I once made a wonderful mistake in an ironmonger’s in Paris where I was searching for a knife to cut the bread. I was a young student at the time, short of money but reasonably resourceful. Being unable to recall the French for knife, except that it began with a c, I described its function in great detail. Alas, to the great amusement of the proprietor, the word was culottes!! This was long before they were a fashion item, I hasten to add. Needless to say I have never forgotten couteau and the said knife survived many a student outing round Europe!

Gervase @ 50. Yes it’s most disconcerting. Sometimes it is listed as Monaco di Baviera, which still bears little relation to Munich.

All good fun, though.

Robi @ 47. Thanks, it makes a little more sense now.

Giovanna

I have to agree I sometimes find Rufus less accessible than say Paul or Brendan. I had thought it was just the fact that there’s usually a theme and/or that my mind set and general knowledge was compatible with my two favourite setters.

Your theory may also explain why I found Gordius yesterday easier than I usually do.

Very interesting.

Giovanna @46

You’re right I never would have guessed Basilea. I remember a seasoned traveller once telling me that if you have some French then adding either a final ‘E’ or ‘A’ and putting on an outrageous accent often delivers comprehensible if not good Italian. He also said it didn’t always work as he had once asked for the bill for lunch by saying “l’addizziona per favore”. At which the English speaking waiter dissolved in floods of laughter.

I have been puzzling over why I found this puzzle so much easier than most other posters seem to have done. It occurs to me that there are several factors which influence the degree of difficulty of a crossword:

Vocabulary – it helps if you know the words, which in this case I did, fortunately.
Shape of the grid – a lot of unchecked initial letters round the perimeter makes a puzzle trickier for me, but there were none such in this one.
Construction of the clues – Paul’s aren’t the easiest, certainly, but I find it easier to spot the definition in his puzzles than in some others

For me, there is another factor: the nature of the crossing letters. Uncommon crossing letters can make solutions to the remaining clues easier to find. I’ve often groaned when a recalcitrant clue has crossing letters which would all score 1 at Scrabble; there seem to be too many possible solutions. For interest, I have calculated the average Scrabble score of the crossing letters in the four puzzles that have appeared in the Guardian this week. The results are as follows:

Paul 1.65
Gordius 1.57
Brendan 1.48
Rufus 1.38

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I don’t generally find Rufus’s crosswords as easy as many other do.

As any fule kno, a Swiss Army knife also includes (or did) a device for taking stones out of horses hooves!