Guardian Cryptic 29460 by Paul

81 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29460 by Paul”

1. I suspect DIATRIBE is intended as an &lit otherwise tirade is doing double duty.
   Stylo in CRUSTY LOAF is the French word for a pen, hence le pen.
   ELDER was nice. Just started making 25 litres of Elderberry port from the Elders in the garden.

2. Thank you Tim C @1 corrected now. I should have known that.

   I wondered about the double use of DIATRIBE but wasn’t convinced by the &lit, so fudged the lack of clue definition.

   Be careful with the elderberry wine -it’s not brilliant to drink (or eat) in large quantities as the tree and berries contain a cyanide producing glucoside.

3. Thanks Paul and Shanne. I think one of meanings of LIGHT for “easy” in 25a is as in “light duties” or “light exercise”. In 6d the pen is STYLO, short for “stylograph”, which accounts for LO.

4. Me @3: 15a of course, not 25a.

5. Well done to Shanne as this was not the easiest crossword to blog as your cryptic initiation. Arriving at the correct solution was often easier than parsing. I wasn’t aware of the term KENSINGTON GORE for fake blood and had forgotten about Al of that ilk, so for a while KENSINGTON stood alone in the grid. I too wouldn’t have put NUNEATON in Warwickshire if asked (a boring stop on the train en route to London from Manchester), but a very Paulish near homophone. Liked BOOMERANG, SENEGALESE and BOTANICAL amongst others. Thanks to Paul and Shanne.

6. [Thanks Shanne @2, that Elder is probably the American Elder (Sambucus Canadensis) as opposed to the European Elder (Sambucus Nigra) which I used to use in the UK to make wine and now grow here in Sydney. Never had any problems with the wine (apart from the adverse effects of alcohol of course). Ground elder is a different genus (Aegopodium) but looks similar to Sambuca.]

7. Like Willbar @3 I too think LIGHT = easy in 15a.

   Thank you Shanne and Paul.

8. I’ve found some of the recent puzzles in the G rather unsatisfying – convoluted beyond need, or with very loose definitions. I see others liked them, so I’ve not commented, but I do like a clue which, when you get the answer, you know it’s the answer. This one, in spite of some ridiculous shenanigans (would it be Paul without such things?) and some very very dubious double duties, was, for some reason a fun challenge.

   [We too have made elderberry wine many times in the past, with no ill effect, and you can buy it commercially. We have both white and black elderflower trees in our garden and also hope to make wine from the flowers. As Tim C says @6, this is a different species from ground elder. Incidentally, it used to be common practice, now outlawed, to add elderberries to port in order to improve the colour. I do find the wine needs a fair bit of time before it is drinkable as the tannin levels can be pretty high.]

9. DNF due to “Chat Show” inspite of having all the crossers…

   Googled Warwickshire towns for “Nuneaton”…never heard of it.

   Got “Kensington Gore” through parsing alone, had no idea what the answer meant…

   El Bat?? Really?

   As Shanne said, 25a and 27a were very good clues…

   Didn’t understand the parsing of 15a…the connection between “light” and “clue”

   Thank you to Paul and Shanne

10. TPS @9: think of a clue throwing light on a puzzle, enlightening the solution.

11. Willbar@10: Oh ok, yes, that makes sense, thank you.

    I first had Kensington Bush, and then Ford after getting an “o”, till I settled on Gore…

12. Tough to get going (as always with Paul). But ultimately very rewarding. Diatribe, convenience food, and taximeter are the sort of clues which make Paul my favourite Setter in Grunniad.

    Will now go through blog to fill in everything I missed.

    Thanks Paul and Shanne (tough blog to do today – Kudos for a job well done)

    Thanks Paul

13. Sorry, I’ve added in the other definitions for LIGHT and TABLE, plus a link to KENSINGTON GORE, which I didn’t realise is a trademarked product. (The Simon Brett Charles Paris, serialised on BBC R4 with Bill Nighy feature Kensington Gore fairly frequently.) I was blogging by answering the bits I found hard, not the things I found obvious. Apologies.

    Continuing the elderberry diversion – sorry, yes different things ground elder and elder trees, but with similar looking leaves. And I knew about elderberries not being brilliant for you from when my parents used to wine make with it. They reckoned it was one of the better wines, along with elderflower, blackberry, rice and raisin, but not dandelion)

14. Thanks Paul and Shanne
    I’m puzzled by BOTANICAL. It’s an adjective, but I can’t see that either “nursery” or “for nursery” equates to one.
    I did know KENSINGTON GORE, probably from Charles Paris. It’s a pun, as it is also a road in Kensington.

15. When my first one in was PUNIC (knew that!) I did fleetingly wonder whether Paul might one day use the word Pubic, as referring to the Public House or Pub. Anyway, the long anagram LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED was a great help into getting started with this as ever entertaining Paul Cryptic…

16. In crosswords a light is the answer to a clue. So 15a LIGHT could have been “Easy answer (5)” or “Easy solution (5)”. Chambers has
    ‘…; a hint, clue or help towards understanding ;…’ before it gets to
    ‘…; in a crossword, the word (or sometimes an individual letter in the word) on the diagram that is the answer to a clue. —‘
    LOi – much later – CHAT SHOW

17. muffin @14 – I didn’t think of botanical causing a problem as I can use nursery and BOTANICAL interchangeably as nursery is used as the adjective (as in nurseryman) – as in: nursery/botanical garden products. I included the “for nursery” in the definition as I thought that worked slightly better. Botanical/botanic are the adjectives from botany, when I looked it up in the BRB just now, so I suspect we’re using it differently from the original meaning – advertising trying to find a flashy word for natural.

18. Yet to tackle Paul’s so I’ll save that for my journey home. I hope it’s OK to point people towards Atrica’s puzzle in the Independent, which deserves more love than Indy puzzles usually get!

19. muffin @14, can’t nursery be an adjective as well (C has it as such). A nursery plant is a botanical plant?

20. Shanne and Tim C
    I hadn’t considered “nursery” as an adjective, but I suppose it could be. Still not sure it’s equivalent to “botanical”, though.

21. Agree FrankieG@16. Was about to say the same about LIGHT being answer, not the clue. Like your ”easy solution”.

    Agree with TimC @1. I think DIATRIBE is meant to be an &lit. Several definitions include the word bitter.
    From etymonline “a strain of invective, a bitter and violent criticism”.

22. Interesting article here on LIGHTS.

23. Yes Tim C@22. Thanks for the link to Crossword Unclued. I’d read that before but forgotten both aspects of lights (and I don’t have Chambers 🙂 ).

24. paddymelon @21 I’ve corrected LIGHTS – I didn’t dig out the reference books for that one, It adds to the time blogging if everything has to be referenced.

    And I added a note to DIATRIBE following TimC’s comment – it might be meant to be an &lit, but the primarily means that it doesn’t work as such. A bit like the record in the clue to TAXIMETER, which doesn’t fit into the meaning (a TAXIMETER is the tool, not the record). And having been pulled up before by calling something an &lit when it wasn’t, I’m not going there.

25. Congratulations on your first cryptic blog. I felt this was closer to the elderflower than elderberry wine end of Paul’s spectrum (light sparkly and amusing as opposed to dense, chewy and taking ages before you can enjoy it)

26. Congratulations Shanne on unraveling a particularly tricky solve. I walked along KENSINGTON GORE a couple of days ago but was not aware of the alternative meaning. I thought CONVENIENCE FOOD was one of Paul’s best for a long time. Was a bit caught up with BOTANICAL, as I had confidently, especially as this is Paul, entered ANUSOL as the ending to the solution. Other favourites were CRUSTY LOAF, BOOMERANG, NUNEATON and SENEGALESE.

    Ta Paul & Shanne.

27. Congratulations on your first cryptic blog Shanne. One minor correction. The Carthaginians were originally Phoenicians (from modern Lebanon) rather than Greeks, and Punic was the Roman name for them (it is a latinised corruption of Phoenician). That was my favourite clue – a typical Paul pun!

28. 5/21 – no idea what is going on here! I did not parse 5d apart from SING= twitter? and failed to solve the GORE bit. I never heard of Kensington gore so I don’t feel too bad about failing this.

    Thanks, both.

29. Enjoyable from Paul. CRUSTY LOAF was fabulous.

    Thanks Shanne & Paul.

30. I saw the setter’s name and nearly didn’t bother. Pressed on, looked at every clue and managed 3.
    I’ve said it before that Paul sets for his own smug enjoyment and not for our pleasure. Yet again a waste of time.

31. Another very mixed offering, from the obvious (to me) COWER, which I quite liked, to the highly obscure (to me) KENSINGTON GORE. I’m not entirely convinced by “deepest of all” meaning “last letters of”, but I suppose it just about works. My other quibbles, and there were several, have all been more or less convincingly justified by you clever people.

32. [Alan C @26 I just realised I lived next to Kensington Gore in Beit Hall for the first term at Empirical College many moons ago but like you was unaware of the other meaning which I had to goggle]

    Reverting to LIGHTS, I was interested in the quote from Azed in the introduction of his A-Z of Crosswords. “The answers to be entered in a puzzle… are sometimes referred to as ‘lights’, like church windows (presumably to get over the fact that they may consist of more than one word or not be real words at all), and further to confuse matters ‘lights’ may also be used to refer to the clues themselves. I personally prefer to stick to ‘clues’ for clues and ‘answers’ for answers, whatever form they may take.

33. For me this was one of the best Paul puzzles in ages. Like ronald, my FOI was PUNIC – which meant that the long anagram hit me immediately from just the N and the enumeration. Quite a lot of the longer entries went in from the crossers rather than pieced together from the wordplay, but I never mind too much about that. It wouldn’t be Paul without a non-rhotic ‘sounds like’ (IKEA), but NUNEATON is a genuine homophone, at least in posh RP!

    ‘Nursery’ for BOTANICAL did raise an eyebrow, but there is just about enough semantic overlap.

    For a clue to be a bona fide &lit there must be no extraneous words and the surface must be an accurate definition – straight or cryptic. Of the possible examples here, CONVENIENCE FOOD is closest, but such comestibles, although often unhealthy, are not ‘criminal’. Best call them ‘clue as definition’ (CAD) – this label covers both genuine &lits and near misses. Anyhow, all three in this puzzle were among my favourites. I also liked CHAT SHOW – ‘broadcast’ misleadingly as a definition rather than a homophone indicator.

    Thanks to JH and Shanne

34. Thanks Paul & Shanne.
    I thoroughly enjoyed this, especially the moving mountains, the raw CONVENIENCE FOOD and the ‘circuitous’ in TAXIMETER. And ‘vampire in the mirror’ is indiscernibly neat.

35. Andy in Durham @ 27 – thank you for the clarification – my knowledge went as far as names from Ancient Greek history that were linked enough to mean the same. According to my quick google, they came from Carthage in Africa, a city in what could be modern day Tunis, but the colonists came from Tyre, now in Lebanon. The Carthaginians were overwhelmed by the Romans in the Punic Wars. – link to Wikipedia

    [TimC @26 – I lived in Beit too, my comments about learning crosswords as a student was with others sitting along the Union Bar, way back when.]

36. Gosh, thirteen clues ending with question marks! Is that near a record? Some nice ones, and I rather liked the clever definition for GESTAPO, ie (police) force of evil. I wasn’t so sure about the “home buyers” in IKEA, but I suppose it’s intended to mean people buying things for their homes.

    Thanks Paul and Shanne.

37. I thought that DIATRIBE could work as an &lit if primarily was doing double duty, both to indicate the first letter of bitterness as well as in the definition, ie that bitterness was predominately/largely an aspect of a tirade which made it a diatribe. Will retreat now, before the Kensington Gore turns into the real stuff.

    Gervase@33. I can just hear someone who is critical of people who don’t cook, and of convenience food, saying disdainfully “That’s criminal!” Made me laugh. (Probably needs a caesura after criminal.)

38. I really liked IKEA, made me laugh. I always think Paul’s clues read differently to anything else I’ve done – some baffle me but I managed to get this one done – I parsed KENSINGTON GORE although I hadn’t heard of the term before. Thought CONVENIENCE FOOD was nifty and BOOMERANG raised a chuckle as I read the answer out loud. BALLOONIST was last in, another excellent clue.

    Ta Paul and Shanne!

39. As so often happens, I found Paul so convoluted that the destination was not worth the journey. I liked the long anagram at 26A, 6A made me smile, and 25A was good. 14D was nicely constructed but fell at the last, so to speak, with equating the adjective BOTANICAL with nursery, pace those above justifying it.

    However, several others left me attempting to parse after writing in an answer, others giving up on the parsing altogether. The equating of BONANZA and mine seems pretty loose to me; gold mine would have been better. NHO 5D despite having KENSINGTON and both crossers. 16A is almost inexcusable. Failed completely on 10A.

40. Three &lits, and Paul doesn’t usually give us any! I didn’t think this was easy at all – after my first pass I didn’t think I was going to finish – but some of the craziness made up for it. El Bat, really!! And “bloody cheat” was wonderful.

    Got, but misparsed, CHAT SHOW. Knowing Chat Masala as a flavouring steered me wrong.

    I concur with muffin’s misgivings about BOTANICAL. London bus again, I’m afraid.

41. Loved the puzzle, hated IKEA. I still maintain that brand names have no place in a crossword; no doubt a sign of my advancing years!

42. It took me ages to get started and slowly fell in to place…. Well done Shanne, first of many no doubt. You did a brilliant job🎇! Many thanks to Paul for a challenging solve. I really liked LEAVE NO STONE… EL BAT, BOOMERANG and POGO STICK made me smile 😎

43. All the previous discussion on here about Nursery – at Lords Cricket Ground there’s The Nursery End, opposite the Pavilion End. Btw…

44. I’ve finally given up on ever getting IKEA, but I liked the rest, though there were quite a few that had to be parsed after the event, and one or two never were. Missed le stylo in CRUSTY LOAF, and got tangled up in trying to force BONZA (good, Antipodean) into BONANZA. I needed to look up the Carthaginians to get Hannibal out of my mind. Enjoyed COW-ER (very Paul), POGO STICK (ditto), KENSINGTON GORE, NUNEATON, el Bat and the long anagram.

    [My dad, when he was in the Army, used to travel from Woolwich to Hounslow on the Underground to court my mum, and my grandmother’s elderberry wine was responsible for him falling asleep in the Tube on the way back, missing his station and waking up at Cockfosters.]

45. Gladys@44…that elderberry wine must have been potent stuff, I reckon there must have been over 30 other Tube stations on the Piccadilly Line at which your Dad never stirred😀

46. ronald @45 – it’s really common to find people sleeping at the end of the tube lines who’ve often slept through a lot of stops. I live at the end of one of the lines, and I’ve woken people up to find they wanted to get off much earlier, if not had gone past their stop on their way in one direction and returned to the far end of the line in the opposite direction. Not so funny when it’s the last tube out.

47. Four completed on the trot, but, as ever, Paul’s clues are utterly meaningless to me.

48. I have no doubt it’s a good puzzle for good solvers.
    But, sadly, not for me … The few clues I did were delightful. But it’s just not satisfying when you can only complete a few.
    Big tick for LIGHT. My first one in (and the only one completed on first reading). Okay, it really was an easy clue! But it raised a smile.

49. Fun fact about TAXIMETER: the vehicle is named after the meter, not the other way around. The taximeter measures the charge (the tax). A taxicab was originally, therefore, a cabriolet with a taximeter. Taxi and cab then evolved separately as shortened forms of taxicab.

    The “deepest of all” device in the clue for ONYX is one that only works if you assume that down clues have (as one prominent American setter once put it) “a general atmosphere of verticality.” I loved that expression enough to remember it at the time, and now I’m in turn sharing it with you.

50. NUNEATON always brings to mind the late great Larry Grayson.
    LIGHTS are the bits of a stained glass windows where the glass goes – so they are clear as opposed to the dark tracery stonework.
    There is far too much wine in this blog.

51. Got some last night, some at 3am and some this morning with a bit of CHECK. Had to reveal IKEA. Nice puzzle, as usual for Paul.

    How come bon=good without any foreign language indicator?

    Nuneaton and Kensington Gore are on the long list of familiar names that I know are somewhere in the UK but have no idea where. I was surprised to lean that Kensington Gore is in London, I’d imagined it farther afield. I had no idea of the “fake blood” meaning, so thanks for the link, Shanne. Appaently they made three types — arterial, aged (?) and “venial.” They were really allowed to get away with that malapropism?

    Thanks to Paul and Shanne (and welcome to cryptoland).

    Thanks for the link to

52. manhattan@41 Fully agreed. One reason I lost interest in the New York Times crossword was the constant refrain of brand names, and even advertising jingles.

53. Took a long time to be able to get my first answer in (NO STONE etc), and a few followed after that. But at this point in the day, with perhaps just under half of it completed, I revealed the rest. One of *those* Paul puzzles, shall I say, in that there were too many convolutions and contortions for my brain to follow.

    Thanks for the blog, I looked at so many of the parsed answers while shaking my head, as they were just beyond me.

54. I got nowhere, fell asleep, had another go and finally twigged 26,9a. A very slow plod with many groans like IKEA, but I’d better not write what I said when EL BAT went in. (Manuel from Fawlty Towers maybe, but probably not Cervantes.)
    Failed on GORE. Just bunged in the first pol that came to mind which was Dole.
    Sterling effort Shanne and thanks Paul.

55. Valentine – Kensington Gore runs around the back of the Royal Albert Hall, in the area dedicated to arts and science by Victoria and Albert – so within the block between the A315 – where Knightsbridge (the road) meets Kensington High Street, with Hyde Park and the Albert Memorial to the north, and Cromwell Road to the south (where are found the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum), Queensgate to the west and Exhibition Road to the east. That block comprises Imperial College (which was originally the Royal College of Science, the Royal School of Mines, and the City and Guilds college), the Royal School of Music, the Royal School of Organists, the Royal College of Art, the Science Museum and the Geology museum. And a block across includes HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) and the Brompton Oratory.

    Bon is in the BRB (1998) with a brackets (F), but is then defined as good.

56. Fortunately for me, I am familiar with KENSINGTON GORE for, as a young teenager in the early 1960’s, I used to stay with my widowed grandmother who lived then in a flat in Queensgate. And nearly all those places you mention@55, Shanne, were very much my adolescent stamping ground, especially those museums…

57. 4d I would never have got Ikea in a month of Sundays but I had the I & E and as it is the 13th of August I thought Ides which to the Vecchia Romanos was the 13th of the month except for March, May, July and October when its the 15th (See 15th of March 44BC)

58. Thanks both. It took me slightly longer than I wanted to give to it and was a dnf thanks to CHAT SHOW (watery definition/I’ve been too long at this) and IKEA (my entrenched brain will not stretch to considering brand names) so a 6 on my new scale.

    COD was CONVENIENCE FOOD.

59. For the first time I found Paul’s offering very convoluted. Perhaps it’s the heat! Congratulations to those who made it. I didn’t!

60. So what’s a Cervante?

61. [WBE @60
    There was a letter (?) in the Guardian very recently bemoaning misuse of apostrophes that had a very similar (identical?) error! Coincidentally, I came across the correct “Cervantes’s” in a note explaining “tilting at windmills” later in the day.]

62. [Luckily I knew both the fake blood and thoroughfare meanings of KENSINGTON GORE, but the discussion has prompted me to investigate why a London street should have such a name. It seems that ‘gore’, in this sense, is an old English word for a narrow, triangular piece of land; it was the name of the site where the road was constructed.

    I remember my grandparents in Liverpool talking about an area near the centre of the city called Goree Piazzas. To me, this sounded like something out of Romeo and Juliet, but ‘The Goree’ was the old name for the street facing the Mersey now called Strand. In fact the name comes from an island of the coast of Senegal called Gorée, which was a centre for the slave trade. So the association with blood, though accidental, is sadly appropriate]

63. I’ve just noticed the similarity between El Bat and Le Pen (although used a little differently). Maybe just a coincidence, or maybe Paul intended to repeat the idea so as to make the second one (whichever that was) easier for solvers, if only subconsciously.

    I was frankly a little surprised by STYLO. I knew it, but it seems to me to be a few notches beyond the old standbys of French articles and “Summer in Paris”, but nobody has complained, so it seems Paul has judged right.

64. Paul certainly has a distinctive style, one I fortunately enjoy. Some really clever ideas here. Faves KENSINGTON GORE, CRUSTY LOAF and SENEGALESE.
    Thanks, P & S
    Shanne @46, your comment reminded me of a memorable drunken night back in college, going from Green Park to Kilburn via Wembley Park, North Harrow and Trafalgar Square (for the night bus)! Nothing like the extended use of public transport to sober you up for a day’s work 🙂 .

65. Well done, Shanne, for your excellent (first Cryptic) blog.

    Lots of Paul’s typical humour here, which made this puzzle fun in spite of being difficult. 🙂

    I find the discussion of double duty, @lit and CAD interesting. There seems to be a great need to distinguish between &lits and CADs, in order to justify or vilify the use of double duty – OK in &lits but not in CADs. And all because some “expert” decided a long time ago that double duty is a bad thing (except in an &lit where every word is doing double duty). I am reminded of Duke Ellington’s comment about different styles of music: “There are simply two kinds of music – good music and the other kind.” I feel the same way about clues, and both good clues and the other kind can use double duty (and indirect anagrams). In this case, I thought 11a and 25a (DIATRIBE and CONVENENCE FOOD) were excellent clues – good wordplay and witty surfaces. Other favourites were the cheeky 16a TABLE and the other &lit/CAD at 27a TAXIMETER.

    Thanks Paul and Shanne for the fun.

66. I thought this puzzle came up short of Paul’s usual superior clueing. I would have liked 16A more if it was worded as … viewing THE Cervantes’ vampire…. I’m not sure why the first XI is a winning team. Plenty of first XIs are losing teams. I didn’t particularly love Botanical as a definition of nursery, or bonanza as a definition of mine. I solved the puzzle, but thought with a little editing it could have been made much more enjoyable.

67. Kept thinking of “la plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle” when dealing with the pen and the baguette, so didn’t get anywhere near the stylo until parsing post filling in.

68. Shanne – I’m not sure about your description of the clue for CONVENIENCE FOOD as a rare &lit. The clue expressly states no cooking involved so surely raw is the right word 😉

69. Thank you for the parsing . re 15ac “LIGHT” used to have a sexual meaning – a synonym for “EASY” cf Robert Browning “That the woman was light is very true…”

70. Jay@66 – yet more trickery from Paul- if you ignore the usual usage of “the first XI” within a club, then the first XI are (e.g. in the Premier League) the Winning Team..

71. That 4th row reads IT WAS SNL. Is there a theme?

72. Aljastair@30
    From reading the comments here it seems that Paul successfully sets in order to give pleasure to many not just himself.

73. Me@73
    Alastair, sorry.

74. Good point, DaveJ @70.

75. I’d never heard of Kensington Gore, the street or the fake blood. But I think the name for the latter is very witty, using the street name. But I take it to mean that there are theatres in Kensington , so it’s the kind of blood you could find in theatres in Kensington, is that right? Very funny British humour. Whoever named the fake blood should get a gong.

76. I only know Kensington Gore as a street that I would never be able to afford to live in
    Kensington is in my Chambers but not with gore.
    The answer was gettable from the wordplay
    I liked the rest of it

77. What cellomaniac @65 said 🙂

78. In answer to WBE @60 and muffin @61, the Guardian style guide says:

    “The possessive in words and names ending in S normally takes an apostrophe followed by a second S (Jones’s, James’s), but be guided by pronunciation and use the plural apostrophe where it helps: Mephistopheles’, Waters’, Hedges’ rather than Mephistopheles’s, Waters’s, Hedges’s.”

    from this article entitled: Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds from this morning’s paper. That also quotes the AP style guide which would give Cervantes’ as correct.

    I think that spelling fits the Guardian style guide.

    Cellomaniac @65 – it’s one of the things that puts me off blogging the Cryptics: the need to classify the clues into neat categories that then gets debated ad nauseam by crossword nerds. I thought those clues were brilliant, as I said in my introduction, but I then didn’t want to get into the arguments about their descriptions.

79. Before entering the Royal Albert Hall for last night’s Promenade Concert (Elgar, Holst, Stanford and Vaughan Williams, excellently played by the BBSO) I was actually sitting on a wall on Kensington Gore grappling with the crossword. I still didn’t see the answer, only twigging it when I got home afterwards.

80. “I Kier” doesn’t sound like “IKEA”. I absolutely detest homophone clues that hinge on regional accents.

81. I had Kensington dove, which was satisfying and puzzling at the same time. Kicking myself for not getting Gore. My Google searching to justify my solution has resulted in a number of quite technical pigeon racing articles being suggested by my phone.

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