Comments on: Azed 1960 Christmas parcels – hard to unwrap!

By: Don Manley

Don Manley — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:16:04 +0000

I found this pretty tough and resorted to solving aids much more than normal. A number of regular solvers gave up, I know. Although I enjoyed the struggle for the most part, I am worried that Azed might have underestimated the level of difficulty.

By: liz

liz — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:10:25 +0000

Thanks, bridgesong. This utterly defeated me and I take my hat off to those who finished. I managed to get RAGU, without seeing any of the wordplay, and ground to a halt. Really fiendish!

By: dr b

dr b — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:03:59 +0000

OED defines STRINE as: A. adj. Australian. B. n. a. An Australian. b. The English language as (allegedly) spoken by Australians.

So 1d seemed OK to me, being Chambers-less.

Was also held up far too long by the mistakes in the online clues!

By: Bob Sharkey

Bob Sharkey — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:38:26 +0000

Regarding the different clue versions, I find it’s helpful to check for these before starting. In a hard puzzle such as this one the discarded version provides pointers to how the final version is to be read.

By: Mick H

Mick H — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:49:17 +0000

A mark of just how hard this was: I solved it over a couple of days before Christmas, then left the Escape section of the paper lying around, where it inevitably found its way into the post-Christmas recycling purge. So having written my own clue, I had to print out another copy (from the helpful link on the Crossword Centre noticeboard) and re-solve it. This New Year resolution took the best part of an hour, as I found I’d already forgotten half the words I’d learnt in the course of doing it first time round. So much for the brain-improving power of Crosswords!

By: Jerb

Jerb — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:19:48 +0000

Hi Ian – you’re right again. For all the time I spent staring at the instructions I missed the crucial words “at the end”…

Oops.

By: Jerb

Jerb — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:11:31 +0000

Oh, and thank you bridgesong for putting my mind at rest with the correct parsing of 19a: I mistakenly made it
M[ORATORIA.L]ATINO (a perfect anagram of INAM[ORATO.RIAL]TO),
with LATINO as “He’s loved” (tenuous, but something to do with Latin lovers, I thought). That meant I was at a complete loss as to how the hell I should force MORATORIA to mean “bridge”. But I jammed ORATORIAL in anyway…

By: IanN14

IanN14 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:05:07 +0000

Jerb,
I think the anagram in 28ac. ends at the end of “gets”.

By: Jerb

Jerb — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:56:56 +0000

I loved this puzzle – it took me ages.

Yes Ian, there seem to be some mistakes in the online Java version, but they’re correct in the pdf.

I was thrown by 28a for some time because the anagram of PUREGESTALT starts at the “u” in “pup” (“Clean record formerly, pup later gets form”), Azed having promised that the consecutive jumble starts at the beginning or end of a word in the clue… though I suppose a puzzle like this would be no fun if he kept to his own rules!

Bravo to everyone who finished it.
Jerb

By: IanN14

IanN14 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:32:31 +0000

Did anyone else try to do this online?
There were a couple of mistakes in the clueing.
22ac. had too many letters for the anagram, and the enumeration for 15ac. was wrong.
This held me up for a while, and I only noticed when I came to fill in the paper version that the clue for 22ac. was totally different…