Times Cryptic No 26890, 23/11/17 Ladies and Gentlemen…

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
…the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

A bit of a quirky oddity, this one, with two answers that end with the same preposition, clubs turning up twice to signify C. one clue with a surface that looks decidedly macabre, and another clue to a dreaded plant/shrub which relies on you knowing a (perhaps less familiar, it’s not Rio) port and how to spell it. I started badly (vide infra) by chucking in the viable TEA at 2 down, which completely skewered the corner. I eventually recovered to complete in 21 minutes and some, which is probably not a stellar time, but I was distracted by spin-off reveries occasioned by clues which jabbed at my eclectic memory banks. Some of them I mention below, so I fully expect Anonymous to have another go at me for including irrelevancies. Tough.

Here’s how I justified my entries, with clues, definitions and SOLUTIONS. Apologies for any earworms triggered, especially the one (two?) in 1 across.

Across

1 Rough circle that may connect us (9)

BROADBAND As one who remembers the heady days of the 14.4 kbit/s modem (nee-dah-urrrr-bic-bic…) the (almost, thank you setter) ubiquitous broadband connection is still a wonder. Rough: BROAD circle: BAND (as in of gold)
6 Having much land, not originally untouchable (5)
ACRED Untouchable would be SACRED, knock off the front to make up a verbo-nounal-adjective that does exist (I looked it up) but shouldn’t.
9 Establish boundary of charcuterie maybe and mark it (7)
DELIMIT Can a charcuterie be a DELI? It is here, attracting M(ark) IT to complete
10 Plant from port, not American — in South Africa (7)
SPIRAEA A plant genus (Wiki says between 89 and 100 species, which looks vague) made up of the Greek port of PIRAEUS without the US of A, contained within S(outh) A(frica).
11 What is next to tread for one getting out of bed (5)
RISER A nice easy one, once you remember that tread is part of a stair. DD
13 Sort of letter from Post Office adjusting pension (6-3)
POISON PEN P(ost) O(ffice) plus and anagram (adjusting) of PENSION
14 Gypsy, chic always, not entirely connected to spirit world (9)
PSYCHICAL Hidden in gyPSY, CHIC, Almost. There’s one of those Muir/Norden My Word stories which finished with the wonderful “You’ll look sweet upon the seat of my psychical maid Fatoo”.
16 Run off quickly with sudden effort round lake (4)
FLIT Lake is usually there to supply an L, here surrounded by FIT for sudden effort
18 Destroy sensational fiction (4)
PULP Immortalised by the Tarantino film, pulp fiction was/were cheap, trashy books or magazines printed wood-pulp paper.
19 Great painter, Mr Chips? (3,6)
OLD MASTER Mr Chips was old when celebrated in “Goodbye Mr Chips” by James Hilton, and a schoolteacher
22 Please write instruction with space between lines (4,5)
OPEN ORDER “O pen order” is your pleading request. As a Bombadier, I might have been required to give it as an order, basically instructing my squad to space themselves out a bit.
24 Puff opening of Narnia, of no real value (5)
TOKEN Puff, as in smoke gives TOKE, especially when a certain substance is involved. The opening of Narnia is, um, N
25 Scottish magistrate to depend on security (7)
BAILLIE Depend gives LIE, and security BAIL
26 Quarry seen from front of yard in big house (5,2)
TALLY HO Traditionally what a huntsman calls when the fox or other victim is sighted, hence “quarry seen”. Front of Y(ard) in big: TALL  HO(use)
28 Walked hard: I then fly (5)
HIKED H(ard) plus I plus KED for fly. The ked is a wingless fly that infests sheep. Surely that’s a walk?
29 Worth mentioning base is back across small summit (2,5,2)
TO SPEAK OF Possibly more common in negative form. Base gives FOOT, which is reversed around S(mall) PEAK from summit

Down

1 Cause of hallucinations that may lead to a fall (3,4)
BAD TRIP Two references, one psychedelic (possibly occasioned by toking) and one physical (possibly exacerbated by gravity)
2 Liquid: heat it furiously, blowing top off (3)
OIL Why isn’t this TEA, “heat” blowing its top and presented in fury? Heat furiously is meant to suggest BOIL, which minus its top is our answer.
3 Initiative to advance steadily through a river (8)
DÉMARCHE (accent optional) means (diplomatic) initiative, one of those words borrowed from the French which they probably don’t use. MARCH for advance steadily (preferably in open order) within the perennial favourite river DEE.
4 Tons loaded into a vessel cause trouble (3,2)
ACT UP T(ons) placed inside A CUP
5 Failed to keep calm to be purified (9)
DISTILLED Failed is DIED, and calm provides STILL to be kept inside.
6 In bad taste? Not entirely, but somewhat (1,3,2)
A BIT OF In bad taste might be A BIT OFF, which is not presented in its entirety.
7 Digging up patio, killer’s acting practically, not morally (11)
REALPOLITIK An anagram (digging up) of PATIO and KILLER, Rather a smooth surface, in a Fred West kind of way.
8 Be likely to catch fish, turning up in trawler (7)
DRAGNET I guess it’s OK for the trawler to be the net a trawler trawls with. The fish caught here is a GAR, tangled in TEND for be likely, and capsized as per instruction.
12 Send up book with original line-up in fantastic colour (3-4,4)
SKY-BLUE PINK Mrs Z insists that this is a real colour, often seen at sunset, and would reject the word “fantastic” unless it means “jolly nice”. Send up SKY (today’s cricket reference) B(oo)K and an anagram (original) of LINE-UP in it.
15 Most dull clubs — I must enter noisiest (9)
CLOUDIEST C(lubs) plus I inserted into LOUDEST for noisiest
17 Yet to be executed in vile prison (8)
BASTILLE The word STILL for yet is there, of course, but needs to be executed because the rest of the answer is provided by BASE for vile.
18 Disdainful official’s expressions of contempt (4-3)
POOH-BAH Originally from G+S’ Mikado, no doubt deliberately drawing on two terms of contempt.
20 Stop conversation, indicating marriage is over? (4,3)
RING OFF A double definition. Nowadays couples don’t ring off, they just stop texting.
21 Member of parliament apparently sleeping, so dismissed? (6)
BOWLED You need to know that the collective term “parliament” is applied to OWLs. A sleeping OWL might be in BED. Today’s other cricket term
23 Evaluates sprints, putting in time for clubs (5)
RATES Sprints are of course RACES, substitute T(ime) for C(lubs). My dodgy eyes read sprints as spirits, and I’ve just spent a good while trying to justify spirits as races, and getting no closer that something to do with wine. Hard work, this blogging business.
27 Finally betray country — that’s disgusting (3)
YUK The final letter of betraY plus the UK, which is still a country, though why it hasn’t been called a Queendom since 1952, I cannot tell.

70 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26890, 23/11/17 Ladies and Gentlemen…”

  1. The plant was my last one; I parsed it first pass, but took an age to think of a port ending in us

    Clues were clever without being witty

    Sky blue pink is my new favourite colour

  2. Happy to see that I’m not alone in bunging in ‘tea’; I suspect I left it in longer than did Z. DNK SPIRAEA, or SKY-BLUE PINK. BAILIE [sic] came to me immediately with ‘Scottish magistrate’, but it lacked a letter, so I actually pushed on, until finally the penny dropped. I overlooked the ‘executed’ and persisted in wondering what BAE was, until I came here and all was revealed. I knew, sort of, about owl groups, but the knowledge did me no good at the time, and I just assumed that ‘dismissed’ was some sort of cricket term. Z, a couple of typos: 5d ‘came’ for ‘calm’; 24ac has an unwanted ‘You’.
  3. I didn’t know SKY-BLUE PINK but with the Y and L checkers (and the ones in PINK) I confidently put in DAY-GLOW PINK without looking too closely at the word play. Eventually something showed me I was wrong. Luckily, when I was 19, I went on Interrail, and we went from Athens to Crete, so I have actually sailed from Piraeus, so that one wasn’t too hard, despite never having heard of the plant. I took a while to get ACRED since I never thought of sacred, and I wasn’t even sure it was a word.

    Did it in two sitting, so no time, but over 30 minutes for sure.

  4. I was through this in 32 minutes.

    FOI 19ac OLD MASTER

    LOI 18ac PULP which went right over my head for a minute or two, sorry Mr. Tarentino.

    COD 21dn BOWLED with 7dn REALPOLITIK in the frame.

    WOD 12dn SKY-BLUE PINK a phrase of my dear Mama’s! with 18dn POOH-BAH taking silver.

    A lot of drugs going on hereabouts 1dn BAD TRIP 24 ac TOKE(N) and the aforementioned SKY-BLUE PINK FLOYD.

  5. Most of this went in steadily enough, but I failed at the end and resorted to aids as I was unable to work out BOWLED at 21dn, which admittedly I should have got, and the answer to the unfair clue at 10ac – obscure plant / obscure port, particularly when expected to come up with a port missing US or AM or even A somewhere in its name. Never heard of the colour, the fly nor the diplomatic initiative.

    I remembered the Scottish magistrate from Private Eye’s immortal creation “Baillie Vass”, a nickname they applied originally in the 1960s to the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

    Edited at 2017-11-23 06:40 am (UTC)

  6. 40 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc. then gave up on the 22ac/21dn crossers.
    DNK Open Order (and the wordplay shaky) and am not up on my bird flock collective nouns. ‘Bumped’ and ‘Over Under’ were my best (weak) efforts. Bah!
    I was once due to play Pooh-Bah at school and learnt all the lines, did the read through, etc, before they twigged I can’t sing a note. I was duly Ko-Ko-ised.
    Didn’t blench for long at today’s plant as Piraeus is the only port I know with a US to discard.
    Maybe sour grapes – but mostly I disliked: Acred as a word, sudden effort as Fit, Please write as ‘O pen’ and ‘Quarry seen’ as Tally Ho.
    Thanks setter and Z.

    1. You mean you played Ko-Ko? or you were axed? I seem to recall a few times when ‘Please verb’ meant ‘O___’; I can’t say I liked it much, but I’ve learned to lump it.
      1. Axed. I didn’t make a career in musical theatre – and I sometimes think this was the reason.
        Re O, I’ll learn to lump it too.
        1. Thank the good Lord that breakfast became your occupation and not ‘the boards’!

          Fyi this morning I tucked into a very good free range boiled egg (5mins) with rye toast and Marmite
          followed by pomello. Oh! and yoghurt with fresh raspberries (Dricolls).

          In China they say breakfast like a King, lunch like a Prince and dinner like a Pauper.

          1. I’m tempted to say yum-yum but it might spawn a flurry of Mikado inspired punning.

            Excellent. I like to hear what you have been noshing: Blue Mountain, chestnut honey, congee, etc. I would welcome this as a regular part of your posts.
            Do you dip marmite soldiers in the egg?

  7. 18m. I thought this was tricky, with some borderline obscure bits, but I enjoyed the tussle.
    My heart sank when I saw how 10ac worked, but like myrtilus once I asked myself what ports might have a US to discard there was only one answer. Of course if you haven’t heard of Piraeus the clue is impossible, it being self-evident that no-one in their right mind will have heard of the plant. Should that be considered required knowledge for solving these things? Personally I prefer it when they’re set in such a way that we don’t have to ask the question.
    I wonder what the ancient Greeks would have called SKY-BLUE PINK? Sky pink, presumably.
    1. According to Stephen Fry, the Greeks did not use any of their words for blue at all for the sky, describing it as bronze, so presumably the pink version would be coppery bronze. Of course, it may be they were all colour blind, or air pollution in Athens was at even worse than 21st century levels, or (most likely) Fry and the QI elves were pushing it a bit.
      1. If I remember my Pinker (or was it Deutscher?) correctly, blue as a cognitive/linguistic concept didn’t exist.
        This is a big if, of course.

        Edited at 2017-11-23 09:18 am (UTC)

      2. Closer to home – it seems that the Welsh language doesn’t have separate words for blue and green. Green is perceived as a shade of blue (or vice-versa) and the same word does for both. I’m sure the Welsh speakers on this forum will know the details. My mother used the term SKY-BLUE PINK to refer to any indeterminate colour. As in, “I don’t care if they’re sky-blue pink” when confronting the racist attitudes of our neighbours. Ann
    2. You made me curious. I have just read that it wasn’t just the Greeks. Blue also doesn’t appear in the Koran, ancient Chinese, ancient Japanese or ancient Hebrew.

      1. Yes. Again, if I remember correctly, the concept of blue sometimes emerges in languages only when the related culture develops artificial blue colouring. Until then there is nothing sufficiently blue to call blue, as it were.
        1. I’m not sure that the concept of blue, or indeed the concept of anything, arises in a language. A word for blue may, although in fact more languages do not distinguish between blue and green than do. On the other hand, Russian, for instance, has no word for ‘blue’, but two words, ‘goluboy’ for light blue and ‘siniy’ for dark; or vice versa, I can never remember. I hope you’re writing all this down. (My students won’t. By chance, I’m talking to them tomorrow about Russians’ perception of blue vs. Americans’. Honest.)
          1. This takes me back to discussions in Greek classes of what Homer meant when he talked about “the wine-dark sea”, because to modern sensibilities this made no sense at all, and suggested that the bard must have drunk some really dodgy retsina in his time.
            1. I remember wondering about the term when I read Lattimore’s translation–don’t know any Greek–but I figured he didn’t say ‘wine-red sea’ but ‘wine-dark’, and the darkness of the sea (sometimes) and the darkness of red wine fit rather nicely.
            2. Somewhere I read that people were seriously thinking that the Greeks’ eyes were either evolved in some different way, or were colour-blind, can’t quite remember, and that they actually perceived the sea as wine-dark. Bah.
          2. I’m not sure that it doesn’t: it is arguable (and argued) that the concept of ‘blue’ doesn’t exist without a linguistic term to describe it. In languages that don’t distinguish between blue and green, they are the same colour in a way that has implications beyond the way we talk about it.
            But now I am operating very much at the limits of what I remember from the books I have read on this subject.

            Edited at 2017-11-23 04:22 pm (UTC)

    3. I’d been suspecting the rightness of my mind for some time and now I know – I have actually grown that plant (and disembarked in Piraeus). Thank you Keriothe – I think.
  8. I didn’t know SPIRAEA or Piraeus which made 10A very difficult. I was quite pleased with my guess of SPIRALA only being one letter out.
  9. I finished but derived little pleasure from this. So many things I dislike. Just needed an obscure antelope clued by biblical references for a full house.
  10. First time this week I’ve had time to tackle the puzzle. Pleased to find I could read the clues without a magnifying glass

    Like others didn’t like 10A – happened to know the plant but a very unfair clue. BAILLIE a write in from Mephisto solving. Chomped through the rest in steady fashion.

  11. I must defend the setter here over 10ac: spiraea is a pretty common garden shrub and I can’t see why knowledge of constellations, the periodic table, European literary figures, US states and their capitals, names of past Prime Ministers, etc, etc, should be considered quite normal while a general acquaintance with garden plants should be dismissed as arcane. It was a fair clue, if slightly tricky because the port wasn’t Rio!
    1. Hear, hear! We were gifted the SA, and as a result it was my FOI. However, I was jolly chuffed with it, and the crossword in general, once I’d finally twigged 21D, my LOI.
    2. Plants: without having counted, many thousands of obscure (def: I don’t know them) plants have appeared in the Times crossword in the past 20 years. Sometimes as common names, sometimes as Latin names.
      Constellations/stars: fewer than 30 have appeared.
      Elements: far fewer than 104 – maybe 10.
      European literary figures: fewer than 20. Closer to 50 if we’re pre-Brexit and UK is still part of Europe.
      US states/capitals: far fewer than 50 – maybe 10.
      Prime Ministers: probably only 6 or 7.

      Not having a PhD in biology or a 30-year career in horticulture, that is why plants are one of my betes-noirs: the number of possible obscurities is nearly infinite. There is no way of having randomly seen them all, once, somewhere in your life like there is with all the other categories you list.

  12. Oh… and I’ve often heard people marvelling that certain languages (whether ancient or modern) have or don’t have different concepts for colours (or for snow in Inuit, or for sand in Arabic and these other old chestnuts). But a distinction must be maintained between natural language (an arbitrary coding system for message transmission) and thought. Languages don’t have ‘concepts’, because ‘concepts’ are entities of thought. Languages have words, phonemes, characters/letters, graphemes, sounds, etc. So I cannot believe that Homer and millions of his fellow Greeks were unable to see the blueness of the sky — but it may be that the language he spoke encoded the concept of blueness differently from, say, modern English. Of course, we actually have no idea what the *meaning* of ancient Greek words was: we can only speculate based on common sense and on the historical transmission of ideas and concepts based on those ancient Greek texts. Check out the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Hours of endless fun!

    Edited at 2017-11-23 11:03 am (UTC)

    2. I’m not sure you can distinguish quite so clearly between concepts and language, because language categorises. What is the difference between blue and purple? There is no absolutely definable conceptual difference. It’s quite easy to envisage a language that has fewer (everything is red until it becomes blue) or more (up to a certain degree of redness it’s purple, after that it’s pfftphgn until you get to proper red) categories, and people using that language will think of those categories as distinct. So Homer could see blue as we could, but depending on the exact shade he would categorise it with other colours.
      I really must dig out that book by Guy Deutscher and read it again.

      Edited at 2017-11-23 04:47 pm (UTC)

  13. I didn’t realize you’d been getting POISON PEN comments Z – but perhaps you’d deleted them before I came onsite. I used to get ones asking for a date…. Oh the puzzle. Well I quite enjoyed it but perhaps that’s just because I happened to have the obscure plant/port info. 20.54

    Happy Thanksgiving to Vinyl, Paul, Guy, Jeremy et al. My daughters are peeling the potatoes and parsnips this year – yay!

  14. I blamed my failure to finish on watching the highlights while attempting this. However, all seem to agree 10ac is unfair. On the positive side enjoyed SKY BLUE PINK, BOWLED and ACRED, my new word of the day. Thanks z and setter.
  15. I was undone by 10a and had to look it up after working out the parsing but being unable to come up with a port minus A, AM or US. Otherwise I still struggled a bit and took 52:56 to get through. FOI OIL, LOI, the plant after looking it up. Knew the colour, smiled at the sleepy OWL, raised my eyebrows at OPEN ORDER and assembled 3d and 24a from wordplay. Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends on the other side of the pond. Thanks setter and Z.

    Edited at 2017-11-23 11:52 am (UTC)

  16. Solved while watching the drizzle in Brisbane (never let me hear an Aussie complain about the Birmingham weather again), so I wasn’t sure if I was being slowed down by the fact that it was the middle of the night. Whatever the reason, I was held up by the obvious stumbling blocks: I, too, suddenly remembered Baillie Vass from when I first looked at Private Eye as a 12 year old and failed to understand this, and a great many other of the in-jokes; SKY-BLUE PINK eventually went in from wordplay without any real understanding of what it meant; and finally, it took an alphabet trawl to give me the plant, even though I am another who went through Piraeus with his backpack as a young man.
      1. Good evening Lord Galspray! You are sorely missed – these days the first comments of the day are almost exclusively from the American bretheren – Thanksgiving, pardoning turkeys etc. – what tosh! – and – ‘never heard of SKY-BLUE PINK, SPIRAEA’ etc. And they’ve got HOCUS POTUS to deal with, poor darlings!

        We are in dire need of the Wizards of Oz back, to balance things up up a bit!
        How’s bloody Murdoch!?

        Edited at 2017-11-23 04:38 pm (UTC)

        1. G’day Horryd. Had just dropped in for some opening-day Ashes banter with my old mates, but it’s all a bit quiet.

          Oh well, it is a crossword blog after all. Perhaps Rupert could organise a Times-solving contest between Beefy Botham and Davey Warner? Now THAT would get me subscribing again!

  17. …you had to walk into my crossword. Also stumped by bowled.
    An easy one – except for the bits that weren’t.
  19. Anyone else bothered by ‘pulp’?. I get the ‘destroy’ bit and perhaps the film connection, but fail to see how ‘sensational’ fits in.
  20. as many others, left with 2 holes to fill at about 16 mins, and had to look up SPIRAEA eventually from checkers. Not being of the gardening frame of mind, I was never going to get it. BOWLED also didn’t come to mind – and I’ve been following the Ashes overnight too….
  22. I had a real struggle with this. It took nearly an hour to unravel and I didn’t enjoy it much. But, otoh, the grid was properly legible for me for the first time in months so that compensated for the puzzle. Ann
  23. I found this very difficult but got there in the end. SPIRAEA I eventually got remembering it from previous puzzles over the years. The unknown BAILLIE and OPEN ORDER held me up but I finally got them from wordplay. LOI (and COD): RING OFF and I also liked PSYCHICAL a lot. Many thanks to setter and blogger.
  24. I seem to be in a minority having got 10a straight away but most of the rest was awful. Unlikeable officials, obnoxious correspondents, people misbehaving, landed gentry and even at 7d a reminder of what one of my neighbours did to his unfortunate wife some years ago.

    DNF after a pretty horrific hour and ten minutes of torture.

    Hopefully it was all just a 1d!

  25. I found this to be quite a tough bottom-to-top solve, though I did at least get 2d as my FOI.

    The unknown 3d DEMARCHE and the rather more well-known 1a BROADBAND were my last two in; I just couldn’t for the life of me see what was going on at 1a. I did the rest this morning in my hour and polished those two off the moment I looked at them this evening.

    It also took me a long time to convince myself that 1d was specifically a BAD TRIP—after all, good trips are just as much a cause of hallucinations as bad ones.

    On the plus side, my parents living in Crete got me to 10a SPIRAEA by way of PIRAEUS rather more quickly than I deserve, given my appalling knowledge of plants and ports…

  26. A bit tired today after staying up late to watch “just one more over” followed by “just one more over” until about 1.30am but it was such a terrific contest between bat and ball I didn’t want to miss anything. As for this terrific contest between biro and newspaper, well it was 23 mins on the train to work for about half and 18 mins at lunchtime to polish off all but 6ac, 8dn and 16ac (I had flit in mind but wasn’t entirely convinced by “sudden effort” for “fit”). Those three took another 2 or 3 mins on the way home. Dnk “demarche”, “open order” or “sky-blue pink”. Had vaguely heard of the plant at 10ac but was helped by remembering the port from classical studies (just joshing, it gets a mention in one of the Asterix books). Props to BW for the death defying thrill ride, great pic!
  27. 47m for me – no problem with the plant as we have a couple in the garden, so obviously not at all obscure, compared to an element I’ve never heard of! The rest needed some working out – pleasant ‘Aha’ moment for OWL and other stuff to enjoy too: SKYBLUEPINK was a favourite of my mum, along with ‘two jumps at the cupboard door and a bite of the knob’ when asked what’s for tea. Enjoyable but triste memories! As ever thanks for the amusing puzzle, setter, and the similar blog, Z, both much appreciated.
  28. Nearly came unstuck on the spelling of ‘baillie’, but corrected myself in time. Similar reservations to some other commenters, but managed to unravel 10a thanks to gnawing at the wordplay and my late mother-in-law’s gardening obsession.
    I also finally got round to tackling yesterday’s Championship puzzle, which took me 17m 48s. Very gratified to have got all three correct, though my cumulative time of around 1 hr 20 m would not have troubled the scorer.
    1. It’s not quite that literal an equivalence, Samir. The idea is just that that someone is pleading for an order to be penned, so taken as a whole ‘o, pen order’ can be read as an exhortation similar to ‘please, pen order’. It’s a little bit whimsical.
  30. Beaten. SPIRAIA and BAILLIE were, of course, completely unfair clues as they are both foreign words (DÉMARCHE, on the other hand, was perfectly fair because I got it). ACRED and DRAGNET were less excusable fails.

    However, I am glad I failed on so many fronts, as it saved me from being annoyed by putting in “sky-blue silk”. According to the internet, “SKY-BLUE PINK” is meant to be a humorous reference to something that cannot exist. On the other hand, the human eye (well, mine, at least*) sees the spectrum in a sort of circular way, with blue giving way to violet which is sort of pinky, and thence back to red. So, I would argue that sky-blue pink would be violet.

    Regarding improvements to the onlineness of the Times, I once again cannot get the puzzles through the Club page. Moreover, if I go to the puzzle through the non-Club route through Firefox, it now gets cropped off in a vignette; I can scroll up and down, but can never see more than about five rows. Works OK in Chrome, though (but, again, not the Club page).

    *in fact I have two, now that I think of it.

    Edited at 2017-11-24 12:34 am (UTC)

  31. The name sprang to life because of a hilariously wrong caption to a photo of ADH in a local newspaper.
  32. about 45 minutes, but with a gap of 2 hours in the middle which really helps. Lot of DNK: DEMARCHE, KED, SPIRAEA, ACRED, SKY-BLUE PINK but somehow it all worked out.
  33. 24 Puff opening of Narnia, of no real value (5)

    Puff = BLOW, and Chambers says that BLOWN can mean worthless. All of which caused me great difficulties.

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