Everyman 4,058 by Everyman

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If it’s Sunday it must be Everyman, so down the pub with the dog…

It was a hot day so here’s Jenny having a quick paddle in a stream first.

Self reference and primary letter/placename clues, can’t see any rhymes though

 

picture of the completed grid

ACROSS
1 SLUMBERING
Son, clumsy, far from alert (10)
S(on) & LUMBERING
6 HATH
Possesseth headgear, ‘tis put on horse (4)
Ye olde English. HAT & H – heroin, horse
9 DRAWING PIN
Pulling wrestling move that binds (7,3)
DRAWING – pulling & PIN a wrestling move
10 ADAM
First man to block America First (4)
A(merica) & DAM – to block
12 HOT POTATOES
Angry Charlotte and King Edward’s unwanted issues (3,8)
HOT – angry & two varieties of potato
15 ALPHORN
A long, powerful harmonic object rendered naturally, principally? (7)
The primary letter clue
16 IRKSOME
Tedious far side of Stromboli, disruptive smoker (7)
End of (strombol)I & a disrupted SMOKER*
17 REPORTS
They describe pupils’ behaviour: explosions, gunshot, etc (7)
Double definition
19 SHAFTED
Ripped off like a dart (7)
Double definition
20 FRENCH BREAD
Euros for brioche? (6,5)
Cryptic def. Brioche is French and Euros money, bread
23 RITE
As delivered, proper ceremony (4)
Sounds like RIGHT
24 BILLBOARDS
Hoarding William’s canned food (10)
BOARD – food in BILL’S
25 SICK
Nauseous, oily, not a little lugubrious (4)
L(ugubrious) removed from S(L)ICK – oily
26 RECYCLABLE
‘Cyber-’? ‘E-’? Call out what some junk may be! (10)
[CYBER E CALL]* out
DOWN
1 SODA
Git given a fizzy drink (4)
SOD – git & A
2 UTAH
Regularly unteach Mormons found in this state (4)
Alternate letters of UnTeAcH
3 BRIGHTON ROCK
Sweet book with Sussex setting … (8,4)
Double definition
4 RIGHT ON
… agreed, that’s an extract from it (5,2)
Hidden in previous answer
5 NAIROBI
Safari centre sees Everyman fatigue abrupt Scotsman after capsizing (7)
i – Everyman & most of – abrupt BOR(e) – fatigue & the setter’s favourite Scotsman IAN all reversed – capsized
7 AND SO FORTH
Accepting only some commands of orthodontists etc (3,2,5)
Hidden, rather well in my opinion, in commANDS OF ORTHodontists
8 HOMESTEADS
Fake some deaths where people might be living (10)
A faked [SOME DEATHS]*
11 BACKWARD ROLL
Shrinking baked good: it’ll keep you in shape (8,4)
A gymnastic move, BACKWARD – shrinking, reticent & (bread) ROLL
13 DAIRY FARMS
Director, light-hearted fellow, equips places with milkmaids (5,5)
D(irector) & AIRY – light & F(ellow) & ARMS – equips
14 APOPLECTIC
Inflamed, each lech’s mostly shown involuntary movement (10)
A-POP – each & most of LEC(h) & TIC – movement
18 SUBLIME
Magnificent muesli in mix bachelor’s ingested (7)
B(achelor) in a mixed MUESLI*
19 SHELLEY
Poet, husky in voice? (7)
Bad joke time HUSK = shell
21 DRAB
Miserable poet on the up (4)
BARD reversed
22 ASHE
Tennis legend showing evidence of fire and energy (4)
(arthur) ASHE, ASH – remains after fire & E(nergy)

48 comments on “Everyman 4,058 by Everyman”

  2. Maybe this was a wavelength thing but this was beyond a cryptic in terms of difficulty. Mainly for the very loose general definitions
    Backward roll – it will keep you in good shape? Am i the only person who thinks this is somewhat odd?

    Also, how does a-pop clue for each in 14d?

    Have been doing cryptics for about 5 years and this was the furthest from completion I’ve ever got. Very odd

  3. Thanks both. Agreed this was far from do-able but you win some you loose some. Here’s hoping for better luck next week

  4. Thankyou flashling and Jenny.
    Homesteads and Dairy Farms are both places where people live in rural areas.

    DNF for me, with the intersecting AND SO FORTH and SHAFTED.
    I missed both the def and the hidden in AND SO FORTH, trying too hard to make it TOOTH for the orthodontists.
    And I didn’t get the husky joke in SHELLEY. Thought it must be a British idiom meaning something like gritty, or raspy.

    I liked the volcanic riff in IRKSOME. Stromboli and smoker, and the canned food in HOARDING.
    Not sure what Everyman was trying to convey with the surface of UTAH. I had two interpretations in opposition with each other, neither of which I think needed to be said.
    And I’d rather not have seen the picture in the clue for APOPLECTIC.

  5. Thank you Everyman and flashling. I solved 6a from the definition, but I still don’t understand the parsing.

  6. This one seemed fair enough to me. I liked Brighton Rock – with its viciously amoral central character – being called a ‘sweet’ book. J @2: the price of something can be referred to as (say) £1 each, or £1 a pop.

  7. Tougher than the last few, definitely. I only got AND SO FORTH just before coming here – was trying for both TOOTH (as pdm@4) and MOUTH for too long. Even then, I didn’t see the inclusion. The pairs are BREAD & POTATOES, and ROCK & ROLL (shades of a recent crossie). Thanks, Everyman and flashling.

  8. TT@7 agree about the pairings. We’ve had several like this in recent times the last being BALL & CHAIN, though I don’t recall seeing two pairs in the same puzzle before.
    Enjoyed this, thanks to Everyman and flashing.

  9. WordSDrove@5. A couple of things about 6a which I hope may help. As flashling has alluded to with his “Ye olde English” comment, Everyman has used possesseth and ’tis in the clue to indicate that the solution HATH is (also) an archaic form.

    The wordplay is HAT (headgear) + H, which is an abbreviation for horse.
    H and horse are also street jargon for heroin.
    I don’t know what was intended here, but it works either way.

  11. J@2. Backward roll – it will keep you in good shape? Am i the only person who thinks this is somewhat odd?.

    I also thought it odd. It’s hardly a definition, unless you’re a gymnast, I suppose, or some footballer practising their goal celebrations. My first thoughts were even weirder, like an orthopaedic chair back support, or a prosthesis for scoliosis.

    WSD@10. Thumbs up.

  12. paddymelon@9
    HATH
    Couldn’t find h=horse in Chambers & Collins (Maybe I didn’t search carefully). On some site I read H meant ‘stallion’ (h for horse is ok that way?).
    If H=heroin is extended to indicate h=heroin=horse, that will be somewhat indirect. Right?

    BACKWARD ROLL
    Agree that the def isn’t precise unless we are missing something.

  15. oed.com has: ‘shelly, adj. … 2.a. 1593– Consisting of or of the nature of a shell; forming a covering resembling a shell; shell-like.’, citing
    ‘1778 The shelly or husky outside incloses a white bitter pulp. C. Milne, Botanical Dictionary (ed. 2) 145′
    So they’re just synonyms, one of which is an unobjectionable (so unfunny) homophone of a poet, 19d SHELLEY.
    [Went to vote on 7 July. The polling station is in a nearby housing estate, where the blocks are named after poets: Milton, Chaucer, &c.
    Coincidentally the estate map billboard manages to misspell Percy Bysshe as Shelly,]

  17. Tough puzzle. Was ready to give after solving only 10 clues.

    I failed to solve 6ac and 7d.

    Thanks, both.

  19. Was beaten by BACKWARD ROLL. I could see how BACKWARD fitted the spaces but couldn’t see what it had to do with the clue. As a synonym for “shrinking” it’s a bit of a stretch.

  21. Oh dear, I thought this was easier than recent Everymen(?). Just goes to show. What I’m not sure of

  22. Nicbach @21, I found this one more straightforward than other recent Everyman crosswords, too.

    Some of this is wavelength and general knowledge.

    Thank you to flashling and Everyman

  23. Don’t know… Took me much longer than the one before. Liked IRKSOME, BRIGHTON ROCK, DAIRY FARMS. Agree with @7 and @8 about the pairings. On the other hand, we had 4 two-part charades with single-letter pieces (S|LUMBERING, HAT|H, SOD|A and ASH|E), I’d prefer having “orthodoxies” instead of “orthodontists” in 7d, for the sake of its clue (well hidden all the same), and I still don’t see how a single countable “hoarding” is a definition for several BILLBOARDS (it’s no, say, scaffolding).

    Anyway, thank you, Everyman and flashling

  24. KVa@12. I don’t know the source but there has been some discussion before about H = abbreviation for horse.
    If H = horse/heroin, I don’t think that’s indirect.

  25. Like others it seems, I found this particularly hard for an Everyman and couldn’t finish.

    Isn’t 20a a double definition?

  26. Not so much tough as a bit vague in places. BACKWARD ROLL couldn’t be anything else but it’s not keeping in shape for me. I missed the … between clues which was relevant for once so couldn’t see why RIGHT ON. Clever in retrospect. Not sure about BORE = fatigue, but mainly not having NAIROBI as a safari centre. Somewhere you fly to to go out on safari maybe.
    Grumble over. Thanks both.

  27. J@23 a hoarding can be made up of multiple billboards. Chambers: “A screen of boards, esp for enclosing a place where builders are at work, or for display of bills, advertisements, etc”

    I liked this Everyman. Probably for the same reasons that others disliked it 🙂

    Cheers E&F

  30. Crispy@29 I would say it’s somewhere you might spend an afternoon on the way to the Mara or Amboseli, not the centre of the safari world.

  31. I sometimes set myself a reminder to check this blog if I’ve found the Everyman difficult. As usual, one week later, I can’t remember which clues caused me problems as the blog makes rhem all sound easy.

  32. paddymelon@24
    HATH
    Thanks.
    If H stands for horse, then nothing indirect.

    Tim@25
    FRENCH BREAD
    Agree with you. Each a def by example (the ? applying to the ‘euros’ as well as the ‘brioche’, I think).

  33. KVa, horse = heroin is in my Chambers, and H = heroin is also given, having just checked. Problem is, that slang is so well known to be in the dictionaries, that’s not what will be used now.

  34. I recall finding this a decent challenge and dnf, being unable to get SHAFTED or BACKWARD ROLL. My favourite, the very well hidden AND SO FORTH took ages to spot. I also liked FRENCH BREAD and HATH.
    Thanks to Everyman and flashling

  36. Shanne@33
    HATH
    horse=heroin & heroin=H are both seen often in crossword puzzles. However, I wanted to understand whether H stood for horse (without taking the heroin route).

    One of the synonyms for ‘book’ given in Chambers is bag (colloq. verb). If the clue has ‘book’, we can have’b’ in the solution. This one seems to be a case of b standing for bag because bag=book=b.

  37. OK, having looked harder, searching where H is an abbreviation for horse, apparently in race card terminology the following are allowed:
    “C= Colt, H=Horse, G=Gelding, F= Filly and M= Mare.”

    That’s also showing here – the Cracking Crosswords site along with S for spades which I couldn’t find in the dictionary either, even though I could find h for hearts, c for clubs and d for diamonds.

  38. Looks like I’m in the minority that found this reasonably straightforward – which, for me, means that i can complete it on the Sunday and not have to revisit during the week.

    I only got AND SO FORTH from the crossers, and hadn’t even spotted it was hidden until I read the blog.

    HOT POTATOES and FRENCH BREAD both raised a smile.

    Thanks to Mik @6 for explaining A POP.

    And thanks to Everyman and flashling.

  40. APOPLECTIC: didn’t get how APOP = each.
    REPORTS: didn’t understand “explosions, gunshot, etc” def.
    RIGHT ON: hidden in previous answer?! I’ve never seen that before!
    Was convinced that 7d contained “tooth”, based on crossing letters.
    Overall: toughest for a while.

  41. I must have been on the right wavelength because I’m pretty hopeless at these things and I loved this puzzle. Thank you to Everyman and Flashling and Jenny is a sweetie.

  42. Just a reminder there is usually, unless he is doing one of the today types, a connected pair, which do not have to rhyme. The pair in this case are BRIGHTON ROCK and BACKWARD ROLL.

  43. Another awkward puzzle, for me, and an unpleasant solve.

    I can’t really see HOT POTATOES as a thing. You hand me a hot potato, do you not, rather than some? You could argue it, I suppose, where you need to confront more than one difficult situation, but I can’t imagine the plural is ever meaningfully used in any real event. SMALL POTATOES, on the other hand, is certainly a thing.

    I did like the idea of ROCK vs ROLL, which presented a nice subtlety.

  44. Started this on Monday (loosely, I only got about 3…) but then buggered off to France for the week, and have only just come back to it. Amazing how quick it went in when I finished last Monday muttering darkly about it being too difficult 🙂

    In my fledgling cryptic career I had come to understand that connected clues, as in 3 and 4 down, were usually totally unrelated and just a bit of fun from the setter. So I enjoyed the fact these two were. Ta!

  45. A fine puzzle. Got it all out, without resort to electronic assistance. Couldn’t quite parse “apoplectic” — failed to spot “a-pop” meaning each, but it seems perfectly sound, now that Flashling has explained it. (E.g. “lollies at 5 pence a-pop”.)
    Thought “Utah” and “hath” were a bit too easy, but that’s being picky.

    Agree that “and so forth” was very cleverly hidden. Also agree with Bodycheetah@28 about the ellipsis.

    Thanks to Everyman (keep ’em coming at this level!) and to Flashling.

  47. U like Rolf I can’t say I didn’t use any aids but it seemed straightforward. Realized BILLBOARDS early but only thought of board = table = food later.

  48. I always do the number puzzles in the Saturday Herald first so don’t get to Everyman until later. Sorry. As it was, I missed 7d (and not alone in this). I had AND NO DONT’S, strange I know but evidently captivated by the orthodontists.

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