QUICKIES originates from Oz. I can hear Ritchie Benaud saying it now, whilst referring to Thompson and Lillee.

    WOD 20ac LOVERLY JUBBERLY (correct pronunciation!)

    I was impressed that Jacqueline Du Pre made an appearance so quickly after being outed in The Times for enjoying a steady ‘menage’ with the Finzis. Whatever next!?

    A Merry New Year to one and all

    Edited at 2020-01-01 07:45 am (UTC)

    1. Our Kev (Kevin, actually, Horryd) didn’t say the clue was unfair, certainly not to Brother Jonathan, whoever he is.
        1. season’s, actually, horryd, and same to you; hoping for a good 2020 for the both of us. (And I was right; you do change your cap, don’t you? Is that significant?)
    2. I thought the obituary which talked about Jacqueline Du Pré was shabby, and not worthy of The Times.
  6. Happy New Year from damp Dorset

    Nice gentle canter to kick off the decade. Straight top to bottom solve. I liked the construction of DAYS.

  7. …but struggled with QUICKSILVERY.
    With a couple of checkers in place I thought 9ac might be ‘mob killing’ as in ‘unauthorised dispatch’.
    Thanks for ENID, Pip. And a very happy new year to you back in the UK!

    Edited at 2020-01-01 10:08 am (UTC)

  8. …and this is LITTLE JOHN, the none too subtle chat-up line of a GI based in Nottingham, as described by Elvis Costello. Thanks to Pip for emailing this puzzle to me when the newsagent’s was closed. Bang on the half hour, with LOI LOFT, unsure also if it couldn’t be LIFT. COD would have gone to LITTLE JOHN, but I wasn’t keen on ‘spot’ for ‘little’, so the honour goes to QUICKSILVERY. I suppose our new cricket coach is Quick Silverwood, and I wonder if the setter got the idea by word association. Thank you again to Pip and to setter.
  9. 27’46”, with ages spent on QUICKSILVERY, even with all the checkers. As I write, it occurs to me that is the same as ‘mercurial’, which now makes sense.

    As we get ready to sing ‘Lo! Star-led chieftains’ 1d eventually fell into place.

    Please let’s not have an outbreak of catchphrases in clues – ‘Little Britain’, ‘Gavin and Stacey’, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ contained quite a few, or so I’m told.

    Wishing everyone a peaceful and happy new year,

    Thanks pip and setter.

  10. 20:24. Another who stared at 11D as my last to do for ages. It was only after starting an alphabet trawl that I remembered “if there’s a U there might be a Q before it”. Lots of nice cunning clues. VANE my favourite. Thanks Pip and setter.
  11. 19:39 … all reasonably straightforward for me except for several minutes at the end stuck on LITTLE JOHN. ‘outlaw’ always makes me think Wild West rather than Sherwood Forest.

    Happy New Year to all

  12. 28’55. I’m tempted to assign myself half an hour max. for each day’s decrypting in the general pursuit of a clearer-eyed approach to things but tend to get too involved to give up so that’s the year’s resolution out of the way. Rather liked this especially the Mons. joekobi
  13. ….that was today’s 2:55 finish on the QC, I plummeted here. I unfortunately took “unusual tip no” in 8D as instruction and anagrist, thus entering “decryption”. I was therefore unable to solve INGESTION (being convinced the Scandinavian girl was Ingrid didn’t help either !)

    Even had I negotiated those two, I suspect I would still not have got the cumbersome QUICKSILVERY, a word surely rendered obsolete by “mercurial”.

    I didn’t much care for the butchering of “Lubbly Jubbly”, which was the original advertising tagline for the orange juice in a tetrapak that was really good when frozen.

    I started promptly with LADY GODIVA, but saw myself GRIND TO A HALT after about 15 minutes, the crossers of UNCLE VANYA and RALPH (Duh !) falling in about 4 minutes later.

    A further 5 minutes wisely persuaded me to come here and identify the malfunction.

    COD FLY-TIPPING

  14. Rather similar experience to yesterday’s but several leaden minutes slower. Those champagne cocktails my husband brewed up must have been more potent than I realized. The equestrienne at 1a flew right in and then nothing for a while. I suppose I must have heard the JUBBLY thing once upon a time but it took forever to surface and although I did manage to twig that there was cricket going on in 11d I didn’t even try to parse it. RALPH (the sacred river) was well-hidden (meaning it took me a few passes before I saw it). 24.53
  15. I read 1d as ‘Get a load of’ meaning ‘take a look at’ = LO, followed by FT.

    It all felt like hard work today, but that might be explicable under the (Jan 1) circumstances. Still happy to finish within a half-hour.

  16. 18:56. When 1ac went straight in I thought I would be in for an easy time with this one, but things soon became more difficult. I had three major and intersecting problems with this puzzle:
    1) putting in a very confident DECRYPTION. It parses perfectly so for a very long time I didn’t question it.
    2) failing to make head or tail of 11dn for absolutely ages. I knew ‘paceman’ as a term for a fast bowler, but not QUICK, so I was trying to fit in the name of a specific person, which would have been difficult for me even if it had been what was required, which of course it wasn’t.
    3) largely as a result of 1 and 2, struggling with 19ac. Because I had an O at the end, of which I was very sure, I assumed this would be an obscure term for TB, but I couldn’t construct anything likely-looking from INGE or INGRID and the weight, which could only be a KILO.
    Eventually I did reconsider DECRYPTION and then everything fell into place pretty quickly.
    Happy New Year everyone!

    Edited at 2020-01-01 01:05 pm (UTC)

  17. A bit slow on the uptake with 2 false entries which held me up, including a VANITY BOX and DECRYPTION, both of which crossed with 19a, leaving me with the indigestible ..X…I.O Having resolved that, I was left with ‘if it’s a U it must be a Q’ which I forgot, and ended up needing help for my LOI.
    1. I did wonder, briefly, but there isn’t one in my grid. Still an odd clue to parse, IMO. Row has to do double duty, or you have to interpret 5 as E without using the (theatre) row to connect the two.
      1. I can’t see any problem with this. In any list of things the fifth would be thing E: there’s no need to refer to theatre rows.
        1. I agree with thud_n below, equating 5 with E without any other link is a recipe for mayhem. And E equals 14 in hex world!
          1. I don’t think that’s what the clue does. It uses the idea that the fifth in a list of things will be thing E. In the same way CHINA might be the first feature, BIND the fourth rubbish receptacle, etc. It’s not the same as just substituting a letter for a number in isolation. It’s also not the first time this trick has been used.

            Edited at 2020-01-01 05:03 pm (UTC)

            1. at the risk of prolonging a non argument; that was my point, unless you mean DIN E is supposed to mean noise / row number 5, which seems a bit odd. I mean, you can have the fifth of 5 CHINs being CHIN E, or the fourth of 4 BINs being BIN D, but can you have 5 DINs? anyway tant pis. I see how you avoid the double duty for ROW.
              1. Yes admittedly it’s somewhat abstract/oblique/whimsical/silly (delete according to taste) so the question mark is doing quite a lot of work.
  19. Good lords – so this is 2020, is it? I have to say that, so far, it seems very similar to 2019, at least out here in the fens. In any event, happy New Year to all and one.

    As to the puzzle, it took me 41 minutes, more due to post-new-year-celebration fuzziness than to difficulty. I had qualms over ENID – if we’re going to start numerical substitutions for letters (1- 26 = A – Z), then the whole thing will end up looking like a sudoku ere long. I think we’d be better sticking to Roman numerals; if they’re not enough, we could throw in some of the mediæval variants which expands the repertoire considerably.

    QUICKSLIVERY was, unsurprisingly, my LOI. FLY TIPPING (which is far easier than cow-tipping) also held me up a little.

  20. A DNF for me in 22 something minutes. I had lift instead of loft. I didn’t quite parse hansom cab. LOI was crust once quicksilvery had fallen. Had an error on the QC too. Not a great start to 2020. Now to go and mess up the jumbo as well.

    Edited at 2020-01-01 02:41 pm (UTC)

  21. Bit of a struggle today. Eventually finished in 40.41 only to discover lift at 1 dn was actually loft. A reality check after good times over the past fortnight. COD for me was quicksilvery, took me ages to work it out but once I did the bottom SE corner fell into place. Hope the rest of the year isn’t like this!
  22. A nice puzzle to start the year. More like this, please.

    It gets to NY at 7pm, so I had something useful to do for 45 min before my relatively tame celebration began. I particularly liked Days and Little John.

    My slow-down error was (p)Lank instead of Bony, and I very much had to think twice about each of the abbreviations in the top row (LO, ER, SP). As for being a BJonathan, Lubberly Jubberly (or whatever) was pretty much the only way those letters could be arranged, even without crossers, and I knew the fast bowler. (According to the papers, we should be worried about our present star paceman being fit for this week).

    Thanks pip, setter, and ed. Happy 2020 to all

    Edited at 2020-01-01 04:49 pm (UTC)

  23. SP in sped means latest news all right. I think it would have come originally from being an abbreviation of “Stop Press” in newspapers in the pre-internet age.

    Unusual but of course not wrong in any way to have SPED and SPEC in the same puzzle and quite close together also. Thanks to blogger and setter.

  24. I struggled with this. Two unsolved after 40 mins. Quicksilvery and Loft.

    Coming to this one late, I mistakenly solved tomorrow, i.e. Thursday’s puzzle, before attempting this one. “Tomorrow” went much better for me. 😀

  25. After a hectic New Year celebration in Cumbria, I drove home and found myself ready for bed at 8pm. Now it’s 2:30am on the 2nd Jan and I find myself awake, so have had a cup of hot chocolate and done yesterday’s puzzles. The Concise was a disaster with 2 typos, but the QC and this one were dispatched without ado. Having got LADY GODIVA, I ground to a halt for a while but then things picked up and I found myself submitting at 27:50 with no pink squares. Impressed with myself having seen the SNITCH. Back to bed now methinks. Thanks setter and Pip.

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