The crossword and "i"

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3360) No real trouble today.  The odd surface of 3/5 meant that it had to be an anagram; were we supposed to imagine that the town of Tonbridge in Kent perfected the art of ordering cricketers before passing it on to the rest of the world?  The only one that gave me pause was 1d, with three vowels as the crossers; I went through the names of elements ending in -GEN before realizing that it wasn't a specific element, but a group of them (in the technical sense as well as the everyday one). Concise (#3360) A three-word top-line pun is usually particularly groanworthy, and today's was no exception!  I didn't get it for a while; my first one in, rather unexpectedly, was TAG TEAM (9a), a term I hadn't heard for years.  Most of the rest was OK but for some reason I missed SHAKY as the obvious answer to 18d (SHADY was the best I could come up with), and I didn't know POPLIN (2d), apparently "a ribbed fabric used in clothing and upholstery".  C

Bank Holiday today so we get another couple of puzzles in addition to the usual weekday offerings.  Five-Clue Cryptic (#3359) A lot easier than Saturday's offering.  A fairly straightforward anagram at 4a first of all, then a reasonably standard charade at 1d.  I was a bit surprised to see a proprietary name as the answer at 2d, but it was clearly clued and couldn't be anything else.  5/6 was then guessable from the enumeration and the definition. Which left 3d - another of those damned spoonerisms!  I had to guess this from the enumeration and the crossers, because there's no way I'd have got it from the spoonerism - presumably FUR TOUT ("animal pelt seller") becoming TUR FOUT and then re-spaced to TURF OUT ("expel").  As I said last time, I rarely come across one of these clues that isn't strained in some way or another, and I'd be happy never to see another one.  Their only saving grace is that they're instantly identifiable from the n

Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword (28 August) Sunday's post will usually start with some comments on the previous day's Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword, which I normally solve in the morning.  Unlike all the other crosswords, I have a fixed routine for solving this one: I go through all the clues in strict order, Across followed by Down, and then do a second pass in the same order.  If I can't get any more Across clues after that then I look them up, fill them in and have one more go at the Down clues.   This is the first time I've kept statistics, so I'll use this week's puzzle as a benchmark: 1st pass: 12 of the Across and 18 of the Down clues solved (plus first half of 2d). 2nd pass: 6 more Across and 2 more Down clues solved. 3rd pass (after looking up Across answers): 1 more Down clue solved. I was astonished by the number of obvious answers I failed to remember: ALAN ARKIN, (JEROME) FLYNN, PATRICIA HAYES and GSTAAD were all names I should have known.  Ho

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3358) Sod's Law dictates that I should start this blog on a day when the Five-Clue is particularly intractable!  I like to think of it as a nice straightforward puzzle to be solved over a cup of coffee, as a curtain-raiser to the main event, so when I have as much difficulty as today, it can be a little disconcerting.   1d caused me no problem; it was clearly an anagram, ETONIAN.  The rest of it made little sense though.  2d was one of those Godawful spoonerism clues, which I generally dislike because they're often strained and never remotely funny; here the spoonerism fodder, as it were, appeared to be LAME NAG ("slow-moving horse"), yet the answer appeared to be NAME TAG ("label").  How did the L get transformed into a T, I wondered?  Then there was 3a, which had to be UTOPIA from the definition and the crossers, but I couldn't make head or tail of the wordplay.  The rest completely defeated me. Fortunately an annotated solution is

This is a new blog documenting the crosswords and some of the other word puzzles in the daily i newspaper.  Each day from Monday to Saturday I'll be giving my thoughts on the Five-Clue Cryptic, Concise, Codeword and main Cryptic, along with any other puzzles I think are worth commenting on.  They'll probably appear by mid-afternoon, depending on my other commitments and on how tough the puzzles are that day. On Sundays, when the paper isn't published, I'll be going through some unsolved Cryptic puzzles, either ones I was unable to complete during the week, or older ones from my backlog (accumulated during February and March).  This week only, I'll be attempting Saturday's puzzle on Sunday because of lack of time today; in reserve I also have #3289 from last Monday, when I was away. There's not normally much to say about the Saturday Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword - either you know the answers or you don't - but if I have any comments I'll be incl

 Test post for the "Crossword and i " blog.