Guardian Prize 29,787 / Brummie

59 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,787 / Brummie”

1. 22D: I think the definition is simply “car,” short for Mercedes, which I think is how you intended to mark it. A fine job on the blog, and an enjoyable puzzle. Having missed many a theme over the years, I, too, was wondering whether BARRIE was leading anywhere.

2. Thanks Eileen. Much more enjoyable then last week’s ordeal and, for me, just about the right order of difficulty. The first pass yielded very little but progress was quite steady and I kicked myself for not seeing some earlier. As you say, a mixture of easy and more difficult clues which made for a good balance.

3. Thanks, Cineraria @1 – you’re quite right, of course: typo amended now. 😉

4. Thanks for the blog, Eileen. I agree with you et al., it was an enjoyable puzzle with a nice mix of clues. You have highlighted my favourites, too.

   I was embarrassed by how long it took me to see QUEENSLANDER, being one born and bred. It was very fairly clued and even so, it took me several goes. Facepalm rather than a dropped penny moment!

   Thanks, Brummie, for the fun.

5. My bro-i-l’s Irish rels follow hurling, but its ice cousin, curling, was new. It looks similar but originates in Scotland … Gaelic assonance? Curiosly, I didn’t twig to the very common crack =:go … maybe a subconscious effect of my aversion to the “Having a crack” gambling adds currently polluting tv sports broadcasts. (I think they’re only local: be thankful!). Nice puzzle, ta Brum and Eileen.

6. Eileen’s summary just about said it for me

   I ticked RIGIDITY, DRAPER, and reluctantly liked SHRINK RESISTANT

   For QUEENSLANDER: I was not enthusiastic about the superfluous “responsible for”, which misled me for a while, and I could not work out where curling came from in CURLING STONE. I had problems in the SE corner and three clues eluded me until Friday morning. I thought MERC loose, NHO ARNICA and GOTCHA was LOI. Otherwise, relatively plain sailing and enjoyable.

   Thanks Brummie and Eileen

7. Encouraged by completing my second prize attempt, especially after last week’s mauling. Okay, I’ll keep it on the agenda! A pleasant solve. Enjoyed 11a QUEENSLANDER (for an Australian state for a change), 14a RIGIDITY (for the smooth and funny surface), 20a CURLING STONE (for the reverse anagram), 5d SHRINK-RESISTANT (for the whimsical definition), 15d DEPLETION (For the Canadian reference! I figured it’d be DION), 22d MERC (for the clever “hospital worker” subtraction)

   Always love Eileen’s preambles!

8. Rather good I thought. No theme that I could see. I almost tripped up over the last letter of 24a which isn’t crossed, until the wordplay, which had to yield RD, pointed to “in the” being an essential part of the definition, together with the “?” .

   Thanks to Brummie and Eileen

9. Thanks for the explanation of several, Eileen, one of which was 9ac; I was about to ask what an examole is, when I suddenly realised it was intended to be example.
   Thanks, also Brummie

10. Thanks, Eileen, this covers the puzzle very well. I think the anagram in 6d is actually O(ld)GLORY after HO.

    Thanks too to Brummie, with some good clues, and the right level of difficulty for the weekend. My loi was getting SHRINK in 5d, getting there on Sunday.

11. Very nice, liked SHRINK-RESISTANT, the reverse-clued CURLING STONE, QUEENSLANDER and MERC. Didn’t get GOTCHA and didn’t parse ARCHIVES; needed help on a few entries. But I knew BARRIE from a recent puzzle by Kite! Thanks Brummie and Eileen!

12. SMEE is Captain Hook’s boatswain in Disney’s version of Peter Pan. Coincidence or microtheme?

13. grantinfreo @5 hurling and curling are very different animals. Curling is essentially bowls on ice. Hurling is a cross between field hockey and Armageddon.

14. Thanks Eileen. GOTCHA got me. I was looking for a woolly hat, somewhere in the world, with cocaine stuffed in the middle of it.

15. Martin @13. Love the description of hurling!

16. And as a QUEENSLANDER by birth and a great fan of the rock band Queen, I swear I am not responsible for the slur. I didn’t even understand the clue.

17. This was good fun, with some witty conceits.

    SMEE was new for me in this context – I’ve always called it a SMEW.

18. A flying start with SCHNAPPS and its down clues going straight in, QUEENSLANDER quickly following and the Q, rather than the parsing leading me to PIPSQUEAK. So uniquely for me I had completed the top half of the Prize in just a few minutes, apart from SMEE which proved resistant to the end. The bottom half proved a different matter and I never did get ARNICA, MERC and GOTCHA, a word which has had a respectable recent revival after its disgraceful usage by The Sun. Thanks to Brummie, one of my favourite setters, and the entirely wonderful Eileen

19. Thank you, Dave Ellison @9 (apologies for causing you a moment’s consternation: surprisingly, that one got past the spellchecker) and sjshart @10 – both corrected now.

    Martin @12 – I mentioned the SMEE / BARRIE (Peter Pan) coincidence in my preamble.

20. I share Eileen’s favourites. I don’t think there’s a theme, though you could see how Peter Pan would make a basis for a themed puzzle.

21. Oh, I’m sorry Eileen. I hate it when people do that. I won’t do it again! Please delete my comment if that’s easy.

22. All is forgiven, Martin. 😉

23. Fairly straightforward for a Prize puzzle but nonetheless very enjoyable to solve. I looked for a theme but couldn’t find one. I liked the hidden REDDEN, the reverse clue for CURLING STONE, the psychoanalyst having problems for SHRINK-RESISTANT, and Mary’s email in IMMACULATE.

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

24. Woody@17 A 1910 book says ‘ On the coast of Norfolk the name Smee Duck includes several kinds of ducks’. It later has ‘ The Smew, or Smee , properly so called ‘. I can’t find any later reference anywhere. Always Smew.

25. I was three short of a finish when I came here, but spotting SMEE in Eileen’s preamble helped me to see IMMACULATE (doh!). Still couldn’t get DEMOCRAT though – not the first time I’ve failed to see ‘march’=DEMO (double doh!).

    SMEE is indicated as dialect in Chambers, and is largely ignored by Google in favour of smew, which is what I am more familiar with. I needed LARGO to help me get CURLING – ‘Crossword setter’s notes’ was a long way from being helpful as far as I was concerned. This is not the first time I’ve struggled with a Brummie – I guess it’s a wavelength thing.

    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen.

26. This is from the Wiki article on SMEW:

    The term smew has been used since the 17th century and is of uncertain origin. It is believed to be related to the Dutch smient (“wigeon”) and the German Schmeiente or Schmünte, “wild duck.”[9] It is probably derived from smee, a dialectal term for a wild duck.[10][11]

27. 12d IMMACULATE was my last one in. I got it from the definition and crossers then used the anagram fodder to work out what was left for the state. I’m glad I didn’t need it to solve the clue as that would have meant trawling through all 50. Almost as bad as clues that clue “boy” as anything from Abe to Zak.
    25a DEMOCRAT. At first glance I thought
    Brummie was being mean and “one-time” was part of the definition!
    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen

28. Thanks Brummie and Eileen
    If you asked Christians who was born as a result of the Immaculate Conception, I bet a lot would get it wrong!
    I thought 15d referred to Dion and the Belmonts, but it turns out he wasn’t Canadian.

29. A satisfying puzzle, some witty clues, just one unparsed. I recognised curling stone from crossers, but was grateful for Eileen’s help in explaining it. Clever! I watched people curling at the (long-since closed) Aviemore Centre in the late 60s when visiting for post-Christmas skiing, also almost finished), but it also pops up in Winter Olympics. Also liked SCHNAPPS, SHRINK RESISTANT, and IMMACULATE.

30. muffin @28 Quite so! I found myself for a while at university fraternising with a lot of Catholic students (and priests!) and it was astonishing how many did not understand the idea of the Immaculate Conception and got it confused with the Virgin Birth.

31. muffin@28
    I’m no Christian, but I have spent all of my life getting that wrong. So thanks for that, though I have to say it’s an even weirder idea than the one I thought.

32. lenmasterman @31 There is a kind of dogged theo-logic to the theory of the Immaculate Conception which I find, like you as a non-Christian, strangely admirable. According to Christian teaching all of us carry the innate stain (Latin: macula) of Original Sin, which is visited upon us in the moment of our conception. Early Christian theologians therefore theorised that the Virgin Mary, in order to be a fit vessel to later carry the Christ child, must, uniquely among humans, have been conceived miraculously without that stain (i.e. immaculate) by St Jerome and St Anne, her parents. It’s weird if you find Christian theology weird, but it is entirely understandable within that framework.

33. So I guess ‘Curling’ is a crossword setter? Rather unfair I think for Brummie to expect us to know that – or maybe just me, being Canadian.
    Not sure either what the difference, if any, there can be between a ‘reverse anagram’ and a plain one.
    An anagram’s an anagram, and that’s it, right?

34. Grantinfreo@5: there isn’t even a superficial resemblance between hurling (or hurley) and curling, other than that they are both team games.

    I can’t quite see why GO=’crack’ in 19d.

35. poc @34 Have a go at something = have a crack at it.

    {Sorry – I have been a bit overactive during this lunchtime visit to the site. I’ll leave it so someone else to set Jenna straight @33 and go to attend to other things.]

36. Balfour@35 a fellow Canadian might as well do it!

    Jenna@33, a reverse anagram is when the anagram goes in reverse order, from answer to clue. In this case, the answer is CURLING (anagrind) STONE (anagrist) which results in “notes” in the clue. A fiendish device. Hope that makes sense!

37. Mig @36

    Thank you for the explanation, much appreciated. Yes, I see it now.

    So this mysterious ‘Curling’ is not a crossword setter but it’s ‘crossword setter’s “Notes”‘ that is derived from ‘Stone’. A tricky device for sure… but now I am ‘better informed’ (and not ‘wiser’ as my Father always used to say). I was able to guess it from the crossers and of course Curling is very popular here in Canada.

38. Thanks Zoot @24 for smew knowledge.

    I couldn’t parse CURLING STONE and wondered for a while whether the late Michael Curl (aka the setter Orlando) was the key. Curl in G perhaps, for some musical notes. I couldn’t make it work, unfortunately.

39. A couple here I failed to parse, so thanks for the explanations, Eileen. Having, like Woody@38, tried to force in a reference to Orlando (I’d actually Googled “curling crossword setter”), I’m rather embarrassed not to have spotted the rather neat reverse anagram. Nice one, Brummie, amongst a number of other nice ones.

40. Woody @38 and KeithS @39 – thanks for the memory of Orlando, one of my favourite setters and a lovely man – I met him at several S and B gatherings. His pseudonym as a setter for the FT was Cincinnus, Latin for ‘curl’.

41. This one was right up my street, though I needed a couple of days for IMMACULATE, which had me baffled for quite some, to yield; which immediately gave SMEE (a NHO) and DEMOCRAT (ahh we’re not looking for a specific politician then, d’oh!) to complete the puzzle.

    [Thanks to Balfour@32 for explaining IMMACULATE’s etymology. The dogma is pretty bonkers, whichever way you look at it – there seemingly being no justification whatsoever for why her birth should have been different from any other, other than merely “well we need a way to explain why she’s “pure” so we’ll just say it was”. From what Wiki says, it’s pretty controversial even amongst Christians!]

    Faves were probably GOTCHA and CURLING STONE, for which I needs the checkers to give STONE before the penny dropped.

    Thanks both

42. I’m a bit late commenting but I just wanted to say that I thought GOTCHA was brilliant and I think it will go into my personal hall of fame.

    Many thanks Brummie and Eileen.

43. Clever, witty and fun – a very enjoyable way to pass a Saturday afternoon.
    SHRINK-RESISTANT, GOTCHA and QUEENSLANDER made me grin, IMMACULATE was neat, CURLING STONE reminded me of the late and much-missed Linda Smith’s comment that curling was “housework on ice”, and when the penny dropped regarding SCHNAPPS, I giggled so much I spluttered tea down my front.
    Thank you Eileen for the blog, and Brummie for the entertainment.

44. Thanks Martin @13, poc @34, I should have looked it up. It was me with the cognitive ‘assonance’, their rhyming signalled ‘like hurling on ice’ — wrong!

45. Things have quietened down now, I think, so, since very few are likely to see this, a bit of self indulgence…

    Thank you, Wellbeck @43 – after fond memories of Orlando, prompted @38 and 38, you’ve now awakened thoughts of the ‘late and much-missed Linda Smith’. As a huge fan, whenever I saw ASBO appear in a clue – as it did use to, quite often – (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/04/asbos-antisocial-behaviour-orders – I took every opportunity to cite her best-loved quotes: this is the best collection I could find:
    https://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2019/01/29/42176/remembering_linda_smith

46. Well I saw it Eileen. Thanks for sharing, she was great.

47. Thanks, Martin @46 😉

48. Oh Eileen those Linda Smith clips made me laugh out loud!
    Thank you xx

49. Excellent link Eileen, thank you.

    ‘Rugby is a game for men with no fear of brain injury.’ turns out to be sadly prescient.

50. Thank you Eileen. A lovely and very funny woman, whom it is always good to remember.

51. Weirdly, this is the same grid as 29,548 by Brummie with PIPSQUEAK in exactly the same place, and crossing with a word beginning with QUEEN clued as “Rock Band” (QUEEN CONSORT vs QUEENSLANDER). I wasn’t convinced by “Upstart” as a definition.

52. Penny @51 – thanks for that. I see I blogged that one, too (!) but it didn’t ring any bells for me. 😉

53. Hi Eileen

    Apologies for contacting you this way, but I’ve just had an email purporting to come from you, asking if I regularly order from amazon.

    I suspect it’s spam, but would appreciate your confirmation.

    Please reply to the email address you can see her, then delete this post.

    Many thanks

    Simon

54. Simon S @53/Eileen
    I’ve had one too. It seemed to have the right address, but my reply went somewhere entirely different and failed.

55. Probably nobody else will see this at this late date, Eileen, but nobody has asked where “conception” is in the clue for IMMACULATE. The definition seems to be “like Mary’s.’ Mary’s what?

    Thank you once again for an enlightening and witty blog, and for coming back in as called for to chat with the rest of us.

    And thank you for the Linda Smith link, which I’ll watch.

56. Valentine@55 I think you can ignore the apostrophe s, and take the definition to be “Like Mary”. A fairly common device, it’s [Definition] “is” [Wordplay]. That is, [Like Mary] is [email…]etc.

57. Valentine @55 and Mig @56

    I did underline ‘like Mary’ (immaculately conceived) as the definition. 😉

58. Re Simon S @53 and muffin @54 – many thanks, both.

    Please see my comment @63 on today’s Vlad blog
    https://www.fifteensquared.net/2025/09/11/cryptic-crossword-no-29797-by-vlad/#comments

59. Eileen@57 Yes, I noticed that — nicely done! 🙂

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