Guardian 29,504 / Paul

80 comments on “Guardian 29,504 / Paul”

1. 21 was first in and then it was off at the races. The obvious theme was right up my alleyway and I smiled a lot, as it all fell in steadily. My previous career has taken me inside three of the NICKs. Also had a smattering of typical Pauline ribaldry with FRENCH KNICKERS and SPANKING. Lots of ticks including SING, PENTONVILLE, GAS MAIN and LEDERHOSEN. I thought this was one of his best, although maybe a bit of a ‘stretch’ across the pond.

   Ta Paul & Eileen.

2. Thanks Paul and Eileen
   A couple unparsed – CALABOOSE and KNICKERS – but relatively straightforward apart from those. Favourites IODINE (of course!) and GAS MAIN.
   I don’t suppose it’s worth saying that Brixton and Wandsworth aren’t prisons? Brixton Prison is a prison.

3. Thanks Paul and Eileen.
   Great puzzle with some fine surfaces. Neat blog.

   COTD: KNICKERS
   Other faves: CALABOOSE, NICK, SOLVE, GAS MAIN (mother’s ruin—TILT. All those prison names-I have already forgotten) and NONET.

4. [Let’s hope AlanC @1 is now going straight]

5. After half an hour of frustration and several reveals it dawned on me that I was wasting my time attempting a UK-only puzzle.

6. What AlanC said @1. Great fun. Thanks P&E

7. Shirl @4: 😀

8. As a non-Brit, it’s true that some of the answers and clues were parochial. I needed online help for the GK such as STRANGEWAYS prison in Manchester, then I opened a wiki list of prisons to check if my answers were actually prisons or not. From my reading of the news, I wonder if the theme is a comment by the setter on the dire state of Britain’s overcrowded prisons, currently almost 100% full with 95,000 or more prisoners in England, Wales & Scotland.

   muffin@2 – I get what you’re saying about Brixton and Wandsworth but the online list I looked at listed all the UK prisons simply by name such as Birmingham, Bristol, Lincoln, Preston, Aylesbury, Bedford, Cardiff, Doncaster etc which are the names of the cities/towns as well as the name of the prison located in those towns.

   I could not parse 1d.

   New for me: CALABOOSE = prison (US slang.

   Thanks, both.

   Shirl@4 – LOL I had the same thought about AlanC@1 😉

9. I enjoyed this more than some recent Pauls; the theme did not dominate as much as they can, even though it cropped up fairly often, especially in the upper half of the puzzle. Yes, I benefit from UK GK – though without AlanC’s inside knowledge. I did rather find myself looking for STRANGEWAYS and PENTONVILLE, once I had solved NICK. SING (SING) was an unexpected surprise. I enjoyed the way Paul worked some theme-related terminology into some of his surfaces too – stretch, arrest, jug, punishment, criminal, convict and the excellent stir crazy which makes TRANSISTOR my COTD.

   Thanks Paul and Eileen

10. [muffin @2: I’m pretty sure that if I were to tell someone that my dad was in Brixton for 3 years, they’d know exactly what I meant.]

11. LOI was FRENCH LOAF having been completely misdirected by the definition. It always surprises me to find an “I” in the word, unlike the Spanish, with which I am far more familiar.
    Paul on top form.
    My thanks to him and to Eileen.

12. Great fun, thanks Paul and Eileen. I had same ticks, but also liked FRENCH LOAF being misled by pain & treatment.
    Stir (& stir-crazy) also a prison reference

13. As ever, completely meaningless to me.
    Total respect to anyone who is able to complete this.
    After 10 years attempting his puzzles, I still have not the first idea how his clues work.
    Thanks both.

14. I always struggle with Paul and today was no exception, despite getting the keystone word quickly. I finished with several unparsed so thank you Eileen.

    I groaned when the penny dropped on 22A, and one of these days I will remember that ‘man’ is often a chess piece.

15. wynsum @12

    I would have given a tick to FRENCH LOAF, too, if the surface had made more sense
    and PostMark @9 – ditto for TRANSISTOR, though I did like ‘stir crazy’. 😉

16. When I first ran through the clues I thought this was going to be a struggle. Then I got 21ac and it was then a fairly steady solve once I’d got my brain into Paul mode. Paul tells a story that his first ever clue was for KNICKERS, which was “name sewn into footballers’ underwear”. Rathe elegant.

17. Great puzzle – took some time but was worth it. Took me a long time to get NICK, but had worked out the theme long before. Favourites were FRENCH LOAF and CALABOOSE (had to look up the definition). Many thanks to P & E.

18. Like Postmark @ 9 I enjoyed this more than recent Paul puzzles. I don’t really know why I find some more enjoyable (and accessible) than others.

    I got NICK straight away and made good progress until the SE which held me up.

    Like Muffin @ 2 my favourites were IODINE and GAS MAIN.

    Also liked: PRATTLE, CALABOOSE

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

19. I am a big fan of Paul anyway but this was a proper treat. I can see the annoyance of overseas solvers though

    Thanks Paul and Eileen (especially for the Linda Smith link.)

20. I didn’t help myself by putting POKE for NICK. I have always tried to teach that strange ways are not necessarily suspicious.

21. I found this reasonably straightforward, with the exception of the SE. I didn’t get FRENCH LOAF, though I wonder if that is because I thought the French word for bread had no “i”, as in Spanish. Seems so obvious now (sort of…). With thanks to both.

22. When I lived in Manchester, I thought STRANGEWAYS was a rather whimsical name for a prison, as well as being the subject of a bad pun. I now discover it comes from an Anglo Saxon word meaning near a strong stream. Sadly it has been rebranded as HMP Manchester.
    Having got the theme early on, I found this a pleasant solve, but obviously easier for those with local knowledge (however acquired 🤣).
    I echo the observations of PostMark@9 and would just add that I was also looking for WINSON GREEN (now HMP Birmingham). I thought PENTONVILLE was a lovely clue. Was quite disappointed not to see SLADE or PORRIDGE…
    Many thanks to Paul and to Eileen for the parsing and the link.
    [Frankie TC@ 16, that’s a much better clue for KNICKERS ]

23. PS Someone might confirm, but I believe Strangeways dropped its name in favour of “Manchester” over ten years ago…(?) Not that that detracts from the puzzle.

24. Crossed with Pauline above…

25. Funny–all the names of British prisons are in the top half of the grid. So I did manage to finish the bottom half unaided. When I was forced to reveal PENTONVILLE, my heart sank. But I’d heard of Brixton (“The Guns of Brixton,” “Electric Avenue”) and Wandsworth (the PM’s secretary in Love, Actually lives in “Wandsworth–the dodgy end”) as places, not prisons, so I did get those. [I’m surprised there are prisons in London, by the way–in the USA, nearly all prisons (ss opposed to jails) are intentionally sited in rural locations, with Alcatraz being the notable exception.] But yes, I did much more revealing on this puzzle than usual, and in part, by the end, it was sheer exhaustion–I did hit the cheat buttons on a few I maybe could have eventually gotten.

    I was surprised that NICK was never used here in its “accident while shaving” sense–Paul seems to usually use his theme words in all their permutations.

26. A mixed bag, a lot of it being the enjoyable side of Paul’s wares, and the rest being the stuff that I find a bit too convoluted/tricky. Glad to have solved most of it, but the SE corner held out and I revealed a handful.

    NHO CASE=SUIT (10a, CALABOOSE), nor LAC=RESIN (7d, TROPICAL).

27. I enjoyed this more than most of Paul’s recent puzzles (with the exception of last Saturday’s). Perhaps Paul missed a trick by not using non-penitential senses of the keyword, which made the crossword a bit easier. However, it took me an unconscionably long time to spot NICK, after which it all fell out more easily.

    I take muffin’s point @2, but it’s standard usage to refer to prisons by name, unlike cathedrals (Ely!).

    Lots of favourites: PRATTLE, CALABOOSE, FRENCH LOAF, GAS MAIN, POLYTONAL, ASBO, NONET.

    BTW, STRANGEWAYS is no longer the official name of HMP Manchester, since its rebuilding after the riots.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen

28. When I was a boy, long long ago, I recall being told that “jail” is an American word, and the British English word is “gaol”. It’s many years since I saw “gaol” in print. As a matter of interest, does anyone still use it? I suspect “jail” is now the grey squirrel, and “gaol” the red…

29. I realise I have crossed with Pauline in Brum and nuntius – too slow in typing!

30. …or FLETCHER, Pauline@22. An enjoyable theme for UK residents, but possibly not for others. After getting SING(SING) as my first entry I was looking for jails worldwide like ALCATRAZ, but apart from CALABOOSE (didn’t see the legal suit=CASE) they remained resolutely British – and I also wasted time imagining there might be a NICK in HANDSWORTH.

    I liked GAS MAIN, ASBO and FRENCH LOAF, whose definition fooled me for ages. Also failed to parse KNICKERS (knickers!).

    Drilling=ITERATION? If Paul says so.

    mrpenney@25: would you like to explain why a prison is not a jail and vice versa?

31. nuntius @28: Gaol, even as ‘jail’, has almost completely lost ground to ‘prison’, or one of its colloquial synonyms

32. I remembered Strangeways from ‘The Smiths’ album ‘Strangeways, here we come’.

33. [nuntius @20 again: The mismatch between spelling and pronunciation of ‘gaol’ has always puzzled me. The word comes from Old French ‘gaiole’, from Medieval Latin ‘gabiola’, itself from ‘caveola’ – a little cavity. That gives the spelling. However in modern French it is (the rather rare?) ‘geôle’ – hence, presumably, the pronunciation]

34. Made a bit of a bad start by imagining 16d could be ELON GATE, with Mr Musk being kept under house arrest for a misdemeanour. That meant that I didn’t twig the key word NICK for a while. Then mistakenly thought that this might be the forename of well known personalities. However….
    Once the penny dropped the key word was hugely helpful, especially with the prisons with long names.
    Thereafter, still a bit of a struggle, though everywhere around here seems to be holding Oktoberfests, so LEDERHOSEN quickly came to mind. Thanks for the parsing of NONET, Elaine. And many thanks to Paul for quite a session on the treadmill for me this morning…

35. Eileen @15: I totally agree that the surface for TRANSISTOR is not up to much but then I don’t particularly look for surfaces in Paul’s puzzles. I think I was just charmed by ‘stir crazy’ once I had realised he was bringing his theme into the clues.

36. Reading back through the comments I realise I missed PostMark’s punning reference @9 to AlanC’s ‘inside knowledge’. Nice one 🙂

37. Gladys @30: jails are intended primarily for the short-term detention of arrestees awaiting trial or other resolution of the cases against them. In some cases brief sentences (typically less than six months, for non-violent offenses) are also served in jail. Prisons, by contrast, are for the convicted–the institutions where you do hard time.

    It’s a distinction that is not made in lay usage, I admit.

38. Nuntius @20 I still use gaol rather than jail in my writing, but I don’t mind being thought old-fashioned in some respects.

    After very tricky Monday and Tuesday puzzles I found yesterday and today much more straightforward, not something I often say about a Paul puzzle.

    I wondered a bit about the use of a foreign word (pain) as the definition without any indication of such. Liked SOLVE, GAS MAIN and ENERGISE among others. Thanks Paul and Eileen.

39. Found this very tough, and absolutely brilliant. Loved FRENCH LOAF, what a great lightbulb moment!

40. Gervase@31 and 33: thanks for the background information. Like Paul @ 38 I think I too will stick with gaol on the rare occasions when it is relevant. “Jail” always makes me think of sheriffs in the Old West.

41. FRENCH LOAF
    paul@38
    I think the indication is there in the solution instead of the clue.

    scraggs@26
    CALABOOSE
    (a law)suit=CASE.

    ITERATION
    You drill someone (by making them repeat something or repeatedly do something) but you iterate (repeat or repeatedly do) something. Is the def loose or have I not understood it properly?

42. CALABOOSE is from Spanish ‘calabozo’ (and HOOSEGOW, not used here unfortunately, from ‘juzgado’=tribunal). I’m afraid I lost interest once I saw the theme and couldn’t be bothered trolling through lists of prisons.

43. KVa – or to drill is to iterate previous learning to embed it.

    This was fun, late as now on the train heading off for the weekend.

    I’ve lived and worked near Wandsworth, Brixton and Pentonville prisons, plus Wormwood Scrubs, usually just the Scrubs. All are in London. We did also have/had isolated prisons, HMP Dartmoor took a bit of escaping from, but it’s currently not safe to use as too high levels of radon, and Guys Marsh is in the sticks, notoriously bad, but rural. And the other prison that held high security prisoners was Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, now part of a bigger prison.

44. Finished in an hour.
    @5 Geoff Down Under. You’re never wasting your time solving a crossword

45. Loved it. My addiction to whodunnits paid off, except Barlinnie wasn’t there, so Rebus was ignored. Pleased with myself for getting 21 first thing.
    Thank you Paul, I will always love your crosswords.

46. Thanks to Paul for an enjoyable challenge – lots of excellent surfaces and the usual humour; but he certainly wasn’t taking any prisoners! Thanks to Eileen for help with parsing a couple I could not manage.

47. Thx to Paul for a great puzzle with some fine surfaces.
    Got some help from the theme of UK prisons. Favourites: CALABOOSE; FRENCH KNICKERS; PENTONVILLE; GAS MAIN; and LEDERHOSEN.
    Thanks also to Eileen for the blog.

48. KVa @41 Indeed. So it’s useful for a check. It’s only a small quibble, but, to my mind, the definition should also be useful for getting the solution. As ever, the justification is probably that some dictionary somewhere cites ‘pain’ as an English word on loan from the French.

49. KVa @41. Thanks, sometimes the convolutions (mine as much as the setter’s) mean I can miss the references.

50. Fun one – thanks Paul and Eileen.

    Liked FRENCH LAOF for the misdirection, but the surface was only “meh”. Favourites were PRATTLE, POLYTONAL (also nice misdirection with “screw”), ASBO and KNICKERS.

    A couple needed lobbing in and parsing later (or checking 225), but all felt reasonable once parsed. nho CALABOOSE, but for once I did get the theme!

51. Am I the only person old enough to remember Billy Cotton singing ‘In eleven more months and ten more days I’ll be out of the calaboose’? A joy as ever from Paul and Eileen.

52. CJ @50: I think you scored an own gaol with FRENCH LAOF

53. MikeB @51
    No!

    Gervase @52
    😀

54. When I was a child growing up in Manchester there was a visiting preacher at the church I was taken to who often started his address with “When I was in Strangeways…” Not all in the congregation knew that he was an accredited prison visitor!

55. I got NICK early, but shot myself in the foot by trying to fit in men named Nicholas. Didn’t find a single one, despite Paul’s usual habit of using different senses of the key word. Once I saw what was happening, things became easier (despite being an expat for nearly 50 years). Liked solving SOLVE.

56. Especially liked 3a TRANSISTOR for Stir Crazy (1980, directed by Sidney Poitier, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor).
    And who could forget Steve McQueen as ‘The 19d COOLER King’ in The Great Escape (1963)?
    [Nobody, because it seems like it’s been shown on TV every bank holiday since the ’60s.]

57. Here’s Linda Smith’s Mock The Week clip on African debt — Thanks P&E

58. Got most of this done last night except for four or five in the NW and SE corners. Finished today with a dash of check.

    Loved “mother’s ruin,” my favorite clue. Never heard of khazi and fogot about LBW.

    “Loaf” isn’t used much by itself over here, we mostly say “loaf of bread,” so have never heard of a French loaf, though have probably eaten several.

    Having discovered the theme, I found to my surprise that I’d heard of all the prisons, and been in one of them. I’ll bet it’s not one of AlanC’s three — I’ve been in Sing Sing as a volunteer with the Alternatives to Violence Project, which also exists in the UK (though not in prisons) and Australia as well as lots of other countries. Like Neill97’s preacher I get a small kick out of things like saying at a wedding, “I may be the only person here who can say I got to know Elizabeth in prison.” (She was a fellow volunteer.)

    Another distinction between prisons and jails in the US is that prisons are generally state or federal while jails are city or county.

    Thanks, Paul and Eileen.

59. Blimey! It’s not often that I solve one of Paul’s, but this makes two in a row. NONET had to be, but I didn’t parse it, so thanks to our blogger for that one (which I now can’t see how I missed). Thanks to Paul too: maybe, just maybe, I’m finally catching on to his wavelength.

60. Given my former occupation (I was a solicitor for 24 years and a judge for 16), to say that I am kicking myself for not having parsed CALABOOSE would be an understatement.
    That apart, I thought this was brilliant, and Eileen’s blog well up to standard. Bonus mark for reminding us of Linda Smith on Asbos.
    Ta both.

61. Nice one from Mr H. Knickers,pants and spanking all typical words in the Pauline dictionary. Loved the misdirection of french loaf! Ta Eileen for the blog.

62. We got 21ac quite quickly but it took my addled brain a while to twig that the related question were prisons not people called Nick doh! Once we’d got Wandsworth the penny dropped and we made sense of it.

63. As usual, I’m in a minority in not enjoying a Paul puzzle very much.

64. Loved it! This was the most approachable Paul I’ve attempted in quite some time. The prisons weren’t a holdup since names were guessable from the crossers and just needed a quick Google confirmation.

    The only real problem – as usual – was the cricket reference. I had no clue how to parse BY-LAWS.

65. George Clements@63: I feel your ‘FRENCH LOAF’

66. Tennis star spending time in prison (7)

    …seems like a super obvious one, although I may need to work on the cryptic grammar there, since it sounds like the opposite of what I want you to do. The number should be enough to make it clear, I guess.

67. [mrpenney @66: I prefer the bad tennis player (6) 🙂 ]

68. 15 all

69. Are they generic or specific tennis players? If it’s the latter, I’m struggling, as I could only name four reasonably current players – Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray – and I don’t think any of those are the answers. (I’ve never watched much tennis. Even when I used to play a lot as a teenager, watching it just made me want to go and play instead.)

    On the Brixton Prison thing, I spent a few months living walking distance from Brixton (Loughborough Junction), and never felt like I had been imprisoned!

70. [AlanC@1 🙂 Not a bit of a ‘stretch’ for this colonial of convict stock. I spent 15 years inside in my former life. Hope the UK doesn’t resort to transporting some of its overcrowded prison population again to our shores, as they did from 1788 to 1868.

    Still, many of our substantial public buildings in and around Sydney were designed by a former convict architect, Francis Greenway, from near Bristol, imprisoned in Newgate, sentenced to death for forgery, commuted to 14 years’ transportation, arriving here 1814, got a ”ticket-of-leave” (parole). He’s often acclaimed for his work, but he also got up to some of his old tricks and was eventually dismissed. I find it amusing that the last gaol I worked at before I retired was renamed as the Francis Greenway complex. Is this a tribute to a convict who came good, or the Aussie sense of humour, or that no one did their homework properly? )

71. Am I the only one to put in BRISTOL, without parsing, then spending ages trying to think of Mexican food beginning with L? Lesson learnt – never ever postpone parsing. Loved ‘pain’ for FRENCH LOAF, can always rely on Paul for delicious moments like that. Thank you Paul and Eileen

72. Took far longer than it should have done on reflection. Thankfully the key clue was very gettable as I often find them impenetrable and ruin the solve. I was expecting Devils, Nicholases, thefts, Santas and other variants to be scattered about but soon realised prisons were the theme which helped. The only quibble I have was the bread. Had the fodder leant towards baguette which is in common parlance now it would have been fine having pain as the definition, but as many other have attested, it stumped me until the end and only when all the crossers were there did it emerge. Wasn’t a pdm or tea tray, more a too clever by half. Otherwise very good indeed.

    Thanks very much Paul and Eileen.

73. General question. What constitutes a DNF? I expect the purists would say a filled grid, no checks, no Google etc and a final check all at the end to verify. For the hapless like me, figuring out the fodder for a long anagram, especially across many numbers, I tend to use anagram solvers. Sometimes when stuck I’ll use the word search. Frequently use synonym lists and GK lists to get me there. I know it’s never a ‘clean’ solve but getting to the end does for me.

74. Yes, Taffy@73. Interesting question. Everyone has their own criteria for DNF. It doesn’t matter to me. I prefer to be able to solve on paper, sitting out in the sun, no electronic aids, no Big Books either. But I’ve read somewhere that setters assume these days that people have access to, and will actually look up, online sources of information. I think what drives many people to post a DNF, is that’s the time allocated to the solve, and want to register an outcome before tomorrow’s crossword appears. Others here have said they’ll keep on with the crossword however many days it takes. If we only had one cryptic per week, and only the paper version, a DNF might be more meaningful, but you can’t roll back the clock, and .even then it doesn’t matter whether you finished, or not. Only if you enjoyed the journey, or not.

75. Thank you paddymelon@74. I’ll continue with my ‘cheats’ in the hope that one day I will indeed get a totally clean solve with zero assists. I prefer to get to the end, by hook or crook, although I don’t use Danword too often, just for the Everyman to confirm my solution when in doubt.

76. Nothing wrong with ‘cheats’ Taffy@75. ”Cheating” is a learning experience to reflect on, and many times you or I might think, aha I get that, or, if only I’d given it a little more time I would have got that. Whichever, it all goes to further cryptocruciverbalistic fun.

77. Taffy

    In “The Chambers Crossword Dictionary” Peter Biddlecombe (Sunday Times Crossword Editor) writes

    Before I tell you about any dictionaries, I’ll tell you that using standard or crossword dictionary to help you solve a crossword is only “cheating” if you later pretend to have solved it unaided. As a former New York Times crossword editor said: “It’s your puzzle. Solve it any way you want.”

    Good advice I think.

78. The easiest Paul yet. Perhaps I am improving.
    French Loaf is pure genius
    I used to pass Strangeways as my trains to Manchester pulled into Victoria. The sight of the outside alone put me off crime for life.

79. Though quite parochial, I enjoyed it. It simply means you solve it like an outsider. Finding foot and hand holds where you can. It is a different challenge, if I think of it that way.

80. This was a real challenge for me, and so satisfying when finished.

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