Eileen still has internet access problems (hopefully being resolved today) and so has asked me to cover for her.
I was pleased to see that it was Tramp today but then less pleased when I found there was one clue (2dn) that I just couldn’t parse. Fortunately a rethink whilst writing this preamble led me to the solution.
An enjoyable solve on yet another dull, dismal day so thanks Tramp for brightening up the morning.
Across
9 One maybe put on runs: deliveries knocked over the top (9)
OVERSHIRT – OVERS (deliveries) HIT (knocked) around (over the top) R (runs)
10 Great first love letter (5)
OMEGA – O (love) before (first) MEGA (great)
11 Breakfast supplier back to cook scrambled egg roll right away (7)
KELLOGG – [coo]K (back to cook) followed by an anagram (scrambled) of EGG [r]OLL (roll right away)
12 Part of organ not quite audible around old church (7)
COCHLEA – CLEA[r] (not quite audible) around O (old) CH (church) – a cavity in the inner ear
13 Model to pose for job (4)
TASK – T (model) ASK (pose)
14 Now feel bad about director cutting salary (7-3)
PRESENT-DAY – RESENT (feel bad about) D (director) in (cutting) PAY (salary)
16 Fire single sniper shot (7)
INSPIRE – I (single) plus an anagram (shot) of SNIPER
17 Mismanage second team that’s winning (5,2)
SCREW UP – S (second) CREW (team) UP (winning)
19 27 on pub game (5,5)
LOCAL DERBY – LOCAL (pub) DERBY (27 {horse race})
22 Relating to listener in two ticks (4)
OTIC – contained in ‘twO TICks’
24 One gave charity millions, one recluse admits (7)
ALMONER – A (one) LONER (recluse) around (admits) M (millions)
25 Winged sandals in Australia? American’s going out (7)
TALARIA – an anagram (out) of A[us]TRALIA (Australia? American’s going)
26 Rider thrown off maiden (5)
DRIER – an anagram (thrown off) of RIDER – a clothes-horse
27 Play score and hear a classic, perhaps (5,4)
HORSE RACE – an anagram (play) of SCORE HEAR
Down
1 Red backs? Lilo tip for swimming pool (6,9)
POCKET BILLIARDS – an anagram (for swimming) of RED BACKS LILO TIP
2 They bow as terrorist group gets time in prison (8)
CELLISTS – IS (terrorist group) T (time) in CELLS (prison) – how many thought, as I did initially, that ‘terrorist group’ gave CELL and then couldn’t parse the rest?
3 Meeting Charlie in one boozer (5)
ASCOT – C (Charlie) in A (one) SOT (boozer)
4 Smalls remain outside for idle … (8)
LINGERIE – LINGER (remain) I[dl]E (outside for idle)
5 … mark in smalls remains (6)
STICKS – TICK (mark) in SS (smalls)
6 Patient one cross in place for work (9)
JOB CENTRE – JOB (patient one) CENTRE (cross {as in football})
7 Improved attention span for top-grade student (6)
HEALED – HEED (attention) around (span for) A (top-grade) L (student)
8 Power arm? A special gym to work out for sporting event? (10,5)
PARALYMPIC GAMES – P (power) followed by an anagram (to work out) ARM A SPECIAL GYM
15 Wearing eye make-up, Britney Spears primarily concealing bags (3,6)
BIN LINERS – B[ritney] S[pears] (Britney Spears primarily) around (concealing) IN (wearing) LINER (eye make-up)
17 Help to protect Britain; politician that might cause upset (3,5)
SOB STORY – SOS (help) around (to protect) B (Britain) plus TORY (politician)
18 Were covers not stained ultimately in the morning with this? (3,5)
WET DREAM – WERE around (covers) [no]T [staine]D (not stained ultimately) followed by AM (in the morning) – with an extended def.
20 Groom mostly attractive and sweet (6)
COMFIT – COM[b] (groom mostly) FIT (attractive)
21 Crude painting? What gallery finally frames? (6)
EARTHY – EH (what) [galler]Y (gallery finally) around (frames) ART (painting)
23 Foreign / film (5)
ALIEN – double def.
Good puzzle. I didn’t have G’s prob with the ‘cells’; I was riffing through IRA, ETA, PLO – the usual suspects – although it was among my last in that NW corner. For KELLOGG I was looking for some variant spelling of ‘kedgeree’ which also irritatingly fitted my crossers for ‘lingerie’ so that idea fixe held me up for no reason except incompetence. Thanks to both & sympathies to Eileen: I share her pain.
Thanks Gaufrid, Tramp, and the troubled Eileen.
Fairly steady progress with this throughout. Couldn’t parse HEALED.
9a suffers from a surfeit of overs in clue and solution.
Well never was the saying about learning something new every day more true than in crosswordland.
I only ever knew the schoolboy slang meaning of POCKET BILLIARDS, but it couldn’t be anything else so in it went.
A mixed bag but most of it very good.
Thanks Tramp and Gaufrid
Enjoyable – seemed tougher than it was, if that makes sense! Everything well clued though “overs” in 9ac put me off putting in the answer. I too was feeling good about “cell” for terrorists and took a while to knock myself out of that infinite loop.
“wet dream” was one of the sneakiest &lits I’ve seen in a long while. New words for me were “tarsalia” (though once the crossers were in it could not be anything else given the clue and the etymology with “tarsa” as in “metatarsals”) and “almoner”. Again that was easy to build from the clue so totally fair.
Little horsey sub-theme with groom, rider, derby, ascot, horse-race, maybe extending to sports too. And maybe a slightly “blue” theme with wet dream, pocket billiards and screw. It’s obscure but I could throw Kellogg in there as a man (John Harvey Kellogg) with very strict ideas about sex and who advocated a plain diet such as cereals to avoid sexual arousal.
Good fun and thank you Gaufrid for the rescue – hope Eileen’s IT is better soon!
I would not consider job centre to be a single word. Gaufrid or his spell checker seem to confirm this.
Thezed @ 4 I don’t know how you fitted an eight-letter answer in.
I couldn’t parse the HIRT in 9a and can just about see it now.
18d great clue – didn’t see that one coming!
David @6 I think that counts as a “thing I didn’t learn today”! My bad…
Thanks Gaufrid for stepping in for Eileen. Great blog.
Living the kind of rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that I do, I was lying in bed one night last week when, at about 3am, I suddenly had a thought that the clue for 9a might have an issue. I’m not sure what made me think of this. I got up, careful not to wake my wife, and checked the proof on my phone: I confirmed my suspicion. Later, I contacted Hugh about it; we both agreed it was too late in the day to change. I can only apologise. I knew this would become the talking point of the puzzle.
Lots of people on the message boards are saying that 6d should be one word. I must have knock-off dictionaries because it’s one word in my Collins and Chambers. This grid was a random fill from Crossword Compiler and the software enumerated the entry as a single, nine-letter word.
Thanks for the comments.
Neil
Thanks Tramp and Gaufrid
Thanks for confessing about the “over” in the 9a clue – it put me off the answer for a while too. Otherwise I made steady progress. PRESENT DAY and INSPIRE were favourites.
I think there is a distinction between any old JOB CENTRE and an official JOBCENTRE – it’s given as one word on their buildings.
tramp @9 thanks for the response re 9ac. My Chambers (New Edition 1983) has job “centre, Jobcentre (also without caps)” so all is copacetic, as our NA cousins might say. At least it was 35 years ago. Who needs to be more up to date than that?
Interesting that you use a random fill – did the presence of a few horse-related answers inspire you to use horse-related clues?
Max Romeo claimed that “Wet Dream” was about a leaking roof. The lyrics dont entirely back that up.
But with such a cool groove, who really cares.
Thanks Tramp and Gaufrid.
David @5; the BRB, Collins and Oxford give JOBCENTRE as one word.
Thanks Tramp for a pleasant solve – WET DREAM, what these setters get up to these days.
Thanks Gaufrid for coming to the rescue. I was thinking of ISIS as the terrorist group and wondered how the ‘time in’ got rid of the ‘S’, doh! Good to see that PRESENT-DAY wasn’t clued as Christmas again.
Thanks both. In 18d I was convinced that “were covers” meant the outer letters of “were” = WE. So I couldn’t work out where the RE came from. Doh! Trying to be too clever
Slow going for me today – held up by winging sandals rather than spotting them as the definition and took ages to see play as an anagrind in 27a. Liked POCKET BILLIARDS and LINGERIE. Thanks to Tramp for the workout and Gaufrid for so ably stepping into the breach.
Copmus – in the Oxfam shop I always have to put a lyrics may offend note on all of Max Romeo’s rude reggae offerings – see also Judge Dread and the Mighty Sparrow’s marital advice
Thanks to Tramp and Gaufrid. I did somehow dredge up TALARIA and knew “pool'” as POCKET BILLIARDS but struggled with “centre” as “cross, the “local” in” LOCAL DERBY, and DRIER as clothes horse and needed help parsing CELLIST.
Hadn’t come across maiden as clothes horse before, thought 14 across very clever and satisfying to solve…
Great fun, defeated by 21 and 26 – definitely have a blind spot regarding 26: drier is the only possible word from rider, and the horse (race)
reference of maiden fits with rider, but how does drier relate to maiden? Please explain!
Huge thanks to Tramp [glad I’m not the only one to have odd thoughts which must be followed up – it’s always 3.00 am! – but hard luck on this one] and, of course, to Gaufrid [and to others for their sympathy]. The BT engineer has just left, after three hours – he’d never seen such ancient wiring as mine – but it seems to be all systems go now. And the fast-track replacement for my lost passport, which has also been exercising me greatly for the past ten days, arrived yesterday, so this time next week I shall be on the way to Copenhagen for the weekend. 😉
Regular readers will appreciate how disappointed I am not to have been able to blog this great puzzle from Tramp but, since I solve it in the paper, I still managed to enjoy it. Nothing really to add to the comments, except that I particularly liked the link between 4 and 5dn.
RH @ 5 Collins online gives:
4. Also called: clothes maiden Northern England dialect
a frame on which clothes are hung to dry; clothes horse
Not one I knew either
RH @18
“reference of maiden fits with rider, but how does drier relate to maiden? Please explain!”
I thought I had done with my note after the parsing. A maiden is a clothes-horse, something on which you dry clothes, ie a DRIER.
The maiden defeated me too. Over here a drier is only the machine; the other is a clothes rack. And it’s news to me that a clothes rack can be a maiden. TILT for me.
Thanks for the rescue, Gaufrid, and for the puzzle, Tramp.
What is the defect of 1a? If six deliveries are an over (I know now), then more deliveries would be several overs, no? I’ve missed the point.
Maiden=clothes drier is a new one for me too – always called a clothes horse in our house. Looks like it may be a regional thing.
Thanks to Tramp and Gaufrid. Enjoyed this a lot, but it was quite slow going. Started off quite quickly, but then slowed down markedly. Eventually got the bottom half in with the exception of talaria (which was one of the last to fall), but I found the NW quite tough to get into (maybe because of the reluctance to put in overs) and overshirt and ascot were the last ones. No problem with maiden for drier, it was a term used regularly in my childhood. My favourites today were jobcentre and bin liners. Thanks again to Tramp and Gaufrid.
Valentine @22
It’s just unfortunate that “over” is in the clue and the solution.
Thanks, muffin.
Thanks to Gaufrid and Tramp
I enjoyed this and have no real quibbles except perhaps the lack of a question mark at the end of my LOI 6d. A jobcentre is not really a place for work, but a place to seek work.
I am mystified though that a fairly simple edit (e.g. changing the last three words of 9a to “around”), is not possible with what would seem to have been several days notice.
As I understand it, when you make changes to a puzzle that’s only a few days from publication, you run the risk of there being discrepancies between the different versions (print, online, overseas edition etc.)
As so often with Tramp, I found this one quite hard, but enjoyed the challenge, and in retrospect a lot of these should have occurred to me earlier.
Thanks to Tramp and Gaufrid
Nuff said about 9ac, methinks.
Many thanks to Tramp for an altogether enjoyable crossword (in which I only failed on 7d).
And if you’re still around, can you please explain how I should see ‘cross’ = ‘centre’ in 6d? Gaufrid’s addition that it has to do with football, I don’t really get (as someone who played football himself).
Thanks Sil: if you centre the ball, you cross it, usually into the box.
Sil van den Hoek @30
That’s interesting, might I assume you are Dutch? When I played, as a right winger, my sole purpose seemed to be to “centre” the ball into the box, usually aiming for the centre forward’s head. You were probably playing a more advanced game involving passing to each other along the ground. We are still trying to catch up!
Thanks both for explaining ‘centre’.
I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘to centre the ball into the box’. Even after having watched so many games on TV.
But yes, probably because I never played any football in this country.
Get it now.
(and since ACD@16 was the only other commenter ‘struggling’ with it, I can only ‘blame’ myself)
Never heard of maiden being a clothes horse before.
I found this quite meaty. Like others, I felt uneasy about 9a. TALARIA, the meaning of maiden as a clothes-horse and POCKET BILLIARDS as pool were new to me (like Doofs@3 I only knew the schoolboy slang definition) and I failed to parse JOBCENTRE and HEALED, so thanks for the elucidation ion the blog, Gaufrid, and the testing puzzle, Tramp.
The discussion of centring, or crossing, from the wing into the penalty area, or goal area, is a reminder of the name given to some goalkeepers: Dracula. Scared of crosses. Maybe this dates me and has fallen out of use?
[Hi quenbarrow
I remember the chant;
I yi yi yi
(Insert name of your goalkeeper) is better than Yashin
We’re going to give (insert name of opponents) a thrashin’
etc.
(For those younger than us, see this link.]
Having solved WET DREAM I was surprised the definition for 1d was so straightforward – a reference to the schoolboy usage would have fitted well. I had no problem with maiden as a DRIER – but I did have a problem finding an anagram of rider! Like Sil I didn’t get HEALED – there are so many possible words and this one never occurred to me. I also didn’t parse EARTHY and liked INSPIRE best of all.
Thanks to Tramp for setting and contributing as usual and to Gaufrid for doing Eileen’s slot – a nice puzzle to be called in for.
Shirt @14
Snap! In the end, I rationalised it by saying “in” is short for “in regards to” = RE, but I didn’t really convince myself.
Another one who has never heard of maiden as a clothes horse. Comments suggest this may be a more north of England usage.
Quite tough today and,for some reason, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the usual Tramp.
Thanks anyway, both Tramp and Gaufrid.
The hardest for me in the Graun this week, took ages to complete. FOI OMEGA, LOI DRIER. COD 15d. Laughed when l cracked 18d to the amusement of fellow bench seaters here in Nairobi who don’t fathom cryptics. Could not also parse 2d but got it from ‘they bow…’
Stymied in the NE but I did find all of this hard, as I usually do with Tramp. I thought JOBCENTRE was two words – and so does my spellchecker- but the OED has it as one! If it wasn’t for the weather I doubt I’d have persevered.
Thanks Tramp.
Me @39
Apologies, Shirl. I-Pad predictive text snafu.
There are a few decent clues in this but in general too many surfaces sound contrived, there is a surfeit of single-letter indicators, and the repetition of “for” towards the end of five of the first eight down clues is not very elegant.
Having noted Sil’s comment @30, I won’t dwell on the “over” issue in 9a, except to wonder aloud whether this sort of thing would not have been spotted immediately by a half-competent crossword editor. Be that as it may, I have more problems in this clue with “over the top” to mean “around”, plus the definition which imo is too vague. In 14a I’m struggling to think of a coherent sentence in which “now” and “present-day” could be used interchangeably: part of the problem is that the former is an adverb and the latter an adjective. Nor do I like the structure of 27a: if handled properly, “play” can be a perfectly decent anagram indicator, but not as an imperative verb form at the very beginning of the clue.
Anyway, thanks to Gaufrid for covering with the blog.
Muffin – he was brilliant I remember the 66 world cup against (I think) North Korea when he was breathtaking almost balletic.
Sil – I suppose coming from the land of total football crosses/centres were too blunt an instrument. Was it Neeskins after the 74 final said we were enjoying outplaying West Germany but just forgot to score!
Gofirstmate @43, I was another one who had my thoughts about ‘over the top’ (in that clue again). And then I considered {OVERS + HIT} going ‘over’ the top of RUNS (=R). Also not ideal but, perhaps, just about justifiable.
As to ‘now’ = ‘present-day’, in 1978 Nick Lowe released his debut album which was called Jesus of Cool but later in the USA (where else?) it was retitled: Pure Pop for Now People.
Your point about ‘play’ is quite interesting. It is here actually in a similar position as when we use ‘doctor’ or ‘engineer’ – although, unlike me, some setters think ‘FODDER doctor’ is all right too.
Is the difference perhaps that when we say ‘playing darts’ for STRAD, the form of the verb is meant to be intransitive (as a device, not in the surface, of course) and when the setter uses ‘play’ as an imperative it is transitive?
And, BlueCanary, I’ve long forgotten about the days of what was just a word (‘total football’). Those were the, actually, shameful days that the Dutch hated the Germans so much that even some of them found the need to spit (remember Ronald Koeman?).
As to current developments, both England and the Netherlands are on the way up again, yep. Not so very long ago someone told the nation that there will be an even ‘brighter future’ ….
Another very good puzzle from Tramp.
Can’t see anything wrong with ‘play’ in 27ac. Anglers might play a fish on the end of their line, allowing it to move around and tire itself.
Thanks Tramp and Gaufrid
Not much to add except that I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Thanks for the comments on “play”: every day’s a school day.
Neil
Tramp @48
Yes, indeed. TALARIA was new to me, and so was ‘now’ in that sense. I was going to query it, but Chambers told me it can be an adjective meaning ‘present’, and Sil @45 came up with an example (the example?) of its use.