Guardian 28,275 – Nutmeg

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Nutmeg in gentle mode, but with all her usual wit and elegance. Very nice. No theme or Nina that I can see, but I’d be happy to be corrected on that. Thanks to Nutmeg.

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
1. ABOARD Nothing drunk by a poet ready to set sail (6)
O in A BARD
4. SPICED UP Given additional quality by Nutmeg? (6,2)
Cryptic definition, with nutmeg being a spice as well as our setter
9. NOTIFY Keep informed of tiny changes (6)
(OF TINY)*
10. SNOOKERS Hinders second examiner’s case, cutting corners (8)
S + E[xamine]R in NOOKS (corners)
11. CAPE OF GOOD HOPE Head deity’s mantle encapsulating old belief (4,2,4,4)
O in CAPE OF GOD (deity’s mantle) + HOPE (belief)
13. TAKE AS READ Presume army reservists are asked to reassemble (4,2,4)
TA (Territorial Army, former name of the Army Reserve) + (ARE ASKED)*
14. SNOG Game partners try turning over to canoodle (4)
S N (partners in Bridge) + reverse of GO (a try)
18. THE BOER WAR A brother we shot in turn-of-century conflict (3,4,3)
(A BROTHER WE)* – there were actually two Boer Wars, but the phrase used on its own usually means the second, 1899–1902
21. SPARE NO EXPENSE Don’t stint, inserting late pound in meagre bill (5,2,7)
EX (former, late) PEN (pound, as in an animal’s enclosure) in SPARE (meagre) NOSE (beak, bill)
23. ACADEMIA Self-help group covering roughly half the folk on campus (8)
CA (circa, roughly) + DEMI (half) in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous)
24,16. ADRIAN MOLE One admiral at sea a regular record keeper (6,4)
(ONE ADMIRAL)* for Sue Townsend’s fictional diarist
25. EVENINGS Extremely gregarious dogs still at home when light fades? (8)
EVEN (still) IN (at home) followed or “dogged” by G[regariou]S
26. ARCHLY Leading lady cleared out in cunning fashion (6)
ARCH (leading, as in Archbishop) + L[ad]Y
Down
1. ACNE Spots men carting bottles up (4)
Hidden in reverse of mEN CArting
2. OUTBACK Remote land available for purchase in reserve (7)
OUT (available for purchase) + BACK (in reserve, as in keep back/keep in reserve); or maybe OUT BACK as a phrase: “I’ve got some out back”
3. RIFLEMAN Scour island for shooter (8)
RIFLE (scour) + (Isle of) MAN
5. PANDORA’S BOX Shipping line’s carrying artillery to fight source of evil (8,3)
RA (Royal Artillery) in P AND O’S (shipping line’s) + BOX (fight)
6. CLOUDY Obscure brash Yankee about to take the lead (6)
C (circa again – about) + LOUD (brash) + Y (Yankee in the NATO phonetic alphabet)
7. DIE DOWN Yearned to possess sink (3,4)
DIED + OWN
8. PASSENGER Charlie feeding writer German fare (9)
ASS (fool, Charlie) in PEN + GER
12. FORTHCOMING First non-medallist reportedly approaching with plenty to say (11)
FORTH (homophone of “fourth”, the first position not winning a medal) + COMING (approaching)
13. TIME SCALE Schedule daily cold drink (4,5)
TIMES (newspaper, daily) + C + ALE
15. DEFENDER Goalie maybe put off guarding goal (8)
END (goal) in DEFER; “maybe” because there are other kinds of defenders, so it’s a definition by example
17. LEAFAGE Pasture with fine mature greenery (7)
LEA + F[ine] + AGE (to mature)
19. WASPISH Tetchy self-righteous son occupying shower? (7)
PI (self-righteous) S[on] in WASH (shower)
20. YEMENI Asian from India pursuing desire to throttle setter (6)
ME (the setter) in YEN + I (India – the phonetic alphabet again)
22. INKY Jet from Bluegrass State arrived first (4)
IN (arrived) + KY (Kentucky, the Bluegrass State)

58 comments on “Guardian 28,275 – Nutmeg”

  1. Commenting on the Graun thread. i compared this to a Rolex but most replies said those watches dint keep good time. What a bargain.!

    What i meant to say….

  3. Many thanks to Nutmeg and Andrew. A lovely puzzle – nothing that I needed to look up, all smooth as silk.

    I particularly liked 11a CAPE OF GOOD HOPE even though I was misled for a while by “Head deity”. I’ll leave others to name some more favourites but I thought 1d ACNE was clever.

  4. ca demi roughly half indeed, pretty cute, not to mention God’s cape, very droll. Yes, the spice lady up to snuff as per. We had the teenaged diarist recently, which helped, though I stared at ‘of tiny’ for minutes until it clicked, der. Nice to see our Oz inland get a mention in outback. I guess most everyone knows where bluegrass’s home is, so that was a kindly clue. Over a bit quick, but fun, thanks Megster and Andrew.

  5. Andrew’s blog begins with exactly the four words I had in mind this morning.  Rather like yesterday – not particularly difficult (compared to what we have seen before) but still beautifully clued and with plenty of individual gems to admire.  I imagine Eileen will be pleased to see Sue Townsend popping up again barely a month on from last mention.  I wondered for a moment whether Nutmeg was sending us a message: we had SPICED UP, the un-Nutmeggish SNOG, ARCHLY with its feminine surface, WASPISH.  Not long ago someone confessed to a mental image of Nutmeg as a lady of a certain age and delicacy: I thought she might be fighting back..

    CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, ARCHLY, INKY (those last two took as long as the rest of the puzzle for me) and PASSENGER were my favourites though PANDORA’S BOX gets a mention in despatches for the clever use of P&O.   (I had a slight advantage with the last mentioned; P&O were a client at one point and the email address format included the @pando string which I needed today)

    Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew

  6. Another delight from Nutmeg. My only quibble is the definition element of 13d: I’m probably missing something, but I don’t quite equate ‘time scale’ with ‘schedule’.

  7. As GeorgeC@6 says, another delight from Nutmeg, particularly EVENINGS and PANDORA’S BOX. SNOOKERS took me about as long as the rest of the puzzle. Lovely stuff. Many thanks to N & A.

  8. A pleasant, if pretty gentle, solve but with rather more loose definitions/synonyms than I’m used to seeing from Nutmeg. Time scale for schedule, hope for belief, back for reserve etc.

  9. could not see ADRIAN MOLE for the life of me, despite enumerating other famous diarists in the hope one would fit!

    “self-righteous”=PI – i don’t understand this, can’t find it in the dictionary. i assume it’s nothing do with the greek letter or mathematical constant?

  10. I’m not an ADRIAN MOLE aficionado, but wondered if PANDORA, ACNE and SNOG might all be related.  Perhaps there are others?

    Gillafox @9:  PI = pious; often crops up for good, very good, smug, saintly, etc  Clearly it’s a useful two-letter combo for setters!

    Lovely start to the day, thanks Nutmeg and Andrew.

  11. Little slower than yesterday but got there in what I deem to be “reasonable” time (don’t ask…).   Lovely puzzle and I wondered if we were heading down a South African path at one point but it was not to be.

    essexboy @10 – you could be on to something; I glaze over with Adrian Mole (far too much of it on R4 recently for my liking) so not sure.

    Thanks to Nutmeg and Andrew!

  12. Pretty good but maybe not quite up to Nutmeg’s usual standard? I liked FORTHCOMING, EVENING and the simplicity of SNOG. Not sure I buy HOPE/BELIEF and DIED/YEARNED is a strange one – grammatically correct maybe but “I yearned for a change of government” and “I dies for a change of government” have somewhat different meanings

  14. What a peach – clever lady.

    I was going to gripe that the AA was hardly a self-help group but was thinking drive, not drink.

    Beautiful misdirect from the head deity – my COD.

    Many thanks, both.

  15. Took me a while longer to finish this typically elegant Nutmeg puzzle, as INKY held me up at the last with the Jet connection not obvious. Should have thought of Whitby perhaps…

  17. talking of AA , i saw a bloke with a tee shirt saying “Designated Drinker” Important info there-dont ask him foraloft home.

  18. @Bodycheetah. What a curious quibble – to die for something is to yearn for it. I’m dying for a pint, to give one example.

  19. Bingybing @18

    I think bodycheetah @12’s quiblet (which I share) is that although die = yearn, it doesn’t work in the simple past tense – probably because, logically, once you are no more, the days of yearning are over.

    I can’t think of any example in which died = yearned.

    But perhaps the problem can be resolved by splitting into morphemes:

    DIE + D = yearn + ed

  20. @essexboy at 10, yes indeed a cracking spot.  I’d been wondering about a possible South Africa / Boer War theme with the two long across ones, plus rifleman, defender…?  …but that’s a much better suggestion.  Just like the recent time Mr Mole popped up here (and when Anne Frank did too), I spent far too long thinking about Samuel Pepys before the penny finally dropped.  Oh, and I had to google the Bluegrass state, that was a (small) piece of GK I was missing.   Great crossword ?

  22. [Off topic but it’s nice to see that Vlad has made it into my Google News headlines this morning.  International fame indeed.

    Under the heading “Opponents impaled on Vlad’s cross sword” the article highlights a letter to the Guardian, prompted by his Friday offering, which asks, “Is your cryptic crossword (23 October) the latest secret weapon in the culture war? Congratulations to Vlad for impaling so many opponents in one compilation – bungling Boris, Dido Harding and test and trace, to name a few.”]

  23. Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew

    Gillafox @ 9: in addition to essexboy’s explanation @ 10, Chambers’ second definition is “Obtrusively religious, sanctimonious”, which seems to match self-righteous pretty well.

  24. Like a few others above, I was misled for a while by ‘head deity,’ and I took way too long to see that ‘second examiner’s case’ didn’t point to SER as consecutive letters in SNOOKERS. Otherwise reasonably straightforward and lots of fun. We’ve had a great start to the week.

    Thanks to Nutmeg and to Andrew for the parsing of SPARE NO EXPENSE.

  25. For a moment I convinced myself that Mrs Dale (of Mrs Dale’s Diary) was called Marion, and was another diarist anagram of one admiral. I liked the way some of the definition elements of the clues are less than obvious. I am thinking of Head in 11 ac, fare in 8 d and Jet in 22 d. Sadly what I hope will happen is rarely what I believe will happen, and I fear I will have died before we achieve what I yearn for.

  26. I had the same well-I-suppose-so quibbles about TIME SCALE and died=yearned as others. Took a while to convince myself that 8d wasn’t HAMBURGER, and couldn’t parse SNOOKERS or CLOUDY. Favourites PANDORAS BOX and CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, when I finally got it.

  27. A bit late to the party today – I’ve been for a flu jab – so most of what I’d want to say has been said, one way or another, including the quibbles – unusual for Nutmeg – which didn’t do much to spoil the fun.

    Well spotted, essexboy @10. I can’t see any more. I had a quick look at Wikipedia for possibilities and saw that Sue Townsend was actually working on a book called ‘PANDORA’S BOX’ when she died. (In that connection, I liked the fact that HOPE appeared in the solutions!)

    Many thanks, Nutmeg, for another delight, as George said, and to Andrew for another great blog.

  28. Thanks essexboy @19 – that’s exactly what I was driving at and it really is a minor quiblet that didn’t cause any more than a Roger Moore style eyebrow raise.

    Does the difficulty arise because in the sentence “I was dying to know how Dido got her job” the word “dying” is an adjective describing my state of being rather than a verb? That might explain why it’s so hard to think of a sentence where DIED=YEARNED?

    Fascinating thing the English language 🙂

  29. Me too, gladys @26, on the hamburger distraction, or more generally, what other sort of burgers are there? Thankfully the unlikely P at the start put an end to that.
    Yes, pretty similar to yesterday, and that’s no mean praise. A touch harder maybe, but it’s Tuesday so it should be.

  30. [SNOOKERS reminds me of a teenage part-time warehouse job in the 1970’s where the daily newspaper was the Sun.  I’ve never forgotten a three part Sporting Anagram Challenge where the three problems were SENNIT, NOOKERS and BOOTFALL!

    And mentioning the Sun gives me an excuse to post this link to a five minute long Two Ronnies sketch based on a crossword.  Worth watching for those who’ve never seen it.  Arguably 30 seconds too long but the punchline is worth waiting for.]

  32. bodycheetah @28, I think you’re right.  ‘Parts of speech’ categories are more difficult to pin down than you (or dictionaries!) might think.  Someone recently (Penfold?) quoted Steven Pinker’s definition of a noun as ‘a word which does noun-y things’, which I think is spot on.

    In your Dido example ‘dying’ is well on the way to completing the journey from the present participle of a verb (‘to die’) to an adjective equivalent to curious/inquisitive/agog.

    Also – after posting @19 I realised it’s not just a past tense problem.  I still can’t think of an example in the present tense where die = yearn, without the -ing – which I think reinforces your point.

    [PostMark @30:  🙂 ]

  33. I enjoyed this and admired many of the cleverly crafted clues but did have couple if quibbles.  In 1A where ABOARD is taken loosely to mean “ready to set sail”, the expression that I’ve always associated with “ready to sail” is “All aboard.”  Also capitalisation of Nutmeg in 4A grated because of the inappropriate capitalisation.  The clue could have been turned on its head to justify the capital along the lines of “Nutmeg added additional quality?” and the eponymous misdirection is still there.

     

  34. postMark @30 – I don’t think I’ve ever missed an opportunity to post that link – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve done so. 😉

    Pentman @33 – was ‘Nutmeg in 4A grated’ deliberate/

  36. Well, Matilda and now Nutmeg have set the bar very high for the rest of the week.  SNOOKERS, SNOG and ACNE all raised a smile.  But is was the super smooth surfaces that stood out.  Many thanks Nutmeg and of course Andrew.

  40. Pentman: One of the rules of Ximenean orthodoxy (which I find particularly arbitrary) is that it is legitimate to capitalise a word to misdirect the solver, but not to use lower case for a proper noun. Thus Nutmeg (for the spice) is considered perfectly acceptable by the purists, whereas ‘idle’ (for Eric) would be severely frowned upon. The Spanish Inquisition hates ‘lift and separate’ as well, which I personally enjoy enormously

  41. Gervase @40

    It is a ploy I’ve seen before (Boatman is a copious user of it) but it does make me huff every so slightly.  I really should acquaint myself with the Ximenean code of fair crosswords.

  44. Brilliant crossword – though I have not come across GER for German. Is this a staple? Favourites were PANDORA’s BOX, CAPE OF… & ADRIAN MOLE. Many thanks to Andrew and Nutmeg.

    [PostMark@30 and Eileen@34 – loved the link – had not seen it before. BATS cracked me up.

    SPanza@36 – agree the bar this week had been set very high, let’s see what tomorrow has in store…]

  46. Pentman @33. I think there’s a misleading element to the surface of this clue, in that the phrase “ready to set sail” is normally used to describe the state of readiness of a ship (ie when all are aboard, as you point out). Whereas the definition actually refers to a passenger or crew member, who would definitely not be “ready” if not ABOARD!

  47. essexboy @32. I still can’t think of an example in the present tense where die = yearn. Yes, it’s about a state of mind, a wish for the future (I yearn); or an ongoing situation (I’m dying), so even in the past you can only refer to it in the continuous or conditional.

    “I yearn for the love of a good woman/goldfish/cockroach” Replace ‘yearn’ with ‘would die’, or ‘am dying’, but not just ‘die’.

    “She yearned to own that house/Rolex/Swordfishtrombones CD [see yesterday #79]”. Replace ‘yearned’ with ‘would have died’, or ‘was dying’, but not just ‘died’.

  48. What strikes me most about Nutmeg’s crosswords are the smooth, readable surfaces of her clues. She’s the best at this aspect of setting cryptics. I didn’t think this was one of her best as far as devious wordplay goes — a number of answers went in by definition alone without the joy of working for the result. I did enjoy YEMENI, SPICED UP, and ARCHLY. My lack of GK caused my failure at ADRIAN MOLE. Thanks Andrew for the write-up.

  49. Unlike most, wasn’t thrilled by this. As some have noted, there were several lax/stretched defns… unusually so for Nutmeg. A few have been noted… would add: TAKE AS READ, ACADEMIA, EVENINGS, FORTHCOMING; perhaps justified in the nooks and crannies of Chambers, but whether laxity or obscurity, they (along with a few obscurisms & Britishisms) spoiled the fun for me. Just my own take… and glad others were able to enjoy it more!

    Thx to our setter, blogger, and commenters…

  50. sh @57. How about I die for the taste of ground nutmeg on rice pudding = I yearn for taste of nutmeg on rice pudding.  But it really does not matter because we all entered the correct answer from Nutmegs beautiful, laconic smooth clue!!

  51. I was another who loved this.  I needed Andrew’s help for SPARE NO EXPENSE (I saw SPARE and EX but not PEN and NOSE – d’uh!).  On DIED = yearned, I was thinking of the phrase “that’s [a dress/hat/house/whatever] to die for” which is at least an infinitive, so it somehow made sense to me. Otherwise the parsing made sense, though PANDO took a long time to click. Many thanks to Nutmeg for the enjoyable solve, and to Andrew for the blog.

  52. SPanza @50. Never heard anyone say “I die for…”. But as you say, the clue seems to work despite any doubts expressed by me and others!

  53. Thanks Andrew and Nutmeg.
    TIME SCALE has several technical meanings in different subjects – music, geology etc.
    TIME TABLE is the most common meaning of schedule, I felt.

  54. Pauline in Brum @44. GER for German or Germany is in Chambers as a standard abbreviation. It’s often used on TV when a football match is being shown: ENG v GER, for example.

  56. Took a little while to get the last 3:  TIME SCALE, followed swiftly by ADRIAN MOLE and INKY.  Good fun, no quibbles from me.  I was hoping for a French Connection theme after 6 🙂 .

    Thanks, N and A

  57. Re yearned = died, I have a song to sing, O: If “I would die for”, or “it is to die for”, are statements that unrequited yearning could result in death, then it could be said that someone died because they yearned. G&S didn’t actually say it, but Jack Point sighed (=yearned) for the love of a lady, and in the end died for the love of a lady.

    Nutmeg continues to delight – one of the best. And thanks, Andrew, for unpacking a couple of clues for me.

  58. Night had fallen here in Canberra and I was too late to add to this excellent blog on the 27th but I wanted to add my appreciation for this terrific crossword. I did not have a lot of time so the absence of very obscure words was appreciated. I enjoy them immensely when I discover them but it does slow me down! Favourite was CAPE of GOOD HOPE.

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