Never knowingly undersolved
There’s a consistency to Poins’ puzzles that makes this setter seem very much at home in the IoS, but which does make it very difficult to find a great deal new to say … Read more >>
Everyman with the usual easy-ish crossword
Some (read quite a few) new words for me today, in fact more than usual for a Beelzebub, but there was one entry with which I am very familiar having lived in 30ac, … Read more >>
In a way (but only a way) my heart sank when I saw what I was going to have to blog: Azed’s specials are always excellent but take ages and are often very complicated. I was unsure that I’d be able to cope, but it’s all done now and any mistakes have now been made, I’m afraid.
It’s a long preamble, which I won’t repeat, except to say that there are two types of clue, occurring in more or less equal numbers. In half of them (and in these clues I’ve put (D) by the answer) you have to define the answer by finding a spoonerism in the clue. In the other half, which I found more difficult, certainly at the start — I had about ten of the first type before I got any of this type — the clue leads to a spoonerism of the answer, which is always a word in Chambers. So in these cases the answer isn’t actually defined and perhaps that’s what makes it so difficult to get started on them. In the first case the subsidiary indication is normal and in the second it leads to the actual word in the answer, not the spoonerism of it.
Really good. Definitions underlined.