NUDDY at 12 across brought to mind the lines from Ian Dury’s ‘Reasons to be Cheerful – Part 3: “Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy, being in my nuddy”. The song, discussed on the crossword centre message board last year, also counts as blessings “Dimitry and Pasquale”. I think there was a non-cruciverbal reason for their inclusion, but I’d like to add “Azed in my pocket”. This one took me a bit over half an hour on the tube/over lunch, plus a bit of dictionary checking and one correction.

Read the rest of this entry »

This seemed like a harder-than-usual effort from Phi, although no less entertaining for that. It got me wondering about the Saturday slot of the Indie puzzle though: does a setter who usually sets easy puzzles occasionally submit a deliberately harder one to see if they can get the Saturday slot or does the editor notice that the puzzle is, for some reason, harder than usual and decide to put it in? It’s not really an important question of course, but when you’re awake at 4AM feeding a 5 week old baby it’s the sort of thing you tend to dwell on at length. Read the rest of this entry »