Times Cryptic No 27798 – Saturday, 17 October 2020. Anyone for badminton?

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I would have rated this as middle of the road for a Saturday, until I got hopelessly stuck in the NW corner. It turned out I had never heard of the specific form of the sport at 3dn, although it was obviously some sort of tennis (not badminton!), and I found a shaky justification for another form of it. So, that made 1, 9, and 10ac intransigent. Oh well! Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle. Let’s take a look.

Notes for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is posted a week later, after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on the current Saturday Cryptic.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. Deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Crooked person, one ending in slammer? (8)
PRISONER – anagram (‘crooked’) of PERSON I (one) R (ending in slammeR). A clever literal definition.
6 Physicist‘s bilingual parents going in different directions (6)
AMPERE – MA is the English parent, PÈRE the French one. MA is reversed, as instructed, to give AM.
9 Unqualified yob wearing hot pants on the way out (13)
THOROUGHGOING – THO is an anagram (‘pants’) of HOT, ROUGH is the yob, and GOING is ‘on the way out’.
10 A loose woman in the family (6)
AUNTIE – A is literally in the clue, UNTIE = loose, as a verb.
11 Catholic chosen to save canon’s face, I see (8)
ECLECTIC – canon’s face is C. Put that in ELECT, then I, and C=see.
13 Miscues the shot, finding the score (5,5)
SHEET MUSIC – anagram (‘shot’) of MISCUES THE.
15 Yorkshire runner catching golf drive (4)
URGE – G for golf in URE.
16 E.g. pen‘s tip of steel lacking in colour (4)
SWAN – S is the tip of Steel, followed by WAN.
18 Readily opt to change cosmetic lotion? (10)
DEPILATORY – anagram (‘change’) of READILY OPT.
21 Widespread drug consumption one’s seen in parlour (8)
MASSEUSE – there’s MASS USE of E, don’t ya know.
22 I’m leaving mum’s fishy foodstuff (6)
TARAMA – TARA MA, I’m leaving! I assume this is a British abbreviation for taramasalata? New to me, whatever it is.
23 Online comments criticise engaging staff for game (8,5)
POSTMAN’S KNOCK – POSTS (online comments) + KNOCK (criticise), ‘engaging’ MAN.
25 Royal put on proper coat (6)
PRIMER – E.R. ‘put on’ PRIM.
26 Traps fish in the drink (3,5)
GIN SLING – GINS = traps (for animals, not of the horse-drawn kind). LING is the fish.

Down
2 Improve image of soldiers on move (7)
RETOUCH – R.E. are the soldiers, and TOUCH is to move (in an emotional sense, for example).
3 Tots on either side of net in playing this? (5,6)
SHORT TENNIS – SHORTS are tots of spirits. Insert an anagram (‘playing’) of NET IN. Apparently short tennis is a variant of the game for kids. I’d never heard of it and thought perhaps TABLE…S must be some new spread-sheet expression for when one tots up numbers. That left me in a very bad place with 1, 9 and 10ac!
4 Proud parent back home with award (5)
NIOBE – IN backwards, then OBE is the award. A bit of a chestnut, perhaps.
5 Right means of escape in retreat (7)
REGRESS – R for right, EGRESS for escape.
6 Sweet food getting left — it’s really good (9)
ANGELICAL – add an L to ANGELICA, to give a rather awkward adjective.
7 Letter from abroad with a lot of acidity (3)
PHI – apparently a pH of 1-1.5 is typical of gastric acid, so very acidic indeed!
8 Fixing equipment on board (7)
RIGGING – straightforward double definition.
12 Financial record of our client going astray (11)
COUNTERFOIL – anagram (‘going astray’) of OF OUR CLIENT. It turns out I didn’t know what this word meant! Nothing to do with Holmes and Moriarty, for example. It’s the stub of a cheque or theatre ticket, etc.
14 Return of stupid arithmetician, say, in warm period (9)
MIDSUMMER – DIM backwards, then SUMMER.
17 Cover popular musician’s sound (7)
WRAPPER – sounds like RAPPER. Popular with some, if not all!
19 Old coin in wetland, north in gorge (7)
PFENNIG – FEN and N in PIG.
20 Dish with starters of kimchi in noodle soup (7)
RAMEKIN – K and I in RAMEN.
22 Sign showing where Barbie’s affections go? (5)
TOKEN – since Ken is the male counterpart of the Barbie doll.
24 Card game (3)
SIM – double definition. SIM card as in a mobile phone, or a simulation video game.

19 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27798 – Saturday, 17 October 2020. Anyone for badminton?”

  1. When I realised it wasn’t “table tennis”, and I couldn’t find a viable alternative, I sought the answer from elsewhere. Only then did I see AUNTIE which should have been fairly easy. Not my finest hour (well, actually about a quarter of one). Never seen TARAMA without its “salata”, but it was plain enough.

    COD MASSEUSE

  2. I lost track of the time after going offline at 34′, so went off leaderboard. Wasted some time trying to see how TABLE TENNIS would work. I also had AMBROSIAL for a long time at 6d, despite the word-final I it led to at 13ac. DNK SIM as simulation, or TARAMA (I only know TARAMASALATA from a cryptic).
  3. Must have been lucky – prisoner and thoroughgoing were in before looking at 3 down, so the SHORT part had to be. NHO tennis was SLOI, followed by masseuse. Liked token, COD to the prisoner &lit.
  4. I was an hour over this and wrote ‘hard’ in the margins, but I had no other workings on the print-out, always a sign of a prolonged struggle, so I am now at a loss as to what I found so difficult. My only unknown was SHORT TENNIS, yet tennis is the only sport in which I take an interest.
  5. The only query I had on parsing was with SHORT TENNIS so, thanks, Bruce. Otherwise straightforward.
    I guess cheque COUNTERFOILs are a thing of the past now. We lived in France for several years and only left in 2017 but cheques were in widespread use there, even at supermarket checkouts. Here in NZ cheques seem nonexistent and I rarely use cash these days.
    13ac SHEET MUSIC was interesting. I now subscribe to the YouTube channel of the ACO -Australian Chamber Orchestra. I’ve noticed already that their “sheet music” is often on electronic tablets!
    I liked TOKEN but COD to MASSEUSE.

    Edited at 2020-10-24 07:11 am (UTC)

  6. Never heard of TARAMA, though arguably it is the more accurate version, since the dish contains no salata.
    NHO short tennis either, though after I wrote it in it did ring a bell of sorts.
    Otherwise, not difficult.
  7. …the proverbial sign at Watford Gap Services. we must have been posh as we had salad for Sunday tea throughout my youth. 28 minutes. I’ve often wondered why the luminescent pink stuff available in supermarkets is called as it is as there’s no lettuce in it. On the other hand, there’s not usually a lot in fruit salad. I hate it when a physicist is clued as I feel guilty if I don’t solve it straight away. It took a couple of crossers to see AMPERE which I’m giving COD. Enjoyable though. Thank you Bruce and setter.
  8. Couldn’t see “tot” for “short” so bunged in the other possibility I had that didn’t make any sense, as “sport tennis” seemed a bit likelier than “short tennis” for me. I’m not doing very well on these Saturday puzzles recently!
  9. I managed to solve 12 clues in my first session; a good start. FOI PFENNIG, a nice bit of solving through parsing. Mostly I seemed to know the ultimate answer e.g. Short Tennis. The unknowns were NIOBE and SIM as a game. Last four in were Prisoner, Thoroughgoing, Niobe and finally the elusive AUNTIE, which has to be COD as it eluded so many apparently.
    I finished in under an hour at 3.26pm so I could then concentrate on football developments.
    An enjoyable puzzle at the right level for me on a Saturday.
    David
  10. Just on the hour for this so not that easy for me. I can assure Martin that chèques are still very much used here in France mainly for the small enterprises such a masons , plumbers, painters etc. Shops and restaurants have more or less stopped taking them though due to excess fraud! The « sans contact » (non-pin code) ceiling has just been raised to €50 so that is clearly the way forward. Anyway, back to the serious business. FOI PHI, LOI SIM. Did not know the simulation thing, and NHO NIOBE, but the wordplay was helpful. The last time a Frenchman mentioned SHEET MUSIC I asked him what he didn’t like about it! Boom boom. Thank you Brian as ever and setter.
    1. Thanks for the info. I remember customers often used cheques at our local Le Clerc. I’m surprised that the limit for “sans contact” is only €50. I expect it was raised because of Covid. That was the reason it was raised here in NZ but the limit is now NZD $200 or around €110-112.
      1. You are right, it was raised due to Covid but only from €30 to €50, the French being a cautious lot! Francois
  11. Apparantly tarama is the cod roe. To make the salata you add a few bits like breadcrumbs (mainly as an extender I guess,) onion, lemon juice, beetroot colouring, etc.
    Andyf
  12. 30 minutes, so well over average. I think RAMEKIN took an age, one of those where I put it in and took it out repeatedly until the (rather obvious, really) wordplay kicked in.
    SHORT TENNIS is, I think, a relatively recent variation on the game designed for learning the full size game.
  13. Not a good week here – I put the puzzle down about complete when I couldn’t get the idea of “one seen in parlour” being ‘diphthong’ out of my head, and never got back to it. A shame, as the part I did was a nice Saturday stroll.
  14. 43:01. This one obviously caused me some difficulty, though on reflection I can’t see where the hold up was. Probably the unfamiliar short tennis. I think counterfoil and ramekin may also have had me stumped for a little while too. Nice puzzle.
  15. have gone in China and South Korea and try and get a cheque book sent abroad by Nat West. In China cheques could not be folded and had to be pristine, which rather defeats the object. Like infrastructure, cheques haven’t really developed much in the US.

    FOI 3dn SHORT TENNIS – as we built a short tennis court (half size) for my eldest son when we lived in good old Godmanchester. I wonder if it still there? Good game for tots!

    LOI 10ac AUNTIE

    COD 23ac POSTMAN’S KNOCK

    WOD 12dn COUNTERFOIL – stubs

    Time 50 minutes

  16. Thanks for explaining this. tots = shorts made it a very clever clue with the other meaning of tots, but I did not see it till you pointed it out. Had not heard the phrase before, but it could not be anything else with the crossing letters. Thanks also to the setter.

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