Times Cryptic No 27558 – Saturday January 11th, 2020. Another pleasant midsummer Saturday.

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Times Cryptic No 27558 – Saturday January 11th, 2020. Another pleasant midsummer Saturday.

The setters continue to be gentle in the holiday season. I rolled through this one at a steady pace. Strangely my LOI was 11dn, which seems so obvious in retrospect. FOI was 6ac. My clue of the day was 5dn, which had me thinking tragicomic thoughts of Sir Humphrey back in the USSR! Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’. Deletions are in [square brackets].

Across
1 Store work editor rejected, one involved in plot (10)
DEPOSITORY – DEPO is OP (work) + ED ‘rejected’, then I in STORY.
6 Fringes of severed nets caught a fish (4)
SCAD – SD (fringes of ‘severed’) ‘nets’ C (caught), and A.
9 Pay to enter island held by mutinous characters from Bounty (3,4)
BUY INTO – I for island in ‘mutinous characters of’ (BOUNTY*).
10 Mother declines possible award when the action’s over? (7)
DAMAGES – DAM, AGES. The action would be the legal type.
12 Mammal repeatedly hit heads for its refuge (5)
TAPIR – TAP (hit), then ‘heads for’ I[ts] R[efuge]. I raised an eyebrow at ‘repeatedly’, although tap-dancing certainly features repetition.
13 Haughty pair, one given wrong mark in top event (5,4)
GRAND PRIX – GRAND (haughty), PR (pair), I (one), X (wrong mark).
14 Through gritted teeth, accepting one’s been fired? (6,3,6)
BITING THE BULLET – just a cryptic definition, I think. If so, a rather unattractive example of the genre IMO.
17 Having drunk limitless wine, ailing emperor’s given herbal remedy (7,8)
EVENING PRIMROSE – (-IN- EMPERORS GIVEN*), ‘drunk’. The -IN- is ‘limitless’ WINE.
20 Kitty, heading for Altamira, scours series of caves (9)
CATACOMBS – CAT, A[ltamira], COMBS.
21 Goes up to deliver a couple of points (5)
RIDES – RID (deliver), E[ast], S[outh]. “Up” is riding a horse, I suppose.
23 More troubled about location of ashes? One might be (7)
MOURNER – (MORE*) ‘troubled’, around URN.
24 Key worker at home right out of time (7)
INDEXER – IN (at home), DEX[t]ER (right, out of time). Someone who creates keys for books, libraries, or whatever.
25 European family repelled deity (4)
NIKE – E[uropean], KIN, all ‘repelled’. The sporting goods company is much better known than the namesake Greek goddess, I suspect.
26 Artful teacher claims English exercises set back someone not attending fully? (10)
SLEEPYHEAD – SLY (artful), HEAD (teacher), ‘claiming’ E[nglish], and PE ‘set back’.

Down
1 Dubious girl coming out with a roster (9)
DEBATABLE – DEB (girl coming out), A TABLE.
2 Informal assent by dad to meet cost (3,2)
PAY UP – PA, YUP.
3 City type to check an overseas currency one’s invested (3,10)
SAN FRANCISCAN – AN, FRANC, I’S all ‘invested’ in SCAN.
4 But atheist finally believed (7)
THOUGHT – THOUGH, [atheis]T.
5 Record of Soviet bureaucracy? (3,4)
RED TAPE – RED (Soviet), TAPE (record).
7 Cooking oil with garlic creates a little smoke (9)
CIGARILLO – (OIL GARLIC*), ‘cooking’.
8 Case of disease seen regularly by doctor (5)
DESEX – D[iseas]E, S[e]E[n], X (by). ‘Doctor’ is used as a euphemism.
11 Twelve holding calculators when periodic payments due? (10,3)
MIDSUMMERS DAY – MIDDAY (twelve) holding SUMMERS. ‘Quarter days’ have appeared in previous crosswords, but I didn’t remember when they fell. Still, the three letter word looked likely to be DAY, and once I’d run through 12 apostles, 12 is a dozen and (topically) the 12 days of Christmas, the thought of 12 noon helped the answer jump out.
15 Timber producer has post for driver crossing right class of road (4,5)
TREE TRUNK – TEE (post for driver) crossing R, then TRUNK [road].
16 Revered priest ultimately comforted, having lost heart (9)
TREASURED – [pries]T, REAS[s]URED.
18 Roof would be better were the two sides reversed (7)
GAMBREL – swap the R and L of GAMBLER to get a word I didn’t know but put in on trust.
19 Unusual perception shown during service break (7)
RESPITE – ESP in RITE.
20 Culinary plant with Latin name I recalled (5)
CUMIN – CUM (‘with’, in Latin), then IN is N[ame] and I ‘recalled’.
22 Southern US team has to buy it at the borders (5)
DIXIE – XI (side, for cricket or football) ‘bordered by’ DIE (buy it).

19 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27558 – Saturday January 11th, 2020. Another pleasant midsummer Saturday.”

  1. I don’t really remember this one. I wondered about ‘repeatedly’ myself, but I figured a lot of tapping is repeated, and deleting the word would make for a very odd surface. DNK GAMBREL, or at least it looked only vaguely familiar. I was pleased to see 3d, being one myself.
  2. 30 minutes exactly, so yet another target achieved on a Saturday which used to be a very rare occurrence but has become more commonplace over recent weeks (no danger of it with today’s though!).

    DK (OHF) GAMBREL but trusted successfully to wordplay.

    Mention in the intro of Sir Humphrey reminds me of the sad and very recent death of Derek Fowlds who played Jim Hacker’s other chief adviser, his PPS, Bernard Woolley. I’m sure the ever pedantic Bernard would have been the first to point out the impossibility of BITING THE BULLET ‘through gritted teeth’. In fact I think he actually did so in one episode and pulled a very funny face by way of demonstration.

    Edited at 2020-01-18 06:33 am (UTC)

  3. Thank you Bruce. I had several queries which you have duly answered viz. DIXIE, DEPOSITORY, DESEX, GAMBREL and SAN FRANCISCAN.
    I used to know someone by the name of Gambrel. I had no idea she was really a roof!
  4. 31 minutes, slowed down in the SE, with RIDES my penultimate and LOI INDEXER. I don’t think I knew GAMBREL or SCAD, but the instructions were clear, as they were throughout the piece. COD to DESEX despite it bringing tears to my eyes. A relatively easy workout. Thank you Bruce and setter.
  5. I rather like these accessible puzzles. There was still plenty to tease and delay this solver.
    SCAD was another unknown fish but I have learnt that almost any likely combination of letters can be a fish. Like others, NHO GAMBREL but understood the wordplay. DESEX looked wrong at first and is a stretch for Doctor. My last ones in were in the SE. RISES and REARS came to mind before RIDES finally allowed the tricky DIXIE to appear. LOI was INDEXER -clever and my COD. Finished just after lunch so it took a good chunk of my day. David
  6. ….SLEEPYHEAD, so when I got into work at 8am I made a coffee and sat down to tackle this puzzle. I’ve noticed on this blog that some solvers nod off while working on a puzzle – I’m of the opposite persuasion, and find that the concentration required heightens my wakefulness.

    No real problems here, although I did try “kitty = pool” on my first pass at 20A, and “Latin name = nomen” before seeing the clever ruse at 20D. I luckily found the stray CUMIN seed in my Tuesday evening Chicken Jalfrezi before biting into it !

    GAMBREL was a DNK (I could only think of “mansard” – the checkers were a no-no but the parsing was clear eventually. A minute and a half needed at the end before light dawned though !).

    I parsed EVENING PRIMROSE afterwards.

    FOI SCAD
    LOI GAMBREL
    COD DESEX
    TIME 12:24

  7. 20:47 …of which nearly 3 minutes on my last 2 – DIXIE and INDEXER. I too raised an eyebrow at TAP for “repeatedly hit”. NHO GAMBREL so had to verify that in the dictionary. I liked the “post for driver” in 15D and BITING THE BULLET, but COD to MOURNER.
  8. Strong winds in the SE – so I took 42 mins as I had 21ac RISES which failed to deliver DIXIE at 22dn, finally

    FOI 6ac SCAD

    LOI 22dn DIXIE

    COD 17ac EVENING PRIMROSE (oil of)

    WOD 18dn GAMBREL

  9. I also had trouble coming up with DIXIE and INDEXER, but got there eventually. Took me a while to see why DESEX was what it was too. Otherwise a steady solve. DIXIE was LOI. 31:17. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  10. TAP

    SOED has
    1 verb trans. Strike lightly but distinctly (and usually repeatedly).
    2 verb intrans. Strike (usually repeatedly) a light but distinct blow.

    Collins has:
    If you tap something, you hit it with a quick light blow or a series of quick light blows.

    If you tap your fingers or feet, you make a regular pattern of sound by hitting a surface lightly and repeatedly with them, especially while you are listening to music.

  11. 9:07. Nothing to frighten the horses, in spite of a couple of funny words (GAMBREL, DESEX) and a long plant name, which always makes me panic a bit even when it turns out to be something familiar.
  12. My sheet says that I took 47 minutes and that the 24/22 crossers of DIXIE and INDEXER were hard. Then again, it also says “hung over” in letters that even I can barely read, so we may need to take my difficulty with a pinch of salt 😀

    23a was helped greatly by me having watched Under the Skin in the preceding week; a key plot point is a mourner being troubled about the location of her mum’s ashes.

    I’m also apparently quite lucky to have been quite familiar with GAMBREL—look out for MANSARD, too surely coming to a puzzle soon…

  13. 32:19 I found this fairly gentle although if the solution had an X in it I seem to have found it harder than the rest: desex, grand Prix, Dixie, indexer all needed a bit more thought.

    Brnchn, just to prove I always enjoy reading the blog, I think your entry for 17ac is missing the apostrophe “S” from “emperor’s” and the word “given” from the anagrist.

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