Times Cryptic No 28769 — With a belly full of turkey

113 comments on “Times Cryptic No 28769 — With a belly full of turkey”

1. (starstruck, is there any way to manually add my time to the SNITCH? I don’t solve on the Crossword Club on my blog days.)

   1. A very good question. Not at the moment (at least, not one that you can control and I would need to do it as a hack), but it would be a good feature for bloggers. Let me ponder this one…

2. 40 minutes, also finishing with EUTERPE, also considering ‘godi’. Lovely puzzle. Need more of these to trip up the Bletchley Parkers.

   Dunroamin is (according to Brewer’s, it appears) ‘a typical punning name for the home of a family that has finally found its nest or niche.’ Done with roaming, obviously.

   Melpomene one day, please, any setter who might be looking in.

   I rather liked INNER BAR, but then I’m more of a hillbilly than a Manhattanite, more Dick Emery than Larry David.

   1. I’m puzzled that I can’t find an entry for DUNROAMIN in my copy of Brewer’s (18th edition). Do you have a different edition?

      1. Actually a webpage called Oxford Reference, with a nod to Brewer’s. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199916108.001.0001/acref-9780199916108-e-2403#:~:text=Source%3A%20Brewer%27s%20Dictionary%20of%20Modern,found%20its%20nest%20or%20niche.

         1. Many thanks. I see it’s ‘Modern Phrase & Fable’ and on-line only, so not the same as the printed edition. Shame, because its the sort of reference book I’d prefer to have on my shelf.

      2. There’s a block of flats on the Finchley Road (north London) called ‘Dunrobin Court’ (or some such) which I’ve always assumed was related to a retired judge or other legal.

         1. Sounds more like a cemetery to me, if the robbing is in the past.

         2. Dunrobin Castle is the seat of the Dukes of Sutherland, who have presumably stopped robbing the poor to give to
            the rich

      3. Here in UK (or at least in Scotland!), punning house names based on Dun… are not uncommon: Dunroamin, Dunstriving etc. I think the pun is on Dun for hill, common in Scottish place names and it’s a homophone for done.

         Like others, I found the puzzle easy to start but not so easy to finish with Euterpe, Psst and Gods all causing delay.

         Thanks for the blog.

3. Having gotten several Acrosses at first pass, I thought this was going to be a doddle. But nooooooo…
   Really slowed down in the bottom, and cheated to find LOI DUNROAMIN… which neither Chambers Word Wizard or Crosswordsolver.org turn up, nor is it it Collins or Dictionary.com, but Wikipedia defines it as a “stereotypical name for a cottage or guesthouse.” (“DUNROAMIN? Is that Scots… Oh, no, I get it. Ha ha.”)
   YELLOW SNOW is another word that at this point still lacks “dictionary status.” There is a page with that as a “New Word Suggestion” (from 2013) that came up on Collins (once, and then wouldn’t again until I switched browsers), but that refers only to the “toileth [sic] humor [yes, spelled American-style]” sense.
   It was nice to see another muse get some exposure, besides Erato or Clio.
   INNER BAR is not an American expression, but you know that… (and yes, it seemed “poor” to have BAR answering a clue with “barristers”).
   I grew up among HILLBILLies in West Virginia, but I’ve never sounded like them (though I can do the accent).
   How ironic to see “most up-to-date” clueing GROOVIEST!

   1. I agree about ‘barristers’ = BAR. ‘Lawyers’ would have been better, and where have I seen that very recently?

      1. No, because the outer bar also contains lawyers.. but the inner bar is barristers exclusively. KCs would work ..
         On edit: both bars are for barristers apparently, the outer for junior counsel and the inner for Kings Counsel

         1. Barristers are lawyers.

            1. Indeed. But lawyers aren’t necessarily barristers

               1. But ‘lawyers’ is a perfectly good definition for either barristers or solicitors, and hence the INNER BAR.

   2. YELLOW SNOW is in Chambers Revised 13th, and so doesn’t lack “dictionary status”.

      1. It’s in the 12th edition too.

         1. … and in the 1983 edition, so it’s probably been in every Chambers since.

4. 45’20”
   Clearly found this a tough task, never nearer.

   There are some courses where you can brush through the top of a fence and some where the birch is so tight you invariably come a cropper; this was the latter.
   As soon as I realised this needed respect, I was determined to get round with reasons. However, I have to admit I was unaware of the algae; I was thinking of a patch behind the hide of a polar twitcher. I think my subconscious nudged me with the G-D-, as I did see La Traviata from that perspective.
   I don’t want to single out anything as it was a veritable Cheltenham Gold Cup of a puzzle throughout, but the hick, the muse and the retirement cottage were the open ditches for me.
   Bravissimo/a setter, and thanks to Jeremy; you can enjoy some post-prandial narcolepsy now.

5. Maybe not so GR O-O VY ?

   Astro-Nowt on the birds is not keen,
   So today’s finished grid seemed a dream.
   By a clandestine castle,
   The cunning old rascal,
   A ROOK’s got his beak in unseen.

   1. Touche!!

6. After a long struggle lasting an hour I gave up on this eventually with two unsolved as I was completely out of ideas and frankly a little fed up with looking at the clues by that stage. Of course they were intersecting answers and they turned out to be DISINTEREST and PSST. Without the mutual checker I was stumped and doubt I would have come up with either answer no matter how much longer I looked at them.

   I had battled on bravely to get that far, trying not to be put off by hard-fought-for but unheard of (or forgotten) words such as ELLS as ‘annexes’, SHONA, EUTERPE and YELLOW SNOW. In addition I had unexplained things eating away at my confidence that would need to be checked post-solve, such as DUNROAMIN defined as ‘guesthouse’ although I knew it as a retirement home, and the OO in GROOVIEST that I guessed may be chess notation – but if it were so, surely it would have come up many times before and be better known that ring / bagel / egg etc = O as discussed here yesterday? Turns out it means to castle on the King’s side, on the Queen’s side being 0-0-0 which is unlikely to be of much use to setters.

   1. GR O- O Vy, Jack, just realized I biffed that part.

   2. DNF

      “Turns out it means to castle on the King’s side, on the Queen’s side being 0-0-0 which is unlikely to be of much use to setters.”

      Not TOO OFTEN I expect.

      Thank you, plusjeremy and the setter.

7. We don’t have ALL FOOLS DAY here so I bunged in ALL SOULS DAY and assumed the explanation would be revealed in the blog. Didn’t matter much as GODO wasn’t a great attempt at the gallery either.

   And of course EUTERPE was unheard of. Gettable in hindsight, but I gave up on it.

   Bit of a disaster all round. Take me back to Bletchley Park.

   Thanks Jeremy and setter.

8. Wat men or Gods are these? Wat maidens loth?
   Wat mad pursuit? Wat struggle to escape?
   (Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats)

   40 mins pre-brekker left Euterpe and I was not sufficiently inspired to get it.
   I liked the Greek castles.
   Ta setter and PJ.

9. DNF after 30 minutes. A few good clues but the rest not to my taste.

10. Great puzzle. Nearly biffed All Souls’ Day but paused in time.

    O-O well known to chess players, in both descriptive and algebraic notation.

    Fifty years ago there was a badge saying “Don’t eat YELLOW SNOW”. I am still none the wiser.

    I’ve seen many cottages named DUNROAMIN on my travels, but no guesthouses (unless that refers to holiday cottages).

    I’ve heard of the Inner Temple, but not the Inner Bar, not a good clue.

    Disinterested did not in the past mean ‘uninterested’, I think this is a modern mutation which has crept into dictionaries.

    I really enjoyed this puzzle, and finished (with EUTERPE) in 18’19”.

    Thanks jeremy and setter and all you interesting solvers.

    1. Watch out where the huskies go
       And do not eat that yellow snow. (Frank Zappa)

    2. The ‘uninterested’ meaning of ‘disinterested’ is older than the other one. It dates from the 17th century.

11. DNF. Having biffed ALL SOULS DAY, something nagged me to go back and look twice at the clue which enabled me to correct it to ALL FOOLS DAY and avoid that pitfall. It was all in vain though as I was nowhere near to getting EUTERPE. Having not heard the name before I thought it a very tough clue to put together from the cryptic (indeed impossible in my case).

    1. I was another ALL SOULS DAY – there was a nag but it wasn’t strong enough so I didn’t go back for a rethink. Annoying, as I’d struggled with EUTERPE and SHONA and got them both right.

       I don’t follow where the EST of DISINTEREST is coming from – can anyone help?

       Otherwise a great Friday puzzle – tough but not impossible.

       1. Hi. You dig up from the past possibly: ‘you dig up’ might have been expressed in the past hundreds of years ago as ‘[Thou] disinterest’, as in ‘thou makest’, ‘thou goest’, etc. Not a great clue, imho, as the ‘you’ isn’t accounted for in the answer, only the verb form. 🙂

       2. It’s a play on the the old fashioned construction of adding -EST to a verb and indicated by ‘from the past’ in the clue. Cf, The Day Thou Gavest.

    2. Always a good idea to learn the names of the Muses

    3. EUTERPE didn’t seem to stump you when she appeared in December 2020 😊

       1. 3 years is ample time for me to unlearn anything!

12. LOI – Dunroamin. Pressed submit smugly only to find that the OBSCURE Lithuanian gallery the GODO (go do for busy) should be GODS. It’s Friday, please explain why DS = busy.

    1. A busy or bizzy is a policeman
       Collins dictionary:
       British slang, mainly Liverpool
       a police officer

13. 47 minutes. LOI DISINTEREST. I hadn’t heard of INNER BAR either, that was one of my main holdups in fact. Also NHO yellow snow but the clue made it easy. I was also considering GODI for a while before trying DS instead of DI and going ooohhhh. Some of the clues were really cunning and I can only echo the comments above.
    Thanks setter and blogger 🙂
    Steve

14. Found this average to start with, but things got very tricky, and it was a DNF after an hour. Even though I decided the definition for 4d must be ‘inspiration’ I failed to get the answer. For much of the rest of the time I was struggling to see the wordplay. I have never seen ‘castles’ clued s Os. EST at the end of id was another thing that puzzled me.

15. 13:58 but with 1 wrong – an unparsed ALL SOULS DAY, which I failed to go back to. I liked the O-O in GROOVIEST but COD to ENVIABLE. Thanks Jeremy and setter.

16. 45 minutes with LOI a bewildered DISINTEREST. I’ve heard of the INNER TEMPLE, not a BAR, so needed the homophone. I did first put SOULS in with a question mark but then remembered the April Fool’s Day of my youth. I knew SHONA which was as well. My old dog used to specialise in yellow snow too. I’m not admitting to anything myself. COD to TRAMPOLINE, a lovely clue. A tough but fair puzzle. Thank you Jeremy and setter.

17. 23:00
    Subtle, sneaky, satisfying, certainly!
    LOI EUTERPE, LOL YELLOW SNOW.
    The ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ badge probably advertised a 1974 single by Frank Zappa, taken from the suite of the same name which comprised the first four tracks of his album Apostrophe (‘).
    “Watch out where the huskies go,
    And don’t you eat that yellow snow.”

    1. That’s not an apostrophe (’).

18. DNF after an hour. Quick start and thought it would be an unusually gettable Friday puzzle. Oh dear. Not a fan of muses and even with crossers I couldn’t identify the components in the wordplay. LEE SIDE I maybe should have worked out but didn’t and INNER BAR was not on my wavelength (nor anyone’s looking at the comments), even with the obvious BAR. Also a few biffs, NHO “pet” for a strop (dim recollection maybe from a puzzle earlier this year?) and didn’t parse GODS (don’t know the DS=busy allusion.. edit, I know now!). And the guest house reference for DUNROAMIN is pretty random.

    Time for another coffee I think, thanks for you patience (and honesty!) Jeremy and setter.

19. DNF
    Godi. Obviously an art gallery in Barcelona.
    Extirpe. The muse of nihilistic verse.
    I fell over and grazed my knee running here to see the aggro about the definition of ‘disinterest’, but nothing doing.
    Thanks, pj.

    1. Designed by the famous Barcelona architect Gaudi, no doubt. I actually made that same connection during the solve – where did I know Godi from? Sagrada Família – which helped me reject GODI and look further.

20. 15:22

    This was indeed tough in parts but I enjoyed the challenge. Like other I wondered if there might be a gallery somewhere called the GODI. I had fingers crossed on SHONA, kind of assumed that OO was chess notation and couldn’t see how DISINTEREST worked, so thanks for the explanation.

    Galspray, Pootle and any others who didn’t know EUTERPE would do well to brush up on their muses, fates, graces and so on as they all crop up from time to time. I’m a million miles from having had any kind of grounding in the classics so periodically check them out on Wikipedia to keep my hand in.

21. Just on 20 minutes,which is good for me on a Friday. Euterpe my second one in, and pleased to know Shona, only to realise I had biffed ALL SOULS DAY and didn’t look at it again. Scissors!

22. 43 minutes, with one wrong. I just did not see GODS. I picked the wrong policeman and went for GODI. (That sounds like a gallery, I thought, an Italian one perhaps). But I did successfully come up with the NHO SHONA, and the vaguely recognised EUTERPE (one of those muses we’re all supposed to know).

    I felt sorry for 10ac. It didn’t deserve to be picked out like that in the blog. Whatever else, the homophone was a good ‘un. COD TRAMPOLINE; who’d have thought the Po could transform a tramline like that

23. I’m not playing today. DUNROAMIN, even in my bungalow rich environment, is just ridiculous (code for I didn’t get it, couldn’t look it up anywhere) and guesthouse is a wilfully misleading definition, even with so-called. If it’s anything, it’s precisely where you’ve settled into a travel free retirement. Sniff. I only know YELLOW SNOW from the joke: even now I know it’s a thing, I still think the Antarctic reference is unhelpful. And yes, I was “had” with a desperate ALL SOULS DAY, and am surprisingly ignorant of the INNER BAR, linking it with the Temple. I’m not all that convinced by ELLS – annexes either. Another “sort-of-works”. Not enjoyed, so I’m off to get some fun with my next Covid jab. It’ll hurt less.

24. 10:22 Lovely, if quirky, puzzle. This reminded me of the final championship puzzle, partly because of the PSST, and partly for the humour. Same setter maybe? As with that one there were a couple of mid-solve sniggers: DISINTER[R]EST was rather neat (though I admit not grammatically sound) and I liked DUNROAMIN too, although like others I associate it with retirement cottages rather than guesthouses. For a puzzle with some quite tough clues it was surprising that 1ac went in so quickly (just from the 8-2-3), and quite a few were biffable (INNER BAR, HILLBILLY, LA TRAVIATA, etc.). I do like the “cycling” instruction which I don’t recall seeing before. COD to ENVIABLE – brilliant surface.

25. A Titan of a puzzle with a few deceptively easy lures mixed in. I was trapped for at least half my time (over an hour) by the SW corner, trying to explain how a MAF could be a whistler (a detectable magneto-sonic lightning burst, which is how we know Jupiter has intense lightning storms) and flailing about for the African language and the cod house name, which is surely not restricted to rentable accommodation? Well done setter and Jeremy for unpicking this highly sophisticated lock.

    Selected space sounds (including whistlers) from the late, great Don Gurnett are here: https://space-audio.org/sounds/

    1. 😃

26. Liked some of this a lot, but some a lot less.
    Nice to see the O-O, something I have done thousands of times; and always good to see a muse. Challenge to the setter: Polyhymnia looks easy to clue… or Terpsichore?
    Did not like the inner bar or Dunroamin much, why a guesthouse?

    1. Regarding clues for the Muses (one you’ve mentioned in particular), this link was posted here a few years ago so you’ve probably seen it, but just in case you haven’t.

       1. Brilliant!

27. 31:55, a real mixed bag and no mistake. Some of the struggle I enjoyed, some of it…well, not so much. Fair enough, I suppose, not everything is created specifically for my pleasure.

28. Evidently like lots of people here I found most of this very straightforward and was heading for a good time by my standards, but then became hopelessly stuck on five clues. I used aids for INNER BAR, which I’d never heard of, and the difficult EUTERPE was also electronically helped, so my 50 minutes doesn’t really count. In the DISINTEREST clue what is the ‘possibly’ doing? Is it saying that the archaic usage is a possible one, or that the definition of DISINTEREST will only satisfy some? [On edit, after thinking about this: perhaps it’s about whether the word is spelled with one r or two.]

    1. My guess, which I texted to Jeremy, is that during the period when English verbs had proper declension endings, a word like disinter was unlikely to have been in use.

       1. Well “disinter” goes back to the early 17th century so I would imagine that there’s a fair chance of it having being used with “thou” from time to time. Who knoweth in what wise it might have been spell’d though? I think you mean “conjugation” by the way.

       2. Can you escort Clara Morgan out of here (see way below)?

          1. Done. You might also want to use the Contact Us form for this instead of a comment, I don’t always read the comment notifications.

29. 19:49 – all the necessary trivia came to mind, for once, though I thought DUNROAMIN as a guesthouse was a bit iffy – more your chalet bungalow in Worthing, I’d have thought, but the setter was probably more concerned about being cancelled than I am.

30. After about 9 minutes I had everything except EUTERPE (at least, I thought I did), which I eventually pieced together as a plausible Muse – I only know Erato – after another 3 minutes or so. Unfortunately I’d made up GODO as a potential gallery, having not made the leap from busy to DS. I’d forgotten, if I’d even known it, that ‘busy’ could refer to a policeman.

    In competition, I might try to claim that GODO is an acceptable answer, given that ‘go do’ and ‘become busy’ are broadly equivalent, and apparently there is a Godo Gallery in Seoul (as well as the one mentioned above in Lithuania). Worth a shot, surely.

    1. If you had a VAR of the calibre they used in the recent England/N Macedonia international, you migth just win that claim…

31. DNF as I was insufficiently inspired to crack the unknown EUTERPE.

    Otherwise this was a crossword in which I raced through much of it before struggling to put together the last few. STROPS, DUNROAMIN, and the other unknown SHONA were the last to yield before I puffed my cheeks out and gave up with 4D.

    No complaints in defeat. I’ll take that on the chin, so well done to those that prevailed and thanks to both the setter and blogger.

32. Well, I rather stupidly looked up GODO as a gallery and there it was, in Vilnius of all places! So in it went – thinking that ‘Go do your homework’ sort of meant ‘get busy’. I would have been undone by EUTERPE in any case.

33. Good puzzle, 23 minutes, never heard it called ALL FOOLS DAY (APRIL… in my world). Liked the IN A BAR homophone. Agree with our New York friend, YELLOW SNOW is more to do with our dog than algae.

34. NHO Euterpe, nor DS for ‘busy’. Fell into the SOULS trap (without understanding it — which should have sounded alarms but didn’t), bunged in GROOVIEST without spotting the ‘castles’ business, got YELLOW SNOW from wordplay and had to check meaning post writing in. Thoroughly enjoyable puzzle for a Friday. Thanks to all involved: setter, blogger and comments.

35. Main question, could someone explain how ELLS = annexes? Can’t find anything in the dictionary to back this up. Thanks.
    I also agree that DUNROAMIN has little to do with guesthouses.
    And I’m surprised no pedants have quibbled about DISINTEREST, which as we all know should really mean neutrality, not something UNinteresting. Though I guess that battle is lost…

    1. It’s in Collins. I gather it’s an Americanism; on the chestnutty side in the NYT.

    2. As I mentioned above, the battle was lost in the early 17th century.

       1. The battle probably didn’t even begin until the 18th; I bet pedants weren’t attacking the ‘incorrectness’ of ‘disinterested’ until then. But do you yourself ever use ‘dis-‘ to mean ‘un-‘ or vice versa? I don’t; so the battle for me, anyway, is over.

          1. I don’t, no. I also never say ‘toilet’, for very similar reasons. But I also don’t criticise people who do.

             1. Nor do I. But it does annoy me, I’m afraid. A quick scan of the 50 or so words to evoke a place where one defecates leads me to ask what word is, in your opinion, a modern substitution for toilet? I’m not saying I use ‘toilet’ (actually, I always say ‘loo’), just curious to know why you eschew it in particular…

                1. I was brainwashed in Nancy Mitford snobbery by my mum, who was brainwashed in her turn by hers. So I say ‘loo’. I know it’s ridiculous but it’s engrained! I have not passed it on to my own kids.

                   1. There’s a pair I never had to worry about, as I never met ‘loo’ until adulthood; and when I learned it, thought that it was slang, akin to ‘can’ or ‘john’. Never occurred to me that one would prefer it to ‘toilet’.

                      1. It’s said that ‘loo’ derives from the old cry of ‘Gardez l’eau!’ made when the contents of a chamber pot were hurled out of a window into the street in medieval times and since. Toilet is of course also from the French ‘toilette’ and nothing to do with the function it euphamises!

                         1. ODE dates ‘loo’ to the 1940s.

                            1. Ha, well if that is so, it certainly came from the French – just a different era…

                   2. Similar socialisation here, though don’t regret it a bit. Since moving abroad, I’ve had to use ‘toilet’, if I have been too lazy to learn the local lingo.

             2. I’d always had you down as a ‘bog’ and ‘khaki’ man.

                1. bog and khaki?

                2. Khazi?

                   1. Indeed. I have a very niminy-piminy autocorrect. American technology, I suspect. They’re not keen on smut.

          2. Yes, in the 18th century disinterested was usually used to mean lacking interest, while uninterested meant impartial. Then, somehow, they swapped meanings. Now they’re going back the other way again. It seems like it happens every 250 years or so.

    3. Wiktionary, 2nd etymology:
       ell (plural ells)
       1) The name of the Latin-script letter L. (more commonly el)
       2) An extension usually at right angles to one end of a building.
       3) Something that is L-shaped.

36. 56 minutes. Just what others have said; some fairly straightforward ones to get going, but then things became progressively more difficult. I had a lot of trouble with DUNROAMIN, thinking it was just a made-up jokey word and the def for TRAMPOLINE, my LOI. Couldn’t parse GROOVIEST (that O-O for ‘castles’ is worth remembering) and NHO ELLS for ‘Annexes’. Relieved all the lights turned to green after submitting.

37. 9:32, but another who invented the GODI gallery. It just seemed so darned plausible! The relevant meaning of ‘gallery’ didn’t occur to me in spite of the fact that I was in one yesterday evening, watching Kenneth Branagh.
    Like most others I wasn’t very keen on DUNROAMIN. It’s not really a word, and that’s not what it means anyway.

    1. I also saw him (in King Lear I assume?). I enjoyed it.

       1. Yes. It’s had poor reviews but I thought it was absolutely brilliant. People wanting a conventional Lear will be disappointed but it made me think about the play in a completely new way.

    2. I saw Kenneth Branagh play Hamlet when he was still at RADA, in one of the theatre school productions. I have to say that I thought then that he was destined for stardom, and a couple of years later I saw him in the West End in Another Country, in which he was brilliant. After Hamlet I sent him a letter of encouragement, which he was kind enough to reply to very graciously. I haven’t seen his Lear, as I rarely go to town nowadays, but it’s interesting that I saw his debut as a youngster in Hamlet and the ITV ‘Billy’ plays and now he’s doing Lear! (For interesting read ‘I am getting very much older!’)

       1. I saw him play Hamlet at Stratford at around the same time (he was very young but already a star). It remains one of the best things I have ever seen in the theatre.
          Interestingly in that production they did the whole play uncut, and it ran to over 4 hours. But I was not bored for a moment. His Lear that is running at the moment is cut to 2 hours, so the complete opposite.

          1. Since he’s around my age, I imagine that 2 hours of playing Lear is probably as much as he can take!

38. DNF, defeated by LEE SIDE, the unknown EUTERPE and ALL FOOLS DAY (at least I’m not alone with the last two). Never heard of lees as the remains of beer and bunged in a desperate ‘lie line’, hoping that it might be a verb meaning to fish. Also had no idea about the OO in GROOVIEST and didn’t know ELLS as annexes.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    COD Enviable

39. Biffed ALL SOULS DAY and promised I’d go back to it. Obviously forgot. Otherwise would have been just shy of 20 minutes. Ah well. A fun challenge.

    1. Obviously?

40. 42:46 but…

    …cheated with SHONA – only knew this as a Scottish girl’s name (working in Glasgow, I know a few). Fast start and not too bad on the whole until I was left with half-a-dozen to get, including ELLS, GODS, ALL FOOLS DAY then LEE-SIDE, PSST and DISINTEREST and finally the aforementioned African language. Liked the chess notation in GROOVIEST.

41. I started off with ……….-IN-LAW and WAT. DAUGHTER came along a while later. DISINTEREST occured to me early on but as I couldn’t parse it, I left it out until some crossers were in. I did sort of see what it was getting at later. I sort of reverse engineered EUTERPE, with the name of the muse guessed from crossers(and a vague memory from previous puzzles), and the parsing then spotted. Tricky! I’m rather glad ALL souls DAY didn’t occur to me! A flash of inspiration (possibly from 4d) led to POI, DUNROAMIN and LOI, LEE SIDE finally succumbed. 30:54. Thanks setter and Jeremy.

42. 27 mins. Much the same as above. EUTERPE and INNER BAR entirely unknown, and had to be looked up, after a fairly quick solve otherwise. GODS also had me fooled for a while.

43. DNF; couldn’t work out 14d DUNROAMIN, and cheat machine didn’t have it.
    10a INNER BAR; thought it was green paint, and a confusion with Inner Temple, but no Wiktionary has:
    “inner bar
    (UK, law) The legal profession as practised by Queen’s Counsel.
    Coordinate terms
    outer bar” (Obv not yet updated to King’s Counsel.)
    18a YELLOW SNOW, had a snigger but was unaware of the algae; thought it was just rude; In Wiki it redirects to “Toilet humour” which interestingly majors on Mozart as an exponent thereof.
    7d got it but Wiktionary has: “wat
    A Buddhist temple in Southeast Asia, especially those in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
    There are two wats near this village.
    Angkor Wat” No mention of monks etc.
    Stupidly missed how 25d REF was last letters but just biffed it.
    21d SHONA thought the o was short but it isn’t, it is a homophone of “shown a”.

44. DNF but a near miss.
    All but 6 clues within about 30 minutes but my last 5 were biffs or partial biffs.
    I got ELLS from crossers and parsing the clue but still have no idea why ELLS= Annexes (Chambers shows ELLS as “a measure of length or a cloth measure).
    I guessed GODS from the crossers and the word “Gallery” but didn’t know that “busy” is a slang for detective.
    I parsed STROPS but didn’t know that “Pets” is a synonym.
    I got DISINTER for dig up and the rest was biffed from meaning and crossers. Didn’t get the “from the past” element but now understand – thanks for the explanation
    WAT caused me lots of trouble even though I had W?T. Eventually remembered Angkor Wat in Cambodia. My knowledge of Scottish let me down.

    Sadly that left EUTERPE which is a name that is new to me – must do some swotting on Muses, etc. – and although I understood how the clue worked I couldn’t get it.

    1. It’s in Chambers with one L. Collins online (and doubtless other sources) have ELL.

       1. Thanks

45. Perseverance pays off sometimes, and although 65 minutes had passed I was left with just 4dn and 7dn. Annoyingly I chose the wrong option for 7dn and went for WOT, before dredging from the dark recesses EUTERPE. I was also very unsure about DISINTEREST as I couldn’t parse it, but in it went with fingers crossed.
    So, frustration in the end to finish with just one wrong letter, something I used to do on a regular basis, but not of late.

46. 36.16 DNF

    Got some of the hard ones but I was an EXTIRPE mixing up words and definitions all over the place. Should have worked it out probably.

    TRAMLINE for track was very hard but I desperately shoved in PO and hey presto the word appeared.

    Lots of good stuff but probably a little bit too much chaff (here’s looking at you DISINTEREST) for my taste.

    Liked GODS though

    Thanks Jeremy and setter

47. Another one who gave up on EUTERPE and also thought GO TO was good’nuf for become busy. Sadly no.

    Thanks all

48. Gosh, well, we got there in the end, but I had to call on Mr Ego to join forces with me to cross the finish line (I’m beginning to sound like the Prince of Darkness now!). He was the one who came up with the un-remembered EUTERPE, from the cryptic! And also suggested GODS, though I subsequently parsed it. Got GROOVIEST, but without parsing – not a chess player – and STROPS hove into sight once the awful DISINTEREST became inevitable! OK, it may be 17th Century, but really?! It now signals just a lack of education! Or am I being a dinosaur? Keriothe says he doesn’t criticise those who misuse it, but there is a definite distinction between uninterest and disinterest that cannot be denied. I can’t say I was enamoured of this one – the combination of easy and wildly obscure/flouting the rules of grammar was not a happy one and I couldn’t have gone it solo…

49. 58 mins but I had to cheat so my post became psst. Another Friday toughie for me but enjoyed it and thought Dunroamin was brilliant.

    Had to look twice at the post above before realising it was a hack, at least I hope it was!

    1. I have escorted this lady to the spam department, I don’t think we’ll hear any more from her. Please use the link in the Contact Us sidebar to report spam, particularly in older blogs that are not closely monitored.

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