Guardian 27,580 – Pan

by

Pan is one of the regulars in the Monday slot, and in fact last appeared only two weeks ago. He/she also sets Quiptics, and is usually well towards the “easy” end of the spectrum. I thought this puzzle was going to be pretty much a write-in, but came a bit unstuck in the NE corner, which took me longer to finish than all the rest. All very obvious in retrospect, of course.. Thanks to Pan.

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
7. BUCKRAM Fabric obtained from male sheep (7)
BUCK (male) + RAM (sheep)
8. BIPOLAR Mentally unbalanced setter joining most of staff in place to have a drink (7)
I (setter) + POL[E] in BAR. I suppose the definition is accurate, but it seems a bit insensitive to me
9. TEAR Rush meal by river (4)
TEA + R
10. PINSTRIPE Long to get hold of narrow piece of cloth (9)
STRIP in PINE
12. SKINT Hard up family found in vacated squat (5)
KIN in S[qua]T
13. UP TO DATE Prepared to look for a partner that’s fashionable (2,2,4)
UP (prepared) + TO + DATE (look for a partner)
15. PITH Mine hard substance (4)
PIT + H
16. TREND Be inclined to adopt summer’s latest fashion (5)
[summe]R in TEND
17. CREW Gang found in Cheshire town, reportedly (4)
Homophone of “Crewe”
18. SEDIMENT Ten dimes sent as deposit (8)
(TEN DIMES)*
20. BRICK Black stack of building material (5)
B + RICK (as in hayrick/haystack)
21. CAMBRIDGE University in conservative soap opera setting (9)
C + AMBRIDGE – setting for The Archers
22. DOSH Money for parties at hospital (4)
DOS (plural of DO) + H
24. MARTIAN Bird eating a little green man? (7)
A in MARTIN
25. CLASSIC Cathy’s first to meet girl in charge of Wuthering Heights, say (7)
C[athy] + LASS + IC
Down
1. HUGE Enormous shade screening top of garden (4)
G[arden] in HUE
2. SKIRMISH Brawl as drink stops sergeant major getting his cocktail (8)
KIR| (drink) in SM + HIS*
3. LAPPET Friend held up favourite brown moth (6)
Reverse of PAL + PET – an unfamiliar word, but very clearly clued
4. DICTATED One on court in engagement with Djokovic initially is set down (8)
I CT in DATE (engagement) + D[jokovic]
5. MONIED Rich source of opals found in new mine close to Witwatersrand (6)
O[pals] in MINE* + [Witwatersran]D – a variant spelling of “moneyed”: cf the similar “monies”, which always looks very odd to me
6. FARE Get on all right in audition (4)
Homophone of “fair” – my last one in, with the dreaded ?A?E pattern
11. NAUSEATED Disgusted by new American at university not standing! (9)
N[ew] A[merican] U[niversity] + SEATED
12. SLICE Share of extremely substantial diamonds (5)
S[ubstantia]L + ICE (criminal slang for diamonds)
14. TWEAK Time spent making slight modification (5)
T + WEAK (spent)
16. TIEBREAK Couple stop as way to end a game of tennis (8)
TIE (to couple) + BREAK (stop). Chambers only gives this as the hyphenated “tie-break”; strangely it then gives “tiebreaker” as unhyphenated
17. CHILDISH Almost cool meal suitable for infants (8)
CHIL[L] + DISH (meal)
19. INMATE Prisoner I meant to rescue (6)
(I MEANT)*
20. BEETLE German car in which soundly to defeat the French (6)
BEET (homophone of “beat”) + LE
21. CLAY Geological deposit found in Jurassic layer (4)
Hidden in jurassiC LAYer
23. SPIN Spain overcomes popular revolution (4)
SP + IN (popular) – Chambers doesn’t give SP as an abbreviation for Spain, but I found some sources online

41 comments on “Guardian 27,580 – Pan”

  1. Thanks Pan and Andrew

    I found this anything but easy, with most of the east taking ages. FARE was my LOI too. Favourites were SKIRMISH and NAUSEATED.

    I don’t see that “spent” and WEAK are at all equivalent.

  2. Agree with you both, Andrew and muffin@1. I almost gave up on the NE. Also was left guessing for FARE 6d – my LOI too!!!

    I liked 13a UP TO DATE until it crossed with the use of “DATE” in DICTATED at 4d. LAPPET 3d was also new to me but as you say, Andrew, perfectly gettable from the wordplay. Fortunately (for once) I had heard of the placename CREWE in Cheshire so solved the homophone in 17a. Favourite for this Brontephile (pretty close to Emily’s 200th birthday!) was 25a CLASSIC.

    Thanks to Pan and Andrew.

  3. Quite a jolly puzzle, I thought. Thanks to both. My only gripe was abstruse anagrinds – ‘sent’ ok I suppose, ‘rescue’ hmm? Or am I being unreasonable ?

  4. No Jem@3, I don’t think so. I had circled “to rescue” and written “anagrind?” beside it…

  5. Fare LOI here as well. Dnk the moth or the soapie, so a bit of hesitation, but otherwise a one-cup Monday. Although I’m not rigidly pc, I’m inclined to agree re 8d Andrew: no light amusement about mental illness.

    Thanks Pan and Andrew

  6. Homophone anagrind…re-skew??[Joke, but setters’ ingenuity never ceases to amaze and delight].

  8. Fun apart from sour taste of 8ac. Another with 6d loi. Also queried rescue as anagrind. Nice to find soulmates.

  10. A mix of the very obvious and the head-scratcher, especially in the NE corner.   I agree with others views about 8a

    Thanks to Pan and Andrew

  11. Re 8: I thought the clue was a playful bit of humour directed at the setter him/herself, or maybe all setters of cryptics. The use of bipolar in recent times has come about partly to avoid such direct descriptions as “manic depressive” or “schizo…” and to have a single label for various mental conditions.

    Funnily enough I got FARE straight off.

    Many thanks Pan and Andrew.

  12. Having the first letter for 19d, as I read ‘Prisoner I meant’ I didn’t pay any attention to the rest of the clue. It was only when moving on I noticed ‘to rescue’ thought ‘WOT??’

  13. re 8a. I agree it could be construed as insensitive, but very often we see surfaces which appear non pc/insensitive/offensive but when broken down,  become something different.  The two definition words make up a recognised expression or condition with very negative connotations, but the two words separately can mean something different. ‘Unbalanced mentally’, or , ‘Not in balance mentally’ might be more acceptable but ‘mentally unbalanced’ adds misdirection.

    However, I may be wrong and I offer apologies in advance if I should offend anyone. It s not my intention.

  14. >RogerGS says:
    >August 6, 2018 at 10:57 am
    >cocktail, another questionable indicator?

    Cocktail: A mixture of substances or factors.

    Perfect as an anagrind imho and very relevant to the clue since drink – Kir is alreay there so it adds to the mix.

  15. RE Rescue as an anagrind.

    Rescue:  recover, retrieve, save from a difficult situation.

    For me, perfectly valid. I wonder if those who didn’t like it managed to solve it or not?? I suspect they did!

    I think crossword setting should be about bending/breaking/re writing the rules and pushing te boundaries.Would n’t crosswords be dull if all anagrinds were obvious like  ‘mixed up’ or ‘rearranged’.

  16. Ta for the reminder about 2d, RogerGS; I biffed it and forgot to go back and parse. I reckon ‘his cocktail’ for ‘ish’ is kosher.

    Otoh, on the subject of pc, that anagrind has had a bit to answer for over the years.

  17. Thank you Pan and Andrew.

    I also found some of the clues quite hard and questioned ‘rescue’ as an anagrind – but the COED gives for rescue “set free” and the clue wording suggests this.

    muffin @1, as regards ‘spent’ and WEAK the COED gives for spent “having lost its original force or strength; exhausted.”

  18. Anybody else quibble over tiebreak?  A tiebreak ends a drawn set in tennis.  It cannot end the match as a tiebreak is not permitted in the final set.

  20. Thanks All; I have enjoyed coming back and reading all further comments on this forum.

    [MikeinQueensland@12, Hi. Where do you hail from?]

  21. Neill @18

    There are other tennis tournaments than Wimbledon. and even at Wimbledon, a tiebreak may end a match that does not go to the final set.

  23. Thanks to Pan and Andrew. Enjoyable. Like others I did not know LAPPET but parsed it and had trouble with FARE. However I was pleased that even in the US I knew Ambridge from The Archers.

  24. I enjoyed this, though I had to fill in the NE this morning with the help of the check button.  I thought FARE was my LOI too until I noticed I hadn’t filled in 16d, which I had to cheat on a bit, even having all the crossers.

    I did get Cambridge, having listened to The Archers during a stay in Britain in the lat 80’s.  When I first heard it on the radio, I didn’t catch on that this was the famous Archers, so my provisional name for it was “Tea at the Vicarage.”  I did hear the episode when the Archer patriarch Dan dies trying to rescue a sheep who has fallen into a ditch, I think — you only hear the panicked voice of his granddaughter and don’t know till the next episode that the rescue did for Dan.  I hadn’t realized until googling the Archers just now that the fictional village Ambridge was set in a fictional county Borsetshire.  I for one don’t like fictional counties or fictional states.  There are more of the former than the latter — I only recall one fictional state, in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith, set in an imaginary midwestern state with a name like Winnebago.  But I’ve read several English works in fictional counties, notably Barsetshire, of course, but also some detective novels.  (I don’t count Hardy’s Wessex as a fictional county, since it is or was a real region.)

  25. 17d – I don’t think CHILDISH can possibly mean “suitable for infants”. Chambers -“of or like a child; silly; trifling.”

  26. Thanks both,

    I thought a bit then decided I was OK with 8a. ‘Mentally unbalanced’ I’m sure originated as a euphemism for some other term (‘mad’?) and unless we are going to sweep discussion of mental illness under the carpet, which IMO, is not desirable, we have to be able to use some words to discuss it without resorting to an endless procession of euphemisms, each replacing a previous one and itself being succeeded by something else.

    14d was also OK with me. A ‘spent force’ is also a ‘weak force’.

  27. Yes, LAPPET was new to me too but fairly clued, so an obvious lookup. This was much more straightforward than Pan’s previous puzzle, and to my mind a much better fit for the Monday slot.

    Thanks to Pan and Andrew

    [I seem to have lost my saved name and email address, which is weird because I have not deleted any cookies]

  29. This took me a bit longer than usual for Mondays. It was the SW, rather than the NEW that stymied me, with TIEBREAK and MARTIAN my LOsI.
    Gasmanjack: “Childish pleasures”? I know it still means “silly” or “trifling” pleasures, but, to me at least, also suggests pleasures suitable for children/infants.
    Thanks, as usual, to Pan and Andrew.

  30. beery hiker & muffin

    Due to a recent change in the law regarding data and privacy, you now need to ‘opt in’ if you want a cookie to placed on your pc, or other device, that stores your name and email address. If you opt in then the cookie will remain active for a period of one year.

  31. I knew BIPOLAR would ruffle a few feathers. Seems Ok to me though. NE corner held me up and,yes, FARE was LOI so Snap! This seemed really easy at first but I kept finding difficulties.I thought CHILDISH a bit weak and TIEBREAK was a guess.
    Curate’s egg for me.
    Thanks Pan.

  32. “The dreaded ?A?E” indeed – Mrs W had FARE, I had HALE. 🙁 Likewise the NE was the last to yield. I thought everything was fair enough and explained BIPOLAR as pandy@13 which is similar to a recent conversation with a setter (Vlad?) over the difference between the words and the meanings we assign to them.
    Thanks to Pan and Andrew, and to Gaufrid for the name auto fill explanation.

  33. I suppose I’d be beaten to death by Northerners if I protested that TEA is a drink not a meal?

  34.  

     

    El Inglés @33.

    Southerners have cream teas and old-fashioned afternoon teas, both of which include things to eat.  Another cucumber sandwich, vicar?

  35. 1 ac took me back to 1943 when Henry IV part I was our set Shakespeare text in School Certificate. Falstaff’s unveiling as he multiplies his number of buckram-clad attackers and is then unmasked is a set piece for any fat actor ( and a lot of padded ones) It was jump-start for me I this jolly romp.

  36. Nice start to the puzzling week.  I see, from Andrew’s blog and many of the comments above, that I am in excellent company today, in having ended in the NE corner, with FARE my LOI!  My favorites today were SEDIMENT and TWEAK.  “Sent” (as anagrind) and “spent” (= WEAK) were both A-OK by me.  I also enjoyed CLASSIC for the reason stated by Julie in Australia @2.  Also, it gave me a good reason to cue up some Kate Bush on YouTube.  [BTW, nice “fun fact”, Julie and Cookie, re: Emily Bronte’s bicentennial b-day.  She is still tearing it up at 200!]

    After reading Valentine @24’s comment, I tried to “rescue” (in the 19d sense) “did for Dan”, but it is a tough combination of vowels and consonants, so the best I could do (without making a project of it) was Dandi Ford.

    Many thanks to Pan and Andrew and the other commenters.

  37. I’m connected to someone who has been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and I’m glad I didn’t show the clue to them – being sensitive to criticism comes with the condition. People with bi-polar disorders experience mood swings and although you could say that mood swings are a form of mental instability the term ‘mentally unstable’ seems like a global dismissal of someone’s competence. I think if I’d been diagnosed  with bi-polar disorder I wouldn’t have enjoyed solving this clue and thinking ‘ does this mean me?’

  38. 8a: Today’s The Guardian Open Door describes the style guide entries on mental health (amongst other items). The part relevant to crosswords says: “No part of a newspaper is immune. A reader was upset that a crossword clue, “round the bend”, was to be answered “nutty”, and that the clue “mad biscuits” required “crackers”. But I am advised by an expert that several words that have the potential to offend in this way are also established codes to indicate that there is an anagram involved in the clue.”

    I can’t find anything on the 225 site about “mad biscuits”, but “round the bend” brings up a Nutmeg from June 2018: Routine problem for emerging divers lacking second potty (5,3,4)

     

    Thanks Pan and Andrew

  39. I read 14d as ‘slight’ indicating ‘weak’! Am I the only one? I suppose that would mean that ‘spent’ was redundant, so it may just be a slow Monday brain on my part …

  40. Thanks to both for the entertainment.

    Um, Andrew in your explanation for 9a, it should be TEA + R, not TEAR + R.

    Like many others I had trouble deciding on FARE but it eventually came. I also join the group questioning CHILDISH meaning suitable and wonder if the last two words were the clue itself. But that has problems too. Whatever, I am constantly amazed how setters find new ways to express things and try to see what their intent is for the clue. I know there is little room for ambiguity in this marvellous world of ours but a little tweaking is sometimes needed to fit things.

  41. Anyone else put in wagtail for 24A? Consequently couldn’t get 16D as well as being stuck on bipolar and flare.

Comments are closed.