Listener No 4876 Hidewell, Adventures in Outer Space

This is only Hidewell’s second Listener crossword. Previously we had ‘The Usher’ (4774  29/07/2023) which was an excellent debut. So what now?

What do we find? We have to remove a word from all but six clues to enable solving. The words’ first and third letters spell instructions (including three abbreviations) involving six new squares and six arcs. One of the normal clue answers relates to the square sizes. The other five, in some order, give a clue (3,7,4,3,4) for an across answer that must be entered (after following the instructions) as four letters, two of which are already present and omitted by the extra clue’s wordplay.

Six answers are HUNDRED CUPS FIBONACCI ONE OLD YEAR. What luck that one of the Dash blogging pair also sets numerical crosswords for the CrossNumbers Quarterly and has just been working on one related to the Fibonacci sequence. 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1 is a reverse of it and gives a Fibonacci spiral if we use the cells of the grid with eight columns added.

The other one of us was familair with the sequence but not so well primed so it took a while for the Penny to Drop (see Hidewell’s previous puzzle) even after FIBONACCI was filled in at 1d as one of the “normal” clues. The clueing was fair and fairly generous though, so the initial grid-fill was quite quick. (See below for some exceptions.)

Although the extra words were not too hard to spot, the abbreviations in and general terseness of the message ADD EIGHT COLS DRAW AN APP GOLDEN SPIRAL ORIGIN IN SW CORNER ADD A GREEK LETTER TO THE FINAL CELL delayed its decipherment, though once it had made sense, the game was up, so the delay was a good thing. COLS were COLUMNS and APP was APPROXIMATE, but the business about the Greek letter and final cell only made sense after the mysterious “clue (4.7.4.3.4)” for an extra across answer using the extra words HUNDRED, CUPS, ONE, OLD and YEAR was also cracked. After a bit of head-scratching it resolved as ONE HUNDRED YEAR OLD CUPS with “old cups” being the definition for SCYPHI (yes it was a new one for this half of Dash – his excuse is that New Testament Greek doesn’t use it) which is an old Greek word for cups; the wordplay “one hundred year” then gives CY and we were of course told that the word must be entered as four letters, two of which were already present and omitted by the wordplay.

Pardon? Ahhh … we had to enter a Greek letter in the final square of the spiral and PHI is the symbol for the Golden Ratio which the ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence approach. (We hope you got that…) So the second S from SPRITSAIL and the PHI bookend C and Y to give SCYPHI. Seemples! Not. But very fair and very cunning which will do nicely. All that plus the well-conceived devisce of extending the grid (see below) mean that we think Hidewell has continued their winning streak of accessible but challenging and elegant puzzles, and we hope there are more to come, and we can of course raise a SCYPHUS to them and confirm their memberhip of the Listener Oenophile Club.

A few of the trickier clues that delayed us are worth parsing but as always the Full Works appears over at listenercrossword.com.

• 5a HUNDRED “division”: HUN {eg 4d Attila} – (DREAD {awesome} – A). The syntax of using “by X Y” for “Y after X” was tricksy.
• 26a SELKIE “Seal” {“there” = in Spey/Scotland}”: ELKIE {rock singer Elkie Brooks} after S(pey)  [“peg” was extra]. That took some digging into the memory banks…
• 25d OLD “in excess” {Chambers def. 20, as in “high old time”} OVERSOLD {“exaggerated the merits of”} – {redacting} VERSO. Really hard despite the full-checked answer. I wonder how the World crossword champs would have got on with it in the live-solving competition?

One further thought. Puzzle series are slowly moving towards electronic submission, for all sorts of good reasons. But it would be a clever program indeed that could allow for a challenge like this one. Perhaps allowing scanned and emailed submissions will be the better way forward for the Listener.