Times June 1982 – online puzzle in place of championship qualifier #3

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
In 1982 I was working all hours in Dublin and my cruciverbalising was confined to ‘Crosaire’ in the Irish Times, when time allowed. As I remember, those fine puzzles were considerably harder than this one; this seems to me more like a Times Quickie than a full cryptic, or perhaps I was just unusually sharp today. In 5 minutes I had all but the SE completed, and the remaining 4 or 5 clues fell into place in another 5 minutes, before I’d finished my toast. Only one literary allusion, not a TLS challenge like the earlier Times puzzles I was saddled with on two previous qualifier days.

Across
1 AMASS – A, MASS = service; def. collect.
4 LAMPLIGHT – LAM = strike, PLIGHT = promise; def. illumination.
9 TEA-LEAVES – CRS for thieves; found in tea cups.
10 METRE – MET = satisfied, RE = the engineers; def. this length.
11 MOTOR – MO = doctor, TO, R, def. the vehicle.
12 RESTRAINT – REST = support, outside TRAIN = transport; def. control.
13 SALIENT – (AN ISLET)*, anagrind ‘it could make’; def. conspicuous.
15 DRAUGHT – Double definition.
18 ABANDON – A, BAN = prohibition, DON = put on; def. leave.
20 ANTONIO – As in The Merchant of Venice, a pound of flesh.
21 SCHEMATIC – (CATECHISM)*, ‘arranged’; def. according to plan.
23 PERCH – PER = by, CH = church; def. area of land, as in rod, pole or.
25 AROMA – Sounds like ‘A ROAMER’; def. scent.
26 ABUNDANCE – A, BUN = cake, DANCE = trip; def. plenty.
27 PRESIDENT – P = coppers, RESIDENT = inmate; def. VIP.
28 SHEDS – Double definition.

Down
1 ARTEMISIA – ARIA = song, around (TIMES)* ‘bad’; def. plant. As it happens, the middle name of my eldest granddaughter, which I suspect she will keep secret when she’s older.
2 ABAFT – AB =seaman, A, FT; def. behind.
3 SPEARHEAD – SPED = rushed, around A RHEA = a bird; def. those in front. Biffed and then parsed.
4 LEVERET – A young female hare, and hares live in forms, not burrows.
5 MISUSED – MUSED = thought, about I’S; def. badly treated.
6 LEMUR – Hidden in HORRIB(LE MUR)DER; def. night climber.
7 GETTING ON – Cryptic double def.
8 TREAT – TEAT = dug, insert R; def. free food.
14 LOATHSOME – Anagram of HOT MEALS with O; def. nauseating.
16 ANTIPODES – AN, TIP = end, ODES = poetry; def. quite the opposite. Neat.
17 TOOTHLESS – TOO = over, L inside THE; SS = ship; TOO TH(L)ESS; def. without cogs. My LOI as I didn’t really equate teeth directly with cogs, although cogs have teeth of course.
19 NITRATE – NIT = TIN = can, reversed, RATE = tax; def. salt.
20 ACCOUNT – Insert C = about, into A COUNT = a nobleman; def. bill.
21 STAMP – P = soft, MATS = floor coverings, all reversed; def. to make an impression.
22 MIAMI – MIMI the girl in La Bohème; around A; def. resort in America.
24 RINSE – RISE = get up, around N = middle letter of morning; def. wash.

34 comments on “Times June 1982 – online puzzle in place of championship qualifier #3”

  1. 15:33 .. Similar experience to yours, Pip. In fact I was teasingly close to a clean sweep but ran into problems with DRAUGHT (which catches me out every time), PERCH and TOOTHLESS.

    I’d never really thought about the word ‘salient’. It’s one of those words nearly always found in a hackneyed phrase – “salient points”. I had no clue its derived sense is “leaping” … C16: from Latin salīre to leap. Always nice to start the day learning an interesting fact with which to bore muggles.

    1. ‘Salire’ is also the root of ‘desultory’. This helps me to remember what it means, which is rather different to what I once thought it meant.
      1. Thank you. That’s even more interesting. I’m going to be using desultory a lot now.
  2. I put in ‘porch’ instead of PERCH, and it wasn’t even a down clue. Certainly a lot more manageable than the last oldie we had as a substitute, but as Pip says, closer to the Quickie level.
  3. Looking at the date, I may well have attempted this one in my first teenage forays into cryptic solving, maybe while I should have been revising for a mock A-level. Given that I can barely remember puzzles I did a couple of months ago, it’s unsurprising that I recall nothing of it first time round, but if I finished it in the first place (unlikely), it would have occupied me for considerably longer than today’s 6 minutes. If only everything else in life had shown such an improvement in the years since (starting with those exam results). Ah well.
  4. I agree this was straightforward for a vintage puzzle. Only unknown was ARTEMISIA where I’d have been tempted to swap the first I and the E except then there’d have been no anagram element to the clue.
  5. Can someone put me out of my ignorant misery and explain why in 8d TEAT = dug ??
    2. It’s another word for nipple Simon. I thought of you when it came out about yesterday’s puzzle – remembering that some of us on the Forum created clues using your and your fiancee’s names.
      1. Thanks Olivia – although I don’t know what the wife will think of the concept of “dugs” – note that it is almost our two year anniversary now – many happy crossword memories – especially the clue “Cavorting carnal hedonism for this couple (6,3,5)” – which all the guests loved when they got to “Rachel and Simon”
      2. Oops! Your comment about yesterday’s puzzle, Olivia, sent me off searching, only to find that it WAS a marriage proposal (which I might have suggested yesterday would be a tad unwise … ahem). Thank heavens she said yes!
          1. Blimey.

            Anyway, many congratulations. And here’s to a long and happy marriage (back-pedalling like crazy), as I’m sure I meant to say yesterday!

            Where’s the door?

            Edited at 2015-06-17 06:40 pm (UTC)

    3. For some reason the line ‘I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs’ has stuck with me since studying The Waste Land at school. You never know when these useless old memories might become useful!
  7. 14 minutes but a careless ‘speerhead’ did for me. I wish I could say it was a typo, or even a technical typo, but my only excuse is that it was a down clue.

    And I thought doing these things was meant to stave off early-onset. I’d ask for my money back if I’d paid any.

  9. I’ve just finished 26127 the qualifier 3 (from PDF); Not as tricky as the first two I thought. Andy / linxit or someone i/c, am I supposed to blog that as well, if so when do I publish? In a week?
    1. When I had all those quals on the Wednesday, it was assumed I’d blog them at the end of the entry period. Same with Jerry.
  10. Printed this, made a cuppa and moseyed off to my favourite chair, expecting a half hour’s all-in wrestling or a DNF (technical or otherwise). Not a bit of it. 14.43

    As for yesterday’s puzzle – some of us were on the money (Sotira here and yours truly on the Club Forum) but Tony wins the prize for the most appropriate comment. Please RR, can I have one for my 40th wedding anniversary (dv) – it’s November 6, 2016 so there’s plenty of time.

    Edited at 2015-06-17 09:04 am (UTC)

    1. That’s exactly three weeks before Janet’s and my 40th. Perhaps we could ask for a double celebration.
  11. Like most others, thought the vintage would take a while but found it very direct – except for the part where I put in March for the land area and spent a long time before getting around to re-thinking.
    Does anyone have a link to the qualifier PDF?
    Thanks for the blog.
  12. 14 minutes, that was very easy. Slowed slightly by the SW corner and by 4d, where I didn’t understand the definition or wordplay, but couldn’t think of anything other than leveret to fit. I was also a bit slow to get 15, thrown by the inclusion ‘of given,’ which suggested a container or charade.
    1a is a bit odd. It appears to be a clue to A MASS, the convention being def X from wordplay Y. I’m not sure how to read it to get ‘collect’ as the definition and ‘amass’ as the answer, but ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’
  13. Reckon I would have been faster but for the first few minutes I was stricken by my fear of vintage puzzles. Gradually it became obvious that it wasn’t all that vintage, and not at all terrifying.

    Thanks setter (if you’re still with us) and blogger.

  14. My heart sank when I saw this was an old puzzle, but then I did it in 9 minutes. Based on this evidence the Times crossword went through a dramatic change in style at some point in the late 70s/early 80s.
  15. I can never complete these vintage cryptic puzzles, and groan when they appear. But as keriothe says, there was clearly a change in style that preceded this one and I breezed through in 15 minutes or so. Compared to the usual fare today, this is on the easier side. Thanks for the link to the actual qualifier, which I sought out but couldn’t locate on the Club site. Regards to all.
  16. A rather sluggish 5:31 for me. I struggled with several easy clues and my fingers seemed to be at their most uncooperative so that frequent retyping was called for.

    Anyone who hasn’t come across DUG = “teat” before must have missed Juliet’s Nurse’s ramblings in Act 1 Scene 3 of R & J.

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