Guardian 27,258 – Arachne

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Lucky me to get two Arachnes in a row! I rattled through most of this very quickly, but there was a sting in the tale (or whatever the spidery equivalent is) as the last four clues took me longer than the rest put together, not helped by an incorrect enumeration. Thanks to Arachne for another lovely puzzle.

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
8. CONVERSE Opposing party lines (8)
CON[servative] + VERSE (lines)
9. ODOUR It’s redolent of daisies, or umbrageous roses opening (5)
First letters of Of Daisies Or Umbrageous Roses
10. HELD Detained three lads on a regular basis (4)
Alternate letters of tHrEe LaDs
11. COLLATERAL Security company left to guard tower from rear (10)
My LOTP (last one to parse): reverse of ARE TALL (“tower”) in CO L
12. ROPILY In a bad way, failing to end pyloric spasms (6)
Anagram of PYLORI[c]
14. STICKLER Demanding individual senior nurses apply light touch (8)
TICKLE (apply light touch) “nursed by” SR
15. INCENSE Make angry scene in Barking (7)
(SCENE IN)*
17. RHUBARB Sticks end of stair rod into heart (7)
[stai]R + BAR in HUB – my LOI (after getting 6d: I was fixated on “heart”=”core”)
20. SLATTERN Second coffee and Senior Service for slob (8)
S + LATTE + RN (Royal Navy, the “Senior Service”)
22. COBALT Fellow Lithuanian, perhaps, is blue (6)
The fellow Lithuanian is a CO-BALT
23. WAKE-UP CALL Spooner’s baking disaster is warning to the complacent (4-2,4)
Spoonerism of “CAKE UP WALL”
24. BEVY Live with very discontented group (4)
BE + V[er]Y
25. ONION Sequence from Antonioni tear-jerker (5)
Hidden in antONIONi
26. TENEMENT Rubbish home team lacking player around start of extra time (8)
E[xtra] in TEN MEN (a football or cricket team missing one player) + T – I’m not sure a tenement is necessarily a “rubbish” home
Down
1. TONE DOWN The third to rate this clue as “moderate” (4,4)
Third letter of raTe + ONE DOWN
2. OVID Ancient linesman departs following 4-0 upset (4)
Reverse of IV-0 + D
3. PRICEY Expensive diamonds separating pair from last of money (6)
ICE (diamonds) in PR + [mone]Y
4. REALIST She has no illusions about top celebs (7)
RE A-LIST – the “she” here is an Arachne trademark
5. WOMANISH Old bloke seized by desire to be feminine (8)
O MAN in WISH
6. DONER KEBAB Broken bed, a sorry conclusion to a boozy night out? (10)
(BROKEN BED A)* – the enumeration should be (5,5)
7. URBANE Suave Turk removing clothes, source of annoyance (6)
[t]UR[k] + BANE
13. IN EXTREMIS Miners exit angrily, barely surviving (2,8)
(MINERS EXIT)*
16. SWEEPING Tearful under small blanket (8)
S + WEEPING – as in “sweeping changes”
18. RELEVANT Material from inverted belly button collected by oddly repressed priest (8)
Reverse of NAVEL in pRiEsT (omitting the odd letters) – another nice hidden indicator (see also 14a)
19. UNEARTH Find you near the harbour (7)
Hidden (“harboured”) in yoU NEAR THe
21. LEAN ON Get support from the French before long (4,2)
LE + ANON (soon, before long)
22. COLONY Part of waste disposal system close to gypsy settlement (6)
COLON (end of the alimentary canal) + [gyps]Y
24. BUMP Dud and Pete’s initial prominence (4)
BUM (dud) + P[ete] – reference (in an unusual order) to this pair, of course.

52 comments on “Guardian 27,258 – Arachne”

  1. A couple of laugh-out-loud Arachne clues for me today, including Spooner’s baking disaster! A great puzzle as always. Couldn’t quite parse COLLATERAL, even though I could see TALL etc. Favourites were WAKE-UP CALL, TENEMENT, RHUBARB and RELEVANT. Many thanks to A and A.

  2. Thanks, Andrew – lucky you, indeed! – especially for the parsing of COLLATERAL.

    All the usual wit and sparkle – I loved the angry scene in Barking, baking disaster, the 2dn football clue that wasn’t, the waste disposal system, the hilarious picture painted by 18dn and the very last answer, BUMP: any reminder of Pete and Dud sets me up for the day. Many thanks for the clip, Andrew – I just love it when they get the giggles. 😉

    And many thanks to Arachne, too, for getting the day off to a brilliant start.

  3. What a treat – I too was held up by a few at the end, not helped by the wrong enumeration in 6d

    Thanks to Arachne for a lovely start to Tuesday morning and to Andrew for the explanations

  5. Fantastic fun. I was only thinking when I did yesterday’s delightful Nutmeg and got to “Weavers” as part of the clue for 4d, that I would love to see another Arachne puzzle sometime soon!

    Many thanks to Arachne and Andrew.

    Agree with others’ favourites but also really liked 22a COBALT and the tear-jerking 25a ONION.

    Yes I also took ages to get 6d DONER KEBAB and then wrote “two words? beside the clue, although I quickly forgave Arachne because it was so amusing.

  6. Great puzzle with loads of fun my only quibble is “rubbish” in 26a seems unnecessary

    to me and in fact detracts from the effect. It is also inaccurate…… ask any one in a sorry bed

    unmade in Glasgow

  7. 6 is technically a slight mistake but I am wondering if it was deliberate as it made me laugh louder by delaying the punch-line.Maybe she will pop in.

    Biggest laugh was the Spooner. I can see people against Spoonerisms coming to the party with this setter.

    Thanks Andrew and Arachne.

  9. Thank you Arachne and Andrew.

    Great fun, I loved the tear-jerker, the ancient linesman and Spooner’s baking disaster! I failed to fully parse COLLATERAL but the clue for DONER KEBAB did not throw me since I thought it was one word.

  11. Thanks to Arachne and Andrew.

    As others have said, a good fun crossword. I really liked the Spoonerism, STICKLER (where I failed to insert SRN or SEN), DONER KEBAB and ‘one down’; lots of smiles.

    Would harbours have been better in 19?

  12. A really nice crossword. The baking disaster was great. 1d was very clever, and also interestingly reminiscent of the 1d in yesterday’s Quiptic, which I also thought was excellent.

    Robi @11: I think either harbour or harbours would work ok. The words, or letters, harbour the answer. The singular is probably better for the surface.

  13. DONERKEBAB, COLONY and (especially) WAKE-UP CALL were today’s highlights; RHUBARB (such a funny-looking word) my LOI.

    Thanks, Arachne and Andrew.

  14. I’m another delayed by the enumeration in DONER KEBAB but never mind, it wasn’t terminal and a bit of delayed gratification never did anyone any harm. After all, with (5,5) it’s very nearly a write-in.

    WAKE-UP CALL is possibly my favourite ever Spoonerism, and I’m not usually a fan. OVID is a cracker, and like Eileen, any clue that summons up Dud and Pete is OK by me.

  16. Another masterclass from Arachne – too many ticks to mention but I’ll confess to being a bit of a Spoonerphobe who put two against 23A!

    Thanks for brightening up an onerous day in the office!!

  17. JimS @12
    Like Robi, I struggled to see how “harbour” works, but your explanation of [the phrase] harbours vs [the words or letters] harbour is perfect. Thanks for that!
    Great puzzle. Nobody hones a surface like Arachne.
    Thanks to her and to Andrew for the blog

  18. Arachne’s puzzles are always full of wit and invention. This one was definitely one of her easier ones, but there were still a few that required some thought. For me RHUBARD was last in. Took me a while to see DONER KEBAB mostly because of the misleading enumeration.

    Thanks to Arachne and Andrew

  19. My favorite was TONE DOWN. That one produced a great big grin.

    What do doner kebabs have to do with boozy nights?

  20. Valentine @19 – one of my sons used to think that a doner kebab was the perfect end to a boozy night out – don’t think he ever ate one when sober!

  22. Excellent – a joy from start to finish. I had managed to save the spoonerism to the end.

    Many thanks Arachne for a superb puzzle and thanks Andrew

  23. Thanks Arachne and Andrew

    My favourite compiler. The enumeration for DONER KEBAB has now been corrected as a “Special Instruction) in the online version. I failed to parse COLLATERAL fully.

    Favourite was REALIST once I had remembered Arachne’s insistence on using female “persons on the Clapham omnibus”. I also liked COBALT, but I have a problem with it – cobalt isn’t blue; “cobalt blue” is blue.

  24. Thanks to Arachne and Andrew. Great fun (no surprise with this setter). Like others I needed help parsing COLLATERAL, RN for “Senior Service” was new to me, and I associate RHUBARB with stalks, not sticks. Yes, in the US TENEMENT has a pejorative (rubbish?) sense.

  25. I’m probably being really obtuse here but, while I know that towers are tall, I can’t see how ARE TALL explains tower (as opposed to towers) at 11a.

  27. Thanks Arachne and Andrew

    Great puzzle, as one expects from Arachne.

    Mike @ 25: “They tower” = “They are tall”.

    hth

  28. The last Arachne I tried was on 2nd March, which I described (echoing another solver) as ‘a gem from start to finish’. I didn’t enjoy this one as much, and the wrong enumeration in 6d was unfortunate.

    However, I liked 23a WAKE-UP CAll, 24D BUMP, 26a TENEMENT and 7d URBANE very much.

    Mike @25
    I too had a problem parsing COLLATERAL. The idea is that ‘to tower’ means ‘to be tall’, in which case you can substitute one for the other when you say, for example, “you tower …” meaning “you are tall …”. I think that’s right (reflecting what Andrew’s blog says).

    Thanks to Arachne and Andrew.

  32. Very late to the party, as I did this after work. Loved it, thanks to Arachne for weaving her web and thanks to Andrew for the blog. The periphery of the north east corner reads TOP and CHRIS. A deliberate comment on the Tour de France or a lovely coincidence?

  33. Lovely crossword. Am I the only one who spent a bit too long wondering whether there was an obscure material called PILEVANS for 18d?

  34. Been offline for the last 24 hours thanks to a rapacious tree branch but all sorted thanks to those lovely people at BT. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed today’s Arachne. Lovely stuff despite the cock up with DONER KEBAB which I paused over and wondered if something really clever was going on. Of course there wasn’t! Loved the Spoonerism and pretty much all of it really!
    Thanks Arachne.

  35. I notice that there has been a lot of discussion on the Guardian site on “latte” = “coffee” in 20a. I fear that this is another one that’s been lost. Although there is no question that “latte” is Italian for “milk”, every barista in the UK will know what you are asking for if you request a “latte”.

  36. Was hoping someone would spot my “a sorry bed unmade” clue relating to 26a and taking it’s fodder from 6d …it is a street in Glasgow surrounded by expensive tenement flats..

  38. MacLog @ 36: I’ve been diligently trying to guess what you’re talking about and all I can come up with is Sodaberry Street which doesn’t appear to be a thing but should be.

    One of the things I enjoy about this blog is learning the different connotations words and phrases have taken on across the English-speaking world. In the US tenements became inextricably associated with the squalor of the Gilded Age (the first one, not the current one). Before then, I’m sure they were quire respectable.

    On another topic, does “sticks” just mean “stalks” or is there something else going on with the RHUBARB clue that I’m not getting?

  40. I rattled through and got 10 clues or so just after midnight and thought “this is uncharacteristically straightforward for Arachne” and decided to leave the rest until the morning. Little did I know the clever things she had in store – things staring me in the face but which it took me ages to see like “discontented” in 24a, and the interpretation of blanket in 16d. Lots more great clues including her trademark use of the female pronoun for definitions that could equally be male or female but which my conditioning (prejudice/bias) initially goes looking for something overtly feminine. Rhubarb only came to mind because of the recent “rhubarbs” solution.
    Thanks Arachne, and Andrew for the blog and help with parsing 11a and 26a (LOI).

  41. Andreas61 @32
    The nina TOP CHRIS is surely no mere coincidence. Well done for spotting it. (It’s in the north-west, by the way, not the north-east.)
    I think there is a law about ninas: if I look for one there isn’t one, but if I don’t there is. The kind of grid we had today, with all those unchecked letters round the edge, invites us to look for something significant there, but I was blind to that opportunity on this occasion.

  42. Muffin @23

    re Cobalt

    Would you have the same problem with Royal, Navy, Persian or Powder?

    If so you do have a probelm 🙂

  44. Thanks to Jim S @21. In the US, doner kebabs are something you get in a restaurant, not takeout. But they sound a lot like gyro, which you can get as takeout — slices of rotation-roasted meat in a pita with salad. In the case of gyro, also with tahini sauce.

  45. BNTO @42
    I can’t believe that you are being serious. You might get away with “royal” or “navy”, but would you really accept “persian” or “powder” as a definition of “blue”?

  47. Muffin, now you’re being a little obtuse.

    I was merely listing some of the many descriptors of blue which having nothing per se to with colour and in fact are not usually blue in colour.

    In this clue the def was actually “is blue” which is a contraction of “is a blue” which Arachne obviously thought would be too much of a a giveaway!

  50. I’m fairly sure that, in the dim and distant days when I was the proud possessor of a kid’s paintbox, “cobalt blue” was certainly there amongst the slabs of colour – along with a myriad other shades of ‘blue’. When a word is a common qualifier of another word, isn’t the latter acceptable as the definition in a Ximenean-rules clue?

    I’d accept it, at any rate. There’s nothing more satisfying, for me, than when an otherwise somewhat mis-directing clue finally ‘clicks’ in your grey matter!

  51. Hi FirmlyDirac (interesting pseudonym – care to explain?)
    Yes, as I said originally, “cobalt blue” is blue. I don’t think cobalt is a “common qualifier”, though – would you say “the sky is a shade of cobalt”?

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