A classic themed puzzle from Virgilius, which I was on to before I’d filled a single answer in as I saw “Idiot” twice in the Across clues, plus “nincompoop” and then quickly realised the date. Appropriately enough, 17a was the first answer I filled in and after that the various fools came rushing in, as it were.
As a sidenote, I see that Virgilius (as Brendan) was responsible for yesterday’s Guardian puzzle so all he needs now is for tomorrow’s Times puzzle to be one of his to complete the hat-trick.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 7 | (HEAD YES)* – HAYSEED, a derogatory term for yokel, was new to me although easy to guess once a few letters were in. |
| 10 | DUN,CE – DUN means to make repeated demands for payment so “pressure church to pay” = DUN CE. |
| 11 | BRA in LAME,IN |
| 12 | L in COD,PATE – CLODPATE was another new one for me but very gettable from the wordplay. |
| 17 | (AS DOOLALLY F)* – ALL FOOLS DAY. |
| 21 | IC in YORK – the 14a from “Hamlet” and the subject of a common misquotation: Hamlet does not say “Alas poor Yorick. I knew him well”; he in fact says, “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio…” So now you know. |
| 22 | hidden in “joB ONE HE ADored” – very well hidden. |
| 25 | (MICHELLE’S)* – I sort of knew this but wasn’t sure about the spelling so had to wait for a few letters to go in before committing myself. SCHLEMIEL is a Yiddish word for an unlucky person or someone for whom things never go right. |
| 27 | GOOSE – I was unsure about “smoother touch” when I filled this in but I’ve just looked it up and found that a GOOSE is a tailor’s smoothing iron. |
| Down | |
| 6 | T[-o]WER,P – I thought this was very cleverly done, with some well disguised wordplay. |
| 8 | N in DOORS – “roughly equally” tells us that the N doesn’t quite go in the middle of DOORS. |
| 9 | hidden in “thE DICTionary” |
| 18 | LOCKE,DON |
| 19 | HYS,SOP – which is SOPHY’S cut in half and the bits switched around. |
| 20 | RED,DO (going up) |
| 28 | O,OIL (going up) – an OLIO is a mixture or medley. |
Nice puzzle. I solved most of it fairly quickly but it took me ages to get CLODPATE and TWERP.