Dave Hennings’ Crossword Database tells us that this will be Hawk’s fifth Listener crossword. How buff is it going to be?
The previous four have been complex grids with challenging themes and demanding sets of clues as well as imaginative end games so we know what to expect. But what is Hawk telling us about his evening entertainment. And is it over the watershed?
Clothing had to be removed from extra words in 37 clues and would form two cryptic clues to key players (each five letters). Old fuddy-duddies that we are we decided that this was to be their first and last letters… Just working out which words were extra was difficult enough since the vocabulary in Hawk’s grid was not of the ‘Stripey horse (5)’ category. ‘Look in Darwin’s singular monocle (5)’ (giving SQUIZ) or ‘Draw somebody zealously and [forgo] gallery alignment (6)’ (giving SYZYGY) are just two examples (that also earned smiles – a setter had to use those words one of these days as well as his TROPAEOLACEAE and TAUTOMETRICAL). Jumping ahead we saw later how challenging the grid construction must have been and some of those words will have been forced – but putting in the long ones was perhaps a deliberate and wise ploy to keep their word length up.
With the gird filled, we needed to have identified almost all of the extras to piece out two clues from the series of first and last letters, and they were indeed ‘cryptic’ clues. MARCHES COULD BE PASSING NEW LIGHT AIRCRAFT. That was a real head-scratcher until we twigged that the ‘Marches’ could be MONTHS and if we ‘passed’ or removed N(ew) we were left with MOTHS (was his light aircraft a HAWK MOTH – the source of the idea?)
LOVE TO RECALL CLIP OF WARDROBE MALFUNCTION. What sort of surface reading is that? Hawk’s eye was still twinkling… (Or if it’s our own, try to forget!) But of course, FLAME (love) is hidden reversed in that clue, and what do moths idiomatically do? Fly into the naked flame. BOOGIE could obviously become BOUGIE (well obvious once you’ve looked up synonyms for candle) and we had to embellish it with a simple drawing ‘that extends into the central cell’ – the wick and flame. And the moths? We needed Mrs Bradford to list 170 of the things and give us the seven thematic words. LUNA, IO, EGGAR, MAGPIE, OWLET, CARPET and VENEER. Poor moths!
Wht an astonishing compilation, Hawk, with those eight letters that needed changing symmetrically placed! We have to raise a glass to that and it initially looked like ‘Cold beer’ but then we were given ‘Choice Cognac’ and not surprisingly, mixing those, the following clue produced ‘Drunk clansmen’. Cheers, Hawk! A ‘wicked’ puzzle to remember.
Thanks Dash. I haven’t written a setter’s blog for this one, but you’re right that Hawk was a moth here – it had no choice, poor thing.
The idea came from the Oxford Book of Idioms and the imagery was inspired by the Jethro Tull song “Moths”:
“The leaded window opened to move the dancing candle flame
And the first moths of summer suicidal came…”