Enigmatic Variations No. 973 – Shade by Samuel

A double dose of Samuel this week, with the (rather more light-hearted?) Inquisitor 1183 in the Indy on Saturday as well. The preamble here indicated a quotation from extra letters in wordplay, a thematic derivation from the rest of the quotation, and two methods of altering 10 answers before entry. All in all, some familiar EV devices, and your correspondent got off to a reasonable start – before taking a couple of wrong turns…

I trawled through most of the acrosses before getting the first solve – STANHOPES at 40A (one of my favourite crossword words, as STANHOPE anagrams to PHAETONS, another type of carriage…), but I digress. I soon found that there were clashes in that bottom left corner, and twigged that maybe the HOPE of ‘stanhopes’ might be jumbled up. My first diversion – assuming this might refer to Dante’s inscription at the entrance to Hell in the Divina Comedia/Inferno: ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter!’

Back then to some fairly hard slog solving a wealth of – for me – quite tough, but fair, clues. I managed to find 5 occurrences of ‘hope’ to be jumbled, not helped by hurriedly entering ‘ALL-HEAL’, instead of ‘HEAL-ALL’ at 8D, but it took a while to track down the others. Eventually I cracked that 30D was SENTIMENT, and the only way to fit it in was to use T as an abbreviation for TIME – and ‘abbreviation’ was appearing from the extra letters by now. This lead me back to ODQ, and Edward Gibbon’s line from ‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796):

‘The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life’.

So – TIME was abbreviated to T in five places, HOPE was jumbled (failed) in another five, and ‘EVENING OF LIFE’ fitted across the unclued middle row – to be shaded in brown. After my casual treatment of a W S Gilbert theme last time round in EV 969, I have searched for some sort of link/anniversary but, if there is one, it has escaped me. I have learned a bit about the life of Gibbon and his magnum opus on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the process, so thank-you Samuel for that!

A sombre and reflective theme. Although I would like to think of my stage of life as more ‘sitting down for afternoon tea’ than ‘heading upstairs with cocoa in hand’, it is a necessary reminder that we can’t do much about the march of time…and maybe a prompt to think about that pessimistic expectation of the ‘failure of hope’ – which surely we can do something about?…

By coincidence, there had been a recent article in the Guardian about alcohol problems in ‘older age’, which prompted a spirited response in the letters page last week from one Jim Lynch of Milton Keynes:

“Apparently we OAPs drink because of “bereavement, loneliness, chronic … illness, difficulty in sleeping and depression” (Dr Luisa Dillner’s guide to… drink and drugs in old age, G2, 28 June). God forbid some of us might enjoy the stuff.”

I’ll drink to that…maybe a brown ale…?!