Guardian 26001 by Boatman

40 comments on “Guardian 26001 by Boatman”

1. 27 – Shot (def’n) Grapeshot GRAP(N)E(L),
   Losing point, no end!

   Nice crossword Boatman & Blog UY

2. …also 28a is Spar k(IL)lers, “The” Italian lost.

3. …also (sorry) 7a, I thought –

   It goes from kidney (def’n), to “heart” (of) a(N)d, (LIVER AN) encircling (E) string ??

4. Thanks to Boatman and Uncle 17d. This was corker and one I couldn’t have finished without
   generous use of the check button. PEDALO was new to me. COLON was my COD.

   Cheers…

5. Thanks Uncle Yap. I sank in the SW corner. We discussed non words as parts of composites recently and the consensus was they’re OK: having got ANI for 14d I should have seen REE in 16d which would have helped reveal OPPUGN. The rest of it I liked, and had no trouble with. Nice work, Boatman.

6. One of the bylines I always look forward to – harder work than usual maybe today.

   No trouble finishing but got stuck in the doldrums not long after leaving port. Some well-hidden stuff in there but a few crossers (including guessed ones) soon got things moving along.

   Lovely mixture of cluing devices on display but nothing too far-fetched.

   Great stuff. Thanks B and UY.

7. On my first run through I did not solve a single clue and I started to think today must be Saturday! I eventually solved this puzzle with every known form of assistance except the “cheat” button.

   Of the clues I could parse on my own, I liked 1d, 11d, 25a, 30a, 26a, 23d, 5d and my favourites were 28a SPARKLERS, 8a COLON, 17d YAP & 2d MAKE FAST.

   I could not parse 13a, 19a, 27a, 15d, 21d.

   Thanks for the blog, Uncle Yap.

8. Thanks, UY. Glad ToniL was able to help you with GRAPE – I certainly didn’t have a clue!

   This puzzle seems to be an advertisement for Boatman’s masterclasses! Very impressive. If I had any criticism at all, it would be that a touch more humour might sugar the pill.

9. Thanks for the blog, Uncle Yap. Heavy use of the check button to finish this one! It was a slow solve from start to finish and included a few wild guesses –GRAPE being one of them.

   Very tricky clueing and an impressive use of the theme word — I particularly liked SORREL in that respect. 8ac also made me smile.

   Lots of good surfaces, but a little more humour would have been welcome. (There’s no pleasing some people 🙂 )

10. Thanks Uncle and all … If I’d known who’d be blogging this, I might have tried to get a pawn-related reference to “settling with Uncle” into 17!

    Neil – Would those be my excellent-value Crossword Masterclasses, now booking for Manchester in November and with a waiting list for Brighton in the Spring? Ah yes, those’d be the ones. Most kind of you to mention them … Why, you’ll be pointing out that there are full details on my website next!

11. Thanks Boatman; nice sail around the grid losing a bit of wind in the SW corner.

    Thanks Uncle 17 and NeilW for the parsing of ON TRIAL – I realised it had many of the letters of sailor but the penny remained aloft.

    I particularly liked MURMUR and CLIPPER.

    I would recommend the Masterclasses – great fun. 🙂

12. Thanks UY and to Boatman for the puzzle and for dropping by.

    Clever puzzle, with some very ingenious clueing, particularly around the indication of deletions and substitutions. Although GRAPE was my last entry, I didn’t have too much trouble with the SW quadrant, instead becoming becalmed for a while in the SE.

    I enjoyed the theme a lot; it’s just a pity that Otis Redding didn’t get a look-in.

    molonglo @5: the words ANI (a bird) and REE (a Scots enclosure or a female ‘ruff’) are both listed in Chambers, as of course are MIST and KEDGE, so Boatman has not resorted to splitting solutions into ‘non-words’ on this occasion.

13. Thanks, Boatman and Uncle Yap, too.

    Great fun – even coped with the Spoonerism.

    A virtuoso performance on a nautical theme – my favourite.

    I particularly liked GRAPE and KEDGEREE.

    More please!

    Giovanna x

14. Managed to cope without the check button, unless you count Mrs Trailman who kindly checked GRUBS. GRAPE, KEDGEREE and OPPUGN for me, none of which I could satisfactorily parse.

    SE corner was the way in for me, and as can be told from the above, SW the last to fall. So much more enjoyment here than yesterday! Not a function of difficulty, per se. And thanks Gervase for confirming that ANI and REE count as words; I’m strict enough not to want it any other way.

15. this was absolute rubbish and unworthy of the guardian. The definitions were weak and the clueing appalling

16. Thanks UY and Boatman

    I failed on 27a (I thought of grape but could not parse it) and 24d. I had successfully got and parsed the rest by late this morning but left these for new inspiration which never came.

    A very tricky and challenging puzzle. I ticked 8a, 16a, 19a.

17. Thanks Boatman and Uncle Yap
    I got to it late today and found it hard but enjoyable. A couple of quibbles – MAFIA = KILLERS was a bit loose, I thought. I was also a bit confused about BOBBED – isn’t the haircut a BOB – i.e. a noun, rather than “to bob” (= to dock) – a verb? (I will bow to the expertise of anyone who knows more about haircuts than I do – that is, just about anyone!)

18. muffin @17 ‘Bob’ can be a verb: ‘She had her hair bobbed.’

19. Thanks liz – I suspected I was missing something

20. Many thanks Uncle Yap & Boatman

    A Quibble regarding 14d, 18d ANNIE – The Musical was actually a Hit.

    It ran on Broadway for 2,377 performances!

21. I got all but the OPPUGN/GRAPE crossers without aids but then ground to a halt. I got OPPUGN after resorting to aids but gave up on 27ac. I couldn’t make any sense out of the surface reading, and I had forgotten that grape is a valid alternative to grapeshot, so the fault lies with me and not the setter.

22. Verdanta @ 15: you’re joking? If not, some reasoning would be helpful.
    This was a good puzzle in my book – it seemed intractable to begin with, but slowly yielded corner by corner (grid a bit unhelpful, mind)
    Thanks to UY for a couple of parsings

23. Only one light joining each of the quadrants, well. But you’re bloody lucky to get those in The Grauniad of late, I note! Er, what is happening?

    Re 10 & 15, am I right in thinking that the Verdanta Masterclasses are running on the same days, just around the corner(s) in Sheffield and Eastbourne? Ah yes, that figures.

24. verdanta @15
    I searched for “verdanta” in the site and got “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”
    Sums it up?

25. Paul – Yes, some voluntary restraint may be needed over grid 56 and others … difficult to resist, when they’re so (relatively) easy to fill, but there are still plenty of elegant grids in the Guardian library, and I’ll be paying some attention to them in the next few puzzles.

26. I thought that 9ac was a poor clue. How many radio bosses have fired Brand? The clue would have worked much better with ‘what radio bosses did to troublemaker.

    I also thought that mafia-killers was a poor definition.

    Finally, if anyone has thought of a pun as a form of wit, they must have a very low threshold of humour.

27. Thanks Boatman and Uncle Yap.

    I have retrieved my mojo.

    MURMUR was brilliant.

28. Thanks Boatman and Uncle Yap.

    Far too late to join the party today, but what the heck. Was determined to finish and got there in the end – the NE corner was the last to resist. Impressive lesson in the versatility of a single word. One of the toughest of the year so far.

29. While Boatman still thinks he’s the B of my ABC of Cryptic Crosswords, I must admit that Brendan is at least equally as enjoyable.

    There was a lot of cleverness today.
    13ac (ESCAPADE), 19ac (ON TRIAL), 25ac (MARINA), 28ac (SPARKLERS), 4d (PIONEER), 17d (YAP), 21d (CLIPPER) and 26d (NARROW) were all brilliant in their own right – for different reasons, too.

    On the other hand, Boatman is also a setter who does things that I do not really like.
    For example, ‘his head’ = H is probably not a problem to most solvers, yet it falls in the same debatable category as ‘Labour leader’.

    I agree with Tom Hutton @26 re FIREBRAND (9ac).
    Technically, the clue is all right. But the surface stands in the way here. Usually, the surface is ‘unimportant’ but here the opposite is the case. It feels a bit awkward to read ‘do’ instead of ‘did’ as this event took place quite some time ago.

    I cannot see (yet) why in 12ac ‘imitation’ is a valid anagram indicator.
    When you imitate things they stay the same, dont they?

    Finally, 7ac (RENAL VEIN) is still not fully explained.
    Personally, I would like to go with ToniL @3 but that leaves me with ‘heart and’ for N – unacceptable for me but perhaps not for Boatman. In that case there is also no anagram indicator.
    If it is (LIVER AN EN)* [which is fine, though Guardianesque] why does the clue gives us ‘string’?

    Phew, thoughtful puzzle as ever by Boatman.
    GRAPE (27ac) was one step too far today, but altogether a nice crossie.
    Many thanks to UY too.

30. Can I guess about string? It’s common computer speak for a sequence of characters, so maybe we are being told that the characters we need appear in some contiguous sequence, which in fact they do.

31. @#26 “How many radio bosses have fired Brand?”
    and
    @#29 “It feels a bit awkward to read ‘do’ instead of ‘did’ as this event took place quite some time ago.”

    The answer to the first question is two – two stations at least Xfm in 2002 and BBC Radio 6 more recently. No doubt you both thought it was only one.

    Maybe it would be a minor courtesy to the setter to check your facts before slagging one of the finest puzzles this year.

32. Very inventive. But “Barking” (gerund?) does not = “yap”. And “Mafia” = “Killers” is ridiculous

33. Excellent puzzle from Boatman.

    I cant understand the gainsayers as I found it extremely entertaining as well as challenging. The inventiveness of the clues easily compensated for the odd slightly dodgy clue. Although I think all of the cluing can just about be supported.

    Thanks to UY and Boatman

34. Ah honza. Welcome to the site. Great first comment. That’s socking it to him eh – straight to the meat of the issue.

    Although to be honest you might not have fully realised the way the clues in puzzles like this work – maybe you’re trying to apply a rulebook you stumbled across somewhere else.

    Tell you what – I heard somewhere along the grapevine (can’t remember where) that this setter is running workshops and that there’s still space at the next one. That’d be just the shot for you as, judging by your comment, you’d prolly be very interested in the technicalities of different cluing styles.

    Anyway – that’s all detail – welcome to the site, and hope to see you here again really soon.

35. Amen, JS.

36. Indeed, grandpuzzler, Amen.

    I do like Boatman’s puzzles but they are not always ‘pure’. Our beloved setter is clearly a disciple of the also beloved Araucaria. Boatman is creative, inventive, challenging, but does not always stick to the rules.
    Don’t get me wrong, I am happy with that but JS’s advocacy @34 is one of many steps too far for me.

    When I post a comment, it is either to reflect my feelings on a crossword or to ask/hope for an answer to my queries.

    In this puzzle, Boatman used ‘imitation’ as an anagrind in 12ac. Nobody seems to be bothered but I am really interested in what others think of it.

    By the way, there is also the homophone for ANIMIST (14,18d) that didn’t evoke any comment, much to my surprise
    ANIMIST is not pronounced as ANNIE MISSED [it is: a-nu-mist].
    ANI (the bird), however, is pronounced as ANNIE.
    So, it is probably a compound homophone.
    But is that all right?
    [that said, the clue as such was lovely]

    It was a good crossword but sorry JS, certainly not the best this year as no-one can beat Donk’s January crossie.

    Finally, I usually don’t care too much about grids being right or wrong but am I right that Boatman often chooses user-unfriendly grids with first letters unchecked?

37. Sil, as far as I am concerned Annie Missed and Animist are an almost perfect homophone.

    I don’t know where you find your “a-nu-mist” but according to the SOED both the i’s in animist are pronounced the same as in “sit”.

    Hence perhaps the lack of comment.

38. Hi Brendan (not that one).
    In Anthony Lewis’ Word Web Pro (part of Crossword Compiler) there is an option to listen to someone saying the things you want.
    And ANIMIST was surely a-nu-mist there.
    My beloved English PinC also pronounced ANIMIST as ‘a-nu-mist’.
    To be honest, I have more confidence in her than in Boatman :).

    But what about ‘imitation’?

39. Well Sil, nobody I know would pronounce “animist” any other way than with 2 i’s. However it’s not exactly a word that trips off the tongue so often during idle chit-chat. 🙂

    As far as imitation goes. I thought it was just about OK as an anagrind as it indicates using the same letters and also in the SOED sense

    2 The result or product of imitating; a copy, an artificial likeness; a thing made to look like something else; a counterfeit. e17.

    It is probably pushing the boundaries a little though.

40. I actually have some sympathy for verdanta here. Plainly Boatman has a very idiosyncratic style, but I worry that he’s presumably offering masterclasses to promote it.
    Surely this type of clueing is a rare pleasure to be sampled as a curiosity rather than marketed as a brand?

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