Times Cryptic 27602

60 comments on “Times Cryptic 27602”

1. A lot of DNKs: CHARD, COTTAR, ORIENTALS. And although I knew ‘nobble’, it never occurred to me here, as I was stuck on ‘dope’=either info or, well, dope. I wonder if Sotira is ever called Sal; come to think of it, I wonder where Sotira is.
   1. She’s taking a self-imposed rest from the crossworld for a while of indeterminate length.
2. With about 2:19 spent on EVENTIDE.

   Despite lots of unknowns (COTTAR, DISS, crease, CHARD, NOBBLE) and others like TOTALISER which I’ve seen once in a blue moon, I did just fine. Of course, I didn’t understand any of the relevant references for EVENTIDE, but I remember the name of the tune from my days as an organist in an Episcopal church.

   Thanks for the poem!

   Edited at 2020-03-03 02:30 am (UTC)

3. Finally remembered Chard which helped with the vaguely recognised COTTTAR. Diss has appeared before so went in more easily. Thanks for the poem.

   Looking it up, I see that the TOTALISER (or totalisator as it’s known here) was invented by an engineer, the son of the Anglican Archbishop of Christchurch, NZ who was himself “…an amateur mechanic with a reputation for fixing clocks and organs in parishes he visited”. The engineer, (later Sir) George Julius, was a pioneer in Australian science and technology in the first half of the 20th century.

   A few unknowns – ARIAN and ORIENTALS – but overall not too tricky and a pleasant way to spend 46 minutes. EVENTIDE was my last in and favourite.

   1. There is a totaliser machine in the science museum in south kensington. I spent a long time trying to work out how the mechanical mechanism calculated the odds, but failed. It would help to see it running. I can see that fixing clocks and organs would help in coming up with something so complex with gears and chains and dials.
4. I was getting worried, as I was all the way to 25a before there was any ink in my grid, but from there it went in at a steady 40 minute pace.

   I liked that in almost every clue the (well disguised) definition had absolutely nothing to do with the surface of the cryptic, and I particularly liked having the pork pie be Bear Bryant’s (OK, Frank Sinatra’s) hat instead of our usual fib.

   I once spent the night in Diss after an 8+ hour train trip from Liverpool Street. That’s impressive, as given a good pair of boots you could walk from here to there in less time. I was well impressed with Greater Anglia’s ingenuity. Every time the rails appeared open they moved us off the train and into coaches, and every time we cleared whatever traffic jams the coaches had found it was back onto a train. The inn at Diss was good.

   Edited at 2020-03-03 03:10 am (UTC)

5. I had no idea about EVENTIDE but nothing else seemed to fit. I assumed it was a fast (like you stop eating until break-fast). And perhaps the cup final was the EVENT. I didn’t know COTTAR but trusted the wordplay. Didn’t know CHARD despite living in Somerset for many, many years (but in Bath at the other end of the country, and it was Avon for a time anyway). But definitely not 100% sure I was going to get all green but it was fine in the end.
6. ….but since it was wordplay, putting in the obvious answer seemed to work – even with eventide.

   Many town names in the US would be familiar to UK solvers, but not every town name in the UK was brought over – perhaps the settlers were saying to themselves, at least we’re finally rid of that ridiculous Chard and Diss. There is a Chard Pond in Massachusetts.

   My time was 41 minutes, as I was quite tired and not very sharp.

7. …though the two British towns had me worried.

   Like Kevin, I was struck on the “idiot” sense of ”dope” for a long time…

   Nice to learn an utterly new word from decryption: COTTAR (now, to work it into a conversation…)

   The reference to the hymn was clear, though I had never heard of the sports connection.

   Edited at 2020-03-03 05:16 am (UTC)

8. Thanks for the poem. It appears to diss Diss though. It’s a pleasant town.
   1. I never had the impression that B was dissing Diss. Presumably he and Mary had a good reason to go there on their date. At least he didn’t invite bombs to fall on it!

      Edited at 2020-03-03 07:02 am (UTC)

      1. ‘the dimmest place of all’?
         1. I’d imagined he meant dimmest in the sense of most remote.

            Judging by the documentary ‘Something About Diss’ he made in the 1963 he loved the place as in it he describes it as having ‘the sense of a happy, self-contained, friendly community…not too big, not too small, a good train service and no main road. It would be a very nice place to live in.’ The documentary is available on You Tube in two 10-minute part.

            I also found this online:

            Betjeman first came to Diss in 1963 when he was filming a series about English market towns for the BBC. He knew little about the town originally but it soon became one of his favourites.

            The programme, which was first broadcast in 1964, began as follows:

            ‘Ah, Norfolk, Diss. Here’s the station. Where’s Diss? All I know about Diss, up to date, is that it’s near the headquarters of the British Goat Society. That’s all I know at the moment. I must go and find Diss.’

            The town also inspired Betjeman’s well-known poem A Mind’s Journey to Diss which is addressed to Harold Wilson’s wife Mary who grew up in the town. The poem records an imaginary journey from Liverpool Street train station in London – out through the suburbs – and on northwards through the countryside of East Anglia. In classic Betjeman style, it captures many topographical features along the way including church-towers, maltings and quays before finally drawing to a close at Diss station.

            Edited at 2020-03-03 08:17 am (UTC)

            1. That’s interesting. We used to have a company in Diss that handled the dispatch of Bounty Baby Bags to all newborn babies’ mothers. Maybe still does. Bressingham Gardens nursery is also nearby. I wasn’t aware of the Goat Society though.
9. 19:37, with far too long wasted at the end trying to either justify EVENTIDE or come up with something better. In the end I just gave up and bunged it in, and was surprised to find it was right. What a ridiculous clue.
   1. Yes, I’ve popped in this “morning” specifically to lambast this clue as atrocious. Think cluing foreign words with anagrams is bad? Try a cryptic definition that is just obscure general knowledge in an area that many people famously don’t care at all about. The title of the song, maybe, but to have to know its *lyrics*?

      Edited at 2020-03-03 05:40 pm (UTC)

      1. Yes, atrocious. If you do not know the song there is no way to get this. Fast faller? How much time could you waste on this?
         1. Admittedly it’s not the best of clues but to my mind it made a welcome change from all those obscure Greek references that few other than dedicated classicists know nor care about, and we get those several times a week normally. I enjoyed for once knowing something that had some of our top solvers baffled, and count it as a double whammy because of its connection with football, a subject on which everybody usually knows more than me.
10. I think we should follow Merriam Webster at 13ac, ridiculous indeed!

    FOI 2dn AFTERNOON

    LOI 20dn GRATIS

    COD 8dn EVENTIDE

    WOD 1dn COTTAR which I knew and was my SOI

    Is ‘Abide With Me’ still a feature? I bet the Bolton Wanderer knows all the words.

    1. Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
       1. Or at the moment “where, Bolton, thy victory ?”

          I never dreamed that a goalless draw at home to Accrington Stanley would ever be seen as a half-decent result.

          1. The first game my Dad saw was Bolton 1 Accrington 0 in the Cup, January 1926. We won the Cup that year.
11. Not to Englishmen from Newcastle to Portsmouth, via West Ham and West Bromwich.

    Edited at 2020-03-03 07:57 am (UTC)

12. Like others, I spent considerable time at the end trying to justify EVENTIDE. Was the final an EVENT? Was the final tied, and this a homonym for TIDE? But no, and although I knew Abide With Me was sung at cup finals I had no idea of the words. Under the circumstances I was pleasantly surprised to finish with all correct.

    I had also held myself up for some time by thinking of CIA instead of CID thus trying to come up with something Greek to fit A_R_C.

13. 38 minutes of pretty hard graft. LOI was GRATIS as I’d put in Platonism for PLATONIST without checking. MINISTERIALLY took some unscrambling but COD has to go to EVENTIDE, the cup final hymn and the man in the white suit, first seen by me in 1953. The memory still brings tears to my eyes as I join in with the singing each year. I needed all crossers for DETENTE. I didn’t know the musical term in LAMPOON but I guessed it must be something like that. I enjoyed this.Thank you Jack and setter.
14. …and so less than 2 x Verlaines.
    I was going to ask how Sir John qualified as a Poet Laureate on the basis of the Diss poem but after reading it a few times it has grown on me. As Jack says, at least he didn’t invite bombs to fall on it.

    I was going to ask if Abide With Me was still sung at FA Cup Finals, but obviously it is. In the Cotswolds there is a River EVENLODE. Wonder if they are relates?

    1. Abide with me is still very much sung at the Rugby League Challenge Cup final, a summer excursion to Wembley for fans of the 13-a-side game.

       Cedric

       Edited at 2020-03-03 05:22 pm (UTC)

15. 17:14. DNK COTTAR or ORIENTALS but the wordplay was clear enough. No problem with the placenames – I have a sister who lives near Chard and I will be walking around Hoxne near Diss later this morning. It has a pleasant mere in the centre of the town. I’ve stopped there a few times on the way to or from Norwich. I liked the pork pie hat and the reference to Abide with me.
16. 25 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    I don’t recall seeing ‘fairly quiet’=MP before.
    I knew Abide with Me, but thought it harsh on those who might not.
    Mostly I liked the big inmate getting free and the Pork Pie hat – I used to have one during my Specials phase.
    Jack – thanks for the poem. Excellent.
    1. Betjeman himself sported pork-pie hats on occasion and wore them quite often in his travel documentaries.
17. That was all fine and dandy up until the justification of Eventide – could it be a (very short) fast? What is a faller anyway? I did know they sang the hymn before (?) the Cup Final but that’s not an event I’ve watched since West Ham last won in 1980 and I didn’t know the words. The only other DNK was the oriental cat breed but that was easy enough with the wordplay. Chard (along with Crewkerne and Yeovil) will be familiar to anyone from the home counties going on interminable car rides to the west country in the days before bypasses, and Diss to anyone from the same era when Betjeman was all over the airwaves. Thank you setter for reminding me how grateful I am that he has gone out of fashion. A shade under 10 mins, so keeping ahead of the snitch.
18. A fun puzzle and made steady progress finishing in 13 .10. Have to confess to looking up cottar for confirmation but the cluing suggested that was the only solution. Platonist was my LOI , nearly stumped by 13 across but only because it’s always been a challenge to spell it right!
19. A very broad test of what constitutes “general” knowledge: I knew all about the Cup final hymn, even though the big game is not quite such an event as it used to be (small boys in the park…jumpers for goalposts…isn’t it?) and the heretics, but had to trust the wordplay to get to the peasant and the cats. Diss more familiar to me than Chard, but everything fell into place satisfactorily.
20. Must have been on wavelength. No idea why I knew about Abide With Me and football but I knew the dreary hymn well enough from my days in the British gulag. Also knew CHARD from boarding school days because there used to be a whole cluster of those institutions in Dorset and Somerset which entailed interminable drives. COTTAR couldn’t be anything else and I just about remember it from something of Walter Scott (probably read under protest). Took me a bit of thought to see mezzo piano in 19d and I didn’t equate a LOON with a twerp but it was clear enough. Some good stuff here. 12.56
21. Old Scotia’s grandeur springs.

    1d therefore a write-in for anyone with a passing knowledge of Burns. Doric is also a byword for the Scots language, esp. in Aberdeenshire.

    Fleeting appearances by Steinbeck and Mingus, as well Betjeman.

    We don’t sing Abide With Me at Scottish Cup Finals. On the rare occasions these days when Rangers are playing, the songs are mostly about hating Catholics and Irish people.

22. ….CHARMED by this puzzle. I was really worried when my FOI was the penultimate across clue, but I then gathered pace to finish within seconds of Verlaine according to the leaderboard.

    Biffed COTTAR and ORIENTALS, but the surfaces were friendly enough.

    Initially trying to dispose of the I in Diss wasn’t a good idea.

    FOI CANNERY
    LOI COTTAR
    COD EVENTIDE
    TIME 9:51

23. 17:56. No real problems with the GK (although COTTAR and the cats were unknown) as I’m familiar enough with the towns (despite never having been to either) and the Cup Final hymn (despite never having been to one).

    I did, however, make things tricky for myself by getting in a literal jumble with the spelling of OUTMANOEUVRED and putting an M on the end of PLATONIST.

24. Despite regularly visiting my daughter in Cheddar, I was unaware of Chard, but it seemed likely from the wordplay, when Taunton didn’t fit. AGREE was my FOI and COTTAR followed from wordplay. I had heard of something similar in the church vestment department, but that turns out to be a Cotta, a form of surplice. GRATIS took a while to see. EVENTIDE was my LOI on a wing and a prayer, and I was relieved to see no pink squares. The rest of the puzzle seemed to be an exercise in following the assembly instructions, which I quite enjoyed. 22:11. Thanks setter and Jack.
25. Fairly plain sailing – guessed COTTAR from checkers, EVENTIDE also – though I have been to a Cip Final (Manure vs the almighty Palace 2016) I’ve never known all of the words.

    PLATONIST held me up the longest – I still have a problem spotting fashion = TON so guesswork from checkers.

    1. Ton = fashion confused me too. Presume it is French? Cue my usual problem of not knowing enough French ….

       Cedric

       1. Yes, TON was originally French but it’s now an English word in its own right so that it doesn’t need ‘French’ in the PLATONIST clue to validate it. ‘French’ is there to clue ‘the = LA’.
26. Zipped through this, not understanding several clues till afterwards. Eventide went in easily enough, but I had no inkling of the football connection – or the hymn for that matter. Chard is normally Swiss veg in crossword land.
    1. I was about to say I thought Chard was in Switzerland, but you beat me to it!
       1. Oddly, not four minutes after reading your post I came across a Lieutenant Chard in an article on the film Zulu. Baader-Meinhof at work.
27. Probably 5 minutes of that spent trying to justify EVENTIDE. I know of the hymn (and must, I suppose, have sung it on occasion) but I think expecting people to know the words (even of the first line) is a stretch. Otherwise I was pleased with COTTAR as a FOI and my generally steady progress.
    1. expecting people to know the words (even of the first line) is a stretch.

       Perhaps, but when I started writing the blog I thought solvers were expected to know the name of the tune to which the hymn is sung (also EVENTIDE), a piece of arcane knowledge that I just happened to have. It was only later that I looked up the words and realised their significance, and I thought, well that’s okay then, presumably people will know the words they are supposed to be singing.

       Edited at 2020-03-03 02:22 pm (UTC)

28. 20.46. A nice puzzle, steadily solved although I found it hard to get started. FOI 13ac. LOI 8dn. I didn’t get the connection to Abide with me (not that it would have helped) but didn’t waste too much time on it, just bunged it in because it fit the checkers and I had a vague sense that it was a likely looking candidate for the solution. I knew the salad leaf but not the Somerset town. I’ve seen the peasant at 1dn before too. Cobbling Platonist and dissipate together took a bit of head scratching but everything else seemed to fall into place ok.
29. Another leisurely solve, slowed by falling for most, if not all, of the setter’s clever switching of definition and wordplay. I looked for the heretic who started with a European, the golf feature that was a match with the end taken off, all that sort of thing.
    I am indebted to my History teacher for knowing how to spell MANOEUVRE: I had spelled it correctly in an essay, but he covered it with red ink and four different attempts at the “correct” spelling. Happy days.
    Great poetry in today’s edition: I had forgotten (or never knew) that Betjemen had a thing for that particular Mary Wilson. Did Harold know, I wonder?
    Does anyone know why Eventide was chosen as the pre-Final singalong? It seems inviolably embedded now, but it’s hard to find much relevance to a sporting contest in its pondering on human transience. Gets chosen for a lot of funerals, mind.
30. Sort of straightforward in a vaguely meandering way. At least there were no answers lurking in the back of my mind, everything was known, except for the meaning of COTTAR. I felt sorry for overseas solvers here, at least 3 very UK centric clues.
    1. I suppose I count as an overseas solver now… I certainly felt sorry for me, after Googling EVENTIDE!
31. 32 min, but after biffing SMARTLY (I don’t remember why) at 18d, saw what was needed when I got 27a, but forgot to go back to change the M. LOI GRATIS, as having -ISM at 26a had put me on the wrong foot.
32. I struggled with this one, but then it was done with occasional interruptions during lunchtime at work. Add me to the long list of people who only put EVENTIDE in because it fit… I’d say about 50 minutes all told, with quite a few missteps along the way…
33. Unless I’ve missed a previous mention, I seem to be the first to point out that Chard should be world famous.(We just don’t like blowing our own trumpets.)It was in Chard, 55 years before Orville and Wilbur Wright, that the first successful powered flight took place. Jeffrey
34. I finished in a normal time despite the obscurities (to me) around DISS, CHARD and COTTAR. But the most obscure thing today was how UK spelling navigates OUTMANOEUVRED. What a pile of letters. And I’d no idea of what was going on at EVENTIDE except that it fit. The explanation staggers me. Without the checking letters I had no chance. Regards.
35. I bunged in Eventide as my last one in. Now I discover that this is a straight lift from Abide With Me, I feel I should have known it. But it reminded me that when I was a boy (many many years ago!) I watched over my father’s shoulder as he attempted the Times Crossword every night. Very often the clues were quotes from the Bible or Shakespeare, with blanks to be completed. I wonder how we would fare with those clues nowadays?
36. of this. As a learner I was pleased with myself for working out COTTAR as a word I had never heard of. I was on the money with TOTALISER which, I believe, is abbreviated to TOTE at the races. I didn’t get GRATIS partly because as someone else mentioned I had put PLATONISM. Despite knowing virtually nothing about football I knew abide with me and the tune EVENTIDE. Thank you to the someone who has mentioned that OR is MEN because of other ranks _ been trying to work that out for a while! I am also learning to get my head around the fact that a cryptic crossword definition may seem a bit far from my understanding of a words meaning – eg INCLEMENT as bitter! Still enjoying this learning process which is what it is all about. Thanks everyone.
    1. Great to have you aboard, Rowena. Well done! It’s useful to have a good dictionary to hand for the sometimes slightly off-beat definitions. Collins and the Oxford (aka Lexico) are the best for the Times crosswords, with Chambers in reserve. All are available on-line too.
37. We’ve only ever tried a few of the 15×15 puzzles and just wanted to shout out that we managed to complete 80% of this particular one. This will encourage us to try again….
    1. Congrats on your achievement. Looking forward to hearing more from you…
       1. 👍

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