Another unaided solve this week, although I admittedly made a couple of slips which I was later able to correct by checking Chambers.

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Lorraine This week I had trouble with the north east corner, possibly due to over indulgence at Christmas and New Year, got there in the end though. Favourite clues 11ac, 16ac, 20ac, 3dn, 4dn and 12dn.

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An Azed of average difficulty — most answers were pretty straighforward to work out from the wordplay, but I needed Chambers to check that some of the words really existed. Skelder, fratch and lubbard are all good words. Also, I was not familiar with Bunter as a valet, so had to check it. Read the rest of this entry »

We have had a plethora of Azed Specials recently, caused no doubt by things occurring at inconvenient times: first we has TWO THOUSAND, which was in effect the October competition and celebrated Azed’s 2000th crossword in this series. We had GROAN in November, a Spoonerisms competition (I’m not sure why), and then in early December we had A COMING OF AGE, which I suspect celebrated the fact that some member of his family came of age (although in the Azed Slip for this he doesn’t support this theory). And now we have the Christmas Special, and Azed hasn’t let us down. I found this very hard but very rewarding: at one stage I became completely stuck and thought I was going to have to ask for help for this blog. Then the penny dropped.

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I hope I have got the serial number right here, for the puzzle published on 2 January. Because I don’t like writing on newsprint (sorry!), I scanned it in and printed it onto ‘normal’ paper, but omitted the title line. And the recycling bin has bin and gone.

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