Times Cryptic 29216

74 comments on “Times Cryptic 29216”

1. Clueless! And it isn’t me. The Times has chosen to only provide seven down clues in the print-out version today, so solving on paper was made very hard. Checked all including the snitch link and crossword club pdf, no joy.
   Bit of a hassle having to get the missing clues from the phone and it made it very slow. But, some clever clues today and some I had to look up: (C)HENNA(I), DEHORNS, thrown by ‘polls’. Really liked GAFFAWING and DAY RETURN.
   Thanks Jack.

2. When I went to print the puzzle more than half the down clues were missing. I had to print and use the clues on a separate page with quite different text size and clue spacing. Spending a lot of time simply getting ready and this rattled my whole mood for solving.
   FOI DINNER SET with HIGH TEA following. A few regulars EBONY, CASHMERE, SCHISM could be written in with just the definition. held up a bit by TIME WAS and got MALACHITE once I had the M.
   Thanks Jack.

3. 14:20, so I’m with you on this taking longer than usual. I had a lot of half-answers in from my first scan of the grid… something-EYED, something-WAS, something-TEA, eventually managed to put it all together, but MUTANT was completely from wordplay.
   I was trying to make something out of EAT being an anagram of TEA to do a sort of reverse engineered clue out of HIGH TEA.

   1. Re HIGH TEA: That’s the thing about CDs, isn’t it… We cryptologists are always looking for something more.

      1. Being CD resistant (and as a CD this one is only barely C) I preferred to see this a reverse cryptic, despite the S on the end of EAT. I gave the setter the benefit of the doubt and decided EATS was a version of EAT IS.

         1. Per my comment later, I thought HIGH TEA was barely cryptic but then wondered if its a reference to High Noon, ie something to eat after high (after-noon). Or maybe not…

            1. Looked up high tea in (British) dictionaries a few years ago after another crossword, and (without revisiting) the main concepts seemed to be: standing up to eat, tall *high* bench not a table, not a real meal but did service as one, and Yorkshire. My memory is going, so don’t count on any accuracy.
               As non-UK I’d always associated high tea with e.g. The Ritz – Sunday best clothing, extremely posh, delicate buns and cakes and tea. Or the local version – went to Raffles once, and it included dim sum / dumplings.

         2. I think you are correct, and the clue probably got garbled in the editing and transcription. The rest of the puzzle is high quality, and with the removal of one letter, this clue would be high quality too.

4. I, too was annoyed by the printout problem, and decided to solve online for the first time in months. I think this slowed me down a little, but I sped up when resuming after a phone call. I appreciated the obscure literal of sport, and again polls. This is misdirection at its finest. I did have to biff anguished, an obvious biff.

   Time: 27:23

   1. Those clues were missing when I looked at the play-online page too!

      1. They are there to play on line at the Crossword Club but disappear when you try to print from there.

         1. Weird. I didn’t see them there at all.
            This has happened at least once before.

5. When I went to find the missing Down clues at the Play link, they were missing there too.
   How does this even happen?
   I used to produce the web version (print too!) of The Nation’s cryptic, and I have no idea how this could happen!
   I had to go to the E-PAPER, find the crossword there, do a screenshot of the Down clues and print it out.
   Not a hard puzzle, but enjoyable enough.
   POI TIME WAS, LOI HENNA.
   I never knew AMONTILLADO is a sherry, only that there is a cask of it in an eponymous Edgar Allan Poe story.
   The clue for EBONY is brilliantly deceptive, my COD.

6. It turns out those down clues are quite useful after all…

   After being put off by the lack of clues (Seriously? How could this happen?) I went to the club site but wasn’t really in the mood. I toughed this out for about half an hour but couldn’t get MALACHITE so threw in the towel. An ordinary day all round but thanks Jack for hanging in there.

   From Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie:
   …and your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
   Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
   And your sky cries water and your drain pipe’s a-pouring
   And the lightning’s a-flashing and the thunder’s a-crashing
   And the windows are rattling and breaking and the roof tops a-shaking
   And your whole world’s a-slamming and banging
   And your minutes of sun turn to hours of STORM
   And to yourself you sometimes say
   I never knew it was gonna be this way
   Why didn’t they tell me the day I was born?

   1. What, not “Shelter From the STORM”?
      Too obvious, right?
      Liner notes are a rather deep cut.
      Shows you deserve a degree in Dylanology.

      1. I know it through the recording on the must-have first Bootleg collection. ‘Shelter’ has had a go a few times and I like to dig out something from left-field from time to time. I get the feeling a lot of Dylanologists are weird obsessives but I’d love to go to the Tulsa museum one day. (At the moment we’re all too scared to go to the US, visitors get arbitrarily detained or denied entry and the border goons go through phones and laptops for evidence of undesirability…)

         1. Oh, right. I have that record too. I wouldn’t mind going to the museum. The book came into the office and a colleague grabbed it, but a year later I pointed out that she hadn’t even removed the shrink wrap yet and she gave it to me.

            (Regarding your parenthetical, I can assure you that a growing majority of my compatriots are opposed to all that. It may come to a general strike.)

            1. Is there a book Guy? I wasn’t aware (honorary Dylanologist degree just got withdrawn). Good luck with the strike, let me know when it’s safe to travel. The other week somebody was denied entry because they flew from Sydney to Hong Kong and then to LA, and this was deemed suspicious. Apparently the US tourism industry is tanking, dunno why…

               1. Oddly, the Wikipedia entry for the book doesn’t mention the connection with the Tulsa institution.
                  https://bobdylancenter.com/visit/exhibits/mixingupthemedicine/

         2. It’s not completely new. I live in Perth, my parents in Melbourne. In 2007 my dad died, so I flew to Melbourne and stayed a couple of months. Wanted to go to US for work, so got a visa from Melbourne consulate and flew to US. They turned me around and put me on the next plane back: highly suspicious that I’d got a visa from elsewhere than the Perth consulate. To be fair that was only a few years after Dick Cheney had started Homeland Security, who manned the borders – State Department handed out visas, as I found out when I asked Homeland Security to look up my visa application and they admitted they had no access. In the early days Homeland Security needed lots of people in a very short time, so half were good, and half were bad, those that wanted to wear uniforms and carry guns and have power, but failed shopping mall security guard school.

7. This felt like a rather messy solve, with unknown definitions for “poll” and “sport” + a few incompletely parsed – relieved to get there with completion sequence GUFFAWING – ANGUISHED – MUTANT in 40:25.

8. 14:46. Easy in some parts – HIGH TEA seemed barely cryptic – and tough in others – particularly for me my LOI MALACHITE. It took me a long time to recognise “charged” as a containment indicator and I found it hard to resist semi-biffing MALECHITE given I’d got the MALE part.

   HENNA came fairly quickly – Chennai is very familiar from the excellent local restaurant Chennai Express – but I couldn’t have told you it was the new name for Madras.

9. This was hard going. Nho the African place so ANGUISHED LOI unparsed. MUTANT dimly recalled from a past AZED. Spent much time on GRAVITATION – how on earth is IT new? Ninja turtled MALACHITE assuming it was connected to the last book of the Hebrew Bible (but it isn’t). Rather liked TIME WAS.

   27’48” thanks jack and setter.

10. 19:59* with a silly typo (TENOR CLFF)

    In my defence E and F do look quite similar.

    Otherwise I made slow going in the early stages before hitting my stride. TIME WAS and MALACHITE took a while to tease out, with MUTANT my last in. A few unknown bits and pieces along the way but I thought it all fairly clued so no complaints.

    Thanks to both.

11. 13:46. I stopped the clock when I got to 7D on my paper version and sought the crossword in the ePaper which I zoomed in on to get the remaining clues before restarting. I was mystified on solving by DEHORNS and MUTANT, but found the required meanings in the dictionary post-solve. I liked the wife/husband device and the surface for DAY RETURN, my COD. Thank-you Jackkt and setter.

12. Also had the down clue problem.

    This was at the upper end of my solving times but like the blogger can’t quite put my finger on why.

    The anagrams took an age to go in. I didn’t know poll in that context but that’s not really an excuse for a short anagram where I have the first letter.

    HENNA was last one in for an of course moment. A lot of ones I thought I should have got quicker but reading the other comments maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

    Favourite today: ESTIMATE

    Thanks for the blog it got a good reading today with a few partial parses and plenty of hoping that x can mean y in some context.

13. 30:57
    Mutant went in with a shrug. Otherwise, no dramas.
    Thanks, jack.

14. UPDATE @ 09:45.
    THE PROBLEM ON THE TIMES SITE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN RESOLVED.

    [I haven’t checked every platform]

    I had intended to ask in my intro if anyone else is having problems accessing Collins dictionary on line? This started yesterday and it appears to be an incompatibility with Chrome. It opens but doesn’t display in a frame, just as a list of file headings. It seems to think I am running an adblocker, which I am not, so I can’t turn it off as directed. It still works properly in Firefox where I am running an adblocker!

    1. From: Mick Hodgkin (Times Puzzles Editor) Tue 29 Apr 2025 09:21:25 AM

       Morning all. We had two (separate?) problems today. The puzzle has been republished, restoring the down clues in the web version and for printing – Classic will also recover but it will take longer as the edition needs to be republished. There is a separate problem affecting the Live App which we are working on now. Apologies.

       1. I found the Cryptic on my iPhone by choosing one of the options offered when I clicked on the Concise. What a mess!

          1. Thanks so much. Ours are Androids but your tip has worked. Still no direct link to Cryptic.

15. Another typing error otherwise completed in 26 minutes!
    Struggled with MALACHITE but it was somewhere in my memory, also HENNA and biffed ANGUISHED.
    Hard but fair.
    No problem with display, accessed via T live portal.
    Thanks to setter and jackkt.

16. 29.34 with a typo

    Flailed around on this having no idea of the meaning of POLL or MUTANT (which went in with a mighty shrug) and vainly trying to think of the right capital (a waste of time obvs). They were right but misspelt the Director. Not a great effort but liked ONE-EYED

    Thanks setter/Jackkt

17. 13:07. A little tricky. DNK this meaning of ‘sport’, of course, and don’t remember coming across BANGUI before. I probably have because one of my nephews used to know all the capitals (he could also identify all the flags) of all the countries in the world, and we used to test him on the obscure ones. I don’t think I ever caught him out.
    ‘New’ in 7dn is just wrong, IMO. ‘Processing data’ is a phrase that is only – and as far as I’m aware has only ever been – used in the context of computers, so there is no ‘old’ way of doing it that doesn’t involve IT. Using a slide rule is not ‘processing data’.

18. 14:32 and actually on the leaderboard for once thanks to the problems on the ipad app. One of those that looked tricky for quite some time and then came together in a rush at the end.

19. 28:59. COD Day Return.

20. On the subject of glitching Times IT, the word puzzles in the iPad app (quintagrams, codewords etc, also true for sudokus although I don’t do those) all stopped working for me a few weeks ago. I wrote to them explaining the problem in some detail and their response was to send me a complex set of instructions and a lengthy questionnaire that I was supposed to fill in and send back to them.
    Needless to say I just stopped doing the puzzles.

21. The reason why I took 27 minutes is plain enough: I couldn’t remember what Madras had been rehindued (and let’s face it, Chennai doesn’t seem to have any connection) and HENNA is not the most obvious colour. [B]ANGUI is an easy nul points in Pointless. I worked out that DRY NATURE was a perfectly possible antique expression for (edible) fare. MUTANT is right at the bottom of Chambers list of possibilities for sport, but nothing else could be forged. The list of letter sounds is long, and one is more often me than YOU. I worked hard to turn HIGH TEA into a cryptic clue (see above). I eventually ignored the “new” bit of the GRAVITATION clue, which looks redundant, unless our setter has only just caught up with the computer age. The clever Wife and Husband took a while to get paired off.
    I’m still working on whether this thing is annoying or admirable, and I didn’t have to put up with missing clues.

22. I started off with NOG and HIGH TEA, then had a series of half entries I couldn’t complete until much later. MUTANT went in from wordplay. NHO the definition. ANGUISHED was biffed. Eventually submitted at 25,17 but had a careless pink square at 1d where I somehow had DEHORES. Drat! Thanks setter and Jack.

23. I’m pleased to report that I get a real paper every day so no probs with the site.
    25a Weakish biffed, never thought of W(ife) & H(usband). Doh! Thanks jackkt.
    COD 29a Day Return. Decided it had to be dry something and only thought of season, which doesn’t parse. Late PDM.
    1d Dehorns. Wasn’t sure it was a real verb, but it’s in Cheating Machine so.
    LOI 6d Mutant, DNK the sport meaning. Nearly left it blank but decided to go for the only one that parsed and shrug.
    15d Anguished, NHO Bangui, but guessed OK. I added it to Cheating Machine sometime in early 20s. I made sure all extant countries & capitals were in. So HHO and forgotten.
    Thanks jackkt & setter.

24. I enjoyed this effort, which I thought was inventive and witty, once I managed to lay hands on a complete copy of it.
    While solving I was held up by an incorrect belief that Madras was called Mumbai now, which didn’t help. Also never quite got the hang of 7dn until I spotted the correct def. Otherwise a steady solve with several neat clues along the way..

25. About 35′ and like others not sure why. MUTANT=sport is a NHO, but “mutt” ruled out anything else. Also NHO DEHORNS=polls and even the fodder was obvious I needed all the checkers before committing.
    I thought HIGH TEA was barely cryptic but then wondered if its a reference to High Noon, ie something to eat after high (after-noon). Or maybe not…
    I was aware of Chennai as Madras having worked with a number of tech/admin support groups both there and in Pune (Poona in the old days).

26. Did it via the crossword club. Took just over 31 minutes with LOI MUTANT. Apparently I’m in position 111.
    Thanks Jack and setter

27. Late to the party, only just now managing to print from the club site. About 50 minutes with MUTANT, ANGUISHED and LOI DEHORNS all biffs. At least, cricket means I know the modern name of Madras. Decent puzzle, the experience spoilt by the system cock-ups. Thank you Jack and setter. I suppose I did process data before computers, not that I would have said so, using pen and paper, log tables, slide rules, new fangled Facit calculators etc in my sixties Physics days.

28. I think that the CD for 9ac is just about OK, but still pretty feeble, if you see ‘eats’ as a noun rather than as the third person singular of the verb ‘eat’. So ‘Eats in the afternoon’ is ‘Food in the afternoon’. 29 minutes, no major problems although MUTANT was, as with many here, entered because of wordplay and checkers. Hadn’t a clue about it.

    All these problems that people have been having passed me by completely because I solve from the Crossword Club and use a tablet.

    Since we have been talking quite a lot about India I was pleased to watch the 14-year-old scoring the second-ever fastest century in the IPL, not sure if it’s true of all T20. Incredible. A sort of ‘I was there’ moment, although of course I wasn’t there, I was watching it on the telly.

    1. Yes, Wil, that was exactly my take on HIGH TEA. If I’d realised it might be open to other interpretations I’d have tried to make it clearer in my blog.

       1. The ‘other interpretation’ is the verbal meaning, which would be a more normal interpretation of the phrase. Really not very cryptic though!

29. Two goes needed.

    – Made a pig’s ear of MAGMA as I thought the first ‘ma’ was the ‘old woman’ so was left wondering how ‘gma’ could mean organ
    – Relied on the wordplay for MALACHITE
    – Had to trust that polls can mean DEHORNS
    – Struggled for a while to get SCANT, despite it not really being that hard
    – Had no idea about the MUTANT meaning of sport
    – For 15d tried to justify AGGRIEVED, and even once the checkers pushed me towards ANGUISHED I didn’t know which African capital city was involved

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    FOI Ta-ta
    LOI Anguished
    COD Tenor clef

30. Problem still not sorted. We are not seeing the Cryptic on the phone app despite closing and reopening. I completed it through the club but when my husband tried to do the same he got ny answers so only one person can use the club site.

31. I found this tough. 29.44. Last couple were tenor clef and guffawing but only after realising my tenor flag couldn’t possibly work. I think tenor clef was in a while ago and I didn’t get it then.

    Just seen the reference to the app. I don’t know why but filling in the crossword club version always seems to accentuate the difficulty for me which is why I prefer not to use it!

32. Came to it late, and tired, slow but no real problems. Mutant NHO with that meaning was LOI, loth to enter it unparsed. Anagram Tarantino was slow… maybe because I don’t rate him? Though enjoyed bits of Pulp Fiction. Malachite NHO but reasonable. Henna slow, even knowing Chennai. No trains in Oz (editor: there are) so no day returns. W and H for wife and husband common, but the indirect stretch to “married couple” took some time reverse-engineering. Overall an interesting and inventive puzzle, good level of difficulty. GUFFAWING probably COD.

33. Mutant Schmutant.

34. 34:06

    Finally caught up with outstanding puzzles while out on my walk – I thought this was in the ‘very good’ bracket. No problem with the Crossword Club, but of course have solved later than many today. Some thoughts follow:

    HIGH TEA – No problem with Eats as a noun
    TARANTINO – could not make much of it (without pen and paper to scribble the anagrist) until testing out that it might begin with T for Titanic
    MALACHITE – know the word but didn’t know of its relationship to copper
    HENNA – if you’ve worked in IT (that new method of processing data), then you’ll almost certainly be aware of CHENNAI as one of the sources of cheaper IT staff
    DEHORNS – took a while to see, and felt that I was aware of this. And indeed I am – a POLLARD is both a de-horned animal, and a tree cut back nearly to the trunk. My familiarity comes from growing up right next to Pollards Hill in Norbury, South London
    ANGUISHED – BANGUI known of but forgotten until all checkers and the answer were in
    MUTANT – NHO of its ‘sport’ synonym

    Thanks Jack and setter

35. Having had a very stressful morning trying various means of an attempt at printing this thing, I gave up. Came back this afternoon and managed a printout but by then then my brain was on another planet. DNF with MUTANT, TIME WAS, MALACHITE & WEAKISH not answered.

    Disappointing day.

    Thanks Jack for the perseverance.

36. 40 minutes. Enjoyed this puzzle which had some nice misdirection – Jet, Polls, Pan (I was thinking, was Pan really a savage?).
    Mutant went in with a shrug – thanks for the explanation.
    I buy the paper hard-copy, so had no problem with missing clues – I presume it wasn’t down to the black-out in Iberia?

37. Today presented a new challenge – to do as much of the crossword as possible with over half the down clues missing from my printout! I think it did me good, as I managed all the solvable ones (the Across clues from 18a) bar WEAKISH, without having any down clue letters, though I admit looking up the modern name for Madras, which I was unaware had changed its name at all. Then I searched on the Crossword Club site and did the rest of the clues from the screen. At that point I discovered I had wrongly bifd INFORMER for MALACHITE, which turned out to be my LOI, as I didn’t know it was a source for copper. However, no problem with vaguely remembered MUTANT for sport or poll as referring to cutting off, or HIGH TEA. I saw eats as a noun, though I thought the clue a bit weak. With A and G in place ANGUISHED was obvious enough, though NHO BANGUI. Apart from having to tackle in a different way, I don’t think I took any longer than usual, and enjoyed it a lot.

38. I found this fairly tough, and it was 57.45 before TIME WAS became my LOI. I didn’t help myself by initially putting in INFORM for 21dn, even though I was unhappy with the parsing. WEAKISH however made me rethink, and it was then corrected. Like others, no idea of MUTANT in the context required, and was happy to see it was correct.

39. I’m with Zabadack in wavering between annoying and admirable.

    After I find one or two NHOs or unusual words (Mutant, Chennai, Bangui were unknown, I knew poll but recognised that my familiarity might not be universal), it can take a bit to sort out whether a clever device like W / H is, in fact, a clever device worthy of some thinking, or if it is just another unk word.

    thx for the clarity, jack

    1. I’m sure one as admirable as you would never be annoying.

       1. Touche.

          Memo to self: proofread carefully.
          Memo to NormO: thank you

40. 46:01. Definitely took longer than normal – I was very pleased that the mineral popped into my head, I would never have got there from the wordplay… a lovely puzzle though and I enjoyed it all the way through.

41. 87m. SW took forever, not helped by mis-spelling of the sherry. Malachite required a cheat, though was close to getting it. watching the indian premier league cricket right now helped with CHENNAI……. tough today.

42. For 7dn GRAVITATION, I took the ‘new’ to indicate an anagram and therefore took the ‘new way of processing data’ to be TI as in gravitaTIon. Does that work?

43. 18:49

    Hadn’t realised how few buy the paper. I think without the online frustrations you may well have enjoyed this, as I did with pen and newspaper.

    Thanks all

44. 41:21
    I found this a bit of a struggle. LOI DAY RETURN, since I was convinced the fare I was looking for was something edible beginning with DRY.
    I enjoyed MUTANT when I finally spotted it.
    I needed to cheat by looking up types of copper ores.

    Thanks Jack and setter

45. Did this in 18’58” which in light of comments above feels pretty good. LOI MALACHITE, which I couldn’t parse for a long time. AMALEKITE kept entering my brain, causing me to pursue a non-existent connection. Many thanks.

46. The African capital was unknown and I’ve NHO MUTANT in the sense used here. HIGH TEA was a write-in, though the only way I could make it work was to assume that an apostrophe had disappeared from ‘Eats’ (along, it seems, with many of the clues). But that would make for a clumsy and arguably ungrammatical surface unless there were also some missing quotation marks. So all a bit unsatisfactory really.

    Grid completed with fingers crossed in 30 minutes plus change.

47. I’m sure the parsing of 16ac is correct, but I thought of the god Pan (who definitely had a savage side, hence “panic”). Different route, same destination.

    1. I thought of Pan, too.

48. Had to go to the club site to solve, but got very bogged down and gave up.
    Will try again tomorrow.

49. Solved in newspaper with a pencil. Biffed MALACHITE from copper source early on but was pleased that MUTANT turned out to be correct.

50. 34.39 Pleased with that. I was confused by GRAVITATION because I was trying to stick AI in for a new way of processing data. I knew sport was MUTANT but DEHORNS went in from the wordplay. HIGH TEA seemed a bit weak so it went in last. I did like EBONY when I figured it out. Thanks Jack.

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