Guardian 29,741 – Carpathian

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A nice set of straightforward but elegant clues. Thanks to Carpathian.

 
Across
8 UNSOPHISTICATED Simple custodianship arrangement containing note (15)
TE (note in the Sol-Fa system) in CUSTODIANSHIP*
9 BURDEN Polish revolting study as duty (6)
Reverse of RUB + DEN
10 ADAPTIVE Notice apartment I have is changeable (8)
AD (notice) + APT + I’VE
11 CAREFREE Unburdened pedestrian crossing end of lane (8)
[lan]E in CAR-FREE
12 TRENDY Attempt to keep object in (6)
END (object) in TRY
13 WEIGHTY Heavy cube in waxy covering (7)
EIGHT (the cube of 2) in W[ax]Y
16 IRKSOME Shirk something intrinsically tedious (7)
Hidden in shIRK SOMEthing
19 WHALER Vessel with robust finish of copper (6)
W[ith] + HALE + [coppe]R
21 OVERSOLD Exaggerated the merits of series of deliveries of long standing (8)
OVERS (series of deliveries in cricket) + OLD (of long standing)
24 COXCOMBS Vain men member of rowing team grooms (8)
COX (member of a rowing crew) + COMBS (grooms)
25 GIFTED Exceptionally clever German raised without love initially (6)
G[erman] + LIFTED less L[ove]
26 ROGUES’ GALLERIES See gorillas urge rampaging groups of criminals (6,9)
(SEE GORILLAS URGE)*
Down
1 INSULATE Disparaging remark about a European cut off from communication (8)
A in INSULT + E[uropean]
2 FONDUE Warm centre of suet dish (6)
FOND (warm) + [s]UE[t]
3 SHINER Evidence of injury in part of leg found by US emergency room (6)
SHIN (lower part of leg) + ER (Emergency Room) – a shiner is a black eye
4 ASHAMED A false journalist is mortified (7)
A + SHAM + ED[itor]
5 PILASTER Column one covered in gypsum (8)
I in PLASTER (gypsum)
6 MATTRESS Smartest redesigned sleeping pad (8)
SMARTEST*
7 FERVID Very hot iron six found in road (6)
FE (iron) + VI (6) in RD
14 GOLF CLUB Sell revolutionary card to sporting association (4,4)
Reverse of FLOG (sell) + CLUB (a playing card)
15 TIRAMISU Sanitarium dropping an inappropriate dish (8)
Anagram of SANITARIUM less AN – another dish to follow the fondue
17 MAL DE MER Sickness Mark and Emerald spread (3,2,3)
M[ark] + EMERALD*
18 HOT SEAT Tricky situation in house before empty teens dine (3,4)
HO (house) + T[een]S + EAT
20 HOOPOE Ring old English bird (6)
HOOP + O + E
22 ENGULF Wholly embrace heads of each new group unless leaders fail (6)
First letters of Each New Group Unless Leaders Fail
23 SAFARI Garment Fanny Adams wears for expedition (6)
FA in SARI

43 comments on “Guardian 29,741 – Carpathian”

  1. Thanks Carpathian and Andrew
    A typical Carpathian puzzle – not difficult, but very enjoyable.

  2. Thanks Andrew – as you say, a very elegant puzzle, though reasonably straightforward. Having said that, I don’t know why, but it took me an age to see INSULATE (my LOI). Favourites: SAFARI, FONDUE, WEIGHTY. Many thanks to Carpathian.

  3. Perfect for a busy Tuesday. Thanks both. UNSOPHISTICATED was tricky because you didn’t know exactly which note (TE) to add.

  4. I thought hell would be well permafrosted before I equated PEDESTRIAN with CAR FREE but then remembered CAR LESS was used previously. Thanks to setter for an enjoyable crossword and Andrew.

  5. HOOPOE not the first bird to come to mind, but the name and image has stayed with me for some reason, and it was clearly clued. INSULATED my LOI after waiting for crossers before sorting out the anagram for UNSOPHISTICATED. Others have summarised the crossword well, neatly done with nothing too complicated. ROGUES GALLERIES helped to complete the bottom half. Liked COXCOMBS for the word rarely seen these days. Thanks to Carpathian and Andrew.

  6. [I have a hoopoe story. Years ago on a golf holiday in Portugal, my partner and I had played 36 holes. We decided to play one more, as not many people have played 37 in a day. It was just going dusky. As we approached the green, there were about 30 hoopoes on it – it was watered, so it was easier for them to get their beaks into the soil.
    We left them to it and didn’t complete the hole!]

  7. Fairly straightforward but elegant as already highlighted. Likes for CAREFREE, IRKSOME, COXCOMBS, ROGUES GALLERIES, MAL DE MER, GOLF CLUB and ENGULF.

    Ta Carpathian & Andrew.

  8. Very nice puzzle for a Tuesday. Only WHALER and HOOPOE (which can go onto my long list of birds I’ve learnt from crosswords next to the notornis and tinamou) held me up.

    Very elegantly clued as you would expect from Carpathian. Liked CAREFREE and SAFARI.

    Thanks Andrew and Carpathian

  9. TIRAMISU seems to be a another standing dish in Cryptic crossword land. Must echo the words already spoken – straightforward, elegant, enjoyable fare this morning from Carpathian…

  10. [TIRAMISU is often mistranslated as “pick me up”. Tirare is actually Italian for “pull”, so it’s “pull me up”.]

  11. Took me a while to sort out the anagram in 1a as I tend to write the note as TI rather than TE, and even tried the SI variant, but finally saw it from the crossers. As far the rest, smooth and fair.

  12. Hugely enjoyed this one. A couple of new words for me, PILASTER and HOOPOE, obtainable from the wordplay, which is always satisfying. Other favourites were TRENDY, TIRAMISU, WHALER, CAREFREE and SAFARI. Would have been nice for the surface of FERVID to read six-iron rather than ‘iron six’ but I can’t think of a way to do it without making the clue over-convoluted and definitely worse than the setter’s. Thanks Carpathian and Andrew.

  13. Good Tuesday puzzle. Delighted to see Carpathian turning up the difficulty dial a bit from Quiptic level. Top ticks for CAREFREE and TIRAMISU

    [muffin@11 is “pick me up” more of an idiomatic translation maybe? ]

    Cheers A&C

  14. Thanks for sorting out my unparsed GOLF CLUB (had overcomplicated it by imagining sell must be GO).

    Nice puzzle, the kind that makes you feel smart for solving it smoothly when actually it’s down to good cluing.

    My only pause for thought was at gypsum/plaster, which reminded me that I had noticed what I thought might be an old variant of wall-plaster in Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy yesterday, but forgot to look it up. I have just looked again and the word is ‘wainscotting’. (“Instead of wainscotting, the walls are covered with tapestry or damask.”) Wiktionary tells me that wainscotting is nothing to do with plaster but is instead “wooden (especially oaken) panelling on the lower part of a room’s walls”, which I’m sure many of you knew already, in which case excuse this long diversion.

  15. I kept looking for a theme — BURDEN/WEIGHTY/CAREFREE and TRENDY/IRKSOME/OVERSOLD — but I think that was wishful thinking. A satisfying and straightforward solve.

  16. dr.shred @14 Historically,the transition from tapestry-covered walls to decorative wainscotting was often taken to signal the cultural shift away from older ideas of aristocracy to a more modern and possibly a more vulgar fashion in domestic tastes. In this passage from Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, the hereditary heir of the ancestral home, Edgar Ravenswood, revisits the house of his forefathers, now in possession of the successful lawyer, William Ashton, and registers the changes:

    “The mouldering tapestry, which, in his father’s time, had half covered the walls of this stately apartment, and half streamed from them in tatters, had given place to a complete finishing of wainscot, the cornice of which, as well as the frames of the various compartments, were ornamented with festoons of flowers and with birds, which, though carved in oak, seemed, such was the art of the chisel, actually to swell their throats and flutter their wings”

  17. Nice puzzle, just as commentators above have said.

    For SAFARI, I toyed for a while with SPEEDO, which to my mind has all the right ingredients, except that “wears for” doesn’t quite work (nor the crossers, of course).

  18. Muffin@10. Tiramisu originates from Tireme su later Italianised into tiramisu so it literally does mean pick me up.

  20. paul@12, you’ve hit on a surface that I thought didn’t quite work, FERVID, 7(d).
    ” Really excited – before six-iron runs into back of hazard”
    I don’t think I’ll be applying for the job.
    TIRAMISU….15(d)…I’m more confused than ever; I think it was meant to be an aphrodisiac, so pull me up, or pick me up, both sound apt. ( all that sugar and caffeine ). I can personally confirm, it is NOT a hangover cure.
    Superb crossword, smoothly clued, very enjoyable.
    Thumbs up, Carpathian & Andrew

  21. Pleasant puzzle. LOI insular.

    Poc@11, Ti and Te are different notes. Ti is the seventh, next-to last note in the diatonic scale and is a whole tone above its predecessor. Te is in the same position but is only a half-tone above the sixth note that comes before it. Some minor scales us it and so does the mixolydian mode.

  22. Muffin@19. It is a dialect rather than a separate language and is from Treviso. It is thought to have been first made by a mistress in a house of ill repute, said to have aphrodisiac properties hence pick me up. I like making different foods and always interested in their origin.

  23. Then again, some scales also flat the sixth note. So more precisely I should say the the seventh note (TI) in the diatonic scale is a half-tone below the eighth one, which is an octave above the first. In some minor scales and also in the mixolydian mode, the seventh (Te) is a whole tone below the eighth. The same is true of the third note in the scale — Mi is a whole tone above the second, Me is a half tone above it. In a minor scale, it’s do-re-me.

  24. Steve @22
    Thanks. It doesn’t alter the fact that TIRA MI SU translates from Italian as “pull me up”, though 🙂
    Italian dialects are very varied, as a result of their fragmented history, I suppose. Although “classic” Italian is regarded as Florentine, when I visted Rome I soon discovered that I had been taught Roman Italian.
    We watched Montalbano, set in Sicily, to brush up on our Italian, but it was as much use as an Italian watching Cracker to improve his English!

  25. Valentine: Not as I was taught. The diatonic scale was
    doh re me fah soh lah te do. The “H”s were optional, and te and ti were alternatives. The chromatic scale was

    do(h) re me/mi fa(h) so(h) la(h) te/ti do(h)
    di ri fi si li

  26. COXCOMB is not the kind of word one sees every day. I first saw it when Imogen used it in January, although his cox was an apple.

    I thought this was harder than the consensus, but then I’m generally less tuned in the later I start. I saw ROGUE early but inexplicably didn’t think of ROGUES for a while. I liked WHALER (the clue, not the vessel) and HOT SEAT amongst others.

    Thanks Carpathian and Andrew.

  27. Ideal puzzle for a relaxing sunny Tuesday in the garden, my first day of convalescence after a long hospital stay. So just a perfect way to get back in the groove. Cannot thank you enough Carpathian, as well as Andrew for the blog

  28. Goujeers@25, Valentine@23 is outlining major and minor diatonic scales but with the tonic as ‘do’ in both; ti and te are not interchangeable in solfege. Of course in movable-do solfege the minor scale starts la-ti-do, much more pleasant than do-re-me! Loved the puzzle, thank you Carpathian and Andrew( and nice rewrite EN@20, – and happy convalescing Len@27!)

  31. Thanks Carpathian for a very enjoyable crossword full of spotless surfaces and the right amount of wit. Thanks Andrew for the blog.

  32. Agree dod @4, kudos to anyone who cold-solved 11ac by spontaneously twiggng car-free for pedestrian.

  34. Muffin@

    [Hoopoes are one of my fav birds, but there are a shortage here in France as climate change means that they are going north, we need them as they eat the processionary caterpillar which are destroying pine forests. Perhaps in UK you could give Macron, on his visit, any you can catch, and we can give you Ospreys and Red Kites one in one out basis as we do seem to have a lot in Pyrenees Atlantic
    I recalled hearing the hoopoe golf story before, 3 April 2025]

  36. I thought this crossword was easier than yesterday’s.
    I was under the impression the Guardian crosswords were the easiest on Mondays, but perhaps it’s me. I am French and my vocabulary is more limited than native solvers. I often learn new words doing the cryptic. Today it was the word “hale.”

    Thanks Carpathian and Andrew.

  37. Frogman @38: yes, Easy Monday is the theory. But the editor often has a different idea of what is easy or not than the general public does. This is partially because the difficulty of these things depends a lot on your general knowledge coming in, and partly because I don’t think the editor is actually trying all that hard any more.

    [In the New York Times, for the record, they do a much better job–Monday and Tuesday are easy, Wednesday is moderate, Thursday is also moderate but always has a gimmick, Friday and Saturday are tough, and Sunday is like Thursday but twice the size. This progression is almost invariable. Surely this can be managed with British-style cryptics too?]

  39. I really liked this puzzle – sorry for the late comment but I just wanted Carpathian and Andrew to receive my thanks.

  40. I got stuck with two to go, but CAREFREE popped into my head as soon as it hit the pillow. Unfortunately the same did not happen with ‘disparaging remark’, which was too directly clued. (Like ‘US emergency room’ as mentioned by Gervase – welcome back! 😄) I keep on looking for wrinkles that are not there, and simple synonyms become nightmares. Literally, in this case, as my brain was still deconstructing disparaging while I slept!

    Thanks everyone for the hoopoe story, the tiramisu and the wainscotting.

  43. Always happy to see Carpathian’s name on the puzzle. I love their style. Third completion in a row, so yay!

    3d we also have ER for Emergency Room in Canada. Will we ever see Canada as a North American reference?

    Muffin@35, yes I remember your Hoopoe story, too. I suppose it means you completed 36 1/2 holes, which is probably even rarer than 37

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