Guardian Cryptic 29,339 by Vulcan

60 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,339 by Vulcan”

1. I was initially struck by the unshapely grid and thought this would be a struggle, however it proved to be a pleasant, steady solve. Quite a few double-lettered clues, AFFLUENCE, BRASSICA, ABBOT, DEBUGGER, GANNET (again) and FUNNY HAHA. I liked JUTE, BLACKBALL, IMPULSE, LOUT and FRISKING. I think this setter is now making Monday more of a challenge, but I’m not complaining.

   Ta Vulcan & manehi.

2. I took the definition of REVENUE to be “Government department taking” with taking meaning what they gather. I dithered between Hover and HAVER with the wordplay sorting it out eventually. Otherwise no problems. Ta manehi and Vulcan.

3. Only one unknown — LABURNUM — which is probably the right number (I’m happy to expand my lexicon, but in small steps please). I even remembered fence/criminal, an association I’ve only encountered in Crossword Land. I wouldn’t normally regard “avid” and “greedy” as synonyms (I’m an avid crossword aficionado, but I don’t think I’m greedy). Over/be positive was a head scratcher too — I had HOVER, never having heard of HAVER (I guess that makes two), which Collins tells me is British.

   Enjoyable, thanks Vulcan & Manehi

4. HAVER comes to mind more easily than it used to as it’s a word Eileen occasionally comments upon here. The only potentially tricky word; everything else felt reassuringly Mondayish. FRISKING for the nice interplay of gambling/gambolling; JUTE for the def; CURATE for the smoothness; FOYER and BELARUS for the all-in-ones; IMPULSE COTD for a lovely natural charade.

   Thanks Vulcan and manehi

5. Top faves: BELARUS, FOYER and BRASSICA.
   Thanks Vulcan and manehi.
   BACKING
   ‘The reverse’ or ‘The reverse of’?
   LEISURED
   An extended def?
   Tim C@2
   REVENUE
   You may be right. Didn’t occur to me.

6. Tim C @2: I like your take on REVENUE.

7. Good puzzle, not very difficult but certainly no pushover.

   I’ll echo PostMark’s choices @4, plus BACKING, which is short and very sweet.

   TimC’s parsing @2 is certainly possible, but HMRC is often referred to colloquially as ‘the REVENUE’.

   Thanks to S&B

8. Thanks, postMark @4!
   As I entered HAVER, I thought, ‘Here we go again’ and decided to say nothing – since, although I know there’s been discussion in the past, I can’t remember just what I’ve said!

   For what it’s worth, my Scottish husband would exclaim ‘Havers!’ whenever he came across haver = hesitate in crosswords – but both dictionaries make the confusion clear:
   Collins: 1 Brit to dither 2 Scot and Northern English dialect to talk nonsense; babble 3 (usually plural) Scot nonsense
   Chambers: ‘to talk nonsense or foolishly (Scot and N Eng dialect); to waver, to be slow or hesitant in making a decision. n (usu in plural) Scot and N Eng dialect) foolish talk; nonsense’.

   I enjoyed today’s puzzle, with ticks for BELARUS, BLACKBALL, IMPULSE, JUTE, FRISKING and SLACKS.

   Thanks to Vulcan and manehi.

9. I’m sure you’re right Gervase @7 re the naming of HMRC. In Australia they would probably be called The Bastards 🙂 but I can’t otherwise see what ‘taking’ is doing in the clue apart from being a filler.

10. Hover no? Or am I havering (said the scot).

11. New for me: HAVER; and the fact that LABURNUM has poisonous seeds.

    Favourites: FAST, IMPULSE, BACKING.

    I was unable to parse 8ac & 16ac, and I did not understand 21ac BLACKBALL but guessed it was something to do with billiards or snooker (of which I know zilch).

    Thanks, both.

12. Some unusual anagram indicators today, but I found my way around them. I wasn’t sure about AFLAME=embarrassed, though it will doubtless be in the holy Chambers. I enjoyed the snooker c(l)ue, and the botany in LABURNUM and BRASSICA. BACKING and CURATE were neat.

    [I used to work as a DEBUGGER at one time: our pub quiz team was called De Buggers.]

13. Thanks Vulcan and manehi
    I thought that 2d was a genuine &lit. It was my favourite, anyway.
    “may be brought to” is possibly the oddest anagram indicator I have seen!

14. muffin@13
    LEISURED
    Agree. Tho’ the WP is comprehensive, I doubted if it could be termed a CAD. Now I have company to
    call it an &lit.
    HORSE
    We will soon get used to it!

15. I like Tim C’s take on REVENUE.

    Found this surprisingly chewy for a Monday. Thought JUTE was a very elegant little clue.

    Not sure what offer is doing in the ABBOT clue. I presume it’s there to help the surface.

    Most enjoyable, many thanks, both.

16. Good Monday fare with a bit of hesitation by me in the SW corner.

    I liked the exclusive vote in BLACKBALL, the surface for JUTE, and the licking tongues in AFLAME.

    Thanks Vulcan and manehi.

17. Thank you Vulcan and manehi.
    I liked FRISKING, the neat anagram of ‘begrudge’ and the tidy, timely FAST.

    11d reminded me of the prospect-maintaining HA-HA, a kind of NEGATIVE fence or BACKING (a sign of AFFLUENCE?)?

18. William@15
    ABBOT
    grAB BOTtle offers ABBOT.
    The ‘offer’ works as a ‘hidden’ indicator.

19. LABURNUM is a pretty tree, but well-known as having poisonous seeds – much sadness as various parks removed them and the long trailing blossoms in bright yellow. Sadly the ones in the High Street here that survived the culling have fallen to the wind and a new development.

    I found this very Mondayish, but I too use HAVER, one of many Scots words in my idiolect acquired from my grandmother.

    Thank you to Vulcan and manehi.

20. Normal Monday service has resumed. Biggest decision was HOVER or HAVER.

    Thanks Vulcan and manehi

21. This was a quickish Monday romp but came unstuck in NE with two blanks. Fun nonetheless.
    Thanks both.

22. My quickest solve for a few weeks, but enjoyable for some innovative wordplay (‘brought to’ as anagrind and ‘offer’ as a hidden indicator) and some witty surfaces, notably ‘Relaxed – idle? Sure’

    Thanks to Vulcan and manehi.

23. Thanks to Vulcan for a good puzzle and to manehi for the explanatory blog. I felt particularly positive about 13a NEGATIVE! And manehi and others have mentioned some other clues I enjoyed.

24. Some of the definitions and anagrinds were quite Imogenesque which I guess is inevitable from time to time

    I confess I completely mis-parsed LOUT thinking that maybe there was a school called LOUTH or similar. And there is so I moved swiftly on while thinking it was a bit obscure

    Cheers V&M

25. [Love the pub quiz team name De Buggers, gladys@12!]

26. LABURNUM are fairly short-lived trees anyway, even if they escape the chainsaws of over-zealous authorities. Sadly, being in the same plant family as peas, their poisonous seeds come in pea-like pods which may suggest to children that they would be fun to eat.

27. I liked HAVER, and having Scottish relatives and spouse means I have often heard it. And, AlanC at 1, I rather like the grid. Because of the 2 prominent W’s made by the black squares, I refer to it as “Where’s Everton?”, as the other members of the West Indian 3 W’s are there, but not Everton Weekes.

28. Amazed that turnips, root veg, are brassicas like cabbage and broccoli. Oh well, it’s a weird world.

29. I’m another who had Hover instead of HAVER, wondering how the wordplay worked exactly. The correct answer to 12d is not a word I know, though I’ve often been involved in gentle banter with the locals about how to pronounce their Suffolk town Haverhill. I always say Haver-ill, but they insist that both haitches should be spoken…

30. Bodycheetah@24. I had the same initial thought as you, but although I have heard of Louth, I have never heard of a school of that name, so it would be obscure and therefore unfair. So I looked at the clue again and read it the way the setter intended. Good clue!

31. Thanks for that today. I also parsed LOUT as being LOUT(H) and I misparsed JUTE too. I took E to be short for End, so I didn’t understand why “multiple” was in the clue. As usual, manehi’s parsing makes perfect sense.

    BLACKBALL raised a smile. I remember my dad complaining that my mum must want to poison him when she planted a LABURNUM tree when I was young, and I’ve spent way too much of my life debugging mine and other people’s code!

    Thanks for a pleasant start to the week Vulcan & manehi.

32. Perhaps a little on the heard side for a traditional Monday, more down to the grid than the clues I think. Very enjoyable, with BRASSICA filling the quota (following GDU@3’s guidance) of new vocabulary for the day. Thanks Vulcan and manehi.

33. NHO of JUTE in this sense. I could only think of the people often forgotten alongside the Angles and Saxons, and thought it might be a reference to their activities, alongside pillaging, when they first arrived in Britain before settling down.

    Did not know LABURNUM was poisonous, but got there with the crossers.

    I remain dubious about A from ‘active’. That seems to belong to a school of crossword setting where a word is quite arbitrarily reduced to its first letter?

34. Jacob @ 33 A = ACTIVE comes from grammar: A or P(assive) relate to verbal voices.

35. Jacob@33. I’m not sure there is such a “school of crossword setting” 🙂 . There is though a tendency among commenters on this site to assume that the setter is playing fast and loose.

    When I saw that ‘active’ had been used to clue the letter A, I assumed that Vulcan had good reason to do so. After reading your complaint, I immediately reached for my Chambers: a abbrev: about, absent, acceleration, accepted, acre, acreage, acting, active, adjective, etc etc .

    I think Vulcan might be due an apology.

36. Jacob@33…if ever you happen to be in Dundee in Scotland there is the Verdant Mill, which has a working representation of how they processed the jute in Victorian times. Apparently 50,000 of the local people worked within this industry then…

37. This went pretty quickly, was stuck in South East corner for a little bit, but then got LABURNUM and the rest fell into place from there. Thanks to Vulcan and Manehi.

38. Very enjoyable, though I had an embarrassing bout of brain-freeze over the parsing of 3d.
    HAVER was new to me, but fairly clued.
    I knew the tree from the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Six Napoleons”.
    Thanks both.

39. I got most of this before bed, but got six more waking up in the wee hours and the last two pairs (NW and SE with AFLAME being LOI).

    LABURNUM bubbled up as some kind of plant, but not a tree and certainly not poisonous. News to me.

    Ronale@29 Haverhill is also a town in Massachusetts. perhaps founded by folks from Suffolk. I don’t know anyone who lives there, so I’ve been going with your pronunciation without any idea of whether it’s locally correct.

    Thanks for a comfy Monday, Vulcan and manehi.

40. Earworm: “And if I HAVER, yeah, I know I’m gonna be | I’m gonna be the man who’s HAVERin’ to you”

41. grantinfreo @28: another interesting combo is beetroot – another root veg – with spinach – very much a leafy green. Once again, same famimly.

42. No-one else a Daphne Du Maurier fan, then? In My Cousin Rachel, laburnum seeds are the key – “She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.”
    Thanks to Vulcan for the fun and Manehi for the blog.

43. First thing I’d like to say is, FUNNY HA-HA brought back memories of that series of comedy books by Denys Parsons. The first one was indeed titled Funny-Ha-Ha and Funny Peculiar. One each open page, the verso (left side) had a series of hilarious misprints and unintentional innuendos, while the recto (right side) had a set of ‘strange-but-true’ anecdotes. There were several books in the series: I have a couple of them. Anyone else come across them? And anyone know anything about Denys Parsons? – he doesn’t seem to have a Wiki entry.

    Wasn’t too keen on HORSE because ‘brought to’ seems to interfere with the wordplay. And for 12d I initially had WAVER (W=tungsten, a hard metal) – HAVER is a new word to me, so I wrote in HOVER.

    Rest is fine. Liked NEGATIVE, FOYER (tricky one!), JUTE, FRISKING and FAST.

    Thanks to Vulcan and manehi.

44. HAVER is to talk nonsense or ramble. To be unable to decide is SWITHER. Scots can do both.

45. Haven’t read My Cousin Rachel. All the DuMaurier I know is Rebecca (of course) and her last novel, Rule Britannia, about a “merger” between the US and the UK with horrendous results.

46. Thanks both,
    Having once had a girlfriend who went to Louth (pron L-Ow!-uth locally) I was OK with the alternative parsing.

    I had a blind spot with ‘Aflame’. Don’t flames usually lick an object that is not itself (yet) alight?

    OED has one of the meanings of Revenue as ‘the government department responsible for collecting [it]’. In days gone by the Inland Revenue was separate from HM Customs and accountants frequently called it ‘The Revenue’ but since the merger of the two departments we seem to speak of ‘HMRC’, more commonly.

47. Blodwen@42. Laburnum seeds also play a key role in the 1989 TV series Mother Love, starring the excellent Diana Rigg.
    20a bought to mind Abbot Ale from Bury St Edmunds..

48. A minor rabbit character in Watership Down was called Laburnum, and the other rabbits considered “Poison tree” to be an odd name.

49. Laccaria@43 – I immediately thought of those books as well. I remember a quote along the lines of: “The project was a white elephant doomed to crash ere it was fully feathered for flight”. I’ve encountered many of these in the intervening years.

    Thanks to Vulcan and manehi for crossword and blog.

50. Thanks for the blog, HORSE has gone straight to the top of my list of worst clues of the year and 12D sums up this puzzle.

51. FrankieG @40: Well proclaimed. You beat me to it.

52. Bodycheetah@24, SH @30: I found a couple of schools called LOUTH – but as one was in a small outback town in NSW, and the other an ‘academy’ in Lincolnshire, I thought that I must have had the parsing wrong. And HAVER never occurred to me.

53. Blodwen@42 – Yes I’ve read My Cousin Rachel – and now I recall how laburnum figures in the plot. A very ‘dark’ novel – the very first* sentence reads “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.” Says something about what’s to follow…

    I’ve known since childhood that laburnum is poisonous – I think kids of my generation had it drummed into them, all the stuff about steering clear of poisonous plants (and fungi). Perhaps laburnum was more common in British gardens back then, than it is now: I suppose today’s more protective parents prefer not to take the risk! So they grub out any laburnums they find.

    *Repeated at the end of the book.

54. 20a – how do you know to look for a hidden clue here?

55. Steffen @54
    It’s supposed to be “to offer”, but I agree that it’s not the most obvious inclusion indicator. I saw ABBOT included, then worked back from that. Not a great clue!

56. LABURNUM is indeed poisonous, but its toxicity is much exaggerated. Ingestion will cause nausea and vomiting but in almost all cases recovery is complete with 24 hours (‘Poisonous Plants in Britain and their effects on Animals and Man’, MAFF 1984). There are a lot of plants commonly found in the wild and in gardens that are much more dangerous. There is no justification for rooting up such a beautiful tree.

57. Many of us had HOVER for 12d, but no one justified the parsing. I got there with ‘over’ in the sense of ‘more than’ = plus = positive. I think it’s an acceptable parsing and therefore an acceptable solution (and therefore a weak clue, since the duality is not resolved by crossers).

    Thanks Vulcan for the fun and manehi for the excellent blog.

58. Cellomaniac@57. If the parsing you propose had been the only one available, it would have been deemed too much of a stretch, or even unfair, by most here, I reckon. (Also it’s not just ‘positive’, it’s ‘be positive’!). It’s been resorted to by some who didn’t know HAVER but it’s not a good or reasonable answer in my opinion.

59. Is it just me with no objection to 12ac ‘cos I didn’t consider it an anagram but rather an oblique reference to “You can lead a horse to water…”?

60. @28 grantinfreo
    Brassicas are fascinating. Swedes and oilseed rape/canola come from different cultivars of the same plant. They are genetically indistinguishable. So swede roasted in canola oil is quite the family get together.

    Even more surprising – the same applies to cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, and kohlrabi. They are all the same plant. The differences between them come from selective breeding over millenia into different cultivars.

Comments are closed.