Guardian 25,949 – Araucaria

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I made a slow start on this, but after thinking for a while I was going to get nowhere with it, it gradually began to yield. My breakthrough was to be led to the (literally and metaphorically) central thematic answer at 17,19,20 by getting 11,5 from the anagram. Lots of fun in the clues, as always – an enjoyable and satisfying (and tasty) feast. (Anyone trying to use the online version today will have problems, as some of the numbers in the grid are in the wrong order. I gather from comments on the Guardian website that this has also affected some copies of the printed version.)

 
 
 
 
 
Across
9. SQUARE ONE SQUARE (make all right) + ONE (person). “Often reverted to” as in the phrase “back to square one”, which despite a popular etymology probably has nothing to do with early radio football commentaries
10,24d. POLLY PECK POLLY (parrot) + PECK (use beak), giving the company founded by Asil Nadir, whose collapse led to his flight to Cyprus
11,5. LEMON MERINGUE (MONGREL MENU I.E.)* – a type of pie and perhaps a pudding for the summer, which I hadn’t eaten for years but did at a garden part I went to a couple weeks ago (when the weather was slightly summery for a short while)
12. ALIGNMENT G[round] N[uts] in ALIMENT; definition “dressing” in the sense of “putting in order” – coincidentally this sense is also used in today’s FT puzzle
13. FORSOOK SO O in FORK
14. GAGGING Double definition – a gagging order is a “order to say nothing”
17,19,20. APPLE-PIE ORDER An Apple Pie Order could be a “request to be served a pudding”, and to be in apple-pie order ios to be “just so”, but I’m not sure about the “story”: possibly related to another dubious etymology, that the phrase comes from French nappe plié, meaning “folded linen”.
21. CUSTARD Custard can be served with applie pie, and a custard pie is tradtionally thrown by clowns etc.
22. PAVLOVA V in PAL + OVA – ballerina Anna Pavlova, after whom the meringue-based pudding is named
24. PANOPLIED PAN (god) + OP + LIED. I’d always thought this (and “panoply”) referred to rich decoration etc, and Chambers does give this as one of its definitions, but the original meaning is to do with armour, from Greek pan (all) + hopla (shields or armour – so maybe not exactly “armed to the teeth”)
28. CUTIE CU + TIE
29. GALLSTONE ALL ST in GONE (left) – a painful “inside problem” for those who suffer from them
Down
1,26. ASIL NADIR SAIL* + NADIR (lowest point). A dodgy businessman who fled to North Cyprus when his company Polly Peck collapsed in suspicious circumstances. He returned to the UK last year and was sentenced to ten years.
2,19. SUMMER PUDDINGS (DUMPS DRUGS IN ME)* All this talk of puddings is making me hungry..
3. GRAND OPERA GRAN (relative) + DOPER (one taking drugs) + A. Grand Opera typically has no spoken dialogue.
4. MOHAWK MO (doctor) + HAWK
6. OPEN O (love) + PEN (write). “Open order” is a spaced-out military formation.
7. BLUEBIRD The bluebird is a songster, associated with happiness in various ways; and Donald Campbell’s speedboat ‘Bluebird’ “perished” when it crashed in Coniston Water in 1967.
13. FRANC RAN in FC
15. GROOVINESS OVINE (“sheepish”) in GROSS
16. GARDA GARDA – Italian lake and Irish police force
18. PASS NOTE To pass a note is to send a surreptitious message (I’m picturing schoolchildren passing notes while the teacher isn’t looking), and Pass Notes is a feature in the Guardian’s G2 supplement – also available online – about a topical subject and written in a question-and-answer style.
22. PADDLE Three definitions (the “blade” is an oar)
23. ODDS ON ODD SON
25,8. PEER GYNT ENERGY* in PT
27. REEF Reefs are rocky, and a reef is “a portion of a sail rolled and tied down to lessen the area exposed to the wind” (also a verb meaing to do the rolling up).

37 comments on “Guardian 25,949 – Araucaria”

  1. It was a challenge doing the online version of this puzzle, as it was only possible to correct the numbering of the bottom half by looking at the PDF version. However, I was very keen to do this puzzle so I persevered.

    My favourites were 9a, 3d, 13a, 4d, 22a, 15d & 25/8.

    New words for me were PANOPLIED, GARDA = Ireland’s National Police, as well as Asil Nadir & Polly Peck, all of which were well-clued and easily confirmed with a search in the dictionary or on the internet.

    I was unable to fully parse 17/19/20 as well as 7d & 22d.

    Thanks for the blog, Andrew.

  2. Many thanks Andrew & Araucaria for another great puzzle.

    Also thanks to the Grauniad for yet another cock up – as if the puzzle wasn’t challenging enough already.

  3. Thanks Andrew.
    I actually enjoyed sorting the bottom part of the grid! We all know it is rotationally symmetrical.
    A rather sweet (I mean gentle, not a pun) puzzle, and funnily enough, Garda is an answer in another crossword today!

  4. Thanks for the blog, Andrew. My experience of solving was very similar to yours. Took me ages to get going, then LEMON MERINGUE opened up the theme. Last in was BLUEBIRD.

    The check button was hopping all over the place today, which didn’t help!

    Always a treat to have another Araucaria to solve 🙂

  5. Many thanks, Andrew, for a great blog of another great puzzle.

    As you say, this turned out to be not so daunting as it seemed at first sight, with all those cross references – mouth-watering stuff for first thing in the morning!

    Two advantages today for those who buy the paper: no faulty grid and familiarity with Pass Notes. 😉

  6. Thanks Andrew. No such enumeration problems with the paper version here at Trailman Towers.

    It took me till PAVLOVA to get going but the SE corner fell in quite quickly after that, helped by a lengthy Private Eye subscription, Mr Nadir being a favourite of theirs. Then it was a case of working on non-theme clues till APPLE-PIE ORDER stood out. Overall, a pretty quick solve for me today; that’s not a brag, for yesterday took me till early evening, on and off. But I liked the two puzzles for their different forms of inventiveness; well done, Paul and Araucaria.

    29a favourite of many, 15d last in but very good too.

  7. Thanks Andrew and Araucaria.

    Me three – found my way in through LEMON MERINGUE, just like Andrew and Liz, and like Eileen I’m feeling very smug that I’m old fashioned enough to like doing the crossword in the newspaper with a pen!

    After a very fast start with all the yumminess I slowed down quite a lot. Took me far too long to twig the Donald Campbell reference, and last of all for me was PEER GYNT – the ?Y?T had me very worried. Along the way, I thought ALIGNMENT was almost Paul-esque if you read it a certain way…!

  8. Thanks Andrew and Araucaria. A most enjoyable puzzle with nice use of mini-themes.

    I’ve always assumed ‘back to square one’ referred to Snakes and Ladders? I don’t get the joke about football commentators – is it something to do with Colemanballs?

  11. Dunsscotus – the theory about “back to square one” is that football commentators on the radio used to refer to a numbered grid dividing up the field (which they did – it was printed in the ‘Radio Times’), and would say “back to square one” when play restarted after a goal etc. One problem with this is that “square one” was at a corner of the field so isn’t a uniquely obvious place to go back to. A more plausible theory is that it comes from children’s games such as Hopscotch or, as you say, Snakes and Ladders. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_square_one

  12. Was I the only one to go for POST CODE at 18d?
    (I’m not a Glaswegian but my broadband provider is at G2)
    Left me struggling with PUCK for far too long.
    Thanks Andrew and Araucaria.

  13. Thanks to Andrew for the blog. I had quite forgotten about Donald Campbell so 7d gave me problems. I tried for a long time to force DIED in there somewhere but vainly. The songster was clearly BLUEBIRD but the rest ?

    I am one who gets the paper copy each day so the online mess up was not visible to me. I am reminded of the event many years ago (before WWW) when the Saturday paper printed the wrong grid for the prize puzzle. I had the clues, each with its numeration, so I just sat down and worked out what the grid ought to be. As I remember it took me less than half an hour. I was amazed to see on Monday that the paper had allowed an extra week for people to do the puzzle!

    Something similar happened about 20 years ago so I went to work to do the same thing as before. It failed to derive a grid. On the Monday I spoke to a friend at work who pointed out that the numeration was wrong for one of the clues!

  14. Thanks for the blog, Andrew, and to Araucaria for the puzzle.

    I couldn’t think of an alternative to post code for 18D, though I had 28A. Maybe I should buy the paper, though I do invest in the Indie.

    The parsing of 7D also eluded me and I didn’t get 6D or 12A, so I was defeated fair and square by this one.

  15. Thanks Andrew and Araucaria

    Another delightful puzzle from Araucaria and a fine blog from Andrew. I solved it in two goes and would like to think that I would have been quicker if I hadn’t been clearing the garage and going to the tip with all the rubbish, but who knows?

    I was held up for a time by 15d which I thought at first must somehow be Grosvenors. Bluebird was my last in – I failed to remember the lake reference and tiredly used google to dredge it up.

    I particularly liked 9a, 22a (and related clues), 29a, and 15d when I at last saw it.

    When solving A’s puzzles, I sometimes feel, as today, like a child listening in wonderment to an enchanting storyteller. Apologies for the hyperbole but this was a really good puzzle.

  16. Eileen, Trailman, Mitz above
    I’m almost jealous that you are able to buy the newspaper and do the puzzle in the paper version. No such luck for us living in Asia.

  19. Actually on reflection, although Garda is singular, it’s one of those synecdoche type things where the part stands for the whole. And is polis, here, singular or plural or both?

  21. This colleague found the puzzle a pleasant diversion from the very slow proceedings at Lord’s on TV!

  22. Well, yes, it was quite jolly once you had the PDF version printed out.

    But really? Not only were the numbers wrong on-line, there were spurious black squares where 29 should have been!

    The grids the Grauniad uses are fixed. One assumes therefore that they have templates (especially as I have copies of them!). The templates include the numbers. There is therefore, apart from extreme incompetence, not a single valid reason for touching said templates. They should simply be used as is. And even if you want produce your own grid, crossword producing software will do the numbering for you, so again, there is no reason for error. The better crossword compiling software will also check the grid for symetry, so the extraneous blanks would produce a warning. There is thus no way any of this could happen, which tells you the level of incompetence needed to make it happen! This goes way beyond “a simple typographic error”.

  23. Due to the online screw-up I couldn’t enter GALLSTONE, and I got one wrong, going for POST NOTE rather than PASS NOTE. To be honest I had forgotten of G2’s existence, not having bought the paper for a long time, so I can’t really complain.

    I only got BLUEBIRD after resorting to aids. I can’t decide if the clue was very devious or just a little too obscure.

    As some of you have said, this was a challenge when solving online.

  24. “There is thus no way any of this could happen” But it did. Strikes me that the people or software responsible for this “impossible” occurence must be rather cleverer than some of us are giving them credit for 🙂
    BTW, nice crossword, and thanks for the blog.

  25. Nice crossword. I too decided quite quickly to print the PDF version and revert to old technology. Lucky decision as I now see that the problems were more than just the numbering.

    Very quickly got the puddings etc but was held up by the last two in. GROOVINESS and GAGGING.

    Only problem to me is the “of” in 25,8D.

    Any explanations?

    Thanks to Andrew and the big A.

  27. I always print the PDF to avoid being tempted by the various buttons. The PDF that came out at midnight UK time was different to the (correct) one that eventually arrived and had somewhat different mistakes to those in the electronic version. It was actually quite fun working out whether CUTIE or ODDS ON was wrong or whether they just had to be moved elsewhere, and so on.

  28. The errors today can come as no surprise.

    The fact that the monthly Genius still appears in the ridiculous unworkable Java format speaks volumes. I had assumed that this was because the “IT section” could only handle the standard Guardian grids. (Bad enough in itself!) However it now appears that they haven’t even automated the generation of standard grids as otherwise these errors couldn’t have happened.

    By their own actions and inactivity over the last years they have have proved themselves as incompetents.

    The second question of course is how does the “editor” allow such gross errors to “go to press”??? Astounding.

  29. Do Guardian grids come from some fixed set? There seems to be so great a number of variations around at the moment, some of them outrageously unfair, that I’m not so sure! I have an old set that used to be the be-all and end-all, but now well past its sell-by date.

  30. My first puzzle for some time as in Italy for the last few weeks. Still thawing out from 4 degrees on Wednesday morning!
    Lovely to come back to Araucaria, though but thought I had lost it when I saw the grid mix-up.

    Lots of fun anyway and thanks to Araucaria and Andrew.

    Giovanna x

  32. Thanks Araucaria and Andrew

    It’s a credit to A that the quality of the actual crossword still leaves you with a good feeling notwithstanding the grid error!! Was able to work out quite early from the ‘printed online’ version with the rules of symmetry when trying to find where to write Mr Nadir.

    Had a slight grumble with PASS NOTE (was another who had written in POST NOTE). Without knowing the Guardian content … and going via Mesdames Google and Wiki – the G2 trail ended up with a section called “Notes & Queries” rather than “Pass Notes”. Anyway, guess the ‘surreptitious’ gives the argument to A on points.

    Had forgotten about Donald Campbell’s BLUEBIRD at first – I do remember as a kid when he broke the land speed record in Oz at Lake Eyre (which is dry most of the time).

  33. Thanks Andrew and other commentors.
    Fortunately I get the print version and G2.
    Failed to parse 7d – I was convinced the lake was Bled
    Goodnight all

  35. Re Apple Pie Order, story connection is surely Kipling’s ‘Just So’ Stories, and Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes!

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