Saturday 28 August 2021

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 in the same day's paper.  2d was explained by "slow-moving" = "tame", which I don't really buy.  3a was a pun on Thomas More, the author (should have seen that!).  The solution to 5/6 was NOISE ABROAD, an expression which I've never heard; and 4d, PRIOR, seemed to be a rather weak double definition.  Didn't enjoy that one at all.

Concise (#3358)

I also struggled with this one a bit, which is unusual for me.  Normally I can get the pun along the top row more or less straight away, but although I could see ARC for 3a, I couldn't think of a suitable fish for 1a. Managed to get about three-quarters of it done without trouble, but came to a standstill in the NW corner because I couldn't think of 10d (for which I had ????T?L?E); I correctly assumed that "trifle" referred to a thing of little value rather than the dessert, but the answer eluded me for ages.  My last one in was 9a, for which I can only plead ignorance of the definition.

 

Feeling somewhat deflated after those two, I came to...

Codeword (#3036)

The letters given were C, X and Q.  You'd have thought that such a selection would be of little help; but in fact they enabled me to nail the puzzle almost immediately, since there was not only a five-letter word beginning with X (X-2-17-21-12) but a six-letter word at top left 17-24-Q-15-24-1, which could only be SEQUEL or LIQUID.  Since there is no word X?S?? to my knowledge, that gave me XYLEM (a Codeword favourite!) and everything else fell into place from there.  Rather satisfying.

Word Ladder

I won't normally be commenting on these as there's little to say, but I noted that the first ladder could be solved in four steps instead of the usual five: JACK-SACK-SACS-SAWS-SEWS.  I gave myself a bonus point for that one!

Cryptic by Crosophile (#3294)

Setting this blog up has taken me longer than expected, so I'll be delaying this until tomorrow.  I note that idothei has given it three stars, so I'm expecting a bit of a challenge...