As indicated, Smiffy is tied up with work so I will offer my blog instead (I hope I haven’t trodden on his toes!) because some potential solvers may be wondering why the clues do not match the grid.

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When people say things like “You’ve got to get on to the wavelength of the setter”, my inclination is to say “Rubbish. A cryptic is a cryptic and they all more or less have the same rules”. But perhaps these people do have a point: I used to find Punk incredibly difficult, but now the fact that he has appeared here instead of the usual Phi, who no doubt appears tomorrow, has not resulted in any stretching of the time, really. Oh all right then, 33 minutes.

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Some of the slightly odd words and phrases in the grid are explained the Nina: look at the letters around the perimeter of the grid, starting from the top-left hand corner and going clock-wise, then look down at the letters on your keyboard. I guess most people will have spotted what was happening as soon as they saw QWERTY emerging in the top row. Filling in the rest of the letters certainly helped me with more than a few answers. There’s still a few I don’t get though (natch): 10,11 and 13. Read the rest of this entry »

Working away from home for the last couple of weeks meant doing most of this puzzle quickly last night. Some wordplay led to extra letters; some omitted letters (potentially more than one per clue). The omitted letters somehow help in highlighting three shapes in the grid; the extra letters provide further help.

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Didn’t find this easy and am still unsure about 9a
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