FT Christmas Crossword No 17,286 Set by Gozo

26 comments on “FT Christmas Crossword No 17,286 Set by Gozo”

1. Great puzzle, thanks Gozo and Pete Maclean. Nice device for the alphabeticals and not too taxing.
   Grid-filling was not hard either.

2. I look forward to these Christmas puzzles and Gozo didn’t disappoint. I agree with Ilippu that the a-z device with repeating letters was great, working well with answers like JEJUNE and lending a big helping hand with the gridfill.
   Likewise, WILLOW WARBLER helped locate ZWANZIG and from there, I didn’t look back.
   Also enjoyed YOYO, ROLLER DISCO, HEEL AND TOE, EQUALS, ROOD, WRITES UP, PEEL AND KNOT.
   It was a mammoth, and for the most part imaginative, undertaking, and the overall fun factor was high.
   Thanks to Gozo and to Pete for his labours as, inevitably, I had a handful unparsed.

3. Thanks Pete and Gozo

   Starting with A, by the time I got to D I wondered if I had accidentally strayed into the Polymath. After that it blossomed into an enjoyable cryptic.

   Like Diane, I appreciated the choice of grid, and I was able to start writing in the alphabets at an early stage. I finished the crossword with the feeling “that was that”, but now I have escaped the heat of battle, I realise how many enjoyable clues Gozo set. I especially appreciate some of the anagrams that utilised the full word or phrase, and not just a xxx (anagram) without yy.

   I wonder if anyone else had this problem, but the grid was so big and the number of clues were so great that I lost my way a few times.

   Favourites were plentiful, including EASTER EGG, GRETA GARBO, QUINQUE (my absolute favourite), ZWANZIG (a close runner up), TRIPPING, and TREK

   My only criticism is that there were too many UK-specific clues that required an internet search to solve. Alexander, ALEXANDER ARMSTRONG, BLUEBELL line, Bonnie DUNDEE, DUNDEE cake etc. My own ignorance is partly to blame, for sure. But, on the other hand, Gozo’s venture into US English was also a bit shaky. I asked a few American friends what a saloon car is, to be met with mute wonder.

   Many thanks and happy new year to Pete, the fabulous FT crossword setters and the contributors to this discussion who have all provided such great entertainment and guidance through the year. Great stuff!

4. PS Sorry to be a pedant, Pete, but you have the brackets in the wrong place for 23a / Y / YOYO.

5. Great job on a monster blog. I, too, was mystified by the parsing on 34A??? Your guess looks “right”–an editing error???

6. Thanks for the blog and the coloured grid, a massive effort for a puzzle of this size. The normal clues helped a lot when fitting in the others and the double letters also useful in solving. I will just second Diane’s list.

   Martyn@3 WE call it a saloon car, Americans call it a SEDAN.
   The BLUEBELL railway is widely used for TV and films etc when scenes of steam trains are required. It even has various stations restored to represent different eras.

7. Thanks, Gozo and PM!
   Happy New Year to all.

   Cineraria@5
   Suffering from the same K trouble. Are we missing something?

8. Cineraria@5 . I had DISC although I do not see how C gives fraud either.

9. DISC is letters from “detective’s”. I think “detective’s fraud” implies that.

10. Perhaps we’re supposed to equate C and Con in 34a.

11. Thanks Gozo and Pete

    34ac: It must be DISK in the computer sense. In any case, Paul’s suggestion in comment 9 goes way outside the normal range of devices used in FT crosswords. Following Cineraria’s thought, perhaps it should be “grand” not “fraud”?

    61dn: I thought this was an avoidable blemish in an otherwise genuinely excellent puzzle (apart from 34ac). Why use an obscure town name when there are so many other ways of defining PEEL, and so many other words that would fit *E*L if Gozo has used all the ways of cluing PEEL recently?

12. ‘Fraud’ is in the list of anagram indicators. ‘Detectives’ can belong to the CID.
    DISC can become CID’s.
    Might this be the parsing?
    Only niggle is the position of the apostrophe in detective’s, might be better after the ‘s’.

13. Further to my suggestion at 11: “grand” could easily have been mistyped as “frand”, and then wrongly edited (or autocorrected) to “fraud”.

14. I’m unconvinced by any of the explanataions for the C or K (why must it be K?) that try to involve wordplay — all far too obtuse and unsuited to a daily cryptic, and possibly not even sound. It seems much more likely that it was an editorial mistake and ‘grand’ was intended.

15. David L@12: I should have mentioned that I had considered that “detective’s” could translate to “DCI’s,” thus morph into DISC, which avoids the singular/plural problem, but I really was not sold on “fraud” as the anagrind, and indirect anagrams like that are unusual. Plus, I think that the accepted UK spelling in this context is DISK. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, and at the end of it all I am left thinking that there are clearer ways to clue whatever the setter was getting at.

16. Wil@14: I should tone down my original remark from comment 11 to the following. It is much more likely to be K, as a part of a computer for storage purposes, especially now that the “hard disk” in a new computer is not a flat rotating shape any more. However, I see that the external “plug in” device that I use to play CDs and DVDs is called “Disc Drive”. The official solution on the FT website and presumably printed in today’s paper shows K.

17. The published solution confirms that 23ac is DISK DRIVE (not DISC DRIVE).

18. Thanks Gozo for a great Christmas puzzle and for the blog. I struggled parsing disc drive too. One small correction to 2d. It is an anagram of EASTERN followed by NESS (head).

19. I enjoyed this a lot. Clues not impossible and then need to place them correctly. I fell down in placing NINON in the wrong place too early and so was stuck in the SW corner, with 47d and 50d. Otherwise most enjoyable.

    I have noticed with amusement on more than one occasion the “complaint” that there is too much British English usage. Well, the FT, despite the increasing International content, is still supposed to be a British newspaper so I would expect to see British words and usage, which are not so incomprehensible to us. “Alexander Armstrong” “Peel” “Dundee” “Bluebell” – all no problem.

20. Malcolm@19: Is it complain or lament? I take the (shall we say) insular tendencies of some setters as an added challenge, but when a puzzle relies so heavily on UK GK that I can manage it (IF I can manage it) only through tedious googling, then it becomes more of a research project than a stimulating brainteaser. That said, I do not begrudge my friends their own lives and amusements. But I recall with a distinct lack of fondness theme puzzles about “popular” UK media personalities, children’s TV characters, and snack foods, for example, all of which have nearly zero presence in the US. I guess in those cases I am genuinely disappointed that I cannot join in the fun.

21. Roz @6. Thanks for putting me right on sedan vs saloon. I was completely turned around !

22. Our FT crossword for the 31 December seems to be Basilisk, not Gozo? Although we enjoyed it we are disappointed to miss an alphabetical puzzle ….is this because it’s the app and not the physical newspaper?

23. Panthes @22 the Saturday FT puzzles are blogged one week later, this Gozo was in the paper on December 24th. The Basilisk blog will be next Saturday.

24. Thanks Roz!

25. Further to Roz@23, this puzzle was also on the FT website on 24 Dec, along with 17,287 by Julius. A thought that had not occurred to me before now is that maybe the app could not handle a puzzle with such a large grid, and that could be why we had two crosswords on the same day but part of the normally numbered FT crossword sequence. This is speculation on my part, but if anyone is still reading these comments and has definite knowledge, I would welcome a definitive answer on this point.

26. Thoroughly enjoyed, though had Discdrive. I thought this was how the word was spelt.

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