Times Quick Cryptic No 3074 by Breadman

159 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic No 3074 by Breadman”

1. I can’t wait to see what the usual crew, particularly the SCC, has to say about this one. I don’t think they will like it.

   I was forced to treat the puzzle like a real cryptic, and work mainly from the wordplay to back into the definition. Fortunately, I thought of Kilimanjaro at once, and it actually fit the cryptic, so I was off to a good start. But Soudanese, Keble, Nyasaland, and Merckx? At least I have vaguely heard of them, but I suspect others have not.

   Time: 11:12

   1. ‘Real cryptic’? Can you please explain how QC differs
      This Seemed like a 15×15 and a hard one at that

      1. I think vinyl is just saying you can’t guess the answers from the definition and ignore the wordplay.

         1. I agree but the crossers helped. I needed the K from Keble to help with 1ac, and the B and the E from the across to help with Keble….

   2. Slow but successful here.

   3. Well, whatever the “usual crew” has had to say, it has had lots of it! 139 comments and counting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen as many.

      And since a number of people have said that they enjoy the discussion here almost as much if not even more than the puzzle itself, I think we should at the very least tip our hat to Breadman for stimulating one of the most vigorous exchanges in TfTT history.

2. Hi all,

   First time commenting after spending about a year struggling through the quick cryptics with the aid of explanations from this website, and now finally reaching the point where I can just about get through them on my own.

   Today was super tricky for me though, 34:48 with quite a lot of bodging in the answers at the end.

   FOI KEBLE, LOI EIDER

   Had no idea Soudanese was spelt like that, and never heard of quagga, Nyasland or eider. Also annoyed at how long it took me to get Merckx as a big cycling fan!

   1. Welcome and well done on completing a tricky puzzle.

   2. Welcome, and well done in completing this one. The Quick SNITCH is running at 152 which makes it the hardest for quite a while.

      1. At least the snitch score agrees with me. Felt really bad to take so long. Stinker of a QC probably without editorial oversight.
         Thanks for the helpful blog.

      2. A high SNITCH like this actually risks understating the challenge, as duffers like me who DNF are excluded from the calculation. If my time when I gave up – over 25 minutes so more than double my par 12 minutes – was included the SNITCH would be even higher.

   3. Great time. If you can do that in 34 mins after a year, you are not struggling!

3. This member of the usual crew didn’t like SOUDANESE one bit. Soudan is the French spelling, but in French the word would be soudanais. This should never have been a clue, especially a QC clue.
   I remembered KEBLE from Monty Python (Keble Bollege Oxford). Biffed KILIMANJARO, never parsed it; ditto NYASALAND (nho Titchmarsh). NHO MERCKX. DNF.

   1. A sort of “cut and shut” clue. (google it). Front half a French clue and back half an English one amateurishly welded back together.

      1. It’s in Collins, though, as “another spelling,” so what can you do?

         1. Collins sv ‘Soudan’ has it as the French word for ‘Sudan’ (and pronounced as a French word), not as another spelling.
            Anyway, I Googled ‘soudanese’, and there are indeed attested examples of the other spelling.

            1. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/soudanese

4. Very disappointing for a QC IMO. Breadman typically sets harder QCs but this was not fun for me. I NHO KEBLE, LAKE POETS, SOUDANESE, NYASALAND, or QUAGGA.
   I got LAKE POETS and KEBLE from wordplay, but I think the others are ridiculous. This is a great puzzle to turn people off from cryptic crosswords, requiring such broad general knowledge to solve a word puzzle is very off-putting.

   1. Totally agree – a real mood buster for a Friday morning

   2. 100% agree!
      I find it amusing that “our country” is UK, but we somehow use a French spelling for Soudanese? Fortunately. being from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, I had heard of Nyasaland, but nho of Lake Poets, etc.

   3. For a counterpoint – I also had never heard of those ones (Well I had heard of the lake poets, but not the cyclist MERCKX), and am relatively new to all this. I was able to solve all of them – and solving ones you have never heard of from good wordplay (and good wordplay is an absolute must) is one of the great joys of cryptics IMO.

      I was all finished in 24:11 but sadly with 2 errors:

      KILaMANJARO
      cRoSS CUTTING

   4. Totally agree! A great example of how to discourage people by wanting very obscure knowledge. Quagga?? Soudanese?? Etc.

5. It’s been a while since a QC took me 17 but there it is, not exactly what I’d call quick. Same comments as everyone else regarding the many obscurities. Who is Titchmarsh? Never mind. Like vinyl I had to go into 15×15 mode to work a lot of these out. Notwithstanding the GK/vocab issues there were some lovely clues here, but many seemed somewhat out of place. Thanks John (great time!) and Breadman.

6. 9:16, hardest QC I can remember for ages. The general knowledge component was high here and I was lucky to have it all except Lake Poets, which was a guess. Alan Titchmarsh surely unknown outside UK (and rightly so, some might say). Nevertheless, I found this a fun solve, perhaps because I like the GK stuff (although I’m yet to complete a GK Jumbo, which seems to me harder to do than a Mephisto).

   [edit: didn’t even realise until now that I also had a pink square from KIL*A*MANJARO!]

7. 24 minutes. This contains three answers (CHAVEZ, MERCKX and SOUDANESE) that have never appeared before in the TfTT era and one (QUAGGA) that’s appeared only once in a standard format puzzle, a 15×15 blogged by me in 2018. As I write it now it’s being queried by my spellchecker. MERCKX may be easy for those who know of him but very hard for others, especially as the combination of letters produced by the wordplay looks so unlikely. I waited for all the checkers before writing in with fingers crossed.

   1. Merckx the Unbiffable! I had a professor Boeckx from Belgium…

8. DNF. Beaten by SOUDANESE. Some satisfaction in getting all the rest, but I was in unknown territory, in the far reaches of the SCC, by then. Breadman, you have outdone yourself. Thank you John for the blog

9. 17 minutes. Hard going, with my LOI SOUDANESE causing real problems at the end; it is in one of the standard references (Chambers) with this spelling, so I guess it is eligible, but… QUAGGA, CHAVEZ and NYASALAND were also tough.

   Breadman has done the central J, Q, X, Z trick before and that helped with QUAGGA in particular; I remembered how to spell Eddy MERCKX, being a fan of his compatriot and fellow -CKX’er Jacky Ickx . Interesting to see that MALI appears in the unches of the row fourth from the bottom to complement the African theme.

   Thanks to John and Breadman

   1. Well spotted with the MALI nina.

      1. I can count Kilimanjaro, Nyasaland, Quagga (which I am assuming lived in Africa), Soudanese and a probably intended Mali. That makes at most 5 African references, which is perhaps a little light to be called a full-blown Nina. Ninette, perhaps?

         1. It’s just MALI that’s the Nina as it is hidden in the unches. It is tied to a theme of African geography in the rest of the crossword.

         2. Quagga did live in Africa and, when I lived there, we spelt those who lived in Sudan, Sudanese. Same, when I lived in England….

10. Hard, but got it done in 24:32. Did the 15×15 and this felt harder. MERCKX would be hard to guess, and although he was famous in the 70s, that’s a long time ago. Knew NYASALAND from stamp collecting, when stamp albums were mainly about the British empire, see also Bechuanaland and Heligoland.

    I’m not thrilled with student = learner = L. That’s a step too far.

    LOI CHAVEZ, even though my wife is related to him.

11. I enjoyed the challenge of this one and pressed submit feeling satisfied at completing the puzzle but got a DPS from a careless MERCKs, who I haveheard of. Once again I ignored that little voice questioning the parsing of an answer and payed the price. One day I may learn😒.

    I don’t normally comment on things ‘not being a QC’ but LOI SOUDANESE was a bit of a shocker for these pastures.

    Thanks to John and Breadman

12. DNF, beaten by SOUDANESE, which neither my cheat lettersearch program nor my go to dictionaries recognised. And I don’t blame them; it has no place in a QC. If it is even correct, as Kevin has observed. But even before that I was well over time, and some of the GK stretches the G part close to if not beyond breaking point. To choose just one example, CHAVEZ was a largely unsuccessful president of a distant country who briefly, but only briefly, merited world attention, and to clue him as a revolutionary is tough – he was a soldier, a populist politician and a thug, but a revolutionary? Are all politicians who try to shake up the establishment revolutionaries? And then there’s that titan of world affairs Alan Titchmarsh, who I’m told used to be big in UK gardening circles but may not be quite so well known in other countries. And so on.

    A very poor QC in my view. What was Breadman trying to prove here?

    Many thanks John for the blog and I am quite sure the Sunday Special will be very much better than this.

    1. Well Wiki has this on the first para on Chavez:
       “Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías CHAVEZ, 28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013 was a Venezuelan politician, revolutionary, and military officer who served as the 52nd president of Venezuela….”

       1. That’s certainly how he liked to portray himself, I agree. But he was very far from being in the same league as true Latin American revolutionaries such as Bolivar and Che Guevara, or even Castro – and self-identifying as something does not always make you that thing …

          1. OK, I think you know more than I. But that said if he shouted about it enough then I think it is fair that Breadman is allowed to take him at his word…? You might disagree. The thing is the setter will look at a source or two to find something the solver might associate with the answer.
             I have to say that Revolutionary didn’t spring to my mind, but when I checked post-solve I sympathise with Breadman.
             I did of course think of Che (Argentinian) & Bolivar, but as a Cuban I didn’t consider Castro as a South American but as a Caribbean.

          2. Agreed. And, I’m sure that Donald Trump has penned a highly favourable obituary, for himself.

13. Another first time commenter and I have to say I loved this.
    My target time has been pushed from 10 to 15 minutes since I started solving on a tablet (typing on this being so much slower than using a pen). If not complete in 20 I mostly consider a puzzle as a DNF. But this one pushed me to nearly 30 minutes and I thoroughly enjoyed building the answers bit by bit and felt a real buzz when I finished. Many thanks Breadman and John.

    1. Welcome Katla. Glad to hear you liked it. I did too.

    2. Sounds like you have the temperament and the skill set for the main cryptic, if you’re not already doing it.

       1. Thanks for the encouragement. I try the biggie when I have time but it’s definitely a different beast so it is with varying degrees of success.

    3. It warms my heart to read this – what a splendid attitude! Welcome indeed, Katla!

    4. If you enjoyed that you should be doing the 15 x 15 as this was a puzzle written for the enjoyment of the highly talented. Great time!

14. Had to to switch windows three times to check words existed – QUAGGA, NYASALAND and especially SOUDANESE. Thought ‘companion’ was just C in this case so was grumpy about welcome clueing ‘have’ – now put right by John so that bit of grumpiness was self-inflicted. I’m envious of anyone who hasn’t heard of MERCKX – lots of fun awaits reading of his exploits and then you can enjoy watching Pogacar as the closest we’ve come since. Vuelta starts tomorrow but you’ll have to make do with Vingegarde as Pogacar prepares for the Worlds – coverage is free to air in the UK. All green in 25.01 – and probably my least pleasurable solving experience of the year. Obviously masses of that on SOUDANESE including an age wondering if ‘Sengalese’ was the correct spelling before QUAGGA ended that dream. If there’s not a nina and Breadman hasn’t forced himself to choose these words I’m going to enjoy it even less in retrospect. Great blog though John!

    1. No NINA as far as I can see, and he wasn’t completing a pangram (after all, Breadman’s signature is the “nearly a pangram, fooled you into thinking that with J, Q, X and Z there was going to be one”) so I wonder if the real reason for including SOUDANESE is that Breadman left himself S.U.A.E.E and was unwilling to go to the effort of reworking other clues to make the puzzle a better QC.

       1. As BR commented earlier, there is a nina – the unches in the 4th row up include MALI. As for Soudanese, Chambers says it is the same as Sudanese, so we shouldn’t complain.

          1. But then these comments would be so boring, John!

          2. Quite right, sorry Bletchers – I did read that too!

             1. Thank you Ulaca, I do try to entertain with my comments and blogs …

                But on a more serious note, does the fact that a word is in Chambers, while clearly enough to make it legitimate, also make it appropriate for a QC? Indeed, what is it that defines a QC? All we have is that the Q stands for Quick and that it is meant to be a pathway for those that want to progress.

                As for Quick, the mere fact that it is 13×13 not 15×15, and so some 75% of the main crossword only, should ensure that. But I would suggest that there is more to a QC – at any rate a good QC – than this, as it also ought to cater for those who are not looking for a pathway to the 15×15. And I would further suggest that one of the defining characteristics of a QC should be that the average solver has heard of the words used. Not necessarily all of them all the time, but a QC should not require one to go scurrying to dictionaries to find that, yes, that unusual spelling or obscure word does (or in many cases did once) exist. There is the Mephisto for those that want that sort of challenge.

                As it happens, today I did use the wordplay, and a long letter search, to come up with S-UDANESE, and guessed that it might be SOU… (nothing else remotely fitted), but I don’t like putting in words I think outright mis-spelt just to fit the grid (OK, my error today) so I looked it up – and that means a technical DNF. I wonder when the word was last used in the main body of the paper as part of an ordinary article. Quite possibly when reporting the death of Gordon of Khartoum …

                1. Oh, I think that SOUDANESE was a bit silly, but I like the bric-a-brac aspect of crosswords. What I mean is the sort of atmosphere created by a second-hand bookshop, all on different layers, with creaky floorboards and nooks and crannies.

                   Amidst all the computerisation that (understandably and rightly) supports the setter and makes his (not very well paid) job easier, the fact that personality and individuality can come through so powerfully, providing such entertainment (and not a little learning), makes the odd OTTity okay for me.

                2. I agree with every single word.
                   What is the point of having separate 13×13 and 15×15 if there is no differentiation of difficulty.

                   1. No differentiation of difficulty? Come off it! How did you get on with the Friday Cryptic of 25th July? (Try it here) It took Chloe Hutton (Championship runner up last year) with an average solving time 6:16 for the 15×15, over 28 minutes and the slowest solver shown on the SNITCH I hr 50 minutes.

                   2. Well, I did solve this puzzle in a little over 11 minutes. If it was as hard as some of the recent 15 x 15 puzzles, I would have taken 40 or 50 minutes, or not solved it at all. The really tough main puzzles are really off the charts nowadays.

15. Thanks johninterred and breadman but this was not a quickie by any stretch of the imagination. Obscurity wrapped round obscurity to provide an obscure answer.

16. Given the QC is intended to reflect an easier version of the main Times crossword, and an introduction to the world of the Times crossword, is it so unreasonable that (just as for the main crossword) there is going to be the occasional stinker?

    The Times crossword is generally recognised to be one of the harder regular crosswords so I think it is only logical that the Times QC is going to one of the harder quick crosswords. But the QC is still much easier than the main Times crossword.

    To put that into perspective, I found this crossword hard . It took me the thick end of 25 minutes to complete and I needed a break in the middle of that to break some incorrect thought processes. In contrast, a hard main crossword invariably defeats me totally.

    If anyone wants to check out the scope of the main crossword, take a look at 29291 which was a Friday stinker with a SNITCH of 256! I seem to remember giving in after 45 minutes with only a handful of clues solved.

    1. Well said. My time for this was less than 1/3 of the time today’s 15×15 took me.

    2. I accept there will be the occasional stinker and I try not to complain too much about that. Generally I feel the consistency of puzzles has got more appropriate for the QC this year.

       Equally I think you can look at the contents of today’s grid and question whether it’s going to be appropriate for the QC slot, so why press on creating it?

       If I have a specific criticism it’s that Breadman did this thing of clustering Q, X, J, Z throughout his 2024 puzzles and they were regularly stinkers. Probably because there just aren’t so many words involving those letters. I noted he’d ditched this tendency in 2025 and have found his puzzles were more approachable for it.

    3. Hear hear, AgileJames, well said indeed. This took me 11 minutes compared to 46 mins for the biggie – so that’s a relatively quick crossword, in my book. Much enjoyed it too, so thanks to Breadman, and John for the blog.

17. Soudanese? Nyasaland? Mercx? Gimme a break. Even the spoonerism was implausible—surely it needs to be a spoonerism of an idiomatic phrase. Ball Gladder? That’s just lazy.

    I got there in the end (though nho Sudanese, Nyasaland or Mercx), but this was a slog and lacking the usual wit.

    1. I like Friar Tuck myself…

       1. Go to your room!

       2. First laugh I’ve had here in ages 👏👏

18. Having got all the hard ones – SOUDANESE, MERCKX, etc – without much satisfaction, I fell down with a foolish misspelling of KILIMANJARO, putting an A after KIL. Just under 20 minutes and it seemed longer.

19. Keble and Nyasaland ok but half this puzzle way outside the spectrum of possibility. Struggled for a very long time then threw in the towel with no fewer than eleven not even guessable. Misery. So: a lot to learn from John today: welcome = AVE; the revolutionary CHAVEZ (to add to all the other possibilities for that word); NHO JASPER; thought of TAR but rejected it as NHO as coat; thought of SUDANESE but it didn’t fit (MER at the added O – has this been in the language since about 1920?); NHO MERCKX (is he really GK?!); withering = CUTTING; NHO QUAGGA; thought of TUB but didn’t see why it should be unwieldy. On the wrong wavelength here. Thank you, John …………………

    1. Eddie Merckx is often considered the GOAT* of cycling – so that would probably qualify him as GK. Joint equal for most Tour de France wins and held the record for most stage wins until Mark Cavendish broke the record last year.

       * GOAT = Greatest Of All Time for when it comes up in a future QC !!

       1. I see – thank you – so does that mean that the GOATs (like that acronym!) of snooker, golf, polo, and a hundred other sports (all of which I do not follow at all and hence are completely NHO) are considered equally permissible GK? If so, give up now …..

          1. It’s The Times so probably only cricket, football and perhaps rugger!

             – Cricket GOAT is definitely Don Bradman (The Don)
             – Football is probably Pele although Maradonna, Messi, Ronaldo, Beckenbauer and one or two others may be in with a shout.
             – Rugby – I’m not sure there is one. Lots of names to choose between.
             – Snooker is probably Ronnie O’Sullivan (The Rocket)
             – Marathon running GOAT is Eliud Kipchoge, sprinting is Usain Bolt.

             You should get yourself a classic edition of Trivial Pursuit from eBay to help the winter nights fly. That’ll improve your GK. Or simply attempt the weekly GK crossword on Mondays.

             1. Plenty going on here to “help the winter nights fly” – not that desperate – but thanks for those – I’ll keep a special note of them!
                Even I have HO Usain Bolt. Snooker: if pushed I’d have said Steve Davis (does that show my age? but GOAT does mean AT); football HO all those except Beckenbauer, but it’s good to be reminded. Cricket there was Colin Cowdrey and W.G. Grace. Think that’s the extent of my K !

                1. Yes, Steve Davis is, definitely, snooker’s GOAT.

             2. Ouch – definitely not football, only answers permitted are George Best and Manchester United, anything else will get lots of cutting/withering comments.
                Even more not Rugby, I remember an early QC where the clue was scoring in Rugby (or words to that effect) and the answer was “Try”, it caused absolute outrage.
                Only permissible sport is cricket where you are expected to know every player’s inside leg measurement from 1800 on, or rowing where the answer will almost always be “eight”, “stroke” or “oar”.

                1. Sorry I’m so slow / stupid / dense … *what* is “definitely not football”, please?

                   1. New Driver said that the QC sports are cricket, football and rugby. I was suggesting that football is certainly not a “QC sport” as any mention of it causes some discontent. When it is mentioned the only possible answers are Manchester United (a famous team), George Best (an even more famous player), or “Real” as in Real Madrid (a famous Spanish team). Rugby is mentioned even more rarely.

                      Personally I have no real quibbles with obscurity as long as the answer can be obtained from reasonably straight forward wordplay, and/or is guessable. Cricket – I am sure you would agree – occurs rather more often than its place in history, culture, GK or anything else actually warrants.

                      I recall one of your explanations of a (to me) obscure musical term which I found absolutely fascinating. It is the totality of the blog, including all the comments, that I find as much of interest as the crossword itself.

                      1. Thank you, Ham. That’s intriguing, the concept of one sport being more of a “QC sport” than another. I’ll be on the alert now: my feeling was that there had been quite a lot of football “GK” over the past years, but I may easily be wrong.

                         1. I’m still waiting for the first reference in a QC to the version of rugby that is faster, more skilful, requires more fitness and is infinitely more watchable than rugby union, but as it is only played in the M62 corridor and Cumbria (in the UK at least – Australia is a different matter), I may have to wait for some time.

                            (Retires quickly before rugby union afficionados descend en masse to “correct my views” …)

                            1. I played and followed RU from an early age and remember going to Twickenham aged eight to watch England play in 1967, or thereabouts. Saw a few games there, indeed, in the days you could just turn up.

                               When the Australian rugby league team toured GB in 1985 (from memory), I was mesmerised. I couldn’t tell who was a forward or who was a back – they all handled and ran so well.

                               What a chasm away from not only most turgid union (with the lottery of the scrum and the incessant tinkering with the rules) but also the league of my Grandstand days – blokes banging into each other!

                               1. They’re back in October – still tickets for the game at Wembley (25 Oct England vs Australia) but the other two games are already sold out.

                         2. Only yesterday we had SWEEPER and GUNNER as football-related clues …

                2. Are you serious that ‘try’ from rugby caused outrage? That’s wild if so.

                   1. John is the guru on the history of the blog. Am I right?

                      1. No. That would be Jackkt. I’ve been blogging for less than 8 years. I don’t remember there being a fuss over TRY. I’ve checked George Ho’s clue database (see here) and there is nothing there that fits.

                         1. TRY being a problem doesn’t ring bells with me but I only started in 2021 so there were seven years before me.

                            But I vaguely recall (and looking it up found) QC 2099 had “Try a couple of times to accommodate part-time worker (7)” = ATTEMPT which resulted in a bit of discussion around whether part-time=temp but that’s not a rugby issue.

    2. You can make a withering/cutting remark, ie something hurtful to the recipient – who knows, there might be a few floating around later today.

       1. No, I do realise that’s totally fair – just didn’t think of it. Will learn!

20. Apart from SOUDANESE, I had the GK to work through the rest. QUAGGA and CHAVEZ came quite quickly once I had the X and J of Breadman’s central trademark of XJQZ. It’s extremely rare that I cope better than some of the more experienced solvers on this site, so I’ll just enjoy it today! Thanks John for great blog.

21. 17:43
    Gosh this was hard. My LOI was SOUDANESE, which I have never seen spelled with an O.
    After all the rare letters, I was disappointed this was not a pangram.

    Thanks John and Breadman

22. Gave up at 40mins with the newly created SAUDANECE (sauce=pickle?) having trawled round Africa with no success (not Senagelese, not Sierra Leonese, not Somalians, not Sao Tome, not the Sudetenland!). Even having been reading Tim Marshall’s chapter in Power of Geography on Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt yesterday didn’t help.

    Reached that final clue within a minute of entering the SCC and immediately thought of SUDANESE but of course it doesn’t fit. Pleased to get the rest done and nearly avoid the SCC. Spotted the X,J,Q,Z middle immediately and that helped.

    The week would have been done in 1hr05 but this was the 3rd fail and it was “too hard for me, mummy” 😜 That’s why I’ve been doing more 15x15s and got a book of 2017s puzzles for when I want to step up and challenge myself.

    Have a good weekend everybody. Thanks to JohnI for the blog and to Breadman. Will look at the Weekender later.

    Edit: 8:23 on the Weekender – thanks to JohnI and his editor/testers for that.

23. Crikey that was tough. I hovered long over SOUDANESE but then pressed submit, only to discover I’d fat fingered PRESS CUTTIIG. Arrggh. It would have been 13:45. COD to FOI KILIMANJARO.

    I think it’s fair enough to give us the odd stinker, just to remind us that if we want to graduate to Big Puzzle we need to be prepared to sail in choppier waters.

    Many thanks Breaders and John.

24. 18 mins.
    Tricky.
    Thanks, j.

25. DNF disaster.
    OK 1a 1d but downhill all the way – but did manage Alan!
    Thanks, John.

    1. Does Alan like being managed we ask?

26. Very hard with several very esoteric answers. Never seen SOUDANESE with an O, NHO QUAGGA, struggled to spell MERCKX. Tough end to the week.

27. DNF on Soudanese but solved the rest.

    Normally I do not like the really tricky puzzles and resort to aids early on but I enjoyed this one. Did not know Lake Poets but knew Wordsworth lived in the Lake District.

    FOI Sheepskin
    LOI Alcopop
    COD Gallbladder as I usually struggle with Spoonerisms but not today

28. DNF. Fortunately had a busy schedule today, so gave up after 15 mins with no intention to pick it up again later.
    Enjoyed the blog which confirmed my decision. Thanks John.

29. Pleased to have parsed my way to some GK unknowns, and a full grid, but several MERs as reflected by previous comments. GALLBLADDER, hmmm…
    Grateful for the blog to sort out a few gaps in my parsing. One day I will remember CH for companion, but today I had enough to fill the gap. As 13A could, indeed did, accommodate that more commonly encountered revolutionary, it took me a while to work out what was definition and what was wordplay.

30. Hmm. Tough going. NIL was FOI. Finished up, after much hopping around the quite sparsely populated grid, with SOUDANESE, more in hope than expectation. Lots of obscurities, to me at least, today. Surprised to be all green. 14:57. Thanks Breadman and John.

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