‘Sweet Nothings’. A Valentine swine of a grid from IO. Brilliant puzzle but out of my league for a daily. Read on…
Confession time. Good days, I knock off the Tuesday FT in about half an hour. Bad days, maybe an hour, hour-and-a-half tops. Three hours into this one I decided it was time to appeal to A Higher Power (which, as we all know, means Gaufrid). Even with his help I was another hour sorting this out.
It works like this: each of the paired across clues name two types of duck, clued otherwise without definition. The Sweet Nothings are to be ignored,
totally, a lesson for impressionable young persons everywhere.
Then the fun begins…
| Across | ||
| 7, 8 | SCOTER GARGANEY | Sweet FA dropped off by motor-cycle; Nothing showy excluded from ghastly range (6,8) |
| 7 = SCOTER = motor-cycle (‘SCOoTER) minus 0, = nothing = ‘FA’ for ‘[Sweet] Fanny Adams’ = colloquial for ‘Fuck All ‘= nothing. All this fuss for a single digit. I love crosswords. 8 = GARGANEY = GAY (‘showy’, for once) surrounding (‘excluded from’, I guess) an anagram (‘ghastly’) of RANGE. |
||
| 9, 10 | TEAL GOLDENEYE | Sweet Nick, not initially so; Nothing English about the old old cracks (4,9) |
| 9 = TEAL = sTEAL (‘nick’ minus first letter). 10 = GOLDENEYE = D’you know, I’m not absolutely sure. YE (old ‘the’) and OLD and a spare E for English are all in there somewhere and if you work it out do let me know. |
||
| 11, 12 | MERGANSER SCAUP | Sweet little solution thwarts big business operation; Nothing special about winning (9,5) |
| 11 = MERGANSER = MERGER (‘big business operation’) around (‘thwarts’) ANS (‘little solution’) = ANSWER abbreviated. 12 = SCAUP = S (‘special’) + CA (circa or ‘around’) + UP (‘winning’) |
||
| 14, 17 | PINTAIL GADWALL | Sweet beer (just one) leads to trouble; Nothing to go round edge of room (7,7) |
| 14 = PINTAIL = PINT (just the one beer) + AIL (‘trouble’) 17 = GADWALL = GAD (‘to go round’, as in ‘gad about town’) + WALL (‘edge of room’). Blimey. |
||
| 19, 20 | EIDER AYLESBURY | Sweet counter ingredients, from the 23; Nothing wrong with yearly subscription being reduced (5,9) |
| 19 = EIDER = an anagram of the ‘heart’ (23d) of ‘ingREDIEnts’ [blimey, again] 20 = AYLESBURY = anag (‘wrong’) of YEARLY + SUB = ‘subscription being reduced’. I know we’re in advanced crossword territory but. even so, that one seems a bit of a reach to me. |
||
| 24, 25 | HARLEQUIN SMEW | Sweet Prince doing strip is given 1 out of 5; Nothing keeps me waiting (too long) (9,4) |
| 24 = HARLEQUIN = Prince cHARLEs (i.e., outside letters ‘stripped’) + QUIN (= ‘one of five’ quintuplets). 25 = SMEW, inclusion (‘too long’) in keepS ME Waiting. |
||
| 26, 27 | MANDARIN WIGEON | Sweet bloke taking challenge to unseat Government; Nothing to pay, someone called time (8,6) |
| 26 = MANDARIN = MAN (‘bloke’) + DARINg (‘taking challenge’ without [unseatiing] G for ‘Government’) 27 = WIGEON = and again, I have no idea. ‘Eon’ is a time, of course and a ‘wig’ might be someone called to the bar, I suppose, but… nope. |
||
| Down | ||
| 1 | SCHEME | Secretly plan to snare Charlie – he’s going out with yours truly (6) |
| Anagram (‘going out’) of ‘HE’S’ surrounds ‘C’ (‘Charlie) + ME (‘yours truly’). | ||
| 2 | STALAG | What’s grown-up without Kiddie Camp? (6) |
| STALAGmite (‘what’s grown up’) without the ‘mite’ (‘Kiddie’). Did anybody else find this slightly sinister? | ||
| 3 | OREGON FIR | Region for making out that’s high up in NW US (6,3) |
| Anagram (‘making out’) of REGION FOR. Not the most direct of definitions for a word that was one of many new to me today. | ||
| 4, 23 | GREENHEART | Laurel’s jealous lover (10) |
| And here’s another. GREEN (‘jealous’) + HEART (‘lover’). | ||
| 5 | WATER COW | Tingling, react in grip of something sensational, being by river (5,3) |
| And another. Anagram (‘tingling’, really?) of REACT ‘in grip of’ WOW (‘something sensational’). And the def wasn’t the most helpful ever. Ah, well. | ||
| 6 | REVENUAL | Leave – run out of interest, perhaps? (8) |
| Anagram (‘out’) of ‘LEAVE RUN’. Even the easy ones are hard today: another new word. | ||
| 8 | GOLFER | Official record of events showing up guy putting on 4? (6) |
| My favourite clue. A nice surface with some clever wordplay and a bit of cross-referencing. Traditional crossword fun. Gosh, this has been hard work. As if you didn’t know, it’s REF (‘official’) + LOG (‘record of events’) all reversed. | ||
| 13 | MATE IN TWO | Partner instigating split? The end is nigh (4,2,3) |
| Thank goodness. What a marathon. | ||
| 15 | IRISHMAN | National flag Ms Cusack raised before dumping one? (8) |
| IRIS (‘flag’) + NIAMH (pronounced ‘neeve’ but anyway without its ‘i’ and reversed) for the second-most-famous Cusack actress. You’ve made us work for this one, Io. | ||
| 16 | THE BRIDE | Woman perhaps heading to Gretna Green and to Northen Isles stopped short (3,5) |
| T[O] and HEBRIDE[S] both ‘stopped short’. | ||
| 18 | TYBURN | Spooner’s to stand round where rogues used to buy it (6) |
| BUY TURN in Spooner-land but only just and Spoonerisms only ever seem to be solvable in retrospect, don’t they? Just saying. | ||
| 21 | BESIGH | He’s big, freakishly long for antiquarian (6) |
| At last, a nice simple anagram. For a word I’ve never heard of. Grump. | ||
| 22 | REEBOK | Horny individual, not very big in SA, stinks like Russian dolls (6) |
| The odour of BO is (in the manner of Russian dolls) ‘nested’ in REEK to give the required small south African antelope. | ||
| 23 | See 4 | |
*anagram
Thanks Grant
Sorry but I can’t help you with 27ac and the only way I can get 10ac to parse is:
OLDE (old) in (cracks) ENG (English) reversed (about) plus YE (the old)
19ac is a hidden reversal (counter) rather than an anagram.
Next Tuesday should be easier!
Many thanks, & much sympathy for blogging this stinker of a puzzle – Knut’s theme today was to give us a thrashing but Io really beat me up today – I didn’t solve a clue until I got to 15d which is an easy clue for this puzzle but far from an easy clue by any objective measure.
I can help with 10ac – it’s ENG (English) about YE (the) all reversed with OLDE (old old) inside (cracks).
27ac WIGEON I couldn’t parse either unless to pay someone can equal to scold = WIG.
27ac is a homophone of to pay = toupee = wig + eon.
Good job I like ducks!
@1Gaufrid – sorry, I should have refreshed before posting to avoid duplicating your parsing.
Wot no pochard? Used to be the go-to duck back when I started solving cryptic crosswords many moons ago.
I did say to someone early on this morning that I felt very sorry for the person who’d got to blog this one. 15d was my first one in too and then I spent literally hours on the rest of it (fortunately the day job is very quiet this week) and I’m sure our setter heard the loud clang when the penny dropped loudly to the floor as to what the ‘love-birds’ were all the way up there in York
One of those puzzles where you look it again after the obligatory lie-down in a darkened room and realise what a brilliant puzzle this is. Thanks to IO and commiserations to Grant.
Well done Grant and Gaufrid for decoding this! It defeated me even with a Wikipedia list of ducks open on my phone. Having cracked the theme I was thinking the downs would probably be straightforward and off we would go – but no! I gave up after an hour with perhaps half done….
WIGEON = homophone “to pay”=”toupee”=”wig” + “eon2
shikasta @4
No need for any apology. In any case your parsing differs from mine. However, in your parsing you have used the ‘about’ to give ENG around YE but then you are left without a reversal indicator. Therefore YE has to be the last two letters which follow OLDE in ENG reversed.
Yes. I took a quick look at this and then headed for refuge in Knut’s sweet embrace. Very interested to read Crypticsue’s comments. If even she, a high ranking Times finalist, took hours over this then I wonder about the target audience.
Embarrassed to say that not one clue could I get albeit with much less spent than others. If I can’t get any on my 20 minute tube ride home, I know it isn’t go to happen. I didn’t know there were so many ducks…..
Many thanks for this but way too hard for me. Took me all day (on and off) to get one wrong and fill in three (correctly) and a pair of ducks tentatively which turned out to be half correct (only one of the pair of ducks!). A humbling experience.
The “Sweet” and “nothing” aren’t to be ignored – they’re the definitions. I got 1d, then 15d, then 21d, then 18d. I’d guessed SCOTER and TEAL but hadn’t put them in because I didn’t see why. But then I got MANDARIN, and from there it came reasonably smoothly. But it had taken 45 minutes, so I’d agree it was a stinker.
A clever idea and very tough challenge. For a long time I had just a handful of down answers and thought I was never going to make further progress!
I didn’t get REVENUAL – neither Chambers nor any of the wordfinders I use offered any possibilities for filling the missing letters. I wondered if there was an error but I now see it is Collins.
Great puzzle, probably best suited to those of us who didn’t have Valentine’s dates to go to…
Boring! What a waste of time.
To Chalmie @ 11:
Sweet & Nothing are indeed good defs of ‘duck’ but one would be pretty miffed if either were offered as a definition of a particular duck in the absence of any other indicators. They’re more definitions-of-definitions and thus safely ignorable. Worked for me. Eventually…
Thanks Io and Grant
As I saw the banner … my first thought was “Grant, you poor b*stard !!” – with new knee or not – this was always going to be seriously hard work !! After the first hour when only 4 or 5 down answers were entered, my second thought was “Bruce, you poor b*stard!” – it’s even harder than I thought with both old knees !!
Eventually I found, of all things, HARLEQUIN as the first across answer, then TEAL which led to finding all of the ducks on the LHS with the help of trawling through a couple of lists of duck breeds. Thought that the RHS may have been something different … and it took a couple more down clues and then SMEW to realise that the duck theme was being continued. It still took until 9:30 this morning (my time) to get the last one filled in … and then for the corrections !!!
I initially had HEBETUDE at 6d (which strangely enough is a word that means ‘mental lethargy’ or close enough to ‘out of interest’ for me). HERB for leaves without the R and then a vacuum as to how the ETUDE would be derived. GADWALL certainly didn’t help … and thought that there must be another undocumented word HEBETUAL … which ultimately brought about the error !!!!
Didn’t properly parse GARGANEY (apart from the jumbled RANGE), GOLDENEYE or the WIG part of WIGEON.
Finally it was done … and a battle scarred me looked onwards to the tangle with Aardvark !!!
Perhaps Richard (post 13) didn’t get the Valentine spirit because he was the victim of the god of love? After all, he does appear to be a Cupid stunt…
Super puzzle. My thanks and sympathy go to Grant. I have finally given up on this after nearly a week. I was hoping that if I looked at it long enough the last couple would finally drop. In the end it was just me that dropped.
I have only just twigged how excluded means surrounding: it is opposite of included.
I still don’t understand “instigating” in “partner instigating split”. Can anyone explain that to me?
PeeDee
The ‘instigating’ is indicating that MATE is coming before IN TWO. It isn’t necessary for the wordplay but it does provide a more meaningful surface.
Thanks for that Gaufrid. I had quick look in Chambers and instigate is to urge on, incite, initiate, bring about, none of these mean “to come before”.
PeeDee
Chambers Thesaurus has “initiate, set on, start, begin, …” for ‘instigate’ which is close enough for me.