Grids with no bars (and a bar pattern that is not symmetrical and must not be shown) and clues giving no word lengths are somewhat daunting. There’s an intriguing device that is going to give us a hint to the inventor’s name. We are going to use ‘the letter at position n from the start or end of each clue when n is the word length of the answer.
These were surprisingly gentle clues for Ifor with no gimmicks involved, and recording those letters produced a series of girls’ names SAFFRON, ALISON, LORETTA, MARY, HILARY, JOAN, VIRGINIA with the other letters spelling out RIGHT PINCH WITHIN BOXES IMPRISONING BRIGHT GIRL. Time for some head-scratching. When was there a girl imprisoned in a box? The Zig Zag girl illusion performed by Robert Harbin came to mind for one of us who then had to work out how were those words a hint to him. Ah: BERTHA is a ‘bright girl’ and, of course ROB is ‘pinch’, R = right and maybe the box gives BIN? So perhaps R inside ROB BIN all round BERTHA and the girls’ names as just random ones. Hmmm. Not easy! The other of us of course did it the other way round having no recollection of Harbin, but then having to spend far too long arranging the above elements into a plausible name to Google. That rather counterbalanced the easiness of the listed clues (no dount deliberately) and made it a rather unusual puzzle in that the chief clue to be solved only emerged after all the others had been solved and the message extracted.
Our first grid produced a block of 16 empty cells and, when we moved the central block of 16 cells (the poor girl’s middle) into those, we astonishingly still had real words, all of four letters going both across and down. What an achievement, Ifor!
The clues were excellent as always with Ifor and both accurate and inventive (“toast out of oven” gibing T from TOAST – OAST), sometimes requiring a good look at Chambers (and into the appendices for BERTHA). The only ones that caused a real hiccup were “Level stair, not having it split around base” which could have been RASE ((STAIR – split IT)* + E) but proved to be our old friend TIER, and “Seeing ahead in places, taking finale from Stones to end Proclaimers’ acts” which apart from giving an interesting insight into Ifor’s earlier listening habits got one of us well confused when we put down LORETTE for LORETTA and BOX IS for BOXES in the messages using the 9th letters, and putting in DESCRYINGS for the answer (which all work OK) – only to find that a 7-letter word was needed and having to re-think the whole thing. Or perhaps we’re still up the creek and a kind commenter can give us a paddle?
Now for the alcohol! First we had ‘Poisonous vine, best it were left to toxicology to untangle’. That gave us BEST IT WERE and the T of Toxicology – (its ‘left’) to anagram giving BITTERSWEET. Quite an achievement as Ifor needed those 11th letters I and Y. Things improved: soon it was beer, ‘Frightening round includes one over the eight’ That had to be NINE that was hidden reversed in ‘frightening’, producing a G and an I. Finally we had a ‘Small serving of Scotch swallowed after the bar ends in haste’ giving us TATE and the L and A of GIRL and VIRGINIA. A mixture of that toxic vine, the ale and the Scotch – not too palatable – but we have to say “Cheers, Ifor!”