I knew this special was coming because, unusually, Azed told us about it in the monthly Slip from the previous competition. It’s a format that he invented, and it crops up from time to time. I’ve marked A or C against the numbers to indicate the type of clue – A where a Spoonerism of the answer is defined, and C where the definition itself is “distorted by a Spoonerism”, as the rubric puts it. Type C clues are often fairly easy to spot, after which they become as easy or hard to solve as normal clues; type A can be trickier, as what is defined is usually not a standard word or phrase, and sometimes is just two unrelated words. I think this, along with the fact that in type A there is no definition of the answer, is a bit of a flaw in the format. Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable, if challenging, puzzle. There are a couple of places where I’m not sure I’ve got the Spoonerism right – enlightenment welcomed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Definitely harder than the last one I blogged (2 weeks ago) and probably a little harder than last week. The surfaces here are impeccable pretty much throughout, and overall I felt this had slightly more of the feeling of a weekday crossword than normal. In fact clues very similar to 6ac and 21dn appeared in this week’s (last week’s by the time this goes up) Guardian crosswords.

Read the rest of this entry »