S & B Macclesfield – puzzle by Alan

6 comments on “S & B Macclesfield – puzzle by Alan”

1. A jumbo crossword in the tradition of including long well-known phrases, that one suddenly recalls when a few crossing letters appear – no real need to unscramble the anagrams. All good fun.

   I thought I’d completed the puzzle but I see I didn’t get 26dn quite right; I had it as YOU’RE (you are) – referring to the solver(s) as the setter’s audience.

   Thanks, Alan B and Sil

2. Gave this my customary setting hour today (though perhaps should’ve given it two as it’s a jumbo) and got about 2/3s in with a bit of dictionary and anagram solver help here and there. Enjoyed what I did and honours go to the amusing surfaces of 24d and 41d so thanks to Alan for the puzzle and to the now not easily Elbow-taxed blogger.

3. I was determined to get around to this and have now completed it except for the river island and WEALD – which meant my anagram at 1d/52a wasn’t quite right either.

   I made things a bit messier for myself than they needed to be: I like to highlight the enumeration on the grid, but I kept miscounting and kicking myself afterwards.

   As allan_c@1 mentions, the impressive (but at first scary) long phrases eventually jumped to memory after a few checkers. I thought the “sort of” was interesting in an &lit sense – indicating both wordplay and a liberal interpretation of the fodder as definition. I did spend ages unravelling GHOST-RIDDEN, an excellent anagram. And I was happy when I eventually sussed YOUSE, I’d been trying to force HOUSE as an audience. TEDDY BEAR got a smile

   Well done Alan, all good stuff and great fun, many thanks for what must have been quite an effort. And thank you Sil for the write-up and the parsings of WEALDS, EYOT as well as JUNEAU – I think I vaguely knew it was the capital but didn’t get there, I got stuck thinking Alaska’s capital had to be A, though i had the answer.

4. I’m hoping for more comments, but I’ll take this opportunity to reply to those I have received. Many thanks to those who posted them.

   The crossword was built around the five long anagrams, which formed a sort of theme. As Dutch says, ‘sort of’ intentionally did double duty as an anagram indicator and a liberal definition of the answer.

   This crossword was an experiment, and the five phrases were the only ‘proverbs’ I found in a finite time that were amenable to ‘&littish’ anagram phrases, and, again as Dutch rightly said, it was quite an effort. I don’t see myself attempting this again.

   I don’t like the word YOUSE (nor did my test solver!), but dislike doesn’t make it invalid, and I would have got stuck in the middle of the grid without YOUNG and YOUSE. (YOU’RE instead of YOUSE would have been possible, as allan_c can attest, but that would have been as hard to clue as YOUSE.)

   Thanks also to Sil for writing an excellent blog with his comprehensive explanations going beyond the annotated solution that I submitted.

5. Sorry for the late reply – I only remembered to have another look at this one last night. At first glance I was deterred by the long anagrams, but once I realised what they were, the rest were guessable from the definition and enumeration, and once those were in place the rest of the puzzle gave way pretty easily. AGENDA was my last in. All quite enjoyable.

   Thanks to Alan and Sil

6. beery hiker @5
   Thank you for recounting your experience of this crossword.
   As I indicated @4, putting multiple long &littish anagrams into a grid was an experiment. It went down well with my test solvers, who encouraged me to publish. Solvers’ enjoyment was the main aim, with the hope that the puzzle might have been challenging to some.
   This comment is probably the sign-off for this blog page, so I’ll just thank the solvers again for their comments and highlight again Sil’s ‘labour of love’ in blogging three of the four ‘volunteer’ crosswords that were submitted at the S&B event.

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