We enjoyed it and thought it was well constructed, so please Jambazi have another go!

Thanks Duncan for the blog and flashy grid!

The Listener crossword website (address below) contains, among much else, very detailed guidelines for setters thinking of making a submission.

http://www.listenercrossword.com/

This last year or so, I’ve enjoyed solving a few of Lato’s excellent IQ puzzles and I was delighted to finish, during our summer holiday, the brilliant QUIZ IQ that Nimrod set. I still feel that I am a novice when it comes to solving advanced cryptics — I don’t get enough time to solve them and I think that explains some of the issues I had when trying to compile this puzzle: particularly around creating the grid.

I’d wanted to set a barred-grid puzzle for a while but could never come up with a decent idea. I did have a few attempts that, unfortunately, were too weak to ever see the light of day — a shame really because I’ll never get those days back! Anyway, in March 2012, I happened across the phrase ZEBRA CROSSING and immediately thought of Abbey Road. I don’t even like the Beatles and know nothing about the album so I checked out its Wikipedia entry. I couldn’t think of a way of working any of the songs into a puzzle but then I had the idea of trying to recreate the cover. I checked out the artwork on the internet and figured I could have the band members walking across ZEBRA CROSSING which could span the whole of the grid, as it’s 13 letter long. I was pleased to see that I could get George, Ringo and John/Lennon into the grid, walking across the road, as it were, whilst maintaining the correct order on the sleeve, but, I thought this was going to lead to another failed project when I saw there was no way of slotting Paul/Mccartney in between the first two. I was about to give up when I saw the A and thought of MACCA.

Before starting work on the grid, I thought I needed to put the title somewhere in there (even though this doesn’t appear on the LP cover; at least it didn’t when I checked Google Images, although there is a title in Duncan’s picture above). I spent ages searching for words that could be changed easily into ABBEY ROAD; nothing materialised but I came across GRAYBEARD which wasn’t a million miles from ABBEY RD. I thought I’d use this and nervously set about designing a barred grid. Barred grids still seem foreign to me and I stuggled for ages trying to fit ZEBRA CROSSING, checked with the ‘feet’ of GEORGE, MACCA, RINGO and JOHN/LENNON, and GRAYBEARD, into a grid. I managed to do it but each attempt had either way too many short answers or too many entries with insufficient checking. I think my early efforts had over 70 clues. In the end, the best that I could come up with was this grid. Realising that I’d already wasted far too many days on what some teachers refer to as “basket work” I didn’t want to add to this by writing lots of clues only for the editor to say the grid was rubbish. I contacted John Henderson saying that I had an idea and that I wanted to check that it hadn’t been done before and that the grid was ok; John passed me on to Ken. I told Ken that I was thinking of spelling out the address and postcode of the street using extra words in the clues. Ken thought it would be preferable if I used some other way of spelling out the message: superflous single letters in wordplay for example. I think this would have been better but I already thought I had enough of a challenge ahead of me so decided to stick with the extra words. The clues were written quite quickly and Jim Toal did a good job of test-solving the first effort. At the end of March, I’d settled on the pseudonym Jambazi (Swahili for Tramp, my Guardian name) and sent it to John Henderson for his consideration. After test solving by the IQ team and a few minor improvements it was deemed suitable for publication.

JohnLowe is correct — (T)INTI(n) is the correct parsing for 45 down. On reflection, it perhaps is a little tricky,

KenMac et al — I can only apologise for the misuse of WHISKY for the radio code word. It never entered my head to check this.

HolyGhost — you’re right about the ambiguity of the wording of the preamble. I should have explicitly put “solvers must change two unchecked cells….”. As for the UNTARRED/TARMAC and RING/RANG issue, it had never occured to me that the setter should, in all clues, avoid using words that are similar to one of the grid entries. Is that an unwritten rule of advanced cryptics?

I’m struggling for inspiration for another attempt at an advanced cryptic but hopefully I’ll get to do another.

Thanks again folks

Jambazi

I agree with John Lowe‘s understanding of how the wordplay for 45d works (comments 3 & 5) – though it was by far and away the last clue that I resolved to my satisfaction.

And along with kenmac at comment 9, I found WHISKY instead of WHISKEY a minor irritant.

There were a couple of other weaknesses for me: TARMAC & UNTARRED (16d & 21d) are too close, and slightly worse is having RANG in the wordplay for 25d and RING as the answer at 28d, clued by “called” and “call” – and in consecutive clues.

Nevertheless, thanks go to Jambazi, and of course Duncan for the blog. (Let’s hope that flashing grids don’t become de rigueur – I think I’ll use them only when there is some change to the completed grid required before submission.)
>>> Incidentally, here the rubric states that “Changing two other unchecked cells in the completed grid will form an abridged title of the work”. Is this an instruction, or merely a statement of fact?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FAA_Phonetic_and_Morse_Chart2.svg

So I saw the solution 8 months before I saw the puzzle. As the extra letters began to appear I had this nagging feeling of déjà vu and then when I found the four names I thought, “isn’t this similar to a puzzle that was out a few months ago?” – d’oh!

The one thing that niggled me was that a large number of clues (I didn’t count them) had a capitalised word as the extra word, making it easier to spot the superfluous words.

And I didn’t notice that their “feet” were on the crossing, it’s so obvious now that you mention it.

Nice “flashy” grid, Duncan well done.

Thanks for the very clear blog.