Guardian Prize 28,099 by Paul

54 comments on “Guardian Prize 28,099 by Paul”

1. Bridgesong, I think the delicate creature in 22a is the comma butterfly.

2. Thanks Paul and bridgesong – lots of fun here.

   I thought the “delicate creature” in 22a was COMMA, a type of butterfly, with N (name) and DEER (Bambi) attached to it.

3. Thanks Paul and bridgesong.
   I took ‘Those landed in hot water’ as a whole to define ‘kettle of fish’ in 18,2 otherwise the ‘in’ is a misleading envelope indicator.
   I think ‘dry’ as ‘not obviously comic’ in ‘dry humour’ works for 28.
   Favourite GEORGE ORWELL.

4. This occupied a few pleasant hours for me. Lots to like, with EYELESS and WILLY-NILLY as perhaps my nominees for best clues. Thanks to Bridgesong for the parsing of PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH (still not sure what justifies the OF) and GEORGE ORWELL (the homophones are both stretches, but I’ve run across worse). No complaints, and only my LOI, SPAG BOL, was unfamiliar to me, but with all the crossers in it had to be.

5. Paul at his best for me – inventive, witty, ingenious – not a duff clue in sight. I had ticks galore ALFIE, GESHUNDHEIT, INFELICITOUS, COMMANDEER, EYELESS, AVID, BOOGALOO, LISTLESS, WILLY-NILLY with my cod going to EYELESS.I spent too long trying to get POOH (bear) into 7d – did anyone else come up with the HOOLAHOP dance? I enjoyed this one much more than yesterday’s Paul, and didn’t find it as hard to complete the grid using the whole clue rather than the solve then figure out how the wordplay works. More like this please Paul, and thanks to bridgesong for the blog – and I did tick GEORGE ORWELL as well.

6. Thanks, Gonzo @3, that clue works for me now.

7. Excellent Paul. Thank you, though you defeated me in the NE corner. I got Baloo but simply couldn’t take him any further. As always, easy when you know the answer. And thank you Bridgesong – I would never have parsed Waugh without your help. And I agree with the others – definitely the comma butterfly

8. I agree this was a super puzzle, with ingenuity and originality on show throughout.  I particularly liked SPAG BOL, INFELICITOUS, COMMANDEER, TIE IN KNOTS and GEORGE ORWELL.

   Solving 8d was an unusual experience.  When I had ony the penultimate letter S I thought of GOALPOST almost straight away, as it fits the clue perfectly.  The only problem was that the A did not agree with any possible answer for 10a (UNANIMOUS, which I was working on at the same time).  I thought of LISTLESS next, which apparently fits the clue less well (if something lists less it doesn’t follow it’s now upright), but the ‘?’ makes it work: something ‘listing less’ can be upright.

   Many thanks to Paul and bridgesong.

9. Thanks bridgesong. Classic Paul I thought and a welcome way to spend some entertaining time. Mindful last week’s colon clue I flirted with the punctuation mark in 22a too but couldn’t quite make it work and settled for the reasoning @ 1 and 2 above. My LOI was 5a because I had convinced myself that the second word had to be OIL. Even when BOOGALOO (I’d never heard of it) revealed itself I couldn’t think of the obvious answer.

10. I’d be interested to learn about the general familiarity with and date of emergence of SPAG BOL (the abbreviation). I’m an expat, and never heard it (or rather, don’t remember hearing of it) while growing up in the UK (50’s to early 70’s), nor has it shown up in the news or comedy panel shows, the main ways I stay in touch with events and culture. (I’m very familiar with the long form, btw. Yum!)

11. Dr. WhatsOn: OED has only
    “1970 D. Clark Deadly Pattern iv. 86 To eat oxtail and spag bol properly, you’ve got to be stripped to the waist.”

12. I remember enjoying this puzzle, but not much about the solve itself.  Looking now at the clues, my favourites are UNAMINOUS (for the Finnish gran), GESUNDHEIT, EYELESS and the clever GEORGE ORWELL homophone.  I was familiar with the BOOGALOO only because of this Ray Charles number in The Blues Brothers.

    Alan B @8. For LISTLESS, I think the idea’s not LISTS LESS (verb + LESS), but it LIST-LESS (noun + suffix) i.e. without a list, therefore upright.

    Good Prize.  Thanks, Paul and bridgesong & Timon.

13. Some similarities in my experience with those already recorded as I found lots to like here, although I have to say my memory of the process I used in solving this puzzle seems to have dimmed. It feels like it has been a long week! However I have ticked 5a SPAG BOL three times and written LOI beside it (cf. DaveinNC@4), so I obviously relished that one! I enjoyed your mini-discussion above regarding that dish, Dr. WO@10 and Gonzo@11. I also have triple-ticked 13d WILLY NILLY which is one of my favourite Echo Phrases. 26a LARGE was one of the cleverest mis-directions I have seen in a long time as I kept looking and looking for a word that meant “Whacking cane” (birch etc…) [That one actually gave me the heebie jeebies (!) as I kept thinking of the time aged about 10 when I got six whacks on both hands from the head nun’s cane, as did my friends, for making clover chains in an out-of-bounds area of the school grounds. The name of the girl who dobbed us in is still engraved in my little black book and the memory still smarts.]

    One tick each for 5a ALFIE, 8d LISTLESS and 23d MOPED, but I couldn’t parse 27a EYELESS or 19,20d GEORGE ORWELL at the time. EYELESS now seems obvious to the then oblivious, but I wouldn’t have connected that quote regarding “jaw jaw” and “war war” in the context of the G.O. clue in a month of Sundays. I do agree with the preamble though in that it was a fantastic clue now that I can see the parsing!!!

    Thanks to Paul for the enjoyment and to bridgesong for the elucidation, and also to fellow travellers for your comments already and those to come.

     

14. Margin note says ‘steady, nice’, so not at all fiendish. Soumi for Finnish was a nho so nut out then look up. Only a couple of ?s; one for battery, because ‘dry’ in relation to humour evokes wittily dry; otoh, its other meaning is boring, which I spose is related to ‘not funny’; and the other for ‘tie in knots’ which lacks the reflexivity of ‘make oneself worried’. Quiblets merely. A couple of der-groans, one for spag bol and the other for making maid mad. Vaguely remembered comma the butterfly, most likely from a previous puzzle. Lots to enjoy, thanks Paul and Bridgesong. Oh and yes geor geor well was a beaut.

15. Thanks bridgesong.  For WILLY NILLY Paul once (26,003) had:” Part below zero literally empty, however.”  I thought the phrase had a nolens-volens origin but more likely is the disappeared ancient word Nill as the opposite of Will. Big tick for the jaw-jaw reference in 19,20’s ‘better author’ and another tick for ‘the arrogant writer’ in 4D.

16. ‘Whacking great’, yes, but is whacking on its own ever used for huge or large? [Ouch, JinA, twelve cuts for a daisy chain! A bit ott, if not sadistic!]

17. Dr WhatsOn. I too am an expat and can’t remember post-student days in “alternative” London in the late ’60s / early ’70s well enough to know whether “spag bol” was common usage or not. I would imagine it was. Certainly, here in Oz, “spag bol” is as common as “mushies and scrambo for brekkie”.
    It may be just the company I keep, of course!

18. Thoroughly enjoyed this, although towards the end I wrote in both GESUNDHEIT and ELKHOUNDS without managing to parse them properly and only realised later I’d missed two anagrams, one fairly obvious, the other a bit less so. I felt a bit silly at that point, especially having struggled to get the hunters. Top marks though for the WAUGH, GEORGE ORWELL combination, combining clever clueing and some quiet literary commentary masquerading as wordplay. Or maybe it really was just wordplay… Nice work, Paul, and thanks, bridgesong.

19. I found this quite difficult but I’m not complaining.  In fact, this was very welcome after a run of easier-than-usual puzzles.  And whereas I can normally get the puzzle finished the same day, this time I was still finishing it off on the Monday!

    Living as I do in Suomi-Finland, I got 10ac almost immediately and this got me started.  And , as a linguist, Gesundheit was next in.  I love languages and am always happy to see linguistic references in clues but I did wonder quite how fair this latter word was?  By the way, Suomi is the name of the country in Finnish, though, written with a small s, it is also the name of the language.  Countries and their languages tend to be the same word in Finnish.

    I wasn’t aware that listless could mean pale.  And I failed to understand the parsing of GEORGE ORWELL, so thanks for the explanation.

    But there were lots of great clues, my favourites being: CHOCTAW, COMMANDEER, EYELESS, WAUGH,  MOPED.  Interesting word-play and good surfaces too.

    And I’m fairly sure we used to refer to spag bol in my student days (1972-1977).  Or am I remembering it wrong?

    Julie in Australia – I feel for you.

    Good puzzle.  Thanks to Paul and to bridgesong.

20. I only got BOOGALOO and SPAGBOL through use of pattern search on Chambers clever iPhone app. So a DNF, but enjoyable. BOOGALOO seems like a pretty tough clue, Baloo –> Bear isn’t obvious, I did think afterwards the dancing could do double duty; in the Disney adaptation Baloo famously does a dance “I wanna be just like you”. Spag bol would be obvious with the B crosser, and to anyone who grew up on English school dinners which I did not! Agree with the previous comment – the cricket reference is misleading – presumably another cunning Paul trick ?

    My favourite clue by far was GESUNDHEIT – lovely misdirection and a genuine aha! moment when the pfennig fell. UNANIMOUS also gets a mention for having SUOMI in reverse – probably not the first time its been used but new to me and delighted to make its acquaintance. Also LISTLESS, EYELESS.

    Not really getting the love for GEORGE ORWELL. My (non-English) ears struggle a lot with homophonic clues anyway but this one felt like a very long reach indeed. Genuinely interested to hear if anyone worked this out from the wordplay alone, rather than seeing the writer from the crossers and back-solving the wordplay. Even allowing for the homophone reach the rest of the wordplay is convoluted to my eye.

    As ever thanks to Paul for a great challenge, to bridgesong for explaining it all so clearly and to all other contributors on this learned corner of ye Internette.

21. The earliest known reference to SPAG BOLL (as recorded in the OED) was in 1970.

    If anyone finds an earlier printed reference, I am sure the OED woud like to know — they are always excited by antedating!

22. Absolutely loved this and, as others have observed, it came at the right time after a number of slightly less challenging puzzles.  What’s not to like?  Paul at his best.  I loved the defInition of GESUNDHEIT, the two linked writers WAUGH and GEROGE ORWELL, WILLY NILLY was cheeky and had me giggling, COMMANDEER was clever.

    I have always struggled with Spag Bol insofar as I grew up in a family that, for some reason, called it Spag Bog!  And that has stuck with me.  I know it makes no sense as it’s not an abbreviation.  It’s not even a terribly good rhyme.  But there it is and I’ve had 50+ years of reinforcement so I’m unlikely to change.  Fortunately, both my teenagers insist on correcting me at every opportunity so the mistake is unlikely to outlive me.

    Thanks Paul and bridgesong (especially for parsing ELKHOUNDS!)

23. Phitonelly @12
    You’re right about LISTLESS. My GOALPOST suggestion is not a better answer, but (of course) I maintain it’s an equally good one, albeit ruled out by the crossing letters.
    Thanks for pointing out what I missed.

24. It’s been said before, but funny how perceptions of difficulty can vary so much between solvers.  As an example, when I read the comments on this site I am often in awe of rodshaw, who appears to whizz through puzzles while I’m still staring blankly.  On this occasion, however (and I know he found it challenging from a post earlier this week) it was I who, well, perhaps not whizzed exactly, let’s just say I was on Paul’s wavelength.

    You can count me as another GEORGE ORWELL fan (and yes, re Epee Sharkey’s query @ 20, I did actually get as far as GEORGE OR just from the wordplay).

    Did wonder about STALINIST = revolutionary.

    1a brought back CHOCTAW Ridge, the wonderful Bobbie Gentry, and the Ode to Billy Joe.  “There was a virus goin’ round…” seems particularly poignant right now.

    I had to smile at ELKHOUNDS.  Perhaps it was a tribute to 15²’s recent elk-erfuffle?

    But surely Paul missed a trick by not cluing it: “Crypto-antelope turns tables on its pursuers?”

    Thank you to Paul, and to bridgesong for the blog, to Anna for some interesting info about Finnish, and to J in A for adding to my stock of nun-related horror stories!

25. Of course, the descriptions of WAUGH and ORWELL as respectively arrogant and better are what are expected of us as Guardian readers!

    SPAG BOL is in the current Chambers (as a separate definition from ‘spaghetti’) and, though I cannot cite anything before the 70s, it has been familiar to me that long. I too am a Babyboom Londoner, Gert@17 and DrW@10, (though have emigrated only as far as Herefordshire) and we certainly have long referred to SPAG BOL.

    Thanks, bridgesong, for explaining EYELESS, which I never parsed, even though I finished the puzzle in roughly average time. But I have a problem with LISTLESS – does it mean ‘pale’? Chambers says ‘uninterested’ or ’languid’, which sounds right to me. Any views, anyone?

    As to BOOGALOO, look up ‘Gimme Dat Ding’ by the Pipkins, or listen on Spotify or YouTube. One of the great songs of 1970 (which just proves my age!).

    Stay safe, everyone.

26. ES@20 – Like essexboy@23 I got to GEORGE OR from the wordplay and thence to the solution. Also like eb@23 I remember rodshaw’s comment and thought exactly the same – the puzzle was a challenge but unravelled steadily and was exceptional for its quality rather than its difficulty.

27. Thanks to those who pointed out that the delicate creature in COMMANDEER was the comma butterfly, not the deer.  I’ve amended the blog.

    I’d have thought spag bol might be found in schoolboy stories from the post-war period: Molesworth perhaps, or Jennings?  I wonder when it first became available in tinned form in the UK.

28. Thanks for all the explanations.

    Just one question.

    Why does posh lead to ‘U’?

29. molonglo @15

    Chambers’ sole definition for ‘nolens-volens’ is willy-nilly

    What a super distraction this puzzle was from the current virus chemozzle.

    How, in my fourscore yeas and ten, I never came across BOOGALOO I cannot think; the only blot on a fine, week-long entertainment.

30. JN@28 – this Wikipedia article explains the origin of U (and non-U), originally appled to language, but extended to refer to social class generally. Now that we in the UK are (a bit) less class-conscious than in the ’50s, U=posh has become one of the many obsolete usages which survive mainly in crosswords.

    I agree with most of the previous comments. I thought yesterday’s and this “Prize” xwords were Paul at his best. Favourites were WILLY-NILLY, and GEORGE ORWELL which I thought one of the best clues I’ve seen for months (matched perhaps by yesterday’s fat cat clue).

    Thanks Paul and bridgesong.

31. Sorry – here is the Wikipedia link

32. Agree with Essexboy: a Stalinist is the opposite of a revolutionary

33. I forgot to mention that BALOO is not just from Kipling. It is the normal Hindi word for a bear, I believe (usually transliterated as ‘bh?l?’, I think).

    I find my reference to‘Gimme Dat Ding’ is timely, as it maxed in the charts in April 1970, so currently celebrates its golden jubilee.

34. Bhalu, with accents which the system cannot read right.

35. Thanks to Paul, and Bridgesong for help with parsing particularly EYELESS which we just could not see (appropriately ho ho). Also to Essexboy for the reminder of the excellent songwriting of Bobby Gentry with the reference to Choctaw Ridge. Having actual solved 1a from the wordplay (our usual method is from the crossers and then reverse engineering the why) I spotted its use as a street name in this week’s lockdown talked about TV Tiger King.
    WILLY NILLY made me laugh out loud and LARGE another favourite. The top right defeated us. We derailed ourselves with tasty and up being an anagram of Stay Put for 5a and like others this morning have been reminiscing (in our case still under the duvet) about when we first used the term spag bol.
    Baloo was quite a staionary bear, too laid back to dance, it was King Louie who foolishly wanted to be ‘be like us’ in the Jungle Book animation. A poor ambition given the current global faecal hurricane.
    I am with sjshart, one of the listless not meaning pale grumblers. Not possessing a Chambers I shall carry on chuntering in blissful ignorance!

36. I found this very difficult, but probably above my pay grade.

    I, of course, noted the two ‘ors’ in GEORGE ORWELL, but that didn’t help with the parsing – congrats to those who got it from the wordplay. I thought ‘gathered’ was a rather iffy anagrind.

    Good crossword; I loved the US dancing bear.

    Thanks Paul and bridgesong.

37. Thank you Paul for a super puzzle and bridgesong for an enlightening blog – I would never have parsed GEORGE ORWELL!

    The only spaghetti I remember while living in England in the late 50s early 60s was the Heinz tinned variety, it had no meat and one ate it on toast for high tea…

38. Bravo Essexboy @24 and whiteking @26 !

39. [JinA @13, your painful story about being whacked on the hands reminded me of the only time a teacher tried to do that to me for some naughtiness, cannot remember what.  Our dear old French teacher, an aristocratic refugee from Poland, asked me to hold out my hand palm upwards whereupon she brought the ruler down – I pulled my hand away and she crashed hers on to the desk, I ran out of the room into the garden and she chased me around and around, then started to laugh!]

40. 5a. I can only think that the OED hasn’t been looking hard enough. Spag Bol was the turn-to dish for flat dwellers during my time in South Kensington. I left in 1971 and it was popular well before that. Surprised if nobody wrote it down.
    7d. I had to check on this, having heard of BOOGABOO (a bogeyman) but not the correct answer which Wiki says is more commonly used by the far right in America.
    Enjoyable as was yesterday’s. Paul seems to be on top form. Thanks too to bridgesong, especially for parsing 19d,20d.

41. sjshart@33: thanks for the useful info re ‘baloo’.
    To show special characters here, type the ampersand-something-semicolon code from
    https://www.freeformatter.com/html-entities.html

42. Paul at his best,I thought,and certainly more enjoyable than yesterday’s. I’m glad I’m not alone in not parsing GEORGE ORWELL: quite brilliant now it’s been pointed out. I seem to have used the term SPAG BOL forever but the term probably came into use no later than the latter years of the sixties. I also remember the tinned version which,along with Vesta curries, was one of the culinary abominations foisted on us Brits. The foodstuff equivalent of ‘Gimme dat Ding’: the mention of which has provoked a thoroughly unwanted earworm!
    I don’t remember when BOOGALOO first came in. I do recall that many old school RnB performers updating their old hits with the term- Huey(piano) Smith did this with ‘Rocking pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu’
    Did anybody else try to get Yogi Bear’s sidekick,BooBoo into 7 dn?
    Thanks Paul

43. I was another who got GEOR GEOR from WAUGH WAUGH. Fantastic clue. And I also wondered about STALINIST = revolutionary, but not until after I had solved the clue!

    Re bridgesong’s comment at 14a about Paul not commenting here, I am sure I have seen several appearances by him in the past. Not many write-ins here, but plenty of juicy clues.

    I remembered BOOGALOO from a  Ringo Starr record in the 70s.

    Sorry to hear that Paul’s use of “whacking” to define LARGE revived such painful memories for JinA.

44. One of the few that I’ve finished in one day, so a satisfying achievement although this week’s one looks set to provide many more hours of entertainment.  Some parsing eluded me – suomi, comma, and the jaw-jaw quote (although the repeated syllable clearly referred to something) were new – but the rest of the clue and the crossers were sufficient to be certain.  Agree with queried definitions: whacking on its own, stalinist and listless all seemed to be stretching it a bit… but my favourite was definitely gesundheit – lovely definition!

45. Mark@22: My family has always called it SPAG BLOG. we now make it with rotini so we call it ROT BLOG – sounds even more appetizing, eh?

    One of Paul’s best in my opinion – my cod was EYELESS, but there were many ticks for good surfaces, ingenious constructions and pdms. Unlike others, while I agree that GEORGE ORWELL was brilliant, it fell into the too-clever-by-half category for me – easy to get from the crossers but I would never have been able to parse, although the parsing was a revelation after the fact. That’s not a complaint, not even a quiblet, and I enjoyed the literary criticism in that clue and WAUGH.

    JinA – How those childhood memories, especially the bad ones, can stick in the mind forever. I was never whacked, but I do remember being kicked out of the boys choir at age 12 for organizing a strike. (The issue was the lack of padding for the kneeling benches for the boys – the men’s benches were padded.) Maybe that’s why I eventually gravitated to the Guardian for my cryptics.

    Thanks to Paul, bridgesong (especially for GEORGE ORWELL) and all contributors for the exceptional fun.

     

46. Re childhood punishment tales, when I was about 7 or 8 a teacher once whacked me on the top of the head with a plastic 12” ruler. 2“ broke off the end…

47. I wouldn’t describe this as “fiendish” myself – “fun” would do nicely, though.
    A bit confused by those who DIDN’T solve GEORGE ORWELL via Wordplay; as soon as I (mentally) voiced “WAUGH WAUGH” I immediately thought of Churchill’s “jaw jaw” (and,irrelevantly, Lord Haw Haw!) which led to ‘jaw jaw well’ seamlessly – but then I’m no dyed-in-the-wool rhoticist! My next, immediate, thought being ‘what a delightful clue!’.
    Suomi will be well-known to any of us who has ever collected stamps…
    Other terrific clues included WAUGH (FOI) and WILLY-NILLY.
    No matter the difficulty level, one could never describe Paul’s puzzles as ‘write-ins’!
    Being able to enjoy one of Mr Halpern’s offerings is something I love (- especially) in the time of Co-wrong’un-virus…

    Chins up, boys and girls! Just think – there are some people in this world who aren’t addicted to cryptic crosswords and have no idea of the joy we have in solving a Paul puzzle. Those poor people….

    Best to Bridgesong – keep up the good work. And thanks to him and, of course, to Paul – I’ve said it before (and will again, no doubt) How Does He Do It?!

48. William F P:

    Don’t be confused. As a Canuck I pronounce my r’s, so war and jaw do not rhyme (I would say “wore” and “jah”), and I’d never heard the Churchill quote (a nice TILT by the way), so how could I get the solution via wordplay?

    I’m not complaining, though. I think of homophones as “sounds similar to” rather than “sounds the same as”, so I agree the parsing is fine – it’s just not as obvious as you seem to think it should be to a Canadian.

49. If I may simply quote Peter A @42: Paul at his best,I thought,and certainly more enjoyable than yesterday’s. I’m glad I’m not alone in not parsing GEORGE ORWELL: quite brilliant now it’s been pointed out.

50. Very tough throughout. I never managed to get SPAG BOL or BOOGALOO, even though I considered ‘BOL’ for the first (specifically SNOW BOL which I think(?) is a drink made with Bols egg flip and lemonade, a brand-specific version of the Snowball) and BALOO the Bear for the other. Not quite sure why I couldn’t make the jump to BOOGALOO. I think if I’d been working on paper I might have. Usually, if there are a couple I can’t get like this, Chambers Word Wizard will come to the rescue by allowing me to pick from its list the word or phrase which answers the clue. Unfortunately, it doesn’t recognise either of the answers I lacked in this case! (However, I notice from Epee Sharkey@20 that they are both on the iphone app! WW online uses Chambers 21st Century Dictionary).

    Loved the double def for MOPED, though I think I’ve seen something very similar. Still had me foxed for a good while.

    GEORGE ORWELL was a beaut of a homophone (although not for those with rhotic accents, probably), and not too difficult given how famous the quote is (pace cellomaniac@48). Epee Sharkey@20, sorry to hear you have the ‘wrong accent’!

    With 10a, UNANIMOUS, I had UNAN in a long time before I took seriously enough the idea that Soumi could mean Finnish, so was delighted when I finally looked it up.

    Re 8d LISTLESS, I agree with Anna@19 and sjshart@25 that is doesn’t mean pale, although that word is often found in association with it.

    15d ELKHOUNDS was not a word I knew, but found with wordsearch. Still took a while to parse.

    Interesting nugget from molonglo@15 re the word ‘nill’. Didn’t know that. Thanks.

    Gertbycee@17, although ‘spag bol’ is very familiar to me as a Brit now, I would not be at all surprised to learn it (the abbreviation, not the dish!) started in Oz. Btw, I’ve never heard anyone speak of “mushies and scrambo for brekkie”, but I would have no trouble understanding the meaning — or that the speaker was Australian! I think ‘brekkie’ is fairly well established in the UK too, though.

    essexboy@24, I also was primarily familiar with Choctaw from Bobbie Gentry’s brilliant Ode to Billie Joe. Btw, I found a brilliant live rendition from a spot on the Andy Williams show. She sings it with so much feeling, you would think that Billy Joe McAllister was a real personal friend. Surely one of the best pop songs ever written. The last line gives me chills every time.

     

51. Thanks TC @50, great song, great version.

52. I really enjoyed this puzzle and got much further than I usually do with Paul. I was very pleased with myself for spotting Waugh Waugh and linking it to Jaw Jaw but that didn’t get me to George Orwell, despite having most crossing letters. Probably partly because I was convinced 28 across was DAY TIME on account of TIME being also what you get after a conviction…

    I thought the lesser explosion in Berlin was absolutely inspired.

53. Shouldn\’t the clue \”US dancing\” give BOOGALOOING?

    Also, I\’ve never heard/seen the phrase \’a PRETTY kettle of fish\’.

54. Re BOOGALOO, I’ve just discovered this.  I wonder if Paul was aware of it when he put it in the grid? (Annoying that I don’t know how to stop everything after “this” being part of the link, but there you go

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