Solving time : 21 mins approx
Solving this crossword at 6pm here in San Francisco was interrupted by, of all things, a Scottish pipe and drum band playing outside my window.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1,4 | COMMON ENTRANCE probably a hard one for international solvers who weren’t brought up in the UK, being the exam that public schools use to screen applicants for academic ability |
| 10 | PROP=shore in MIRE* |
| 13 | OLD (16d is AGE). I put this in as “old age” based on ancient, but doing this blog I realize that it has to be “age old” really. This=16d=AGE 13=OLD is ancient |
| 14 | A PAY in PA (which must be an abbreviation of Panama) |
| 17 | CO in SURGE. If we want to be pedantic, carbon monoxide isn’t strictly poisonous, it just binds to haemoglobin more tightly than oxygen so eventually asphixiates |
| 21 | ENJOy I N |
| 25 | BAG, presumably, 2 mngs. But neither meaning seems precise. Book in the sense of “I bag the seat by the window”? |
| 27 | CADDIE “caddy” (for tea) |
| 28 | RUTHLESS hustlers* although “hard” seems a bit imprecise as a definition |
| 30,31 | CONTRACT BRIDGE, a bridge being a kind of rest in snooker apparently |
| Down | |
| 1 | COWS=jerseys LIP=put on S=small |
| 2 | MEA CULPA (cup a meal)* |
| 3 | OUTPLAYS cryptic def |
| 6 | NIMROD nim is a game with some interesting binary arithmetic properties. Nimrod was a skilful hunter, grandson of Noah |
| 8 | ETRIER. I eventually guessed this since I know that étrier means stirrup in French. It is a short climbers ladder. |
| 12 | CLAUSAL defn is “of less than a sentence” |
| 15 | pACT |
| 18 | END ANGER=needle (v.t.) |
| 19 | WOOD WIND. There is indeed no brass in the woodwind section of an orchestra |
| 20 | INVEIGLE (leg vein i)* I’m not sure how the “varicose” in the clue is meant to fit unless it is a second anagram indicator. But there is a “?” so we should be gentle, I suppose |
| 23 | poST AT INfirmary |
| 24 | BOWLER being a type of hat and also the person in cricket who can get a hat-trick (getting three batsmen out on three consecutive balls) |
poison
n any substance which, taken into or formed in the body, destroys life or impairs health;
I’d say CO would pretty much fall into that category.
I thought that the “varicose” in 20d was probably the anagram indicator (presumably with its “knotty” connotation) and that “to manipulate” was the definition.
I also found the 13 16 OLD AGE thing a bit unclear, confusing and too circular for my taste, maybe it’s signs of 13 16 setting in!
I guess my vocab must be more limited than it ought to be as a lot of words here were pretty new to me:
ETRIER, NAP, STATIN, LITTORAL, NIM, BARSAC…
I was also briefly perplexed by the typo at 12A.
I think that the FT has a tendency to allow some pretty nasty grids. Sometimes this can be forgiven for the sake of a good theme for example. However, I’m not a great fan of grids which are effectively 4 barely connected mini crosswords.
Re grid, maybe, even where the paper now offers compilers more of a range (with some really excellent examples) to select from.
Nonetheless, I thought my colleague Quark managed the situation extremely well: 1,4 & 30,31 seemed designed to offer solvers fair access at both ends of the W & E areas, while 12dn, 15, 17 and even 16 were hardly a bar to progress twixt N & S.