Guardian 26,817 / Picaroon

54 comments on “Guardian 26,817 / Picaroon”

1. Lovely puzzle as always from Picaroon. It took me some time to get going, and I had to check ALEMBIC and WHIPSAW, but the answers all gradually emerged. Favourites were HEATHCLIFF, FILM SET, NOON and COCOON. Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

2. Thank you Eileen and Picaroon. A most enjoyable start to the day. I was held up on the parsing of 20dn as from my school days I saw no connection between PE and sport. 13ac was very nice.

3. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen
   A quick finish for a Picaroon, mainly because the long ones jumped out at me. LOI was NOON, after checking showed the plausible DOWN (DOWNTIME = OFF, minus TIME) was incorrect. ELLA went in easily from the crossers, but I wasted a lot of time trying to work out how Al (Jolson) fitted in. I didn’t parse BRAHMS either – I thought it was an oblique reference to “Brahms and Liszt” of “in ones cups).

   I didn’t parse FILM SET either, and I’m sorry Eileen, I don’t understand your explanation either – it isn’t an anagram of FIL(m) and LEFT.

4. Is it FILM (mist) + SET(tle) – left to dissipate?

5. ….mostly!

6. Sorry muffin – I wrote it the wrong way round; anagram of MIS[t] LEFT. I’ll amend it now.

7. Ah!

8. Actually, it’s *MIST+LEF(t) – mostly left

9. [Eileen – same clue. I think the reference in your modified explanation to “film” isn’t needed – it’s just MIS(t) LEFT anagram.]

10. Sorry, Eileen, we crossed. Your way works just as well

11. I think it could be either, Stella. 😉

12. For those of us who live here 1d was relatively straightforward although slightly embarrassing. The clue was subtle, “Aussie” having the necessary suggestion of slang, but I am afraid that Aussies speak like this a lot. Good weather dictates that barbecues are a popular social activity, but something else means that Australians invite the rellies to a barbie, often indeed held in the “arvo”, where the food is mostly steak or snaggers, but there could be a few veggies, while the smoke keeps the mozzies away. Etc. Still, no worries.

13. So many crosses, Stella!

    Sorry again, muffin – I was in too much of a hurry to correct it [and I was already recorrecting it while you were typing!].

14. Thanks Eileen, inter alia for ELLA which I had but couldn’t fathom the ‘other’ bit. Paul had the Aussie PM last year and the year before, it’s neat. Picaroon has no less than five O insertions here, all different: 17, 21, 23 and 24A and 7D. Excellent puzzle.

15. Please don’t apologise, Eileen – you do a great job 🙂

16. Great puzzle and great blog…..thanks.

    ‘Alembic’ is also the name of an American manufacturer of high-end guitars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic_Inc)

17. I have in my cellar here in the south of France a jar of eau de vie produced some years ago by an alembic ambulant, a peripatetic distiller who travels from village to village collecting and processing – illegally I suspect – fruit provided by the locals, plums in my case.

18. Alan @17: I suspect he is aged rather than illegal. Those practitioners around when the practice was outlawed were allowed to continue, but the right to run a still dies with them.

19. Thnks, Eileen.

    Very enjoyable puzzle, seeming thorny on first pass but giving way gracefully. I knew alembic from Jonson’s play The Alchemist. That’s twice this week an acquaintance with Ben has come in handy, after Arachne’s poetaster the other day.

    1d: A friend, visiting Australia for the first time, spent a fruitless hour looking for a pub called The Arvo, his host having said “We could meet for a beer in the arvo?” Only when he asked someone for directions did he discover what it meant.

20. Thank you for the blog, Eileen. 13ac was indeed “a gem of a clue” – the answer took some finding but it was well worth the search!

    Many thanks for a most enjoyable puzzle, Picaroon.

21. Thanks Picaroon & Eileen.

    Difficult to get started with both 1’s unknown. It wouldn’t have helped much but I think 1A deserved an ‘old’ qualifier. I could only think of retort but that failed on enumeration as well as crossers. I remember the Kipp’s apparatus used to make smelly hydrogen sulfide (or sulphide as it was then.)

    Thanks Eileen for parsing ELLA, which I missed. I see that both ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses’ and ‘Fanny Hill’ are listed as EPISTOLARY NOVELS. Amazing what you learn from crosswords.

22. I’m another one who couldn’t parse Ella, but now I have Eileen’s explanation — what a lovely clue! Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

23. This went in smoothly, apart from 4 where I had COSSET (COs + SET = running – a bit dubious?). Sorted out once the excellent STAMFORD BRIDGE revealed itself. I would have preferred “out” at the end of 18 as “off” seems a little inaccurate. This was my LOI, so maybe that’s the sour grapes talking 🙂 .
    Great puzzle! Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen for the blog.

24. @3 Muffin. I’m another who had ‘down’ for 18ac, for the same reason. I think we can count it as an alternative valid solution.

25. Even though I’m American, I got Ambridge, but Stamford Bridge (which I assembled from the wordplay) baffled me, as did “blues.” Thanks for the help. (Our radio village is Lake Wobegon, as came up in a discussion here a while back.)

    But what on God’s green earth is Etam?

26. One of those days when everything went in unaccountably quickly – and no worse for that, with some beautiful clues. Cracking anagram @2d. Can our resident archivist (BH?) trace any previous use of it?

27. Another top class puzzle from the young master. Ticked four of my first 5 solutions (ARVO, BRAHMS, EPISTOLARY NOVEL and VOILA) and the rest were mostly just as good. Last in was NOON, which took far longer than it should have. WHIPSAW was new to me but easy enough to guess and check.

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

28. DP @26 – no, the only previous occurrence of the solution in the Guardian archive is completely different:

    Shed 23799: Year spoilt by “Les liaisons dangereuses”, say? (10,5)

29. Hi Valentine @25

    Etam, in my youth, was a chain of shops here, long defunct, I thought but, googling it this morning I found that it’s now ‘A network of 4,400 sales outlets in more than 40 countries and regions’!

    I remember a lovely ‘Book at Bedtime’ series on radio here a few years ago of extracts from ‘Lake Wobegon Days’, read by Garrison Keillor, who seemed to have just the right voice for it. [I’ve just found some on You Tube and will return to it later.]

30. Alembic. Shakespeare knew the word but used the alternative – limbeck in Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7. He used the word in the sense that with wine the brain will become a limbeck, a receptacle of fumes.

31. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon.

    Missed out on NOON and the explanation to ELLA, too.

    I took POINT as POT (of beer) a round IN, and then spotted PINT around O; could be both, I think.

32. Thanks Picaroon for a cracker and Eileen for the blog.

    EPISTOLARY NOVEL may only have a single previous appearance, but EPISTOLARY on its own appeared twice last year and once in 2013.

33. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon.

    A very pleasant solve. ALEMBIC took a while to remember and AMFORD village was unknown, though I have heard of The Archers. BRAHMS and EPISTOLARY NOVEL were great.

    Alan Swale @17 and bdg @18, so that explains what has happened. We had an elderly itinerant distiller come to the village every year, especially for the pears from our huge old saugis pear tree – sadly the tree died a while back, but since I do not like eau de vie we have replaced it with a cultivated variety and are no longer invaded by hornets in the late summer.

34. Should have given the sources!

    Tramp 26 680, 18/9/15
    Imogen 26 489, 14/2/15 (NB date is for blog of a prizer)
    Crucible 26 082, 18/10/13

    hth

35. Little to add at this late stage other than join in with my praise.

    NOON and ELLA show Picaroon’s genius as well as any. Four-letter words can be the devil to solve and, I’m sure, to set. These two were right out of the top drawer.

36. Simon @34 – you are right, and there were only two earlier ones – these are the ones I have:

    Shed 22724: Form of novel – early one with post involved (10)
    Pasquale 24400: Like certain writing from Italy, prose that’s fancy (10)
    Crucible 26082: 45 royalist nuts devoted to 20s (10)
    Imogen 26489: Tired wife out, keeping arm in correspondence (10)
    Tramp 26680: English piece having advanced lines in the form of letters (10)

37. Many thanks BH. The Shed clue from the archive is rather good, too!

38. Trailman @35

    I always start crosswords by looking at the clues for 5-letter and 4-letter words first – not because I find them easy (I don’t), but because it can be so satisfying to solve them without relying on the crossers. As you say, ELLA was from the top drawer. (I got that one, but NOON was my LOI.) I though VOILA was rather brilliant too.
    Thanks to Picaroon and to Eileen. Garrison Keillor also has a pleasant singing voice, though perhaps not quite as pleasant as Ella Fitzgerald’s.

39. *thought* !

40. NOON was my LOI too and I couldn’t parse ELLA. Both clues were excellent though and so was the puzzle. I loved STAMFORD BRIDGE- I’m an Archers fan- WEEKENDING and HEATHCLIFF. I parsed FILM SET as MIST + LEF and thought it another goodie.
    More like this.
    Thanks Picaroon.

41. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. I needed help parsing ELLA, PROPER, and especially NOON (my last in) and took a while seeing WEEKENDING, but I did know ALEMBIC from The Alchemist and STAMFORD BRIDGE (and Ambridge – I’ve never heard The Archers but have a friend who has played three different roles over the years), though I had to look up ARVO. Very enjoyable.

42. As usual, I’m too late to say much that is original, but I must join in the deserved praise for today’s puzzle. I loved the precision and originality of the clues and enjoyed the innocent little misdirections here and there that made me think – and smile. Where there were unfamiliar words I was grateful for sound wordplay to get me there.

    I could add a bit to Eileen’s explanation of Valentine’s query (see posts 25 and 29) concerning Etam in 5D by saying that Etam are clothes shops where you can buy a top – to make the clue’s surface nice and smooth!

    There are many really good clues, which I remember saying of the last Picaroon I completed. My favourites have been identified as such by others already, but 13A and 18A (ELLA and NOON), while being perfectly good clues, are not among them.

    Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen for an excellent puzzle and an excellent blog.

43. I came across ALEMBIC by dint of recently starting to collect very old (i.e. free downloads!) SciFi short stories and novels to read on my phone when I have time to kill. The story in question was “The Alembic Plot” by Ann Wilson. I didn’t look up what it meant then, but I did today! Now I’ll have to reread it sometime to figure out how the title relates to the book.

44. Nothing much to add except to reiterate the praise for the puzzle and cluing.

    A slow start but once started the solve was very quick. I think the generous grid with lots of crossers and plenty of first letters amongst these gave a litte too much assistance.

    Very enjoyable though and another tour de force from the Pirate.

    Thanks to Eileen and Picaroon

45. Derek
    I was in the same boat as you – having come across the word ALEMBIC but not known what it meant.
    As for WHIPSAW, this was new to me. Hence my appreciation of a clue that enabled me to figure it out.
    I’m all for setters putting in a few words that not everybody knows – also familiar words with meanings that not everybody knows – provided the clues are precise enough. Good setters do this from time to time and do it well.

46. Thanks all
    I could not parse Ella but enyed it after reading this.
    Favourite was turn over.

47. Thank you, Eileen, both for your response and for the excellent blog. (And thanks to Picaroon too.)

    I do the puzzle late at night in bed before turning the light out. All I got on first go-through were alembic (FOI) and stay up. From that I got arvo, Brahms (my favorite too!) and cocoon. Then I was stuck and went to sleep. The next morning I got all the rest.

    I first heard the Archers on a visit to the UK. I didn’t realize at first that it was The Archers, which I’d encountered in books, so I just called it “tea at the vicarage.”

    There was a Miss Marple episode on television years ago, and when she is visiting one of the characters the radio is playing the Archers theme. (Not a touch Agatha Christie put in.) I added that to a Wikipedia article on the Archers later on, but it got deleted the next day.

48. Very enjoyable, with some lovely clues. Thanks, Picaroon and Eileen.

49. An enjoyable puzzle and blog. My only quibble is that, like Tom Hutton, I don’t think that PE is a sport – an activity that may make someone fitter to play a sport but not a sport itself.

50. A very well-crafted puzzle with some elegantly compressed, but precise, clueing: ELLA and NOON standing out for me. Not familiar with WHIPSAW or ARVO so these went in by deduction, but it’s always a delightful bonus to learn things via a puzzle. Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

51. Very enjoyable puzzle
    An alternative parsing for 18 Across as a double definition
    Taking time off (from university) = down
    Time off = down

52. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

    Started this over lunch on Friday and finished it in the late afternoon on Saturday – only got around to checking it off tonight. All has been said about how good it was and I totally concur – it was another excellent puzzle.

    Unsurprisingly ARVO went in on first look – remembering it well after embarrassingly getting it quite late in Paul’s puzzle. I can’t remember this getting any easier as I progressed through it to the end. The last few – WEEKENDING, PARTNER and STIR all still hung on stubbornly before eventually falling.

    Failed to get the AMBRIDGE part of 11a, but was pleased to know that I was looking for a ‘footy ground’ where ‘the Blues’ would be playing at home.

    Too many good clues to call any out as best.

53. Re 13a I also could not get the parsing, maybe Foriegn versions of the jazz singer might have made the clue better. Very late posting but only just got around to solving tonight.

54. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon.

    Yet another fine puzzle and all fully parsed.

    Favourites were HEATHCLIFF, STAMFORD BRIDGE and REARMOST.

    Smooth as a baby’s bum!

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