Comments on: Financial Times 13,479 / Cinephile

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:40:19 +0000

Hi Gaufrid.
After seeing the first line of your preamble this morning, I thought let’s wait for my Partner in Crime to join me for this.
But alas.

So, tonight I gave it a go myself.
One eye on the crossword, half an eye on Mrs Bradford and the other half on the Alex Higgins documentary at BBC2.
Maybe, it was the healthy influence of some new Zealand white wine, but at my slow pace I completed the job.
Well, um, completed? Not really.
In the end I was missing the four in the NW [apparently the hardest part today].
Thought it might be CHAPEL, but I was too lazy to check Mrs Chambers.
And both 1ac and 1d were rather nice – after I saw the solution.

So, I didn’t fully complete this crossword, but I surely liked it. Very well clued, too.
It seems Mr Graham is gearing up a bit [since, at least IMHO, his recent Saturday puzzle was also extremely enjoyable].

And a lot of birds today, weren’t there?

By: Gaufrid

Gaufrid — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:14:23 +0000

Hi smiffy
You are nearly spot on but the definition is ‘Swanee people’. This makes the wordplay simply A T[ime] in OLD FOLKS’ HOME (the retired). Having mentioned the latter in my preamble I should have seen the parsing when I was writing the post.

By: smiffy

smiffy — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:03:24 +0000

Glad to see that I wasn’t the only one to get brainache from this one. The toughest in a long while, I’d say.

I also struggled in the NW corner, although not helped at 1D by being in a part of the world and an industry where “sick-click” is the standard pronunciation. Cracking that one provided a key beachhead, although CHAPEL as the collective noun at 2D was new to me. And, like Eileen, the HORSEHOE bat was also beyond my ken.

Just wondering: is 4D in fact a container/contents? (FOLKS A T{ime}) in OLD HOME.
Requires the assumption that “the retired” = old (people’s) home. But that’s far from a quantum leap by Cinephiliac standards.

By: Gaufrid

Gaufrid — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:08:38 +0000

Hi Eileen
Thanks for the elucidation regarding 10ac. As you will know by now, Shakespeare is not my forte.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:49:00 +0000

Thanks for the blog, Gaufrid.

I liked the genuine homophones in 1dn [and 20dn] and smiled at ‘with stress to the end’ in 27ac, to excuse what might have been a dodgy one!

In 26ac, I assumed that ‘candle’ was as good as anything else [perhaps like yesterday's errand boy's greens?] since it had to be ‘lit her something’.

I was puzzled by 21ac, never having heard of a horseshoe bat.

Re 10ac: ‘often applied to age’: ‘crabbèd age’ is a quotation from Shakespeare’s ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’:

Crabbèd age and youth cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.
Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short;
Youth is nimble, age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;
Youth is wild, and age is tame.
Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee;
O, my love, my love is young!
Age, I do defy thee: O, sweet shepherd, hie thee,
For methinks thou stay’st too long.

And Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an essay entitled, ‘Crabbèd Age and Youth’.

But I like your idea about the mini-theme!