The recent decision to move the prize puzzle blogs to the Saturday has spared my blushes somewhat, as in all honesty this post could not have happened without the “cheat” button. Well, it could, but you’d be solving the bottom half of the grid for me, as it was almost entirely empty after a week of staring at it.

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I seemed to race through this one unaided, though almost inevitably not without a slip. At 15dn I substituted in an initial M, in the optimistic hope that MACE might mean “reprimand” somehow.

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Solving time: 6 mins

A very entertaining offering from Paul, with a twist: several of the answers were rebuses or ‘dingbats’, where a phrase is represented in a kind of pictorial cryptic fashion, such as ‘Mandogger’ (= ‘dog in a manger’) or ‘Erif’ (= ‘Backfire’). These were fun to solve, although I think it would have taken me a long time to solve any of them ‘cold’ (i.e. without crossing letters) without some pointer that they weren’t normal cryptic clues; perhaps a very brief warning at the top of the puzzle might have been merited, although the rest of the puzzle was accessible enough that it was solvable without, especially given that the thematic answers were all multi-word phrases. There were also some very good normal clues in this.

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Well another shortish preamble this week, put relatively succinctly, the  aim is to find a quotation to fill two answers and the diagonal by discovering the unclued work it is from, then determine how this is to be used to derive the answers to four other clues. A couple of further comments – one of the answers, a verb is not in Chambers,  except in conjunction with another one, whilst one answer is listed as an abbreviation in Chambers. Definitely looks to be on the easy side of the EV spectrum, as Salamanca’s EV puzzles tend to be.

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