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Monday 30 August 2021

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
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Saturday 11 September 2021

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3370) A few quibbles in this one.  What's the meaning of GONE FOR A BURTON (3/5)?  I thought it meant "dead", or maybe "broken beyond repair" - not "lost" or "getting beaten" (one of which is intended as the anagram indicator, but I'm not sure which).  It was quite a good anagram though.   1d needed UB = "benefit"; presumably a reference to unemployment benefit, which was replaced by Jobseeker's Allowance in the 1990s (and the latter has itself largely been superseded by Universal Credit).  And 6d was one of those double homophone clues: "smell" = "reek", "cable" = "wire", and REQUIRE sounds (approximately) like "reek wire".  However "reek wire" doesn't mean "smell cable", so aren't two homophone indicators needed again?  I can't work out the conventions on this. Concise (#3370) FILL + LATTERLY = "philately", which
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