This puzzle was obviously something out of the ordinary as soon as I looked at the grid and saw the ‘extended H’ shape made by black squares in the middle. Sure enough, 1/2/6/7 down are a single answer, which we may as well give here: Knick knack, paddy whack, give the dog a bone, this old man came rolling home. This is the chorus of a nursery rhyme which I’d otherwise forgotten. Apparently it’s used as a regular motif in Columbo and appears in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, the 1958 film about Gladys Aylward. The usual version seems to be “give a dog a bone”, but never mind.
Puzzles with long answers like this are often not my favourites – either you get the quote very quickly and the whole puzzle is a doddle, or you don’t, and it’s a slog. In this case I remembered “this old man came rolling home”, but it took a while to dig up the rest, and the other clues were mostly quite easy, so there was no long period of being stuck, and it worked out well for a Saturday puzzle in solving time terms, especially when the Times and Indie were both quite easy.
Solving time 13:53
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 10 | ICECAP=(pace,CI) |
| 11 | NO WONDER – an echo of a recent Araucaria Saturday puzzle! |
| 15 | VAINLY – ref. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all” |
| 17 | SKA,T.E.S – ref. Christopher Dean, skating partner of Jayne Torvill. |
| 18 | THE DOWNS – the N and S Downs are two ranges of chalk hills facing each other across the Weald, formed from an ancient anticline – local knowledge and remnants of O-level Geography for you … |
| 19 | FAR,EWELL, ref. the Haydn symphony where the orchestra gradually leave until reduced to one desk of muted violins. |
| 21 | BUDD,HA(s) ref. Billy Budd, opera by Britten |
| 23 | Octopuses have lots of arms, so Octopussy = ARMY |
| Down | |
| 3 | PROP,HE,TESS of the d’Urbervilles |
| 13 | REVIEW BODY – nice bit of silly and black humour |
| 20 | ELBA = able |
Nimrod on Fri & Sat? This trumps Phi’s Fri & Mon!
Aha – I see. Sorry about that.