Time: 34:41
Music: Sonny Clark, The Blue Note Years
This should have been rather easy, but after racing through about two-thirds I became most thoroughly stuck, and could just not see some very simple clues. I had to crack down on myself, and systematically use all my cryptic knowledge on clue after clue, which does take a while compared to the rapid biffing of obvious answers. I was particularly annoyed at outline and formally, which should be write-ins.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Expert left out of deception (4) |
| BUFF – B[l]UFF. I could not get blind out of my mind, but a bind is not an expert. | |
| 3 | Brochure mistakenly supports involving European Commission (10) |
| PROSPECTUS – Anagram of SUPPORTS around E.C. | |
| 9 | A blow if French business has to absorb most of shock (7) |
| SIROCCO – SI(ROC[k])CO. | |
| 11 | Divulged policy’s main points (7) |
| OUTLINE – OUT + LINE. I felt sure the points were going to be N and E, which made solving this one difficult. | |
| 12 | Head of brotherhood drops rash idea (9) |
| BRAINWAVE – B[rotherhood] + RAIN + WAVE, as in a rash/wave of strange events. | |
| 13 | When caught, clamour for PM (5) |
| BLAIR – Sounds like BLARE. | |
| 14 | Romantic song sequence enthralling new spouse? (4,3,5) |
| BALL AND CHAIN – BALLA(N)D CHAIN. | |
| 18 | Might it indicate a revealing exchange? (5-2-5) |
| HEART-TO-HEART – Reverse cryptic – the heart of heart is A. | |
| 21 | Nothing dividing city assembly (5) |
| AGORA – AG(O)RA. I nearly put ALOTA, but decided to try again. | |
| 22 | New realities for Hebrew (9) |
| ISRAELITE – Anagram of REALITIES, a chestnut. | |
| 24 | Protesting Republican in a bad way (7) |
| RAILING – R + AILING. | |
| 25 | State school accepting society backing ChatGPT among others (7) |
| ESTONIA – E(S)TON + AI backwards. | |
| 26 | Prominent figures rattled Mailer in US (10) |
| LUMINARIES – Anagram of MAILER IN US. | |
| 27 | Assistant’s final check (4) |
| MATE – Double definition, referring to chess. | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | President’s youngest child, cute little creature (8) |
| BUSHBABY – BUSH BABY, another chestnut, which I didn’t see this time. | |
| 2 | Pupils team up in a methodical way (8) |
| FORMALLY – FORM + ALLY. | |
| 4 | Wine and port meets with Hamburg sommelier’s approval (5) |
| RIOJA – RIO + JA. | |
| 5 | Tweeter’s mostly drunken gossip (9) |
| STONECHAT – STONE[d] CHAT. My LOI, where I had to consider the possibilities of the literal a bit more broadly. | |
| 6 | Formation of the ruling class (13) |
| ESTABLISHMENT – Double definition, a very easy one. | |
| 7 | Bishop intervening in case concerning family (6) |
| TRIBAL – TRI(B)AL. | |
| 8 | Perhaps Pedro Ximénez reluctant to welcome European bishop (6) |
| SHERRY – SH(E,RR)Y. | |
| 10 | Joining European race with Italian chap in the lead (13) |
| CONCATENATION – E NATION following CON, CAT. | |
| 15 | Gun going astray in revolutionary socialist’s possession (9) |
| DERRINGER – D(ERRING)ER, red inverted in a down clue. | |
| 16 | Chained off area in Mexican plantation (8) |
| HACIENDA – Anagram of CHAINED + A. | |
| 17 | Usher periodically wangles cheap accommodation (8) |
| STEERAGE – STEER + [w]A[n]G[l]E[s]. | |
| 19 | Part of rifle butt (6) |
| BARREL – Double definition. | |
| 20 | On which one may speak of dishonour, quietly at first (6) |
| PODIUM – P + ODIUM. | |
| 23 | Always around, guarding English official from past (5) |
| REEVE – EV(E)ER upside down. | |
30 minutes, and just what I expect of a Monday puzzle – unlike last Monday’s offering. I missed the parsing of HEART TO HEART, but that was all. HACIENDA courtesy Pat Boone, 1962: “It was a moonlit night in old Mexico / I walked alone between some old adobe haciendas…”.
Beaten by PROSPECTUS and MATE I’m afraid, so a DNF in about 30. No other particular probs though I never properly parsed SIROCCO and really doubted, with BRAINWAVE, whether anyone would try equating RASH and WAVE in that sense…but they did. Thanks V.
From Billy (1 thru 7):
Camping out all night on the veranda
Dealing the cards ’til dawn in the HACIENDA
Up to Boot Hill they’d like to send ya
Billy, don’t you turn your back on me
I was expecting Abandoned Love
I had the same experience as vinyl
A deceptive puzzle
Buff and Mate took a while to click into place
Straightforward today, though a little held up by SIROCCO (kept thinking the French company would be SA or SARL) and AGORA, through failing to equate marketplace and assembly..
One slight MER for me: the one thing you can’t really call a stonechat is a “tweeter”. The noise it makes actually sounds like two stones being banged together – hence its name. They’re lovely birds though.
A steady solve, slow in the middle until CONCATENATION hit me. LOI MATE. COD to BALL AND CHAIN. Thank you V and setter.
28:17, all green. Only aid was to check the NHO STONECHAT. There are hundreds of words for drunken, and STONED now usually means high on drugs. SOUSECHAT would work.
Didn’t see the reverse cryptic, surely “heart of”, not “heart to”.
LOI MATE which was a slow trawl, since PAGE=assistant worked for the first part.
Didn’t parse CONCAT, cat=chat is surely dated. I was looking for Italian mens names, or famous Italians. Good misdirection. I know Concatenation from programming(@CONCAT in excel) , Latin (catena=chain), and maths (catenary, curve formed by a hanging chain)
COD SIROCCO
CON = Italian for ‘with’. CAT = CHAP
Yep, as a Unix dude, I’m used to ‘cat’ as the concatenation command
awk for AUK has caught me out a couple of times in previous puzzles.
🙂
Well, all going fine until the last and staring at CON-A-ENATION for ages before the penny dropped and I missed the sublety of HEART-TO-HEART, great clue.
AGORA is such a crossword land word, no?
I liked BUSHBABY, sweet.
Thanks V and setter.
AGORA brings back painful memories of my short abortive attempt to learn Greek at school 65 years ago. A sentence we had to translate into Greek was ‘The Persians have chased the slaves out of the market place’, in which AGORA had a significant role. Soon afterwards I switched to German, which has turned out to be useful for 4D!
20 minutes or so.
– Was glad that the cluing for SIROCCO stopped me putting in a C after the S (a Scirocco is a VW)
– Never parsed HEART-TO-HEART
– Thought of CONCATENATION early on, but hesitated as I didn’t initially see that ‘Italian’ and ‘chap’ needed to be separated
– Tried to fit an anagram of ‘going’ into 15d before rethinking to get DERRINGER
Thanks vinyl and setter.
FOI Tribal
LOI Concatenation
COD Hacienda
I coveted the VW Scirocco for years. Then when I finally got to drive one I found I didn’t fit in it! Too small..
I coveted one too, had a new black one earmarked as my company car when it arrived at Dublin docks in about 1980. But didn’t keep it for long when babies arrived and we needed more space. I changed to an Audi 100 which was so big I could barely reach the pedals.
Found myself with an audi 200 in the mid 80s. Looking for a 2nd car runaround mainly for my wife and we went to an auction. We got split up and when I saw her and my baby son I waved at her. Turned out my wave was the only bid for a huge audi 200. My wife refused to drive it and took my new company car.. But the audi was a great car and I sold it for a good profit a few years later!
(Edit… tbf the auctioneer accepted it wasn’t a proper bid but it was such a nice car I took it, though I had to be shown how to drive an automatic)
Great story! It sounds like a plot line in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em!
I had a black 1.8l VW Scirocco in the 90s, great car with serious acceleration. Later on, I considered buying a very attractive red model that a friend was selling, but lack of internal space and young family doesn’t mix.
10:58. Good one, pretty biff-proof as noted by our blogger. It took me a while to see the CAT in 10dn, and the WAVE in 12ac.
22:24. Kicking myself a little too at a missed opportunity, LOI MATE adding another 2 mins to the 2 for BARREL.
I did rather alot of biffing: PROSPECTUS reverse-engineered but CONCAT was hit and hope and the clever H2H passed me by.
I’m not a birder but can remember which I have seen and where and agree with Deezzaa, crosswordland would probably clue Crow as “singer”.
Nice Monday, thanks Vinyl and setter.
Sheryl?
🙂
Good spot, I should have used raven. “If it makes you happy” is a favourite of mine yet that never occurred to me. It has now, thank you.
DNF in just under 20 mins. I spent a few minutes searching for my MATE before TAME-ly giving in and guessing wrong.
CODs: MATE and HEART-TO-HEART
Thanks to vinyl and our setter.
Another self-flagellator here: 28:16, almost 15 minutes of which spent on four clues: BUFF, FORMALLY, HACIENDA and MATE. Therefore a frustrating time for what didn’t seem like a particularly difficult puzzle – as rv1 says, a missed opportunity.
None of those clues are particularly difficult, but for whatever reason they took me an absolute age to see.
A four letter -A-E is always difficult, but it was a tough, and really lovely, clue.
I enjoyed it very much though. No complaints whatsoever about the puzzle.
That was an enjoyable crossword. From FORMALLY to SHERRY in 14:59. Liked BALL AND CHAIN. Didn’t parse HEART TO HEART. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
Like several others I missed the subtleties of HEART-TO-HEART, which I thought was a feeble CD, so feeble in fact that I wondered where there was anything misleading and looked here for enlightenment. Otherwise all very pleasant, although for no good reason MATE seemed slightly out. Mondayish for once.
12.41, fortunately hitting on MATE before trawling through the 160 possibilities in Electric Chambers. Not quite biffing, but the cleverness of H2H passed me by, and I like a reversed cryptic. The rest I more or less used the wordplay, sometimes as with BLAIR and CONCATINATION in order to check and avoid pink squares.
HACIENDA da nooze.
In which case you’re lucky it crossed with 18a!
Pleasant Monday affair, done in about 20 minutes while waiting for a tyre to be changed, after pothole damage. LOI was BRAINWAVE as was looking for a “rash idea” and didn’t see how rash = wave. Fair enough though. The ball and chain was good.
16:40 – fairly smooth and straightforward though MATE held me up for a while at the end
48 minutes. Might have been quicker if I’d known a HACIENDA is more than just a farmhouse and if I’d seen the chess sense of ‘check’ for my LOI MATE a bit earlier. I liked the reverse cryptic trick in HEART-TO-HEART.
14:58. Fully six minutes trying to work out MATE. Glad I discarded a few plausible alternatives but it really shouldn’t have taken that long. Good stuff.
17:57
Not too many issues with this quick solve though did take a while to get my first across in (ISRAELITE). Missed the trick with HEART TO HEART and took my time over the BARREL/AGORA crossing. I enjoyed BALL AND CHAIN and shrugged over WAVE=rash.
Thanks V and setter
10’25”, no issues. MATE LOI.
Thanks vinyl and setter.
About 35′ on a flight to Rome. Should have kept it instead for the 70′ waiting in the passport queue as the newish EU automated entry system didn’t allow anyone to enter…
Straightforward enough except for the biff about the sherry and the alphabet trawl for _a_e where like others I was sure there was a PA somewhere until the PDM.
Thanks Vinyl and setter
I seem to have had a quite different solving experience to most here, having no problem with the bird, MATE, BUFF, BRAINWAVE etc but taking far too long over the ‘chestnut’ ESTABLISHMENT and then being left with blank chunks in the NE and SW of the grid that I knew I could solve if I got just one clue in each area. And so it proved. SHERRY was particularly annoying since I assumed that was the answer, but was stubbornly looking for EB to insert. I failed to parse BALL AND CHAIN or HEART-TO-HEART, since the answers were obvious and I wanted to finish before a tech check, pre-TEAMS meeting.
For me, a perfectly judged Monday puzzle: 19 mins. Apart from being slightly dubious about ‘rash’ = WAVE (which I justified to myself as Blogger has), no problems. I’ve not forgotten CONCATENATION from several decades ago when I learned that the play Romeo and Juliet had been unromantically described as ‘a concatenation of improbable events, coincidences and hasty decisions’ – I have very rarely met the word since. Thank you, Blogger, for explaining 18A and 25A. First one in was MATE and last SHERRY. Favourite clue: to BARREL. Thank you to Setter and Blogger.
Always the short clues which do for me. For 27a there must be hundreds of words which fit *A*E but I chose the wrong one.
Am I the only one who did not know pedro ximenez was a sherry grape? I struggled with that until I had all the checkers then saw the wordplay and put it in with a shrug. That delayed me for a good 5 minutes at the end so I struggled home in nearly 30 mins.
Very enjoyable puzzle. Thx v and setter
If it’s any consolation I assumed he was a Mexican politician.
12:39. I spelt the answer to 9A SIRROCO initially which made 10D impossible until I spotted the error. HEART-TO-HEART went in unparsed. Good clue, now it’s been explained! Thanks Vinyl and setter.
Fell at the final hurdle, pitting in a PAGE instead of MATE (which I had considered).
Got AGORA from wordplay (nHO), and CONCATENATION from previous crosswords.
A nice puzzle. Liked
The HACIENDA clue.
Thanks Vinyl and Setter.
34:21 but really should have done better. About 3/4s in in 15 minutes but was missing the obvious with a handful of clues dispersed round the grid. In hindsight they weren’t particularly more difficult than the others.
COD BALL AND CHAIN
Thanks blogger and setter
Looks like I’m the only one who found this VASTLY harder than an average Monday and very much a DNF. Easier fare and less dodgy synonyms on Monday in the future please! NHO the sherry either btw
I would recommend the Pedro Ximénez sherry with Christmas pudding. Lovely rich stuff
Took me ages to get going and seemed like harder work than usual for a Monday. NHO my POI STONECHAT and nearly gave up before seeing LOI MATE. In the end I’m glad I persevered.
A very slow start, even by my standards, before I eventually managed to tune into the setter’s wavelength. Poi Mate needed an alpha-trawl, and I had to write out *o*i*m horizontally before Podium jumped out. I also missed the parsing of Heart to Heart, but at least Agora was ready and waiting this time. Invariant
This one required a bevy of small words from various European languages. Not an easy solve for me, but a pleasurable puzzle.
22:47. Nice start to the week. some funky vocab but I’d seen DERRINGER here before I think. thanks both!
I’m surprised to see many struggled with MATE, nice little clue but I thought chess straight away. I however struggled with both AGORA and REEVE.
STONECHAT is hard enough to get without dubious drunk synonym.
other than that I thought it was good fun.
40 minutes. I also couldn’t quite understand Rash = Wave.