Listener 4859: Forever by Twin

POTUS may be getting us down, but here’s a potential POTY from Twin to brighten our day.

We’re asked to be ready to fill a second grid, so – putting aside all thoughts that Twin has been bribed by Murdoch to double the sales of The Times, and thankful that we have a Crossword Club sub and download two copies, off we go. (Special commiserations to those untethered from their printers at the Dinner, which the present part of Dash was gutted to miss because of his professional duties: perhaps some hard copies were made available?)

As usual the “extra words” gimmick is not too hard to work with, and the clues were easier than we expected – but rather contorted in places and using some odd words and surface constructions. 25a “Spiritualist, ergo [silent] in kicking? (4)? And a few clues puzzled us in other ways.33a  “Comedian’s [Eh] O?? Wha’s Loony? (40) is great fun if also distinctly odd; there are comedians called SHAW which would fit the wordplay WHAS*  – but “Comedian’s O” when pronounced is a SHWA – a phonetician’s term for an indistinct vowel. That was hard! So Something Is Going On. Top setters like Twin only resort to this stuff when there is good reason.

And good reason there was. The clue messages spelled out CLUE INITIALS OTHER THAN THESE and HIGHLIGHT UNCHANGED CELLS. And wonder of wonders, not just the first letters of the first words in the clues (clever enough but easily spotted) but all the first letters of all the words (other than the extra words’ ones which have already been used). And lo and behold the words produced by them fill the second grid perfectly:

We were grateful for the way the elegant simplicity of the highlighted pattern gave us some cross-checks, and were able to read MY WORDS WILL NEVER PASS AWAY. Is Twin on an ego-trip? No: this ecclesiastical member of Dash remembered that it was quoting Christ from Matthew 24:35 (spelled out  of course in the grid for those without the same background) from the New International Version or similar: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” Then when we noticed that HEAVEN and EARTH in the top left and bottom right of the grid had passed away at least from the highlighting. We wondered if at an earlier stage the solver might have been asked to erase them as a final step… (We hope we weren’t meant to erase them now but the instructions don’t seem ot ask for that so we’re taking them rather appropriately as an “Easter Egg”.)

This was the puzzle that gave on giving. Kudos to Twin and put it in on the potential POTY list. And the RICARD pastis (with a splash of gin from GENEVA perhaps) means he keeps up his Oenophile membership even if in real life (as we gather) he’s not a tippler. Thanks and congratulations Twin for a superb puzzle.

If you would like to look at a full parsing of any of the Listener puzzles do hop over to https://listenercrossword.com/List_Puzzles.html and click on the “Notes” button next to the relevant puzzle in the list. When these Listener blogs appeared in “Listen With Others” that was the routine, and we have retained it here rather than duplicate.