This one hurt. It was a challenging puzzle that I nevertheless did quite well with, having everything in except for one clue in about 35 minutes. But I could not figure out 25 across for the life of me. Even after looking up the answer, it took me several minutes to make sense of what was going on.
Touché, setter!
| Across | |
| 1 | My family home collects different food to barbecue here? (3,2,5) |
| OUT OF DOORS – OURS (my family home) around anagram of FOOD TO
This meaning of OURS was quite foreign to me, so this one took much longer than it should have. |
|
| 6 | Hot green dresses are imitations (4) |
| ECHO – ECO (green) around (dresses) H (hot) | |
| 9 | Promotional material mentioned genuine East End butcher’s? (10) |
| PROPAGANDA – homophone of PROPER GANDER
Butcher’s is Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘peek’. (butcher’s hook -> look) |
|
| 10 | A little bird doing no good (2,2) |
| AT IT – A TIT | |
| 12 | Love, difficult at a distance, gets in the way (12) |
| THOROUGHFARE – O (love) ROUGH (difficult) FAR (at a distance) in THE | |
| 15 | Charlie’s excitedly welcoming Penny round (9) |
| SPHERICAL – anagram of CHARLIE’S around P | |
| 17 | Member of party departing the Tabard Inn, where everybody’s drunk (5) |
| REEVE – hidden in WHERE EVERYBODY
A reference to The Canterbury Tales… of Chaucer… and Shakespeare. |
|
| 18 | Noisily change focal point of service (5) |
| ALTAR – homophone of ALTER | |
| 19 | Metrically, one’s very rigorous (9) |
| INTENSIVE – IN TENS (metrically) I’VE (one’s) | |
| 20 | Buffet cars inter alia currently serving rich gravy (7,5) |
| ROLLING STOCK – ROLLING (rich) STOCK (gravy)
Didn’t know ROLLING, slang for rich. |
|
| 24 | Current stable employee covers bet (4) |
| LAID – LAD (stable employee) around I (current) | |
| 25 | Queen Elizabeth Gates perhaps showing this sticker? (10) |
| BILLPOSTER – BILL (Gates perhaps) after (POST) ER (Queen Elizabeth) shows “Queen Elizabeth Gates perhaps”
Someone who sticks up bills. I didn’t know this word, and I still find the wordplay quite irritating. |
|
| 26 | Love interest of old city MD? (4) |
| EXEC – EX + EC
MD = Managing Director |
|
| 27 | Play I promise a short run in? (10) |
| IMPRESARIO – anagram (play) of I PROMISE around A + R (short run) | |
| Down | |
| 1 | My bad theatre job, enormous curtains (4) |
| OOPS – OS (enormous) around (curtains) OP (theatre job)
OP as in ‘operation’, in a surgical theater or a theater of war. |
|
| 2 | Worked beside well (4) |
| TOOK – TO (beside) OK (well) | |
| 3 | Silly exploit with plant that flavours water (7-5) |
| FEATHER-BRAIN – FEAT (exploit) HERB (plant that flavours) RAIN (water) | |
| 4 | Broadcasting / very happily? (2,3) |
| ON AIR – double definition-ish
A reference to the expression walking on air, inter alia. |
|
| 5 | Fish / a curious topping for ginger nut? (3,6) |
| RED MULLET – double definition-ish
Where a RED MULLET would be a bit of a curious look on the top of a redhead. |
|
| 7 | Result of a little home cooking? (7,3) |
| COTTAGE PIE – cryptic definition
Since COTTAGE = ‘little home’. At least this is how I read it. Is there something more here? |
|
| 8 | Confining serpent’s victim to pit below not awfully fair (2,3,5) |
| ON THE LEVEL – EVE (serpent’s victim) in HELL (pit) under anagram of NOT | |
| 11 | Station café’s offering things to give ox (7,5) |
| CHARING CROSS – CHA (café’s offering) + RING (thing to give ‘o’) + CROSS (thing to give ‘x’)
I can feel proud that I got this one as an American, completely from the wordplay of course. |
|
| 13 | Spring routine restricted by extremely elaborate footwear (10) |
| ESPADRILLE – SPA DRILL in E{laborat}E | |
| 14 | Children had remained with English housekeeper (10) |
| CHATELAINE – CH (children) ATE (had) LAIN (remained) E (English)
I look forward to watching Simon Anthony discuss the abbreviation CH for ‘children’ in his YouTube video tomorrow. I don’t dispute it (it’s in Chambers and Collins) but I have never once seen it in a cryptic crossword puzzle. |
|
| 16 | Covering between 100 and 1000 substantial cycles (9) |
| CLINGFILM – FILLING (substantial) with its letters rotated (cycles) between C (100) and M (1000) | |
| 21 | Chap out on roof newly illuminated from the ground? (5) |
| TILER – reversal of RE-LIT (newly illuminated?) | |
| 22 | Step out of a prison (4) |
| STIR – STAIR (step) – (out of) A | |
| 23 | Group One beginning to have change of heart (4) |
| TRIO – TIRO (one beginning) with its guts jumbled
I believe I’ve only seen TYRO, but I could be wrong. |
|
Too clever by far for me. I probably got two-thirds of this but just couldn’t figure some out. I don’t get ROLLING STOCK, I know it’s all the different rolling carriages on the train, but can’t help thinking that rolling is related to the the rich part of the clue, ‘rolling in it’. And ‘stock’ is certainly not rich gravy.
I got BILLPOSTER straight away from the Gates part of the clue but couldn’t parse it. Cottage Pie also a write-in, lovely clue. Had but couldn’t parse CHARING CROSS, very clever. Is there a definition missing for 27A, IMPRESARIO?
Fixed. IMPRESARIO is an &-lit, and the definition for ROLLING STOCK is buffet cars inter alia currently serving. ROLLING is slang for rich.
I’d call IMPRESARIO a “wannabe &lit,” because such a person could also be behind a longer running play, so “short run” is not essential to the definition. As I’ve said repeatedly, a perfect &lit is rather rare, and we put up with a lot of loose ones here.
At the end of a less strenuous week—and a less depressing election—I think I could have gotten thru this all on my own, and it would have been quite enjoyable, but my patience wore thin and I eventually peeked at the blog a couple times to break a logjam. I did get most of the trickiest ones unaided, but the two unknowns, BILLPOSTER and CLINGFILM, were beyond my worry-fraught mind tonight.
It’s common for definitions to contain words that are not essential – look at 20ac for instance. Of course there’s something particularly satisfying about an &Lit where nothing is extraneous but ‘wannabe’ is a bit harsh!
My understanding is that the question mark indicates exactly this overspecificity.
Yes, I missed the DBE flag!
But “short” is entirely unnecessary, as far as I can see.
Having looked again I see that it’s also superfluous to the wordplay (nothing wrong with ‘run’ for R) so I do wonder what it’s doing there!
Psst, starstruck — can you remove my time from SNITCH? I did not finish this puzzle in 35 minutes!
Sorry about that – my imperfect parsing of blog entries. I will remove it when I can, but this may take a few days as I don’t have this built into my online routines yet.
Thanks, btw, for the blog. This was a very tricky crossword!
Now removed. My apologies for the delay.
This was a toughie and I needed 70 minutes to complete the grid, but I must say I enjoyed the challenge as it kept me entertained from start to finish.
I didn’t get all the parsing of BILLPOSTER and I’m not sure that the clue quite works but I found it an interesting one . The surface reading makes sense if one knows that the Queen Elizabeth Gate / Gates is a landmark in London erected at an entrance to Hyde Park in 1990 to celebrate the 90th birthday of HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, hence it’s sometimes referred to as the Queen Mother Gate/s.
The definition ‘sticker / BILLPOSTER’ reminds me of the feeble old joke about fly posting as related here: In the UK in the 1960s an attempt was made to reduce fly posting (the illegal pasting up of posters) and warning notices were put up with the legend ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted’. Waggish fly posters responded with ‘Bill Stickers is Innocent’ notices. Versions of this go back much further than that sometimes with Posters substituted for Stickers, and include a variation published in a New York newspaper The Ocean Herald in 1884.
I’m still trying to think of a substitution for ‘worked / TOOK’ at 2dn.
EXEC was my LOI and I have only just realised that EX = ‘love interest of old’. Whilst solving I simply had old = EX and nothing to account for ‘love interest’. Devious!
The New Yorker wasn’t around in 1884!
Sorry, lost in translation and duly amended.
The idea worked/ The idea took
I.e. the idea took hold/ was successful/ worked
Thanks. I was thinking along those lines but never quite got there.
I could pretend that an afternoon of repeated interruptions, then a two-hour appointment with the kitchen designer and a one-hour drive out of the city ruined my train of thought, but I would be kidding myself. I got all but about five in 40 or so, but the rest were never going to fall as Jeremy’s insightful blog makes clear. My list of fails is led by BILLPOSTERS and also includes TOOK, ECHO, TRIO and STIR. I got CHARING CROSS, CHATELAINE and ROLLING STOCK through sheer guesswork, and am still not happy with the latter on a number of points. Some good clues here but too tough overall for me.
From It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding):
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares?
PROPAGANDA, all is phony
Excellent blog, Jeremy, thanks for the explanations. There were several devices in this puzzle which I’ve never seen before. Glad that I put very little effort into trying to parse CHARING CROSS and BILLPOSTER, amongst others – I still don’t fully understand the latter.
I’m not sure that there is anything deeper for COTTAGE PIE, if there is I can’t see it.
I still have no idea why TOOK = ‘worked’ but with only T-OK (probably) outstanding for what felt like a respectable performance on a tough crossword I took the plunge.
COTTAGE PIE seems straightforward to me. The fanciful conceit is that one has cooked a ‘little home’ – the cottage – and baked the building itself into a pie.
Re TOOK = work:
The idea worked/ The idea took
I.e. the idea took hold/ was successful/ worked
Yes, thank you, or I have realised that similarly a gardener might say that their cutting ‘took’.
Similarly a surgeon told me on Wednesday that the fixation of my fractured scaphoid bone had started to “take”.
Great!
I found this hard. I knew the word BILLPOSTER and could see BILL and ER but I still don’t see how the clue all goes together. I thought CLINGFILM was clever. I got it from the checkers and then had to spend time seeing how it worked to cycle FILLING. There was a lot of clever stuff here. I didn’t understand TRIO either and just put it in from “group” and the checkers.
BILL ER would give “Gates perhaps Queen Elizabeth”
BILL POST ER gives “Queen Elizabeth Gates perhaps”
22.50
This was certainly tricky, although I metaphorically slapped my forehead when I saw PROPAGANDA, which was part of one of two split sections causing me grief.
Quite a few I didn’t fully parse along the way, so pleased to be all green. I needed the crossers to B&B (biff & back-parse) CLINGFILM, but that was probably my favourite. A rather chewy but enjoyable Friday.
Thanks both.
PS. BILLPOSTER made me chuckle, as it reminded me of the occasional signs you still see warning ‘Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted’, under which someone has invariably written ‘Bill Posters Is Innocent!’.
As above 😊!
Ah yes! Great minds 😊
Re: BILLPOSTER, I remember seeing a photo of a sign saying ‘POST NO BILLS’, and underneath it someone had put up photos of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Bill Nye, etc.
An hour plus another five minutes to spot the hidden for REEVE, distracted by the rest of the clue which meant nothing to me. The whole thing felt a bit above my pay grade.
40 minutes and proud! A real Friday challenge. By the way, are others finding the Club site so slow as to be virtually unusable. If the Times is going to charge for this service, they should spend some money and make sure it works!
No chance of that.
If you complain they sometimes get back to you in a couple of weeks. By which time the problem has either resolved itself, and/or you can’t remember what you complained about.
29.40
A real Friday toughie, with a couple of wordplay innovations that I hope we won’t be seeing too often. I’m getting used to the concept of cycling as in 16d, but I don’t think the unindicated POST in BILLPOSTER and separation of “ox” into “o” and “x” for CHARING CROSS are the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.
Leaving the “short” out of 27ac would have made it a more valid &lit.
LOI OOPS
COD PROPAGANDA
I had this thought about 7dn and if RING CROSS had just been indicated by ‘ox’ I’d have cried foul on the same basis that I dislike things like ‘beachhead’ to indicate B. But for me ‘things to give’ (meaning ‘the elements of’) makes it OK.
It’s the other way around, just like the BILLPOSTER clue: “RING CROSS” would give OX.
It’s like those clues with “…could be threat” and the answer is MAD HATTER.
POST wasn’t unindicated, it was a positional indicator in the wordplay. ER was post-Bill.
… where your face was reflected, lovely,
not really there when I turned
to look behind at the emptying air…
the emptying air.
(Echo, Carol Ann Duffy)
I kept going and cracked the SE corner eventually in 40 mins pre-brekker. Very, very clever stuff. Maybe pushing the boundaries sometimes on ‘too’ clever, but I loved it.
Ta setter and PJ
Chewy but nutritious. 45 minutes but some unparsed.
I biffed a lot of this. A curate’s egg with a lot to like, but a few ho-hum clues.
FOI ECHO
LOI EXEC *
COD BILL POSTER
TIME 10:23
* It took me fully two minutes to parse this one afterwards.
Catchartic to see a fellow American struggle with this one.
For 9A, I immediately ID’ed the definition as “promotional materials,” but took forever to get it because of the three-dimensional British nature of the clue. “OK, East End, that means Cockney is lurking here. They drop their H’s. OK, what’s a word that’s missing an H that fits here?” And so on for minutes on end.
Same goes for 25A. I Immediately ID’ed the definition as “sticker,” that the capitalized “Gates” was referencing Bill, and that ER was involved somewhere, but I was off searching my (admittedly limited as a TIRO/TYRO) crossword memory for plants or pointy objects or indeed sticky objects. Nice misdirection from the setter for sure, but billposter/billsticker was not — nor was ever going to be — on my American radar.
Got there in the end (in 67m), but this one took a whole lot of biffing & praying.
p.s. Also looking forward to Simon’s video. Not for the CH abbreviation justification, but to see him breeze through the uber-British stuff that gives me fits whilst taking ages for, say, 22D or 23D. You know, kind of like during the sudoku vids where he masterfully handles all the brilliant logic, but then you’re yelling at him through the screen about a naked single.
Yep, like you I suspected BILL and ER but even once I looked up the answer it took me ages to see how POST worked!
Don’t know how long you’ve been solving but stuff like STIR and TIRO (the I/Y) issue notwithstanding definitely comes with time.
DNF with the two short ones eluding me. TOOK & TRIO. I still don’t really get BILLPOSTER.
I liked FEATHER-BRAINED.
Thanks for the difficult blog PJ.
“Queen Elizabeth Gates perhaps” could be otherwise written as “Perhaps Gates after Elizabeth Regina”, or BILL, POST-ER.
Thanks Amoeba, but it is a bit convoluted IMHO.
Got there in about half an hour.
– Not sure how to=beside for TOOK
– Didn’t know the Canterbury Tales reference but eventually saw that REEVE was a hidden
– Biffed INTENSIVE
– Had no idea how CHARING CROSS worked beyond the ‘cha’ bit
– Likewise, didn’t see what was going on with CHATELAINE
– Also didn’t parse STIR even though I see now it was fairly straightforward
Thanks Jeremy and setter.
FOI Oops
LOI Took
COD Thoroughfare
Beside is one of the many dictionary definitions of “to” (9 in the Chambers app). Cheek to cheek a possible example? Bumper to bumper?
26:04 including about 10 minutes at the end on EXEC (clever one, that), TOOK (which I wasn’t convinced by) and LOI PROPAGANDA (which took an alphabet trawl to see). I’m pleased to see I’m not the only one who found it rather tricky. Thanks Jeremy and setter.
Me too with Exec – we’d already had a cryptic reference to Eve, but she definitely was an early love interest so…
I really enjoyed this puzzle, which I finished in 38:21. Almost every clue was a riddle, unlike the more mechanical anagrams and suchlike. My LOI was the PROPAGANDA and that was a real hand slaps forehead moment, as was EXEC when it stupidly took me an alphabet trawl till I hit X!
Many thanks setter for a great puzzle and I hope we get more like that.
Thanks also Jeremy for blogging it.
Really enjoyed this start to the day
About 70% complete, well out of my league today. In my ability to get into this division from the QC I feel a bit like one of those teams destined forever to hover between the Premier League and the Championship.
24:54. It feels like we’re a tough mob to please sometimes. I loved the originality of the clueing, in fact I thought there were too many outstanding clues to pick a favourite. Bravo and thank you setter.
And well blogged Jeremy for what was a decidedly non-American puzzle. But if I have to put my pedant’s hat on, the rhyming slang term is “butcher’s” not “butcher”.
Oh that makes even more sense! I figured it would have been backformed to the same part of speech.
Strictly speaking it’s « butcher’s hook »,
Butcher ‘ook?
Quite.
Gave up on the hour with three missing. Would never have got TOOK in a month of Sundays – it’s such a long stretch from ‘worked’ IMHO, and the to=beside is a double stretch for an already difficult clue. Also as has been noted, ‘stock’ is absolutely not ‘gravy’. Grumbly about this one.
Quite hard but we’ve had harder. I had lots of it written in pencil so lightly that it is hard to read. Sometimes that was because I had failed to parse, and sometimes the answer seemed very weak.
18a Altar. Tempted by alter, but got it right.
19a Intensive. Bifd.
25a Billposter. Couldn’t parse but it had to be.
2d ToOK. Is to=beside? Too=beside is fine.
3d Feather Br. Bifd. Could not parse.
5d Red Mullet. Hmmm.
8d On the level. Bifd.
11d Charing X. Bifd. Got the cha but didn’t read ox as O & X. Grrr.
14d Chatelaine. Bifd. Got the Lain E bit.
16d Clingfilm, bifd. Never thought of substantial=filling.
22d Stir, could not parse, being thick.
23d Trio. Checked Cheating Machine had both tiro and tyro. It had. It had passed me by and I had mis-parsed as changing the heart from YR to RI, and yes that is different. Ho hum.
I think I would have liked this more if I had fully understood the clues: BILLPOSTER and CHARING CROSS, step forward! I decided the first was something to do with the Queens head on Bill’s envelope, and misrepresented what cafes do as charing and the cross from somewhere else. I don’t think I got OUT OF DOORS either. I did get CHATELAINE after I’d tentatively entered it, and EXEC, TRIO, STIR and TOOK have been entered in the top ten of the trickiest 4-letter words ever to grace/contaminate a crossword. Both ECHO and LAID might have done, but I remembered my Yodaspeak in time. I don’t think you can get CLINGFILM from the wordplay: only after guessing it can you figure out what word is being cycled, especially if it’s cycling that much. FEATHER BRAIN fell once I stopped trying to make it an anagram (silly) of exploit and plant.
23 minutes, which looks as if it might be quite speedy, but I’m glad I didn’t have to blog it: commiserations and congratulations PJ in equal measure.
This puzzle relied heavily on Yoda-speak. (By the way, I like that nomenclature but it’s worth pointing out that non-Yodas also use that construction all the time in noun phrases like “the sandwich I ate”, “the sweater she wore”.)
In “Here is the sweater she wore,” the phrase indicates an object.
“It was a bit chilly out, so the sweater she wore” uses the last four words quite differently.
(“Chilly it was a bit out”?)
I guess I have always taken these clues to be giving noun phrases. Or, shall we say, nominal descriptors of strings of letters. “Hot green dresses”, for example, being equivalent to “Hot, dressed by green”, etc.
Yes, they are. My only point was that the examples you gave above were not necessarily (taken in isolation) the same construction—i.e., an anastrophe (just learned that word!), with the syntax inverted from the normal order for rhetorical effect. If you only wanted to say, “I ate your sandwich—sorry!” it would sound odd to say “Your sandwich I ate—sorry!” It’s normal, though, to say, “I got indigestion from that sandwich I ate last evening.”
I got indigestion officiate.
I don’t follow…?
Sorry, it’s an old schoolboy joke. Officiate= of fish I ate.
Apologies!
No, it’s must be “of fish ’e ate.”
I was about to say Johnny needs to learn how to pronounce “officiate.”
Yes, you’re right. Another vowel please, Carol.
The full joke was:
Teacher: Give me an example of a sentence using the word officiate.
Johnny: My father died officiate.
I’ll get my coat.
18:02. My one small grumble about this is that I dislike the ‘cycling’ concept, but it’s clearly here to stay so I’m just going to have to get used to it.
With that out of the way I can say that I thought this was absolutely superb. Very tough but almost every clue was brilliant. I particularly like BILLPOSTER.
MER at ‘gravy’ for STOCK but it’s close enough for me.
31.30. Completed, but not the style of puzzle I enjoy.
I couldn’t agree more. That was a pleasure to solve (11:33) and even more of a pleasure to parse later (half an hour or so!). The “cycling” trick is just another useful device in the setter’s armoury (not that I spotted it in relation to the loathsome plastic stuff), the bovine bisection was just masterful (albeit the surface is a bit bizarre), and the QE Gates brilliantly constructed, but the highlight for me (COD) was the beautiful homophone for PROPAGANDA, which I will not be able to resist bringing to mind every time I hear the word. I’d always assumed GANDER was also CRS but it turns out it’s all to do with geese having long (& inquisitive) necks. Who knew?
I can see that setters see the cycling device as useful but I just don’t think there’s any meaning of the word ‘cycle’ in ordinary English that indicates clearly a movement of letters from the back to the front of a word. I’m clearly in a minority and I can live with that!
Minority of 2 at least – I also thought I was the only one that this leaves a bit of a bad taste for
According to Collins a cycle in physics is “a sequence of changing states that, upon completion, produces a final state identical to the original one”. Like when you successively move letters from the back to the front of a word?
And strangely enough there’s a human activity in which this sequence regularly plays out…cycling!
‘Ordinary English’!
I think one could reasonably say that some of the scrolling text you see on news channels cycles across the bottom of your TV screen, always in the same order but starting at a different point every time you look at it. This is an analogy that works for me in terms of moving letters from the end of a word to the start (assuming a short message that will fit neatly on the screen, plus continuous scrolling with no gaps).
For some reason I imagine these clues as a (cycle?) wheel, which then rotates to some extent, and that means the letter sequence starts from a different position.
All of these ideas are very (too?) ingenious but I think they involve back-solving to justify something that – to repeat myself – doesn’t really make sense in ordinary English.
This is a very personal view. Crosswords are so massively dominated by convention that it might seem quixotic to object to this one. But I like to think that cryptic instructions should be comprehensible (with a bit of explanation of course) to a layperson and I think this one fails on that front.
Perhaps it’s the mathematician or programmer in me, but “cycling the letters of ABCDE” very unambiguously and naturally means
ABCDE
BCDEA
CDEAB
DEABC
EABCD
I agree, and if that’s what the clue said I would have no objection!
How is “substantial cycles” different for you?
It’s the letters that are cycling. Substantial/FILLING is a singular entity, it cannot cycle.
There’s also an element of the indirect anagram about this for me. I might be persuaded to accept ‘stop cycles’ => TOPS.
I remember the first time I saw the ‘cycling’ technique — there was a TfTT meetup December 2015, and Paul arranged a NY version. Was it the 10-year anniversary? A puzzle had been constructed for the occasion, and I recall seeing ‘cycling’ in one of the clues; if I recall correctly, Olivia twigged the meaning immediately.
20.09
Loved this but it was very difficult in places. The only clue I couldn’t parse was CHARING CROSS so thanks for that.
For some reason I didn’t look at the clue for the easy TILER until right at the end. Had I done so sooner I might have got BILLPOSTER and IMPRESARIO a lot sooner.
30:10 – Can’t see any satisfactory parsing of 25ac either, but at the time I assumed post must be a synonym for gate, with Bill being one of the gates and post being the other. But I can’t find any backing for that usage, so stumped am I too.
It‘s post in the sense of after
[Queen Elizabeth Gates perhaps] is ‘showing’ [Gates perhaps] after [Queen Elizabeth].
Replace
– ‘Gates perhaps’ with BILL
– after with POST
– Queen Elizabeth with ER
I finally and very belatedly get it. Rather neat. Thanks both.
DNF in an hour
Really struggled with this, majorly unhelped by a very rare treeware solve meaning that I thought 1a was 2,3,5 which caused a big blockage.
Left with the SE I completely missed the hidden and despite mulling stations and even at one point getting onto the right track with the ox thing rather ran out of steam. BILLPOSTER was thought of but only pencilled in as the POST bit made no sense. Actually like Keriothe I think that clue is brilliant (as was the fiendish CLINGFILM). Sorry Jeremy but commiserations and an excellent blog as always
About an hour.
Man, that was like pulling teeth. Good puzzle, though.
Thanks, pj.
First ones in were ECHO and ON THE LEVEL. Then it got tricky! As Z8 mentioned, some of the most fiendish 4 letter clues I’ve ever encountered in Crosswordland! TOOK took an age as did EXEC which was my POI. LOI was REEVE where I couldn’t see the hidden and didn’t know the reference to Canterbury Tales either. Took a punt on it from the crossers and party member maybe being a magistrate. 36:16. Thanks setter and Jeremy.
25’08”, late in the day. REEVE was LOI, the Chaucer reference passing me by, and I thought it might be something to do with our new Chancellor.
Thanks jeremy and setter.
It seems this was set by John Henderson (Elgar in the Telegraph Toughie, Io, Nimrod, and Enigmatist elsewhere), which accounts for its difficulty, and its excellence.
75 minutes. I’m not surprised to hear this was by John Henderson. Not quite as hard as he can be, especially in his Enigmatist incarnation, but still very tough. As usual with his puzzles, there was some stuff I couldn’t parse which has been mentioned by others above; I never would have seen BILLPOSTER, REEVE and CHATELAINE without Jeremy’s explanations.
At least there’s no Elgar in the Telegraph Toughie today, so some respite 😊.
Thanks to Jeremy and JH
This was a toughie.
I’m in a similar boat to the OP in that this was a DNF, having stumbled on the same clue. I carelessly put in EXES thinking it fitted the definition “Love interest of old” and persuading my sceptical self that there might be a city in Maryland (MD) called this. A little more reflection would surely have produced the right answer, since it was far from the most difficult clue, but it was my last one in and I my brain was showing signs of fatigue by then.
Jackkts reference to the old joke brings to mind that wonderful group “Billposters Willbe Band” who did many a gig at The Bull in Barnes.
Just crawled in on this one – complete and correct over two sessions so probably 90 mins plus. Not fully parsed and some I thought were weak so definitely not on same wavelength.
COD BILLPOSTER
Funnily enough I’m sat in the Kings Arms no more than 5 minutes from Tabard Street and the site of the Tabard Inn so that one came quite easily.
51:18
Pleased to finish ahead of my Snitch target of 57.5 minutes (Snitch currently 135) -wasn’t busting a gut to finish quickly, rather enjoyed the ride. Not sure that anyone has made clear that a MULLET is a somewhat crap 80s/90s hairstyle sported by footballer Chris Waddle for one (though he was not ginger) – gives a bit more understanding to the clue perhaps? I though TOOK/worked was a bit meh, but thought FEATHER BRAIN and several others were great.
Thanks Jeremy and setter
I nearly finished with all correct, but fell at the last where 26ac defeated me. With 62 minutes gone I decided to put in the only word that I could think of that vaguely fitted the clue in EDEN. Actually on reflection vaguely doesn’t really come into it, with the Garden of Eden hardly being counted as a city! Very good puzzle however that stretched me from start to (nearly) finish.
Did finish, but it took me 75 minutes. Wasted much of it alphabet-trawling T-O- because TOOK seemed too much of a stretch in every way. Thanks to today’s blogger for explaining several of the other clues. Still, a fine work-out, I thought. Now I’m off for a well-deserved pint of Adnams. Cheers!
This took me just over the hour, but great fun. All correct, even if I didn’t fully understand why on Reeve, Billposter, Charing Cross.
Lots of favourites but I’ll choose Propaganda as my no.1 and Espadrille as my no.2.
67’00”
Decided early to attempt to hack round steadily and try to finish in one piece…
….which turned out to be the wise option. Despite more Valentine’s, Chairs and Beecher’s than you could shake a riding crop at, at least my woeful pace included getting it all parsed.
This was an very tough but very enjoyable challenge.
Well done Jeremy for untangling it all, and bravissimo to Mr. Henderson !
Embarrassing to say how long I took, so I won’t, and that was with free use of aids by the end. It was so hard that I stopped trying to work them out after a time. There were some very good clues, but some that I thought were rather a stretch. Why do we have ‘currently serving’ in 20ac? In 2dn does OK = well? In 22dn is a stair a step?
Flight of stairs, flight of steps?
And “Are you OK/well?”
OK. Perhaps.
But they’re not the same thing. One would say ‘Are you OK?’ when someone has fallen down, and ‘are you well?’ when you’re enquiring after their health.
Yes I suppose so. The trouble is that we seldom use the word ‘stair’. At least I don’t.
Halfway down the stairs is the stair where I sit. There isn’t any other stair quite like it. I’m not at the bottom, I’m not at the top. So this is the stair where I always stop.
45:47. I’ll take that. It needed two sessions. I had a good run at it this morning, some going in nicely that I thought might have stumped me another day.
I still needed the second session this evening. I could not always nail the parsing so that it clicked convincingly into place. For example, LOI TOOK with doubts about TOOK itself and the component TO. OK was OK.
All clear now. Thank you Jeremy, and thanks too to the setter
Can someone please explain where the second E comes from in EXEC?
love interest of old = EX
city = C
EC is the postcode for the City area of London.
Thank you
EC is the post code of the City of London.
Thank you
DNF. Three clues short. “On the whole” mucked up the eastern side of the puzzle.
I was pleased to get that far through it in the end, and don’t feel so bad after reading the comments here.
I liked FEATHER BRAIN, OOPS and EXEC
Thanks for an insightful blog and thanks Setter
DNF. Saw that TOOK would fit, but could not equate it with worked.
Did not see THOROUGHFARE or EXEC.
Had IMPRESSION for IMPRESSARIO, which prevented me getting TRIO or STIR.
Oh well. Tomorrow is another day.
I liked it. Even the ones I didn’t understand.
Pretty nasty in places, and glad that all the solvers seemed to agree. Does the compiler ever consider whether their puzzle is unreasonably hard? Do I really want to put well over one hour of my remaining years into this? (Answers on a post card please)
On holiday in New York so only completed this today. Very chewy I found but I was another who failed at trio. As with Jeremy, tyro is the only spelling I’ve encountered for a beginner. Apart from that thought it a typically demanding Friday, even if this is Sunday!
I live in NYC. What brings you here?
Late here, but loved it. Very hard. All parsed – a few after guessing and laboriously working out – except one. LOI REEVE, where I didn’t see the hidden and had no idea about parties or Tabard inns, or drunk etc.
I’m certainly in the camp of liking all the unusual tricks.
This puzzle was utterly brutal so fair play to anyone who solved it without cheating. I find the “reverse” clues where the wordplay itself provides wordplay for the clue totally impossible.
I have queued Simon’s video as I watch it every week, but I presume he will explain it by saying “I say this every week but it bears repeating, you cannot just abbreviate any word to its first letter, it MUST be supported by the dictionary.”