Azed 2591 – Carte Blanche

21 comments on “Azed 2591 – Carte Blanche”

1. Thanks Andrew, I had the same queries as you regarding WELT and LAB, and the same entre to the grid-fill. Good fun, thanks Azed.

2. DNF on this one for myself unfortunately. i understood the WELT clue as being a sort of &littish reference to the word’s two meanings as “a strip of leather” and “to wither, dry”.

3. Agreed that the man seems redundant in ELABORATED.
   WELT has a meaning “to wither, dry”, so the opposite of moisture (encapsulating).
   I got most of the across clues, but for some reason found the down ones hard to solve “blind”. At least with the across clues once you get one, you then know the length of another due to symmetry. Getting HAIR OIL and picking the least common word for mountain pass got me started in the top left, and things dropped into place from there.

4. Thanks for the blog, I think davey and Tim on the right lines with WELT but not a convincing clue, The man in elaborate is also hard to justify.
   The top line was tricky, the two clues across the middle and down the sides were fairly easy to solve and once put in gave a lot of structure. Perhaps we should have a Carte Blanche with the clues in a random order .

5. Sorry about WELT – I had left the explanation incomplete when I first wrote up the blog, meaning to work it out properly later, and forgot to do so. Now corrected, along the lines Tim C suggests.

6. Andrew, It didn’t cross my mind that it was an &lit until I read your blog. I just read ‘l’ in wet = welt = dry, opposite of moisture, but you are correct. I’ve just had a look at Dr Watson on &lit (the website not the clue 🙂 ) and he agrees.

   Incidentally Roz @4, he also calls the blank grid with clues in random order a “Jigsaw” as opposed to a Carte Blanche, although in that case the bars are present. Surely the pinnacle of difficulty would be a “Jigsaw” with no bars. The Listener must have had one in the past. Not sure what it would be called.

7. Tim C – sorry again, the underlining of the first half (now removed) was a leftover from the incomplete version. I’m not sure I agree with Dr W on the &lit-ness..

8. I can’t do Carte Blanche puzzles. I rely too much on letter counts and then crossing letters to be able to cold-solve enough clues to start filling in the grid. By Sunday night I think I’d got three answers and no idea where to put them.

9. Thanks for the blog, Andrew. Have to admit I gave up on this one quite early, with only a handful of clues solved. Too many Azed obscurities for me: RACA, RAS, REEN, and a variant spelling of a nickname for a waitress that went out of fashion before I was even born – and that’s just in the first half-dozen clues…

   Well done all those who managed to complete it, and thanks for the challenge, Azed. I’m tempted to have a look back through the archives and try an old one of these for practice, because I like the form, if not the content.

10. Thanks Azed and Andrew. Further to Tim C@3 about lengths of across answers, once you have the fact that the tenth down clue has a twelve letter answer, that means that the following eight down answers must finish on the bottom row of the grid, and so are in descending order of word length.

11. I’m surprised that the lack of enumeration doesn’t really make the puzzle that much more difficult. It is, however, just a matter of cold solving as many clues as possible before starting to fill the grid.

12. That’s the thing. I usually can’t cold-solve more than a handful of clues, but once I know the crossing letters, I find it easier to fill in the gaps. And there are certain groupings of letters make getting the rest of the answer easier. In a normal cryptic, I search the clues for one that I can solve and then work outwards from that. Also, with a letter count, it’s easier to work out what’s the fodder for an anagram.

13. Tim@6 the JIgsaw puzzles have clues in alphabetical order of solutions so not really random, also bars on the grid.
    I would like, very occasionally, a totally blank grid and clues in completely random order, not even Across and Down.

14. Roz@13, you’re a brave woman! With Carte Blanche, I usually start by trying to solve the first across clue, but in this case, with it being the comp word, that didn’t work. So I started with the last one instead and got DITE, which gave me the clue length for Mountain pass and that led (in time) to GHAT. That was after I’d got TAPERED, which I also thought should be Tapering, but that clearly didn’t parse. Anyway, a bit of fun and thanks to Andrew and Azed.

15. Once every few years would be enough , just for the challenge. I always try the first down clue for these , often a long word so lots of letters to help as in this one, then look for the other side , 9th or 10th usually and this one was quite easy because of the obvious anagram.
    I then look to the middle of the acrosses , clues 9 and 10 for this and once again I was lucky. Next time this method might fail totally.

16. Roz – do you ever have a go at the other barred puzzles such as the IQ, EV or The Listener? If you like the obscure words of Azed but with some extra difficulty thrown in to make them harder then these might be right up your street. Some of these are from the more right-wing publications which I suspect you might not wish to support, but I would recommend the IQ form the i newspaper. If you like I could email you a few sample puzzles to print out at home.

17. Thanks for the tips but I do only solve using the actual newspaper and there are many I refuse to buy or even support by printing them out.
    I do test solve for a few people who set for the Listener, just as a favour, nothing official. In fact they tell me I am not meant to see them really.

18. I don’t like using pirated material, I would rather pay for something if I have the means to do so. A few months ago I succumbed and got a subscription to The Telegraph and The Times crossword clubs so I could also download the Listener and the EV puzzles. Having been a Guardian reader for most of my life this was a difficult thing to do. I managed to persuade myself that by only joining the crossword clubs I was not subscribing to the newspapers. All a bit silly really. I don’t have any interest in politics, my views on the word are very much personal ones rather than political, but nevertheless old habits die hard.

19. Everyone has their own views , I do not judge. My problem is the owners , the Independent is quite a liberal paper really but the owners are possibly the worst of all . I am left with the Guardian and Observer and Private Eye which is quite enough for me really , the FT puzzle is passed on to me most days , I have some Torquemada that someone printed off for me , long journeys or invigilations.

20. Don’t suppose anyone will read this but hadn’t time on Tuesday/Wednesday.
    Thanks for a great puzzle and blog.
    My experience exactly matches Andrew’s. WIRE NETTING and consequently LADY’S FINGER. However my sequence of downs gave me the letters ARRA on line 2. Then I got ARRAS and had nightmares about how two intervening clues could possibly fit in, “quarts and pint pots” if anyone remembers the term. However BARRACOUTA assuaged my misery and it was downhill all the way thereafter.
    Roz’s suggestion gave me collywobbles!
    Hope I might get there in May.

21. Re the discussion on other crosswords, when I retired 34 years ago I did every Listener in the first year and continued to do most until the sad day it closed. My only Listener since has been helping a friend complete a geographical one. Even when it fell into suspect hands the Observer was always my paper of choice and the weekly matches up well though I wouldn’t mind a little division of opinion rather than joint editorship.

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