Clue of the fortnightįrom the Saturday Times and recommended by Catarella: Kludos to Newlaplandes: please leave entries for this fortnight’s competition – and your picks from the broadsheet cryptics – below. The runners-up are Harlobarlo’s “Distraught lover heading to counselling – a way to achieve closure?” and Montano’s “Absorbed by high-level crosswords, it is easy to get hooked” and I hope you’ll tell me if sentiment has clouded me in naming Newlaplandes’s “Develop and grow, essentially, around a little community – good for sticking together” given that it prompted a response from Albery about our “nice friendly and informative community”. If I’d known that the makers of the stuff had made a cringey video trying to police how I use the word, I would have chosen a different portmanteau thank you to Newlaplandes for the link and for the audacious response: “Stick together in opposing intellectual property, getting rid of stupid, pliant, petty rule.”įittingly, VELCRO lends itself to clues which join two words, such as Faiton77’s “Fastening section of level crossing” and Catarella’s “Easy fixing for clever mounted brackets” and to clues involving tangles, such as Artemiswolf’s “Tangled patch of wild clover”. Thanks for your clues for the fastenings made by VELCRO. I’d like to imagine it was the same person behind that mantra-like never-ending sentence and the marginal gloss saying, effectively: “Basically, about who can make hats, mate.”Īfter that, shall we have something terser for our next challenge? Often now made from red felt, it shares its name with the Moroccan city where crimson berries became red dye: reader, how would you clue FEZ? Cluing competition ‘The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great-Britain, Anno 5° & 6° Edw.VI. The word was the used for a hat made of felt, and for a hat made of anything at all, which perhaps explains the punctiliousness of this law of the 1550s: Here’s one from Piccadilly in the Sunday Telegraph’s Enigmatic Variations:Īdmittedly, once you’ve got FELT, you do have to encode it before entry, and after working out what the code is for now, while it’s always a pleasure to feel felt, the words come from different places, and you might have once had a filter of felt. Latter patterĪfter last week’s exhortation to try barred weekend puzzles, a reminder that their clues are solvable. “I’ve filled in a grid,” he tells me and, naturally, “attendees can help create a crossword on the story of the tour.” There’s a list of cities and incredibly precise locations at Paul’s website. Literally so: he started yesterday on a week-long tour of UK cities where he is visiting parks and thanking solvers who have taken part in his Zooms and crossword people in general. Would that encourage more diligent parsing? Puzzling elsewhere Less facetiously, readers Tony Collman and, implicitly, Ousgg suggest that we might do away with bold and italics in the clues themselves. Incidentally, giddy with last fortnight’s innovation of putting definition before wordplay in the explanations above, I’m belatedly responding to a forgotten query about why we’ve been using “ac” for “across” but merely “d” for “down” by slipping in another big change in a way that may not be noticed. ![]() So it is with Martin Bashir in a clue from Tramp:ġa/8d/6d Broadcast did test Martin Bashir: did watch show this once? (7,8,4)Īs usual with Tramp, the theme is explored elsewhere in the puzzle and if you, like me, are interested in such things as the Wilson government’s experiment with BRITISH STANDARD TIME, I thoroughly recommend About Time, the latest book by GreenwichRoyal Observatory’s former curator of timekeeping David Rooney. Other times, you appear in a clue when many solvers may have already made up their minds about you. ![]() So that’s AVIATOR and as with all Saturday Guardian puzzles, there’s an annotated solution if you got any of them but aren’t sure why. So it is for former Post Office boss Paula Vennells in a clue from Vlad:Ģ5a Maybe Post Office really apologising (and Vennells) – from the start IT at fault (7) ![]() There’s a special indignity in becoming part of a clue when most solvers had not heard of you until your appearance in terrible stories elsewhere in the paper.
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