Times Cryptic Jumbo 1626 – what a save!

10 comments on “Times Cryptic Jumbo 1626 – what a save!”

1. DNF
   Never got NHO FIREBRAT, I’m not sure why. DNK, but inferred, SWEEPERS. DNK the hymn. NHO BANKS, but again inferred correctly. COD to BATHER.

2. I had a few queries mostly resolved now although I still don’t understand the ‘gambler’ reference in 27ac.

   My NHOs were FIREBRAT and SHAKEDOWN as a bed. Also the song at 18ac, which I found disconcerting as I am pretty good on folk songs of the British Isles. I thought perhaps it was just the name that had escaped me so I found and played it on You Tube but didn’t know the tune either. The explanation (other than of course I can’t know every song) is that it’s not a folk song in the sense of a traditional one since it was written as recently as 1979. I was reminded of Tom Lehrer introducing the traditional Irish ballad that he ‘wrote last week’.

   1. Hi John,

      Chambers defines a TELL as “(esp in card games) an unconscious tic or other physical betrayal of one’s thoughts or intentions”. It’s what the top poker players will look out for in their opponents to try and divine if they have a good or bad hand.

      I sort of knew the Irish song but had no idea it was so recent. I once had a corporate ticket to a Champions League game at Anfield and the Liverpool fans kept sing this song “The Fields of Anfield Road”, which was clearly based on something already in existence. So I knew the answer was going to be “The fields of…” and the remaining fodder rearranged itself into something that rang a faint bell.

      Incidentally, I noticed that you made some formatting tweaks to my blog while it was in the scheduled pile. What did you do exactly?

      1. Many thanks for the info re ‘tell’, Penfold. I also managed to solve the ‘Fields of’ clue but was surprised I’d never come across the song.

         I wouldn’t tweak formatting or make any other changes to a fellow blogger’s scheduled blog, but if the need arose and there was time I would contact the blogger by email and discuss it with them. All I did on this occasion was to remove the secondary puzzle category as it was labelled both ‘Jumbo Cryptic’ and ‘Uncategorised’ which didn’t seem worth troubling you with.

         The system inserts ‘Uncategorised’ when the first draft is saved unless another category has been chosen. I think sometimes the system saves drafts automatically so that the blogger may be unware it has happened. If another category is selected later, then ‘Uncategorised’ needs to be removed manually by unchecking the box. There was a proposal in the early days that the system might be changed to allow only a single category to be set but I assume it was found not to be as simple as it had appeared.

         1. All noted, thanks. I’ll look out for that in future.

3. Voila

   https://youtu.be/JXtdHfsCFa8

   1. Thank you!

4. I thought this was as easy as they come, barely longer than the day’s 15. That despite The Fields of Somewhere and the unlikely FIREBRAT. On edit: I’ll save that comment for next week, where it’s more accurate. This one took a healthy 48 minutes. Must remember the gap is a fortnight!

5. 22:41. Pretty straightforward, in spite of having to construct the unknown song from scratch. Once I had worked out that it was THE FIELDS OF something, there really wasn’t anywhere else to put the remaining letters even if ATHENRY looked decidedly odd.
   I spent a while contemplating why STELLA might be a ‘female gambler’ (I didn’t remember that aspect of Streetcar) before the penny dropped.

6. I too thought ATHENRY looked decidedly odd. I plumped for ATHEYRN as somewhat less odd. I had even seriously considered THE FIELDS OF YTHEARN as a romantic poetic possibility

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