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unemployment benefit, which was replaced by Jobseeker's Allowance in the 1990s (and the latter has itself largely been superseded by Universal Credit).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 will of course get you nowhere (ha, ha).  Actually it got me through the puzzle, so no complaints.

Codeword (#3048)

U, R and S gave me a reasonable start, as I could immediately see UNJUST in the SE corner, which led me to LUSTRE diametrically opposite.  With the E in place it was fairly easy to complete.

Cryptic by Gila (#3306)

Link to idothei (blogged by Cornick)

Link to Fifteensquared (July 2017, blogged by scchua)

Two stars from Cornick and from me.  I didn't struggle with this one as much as some of the commenters did; I had no idea about the restaurant referenced at 9a, but otherwise I didn't find anything too obscure.  Favourite was the slightly risqué 5d, followed by 4a, 11a, 12a and 18a in no particular order.

15d struck me as slightly irregular, because you're meant to assemble the phrase TRAIN SENT out of two separate definitions, and then move the I from the first word to the second.  I suppose there's nothing forbidding this device, but it seemed a bit awkward.  (And yes, I know that "train" isn't strictly a synonym of "locomotive", but they're confused by so many people that the equivalence seems to have become standard - at least in crosswords.)