With Christmas Dinner still in our tummies, here is Ifor to serve up another special meal for us. Firsts and Seconds – but what happened to the pudding? Taste and seeThe preamble at first looked a little indigestible but actually proved straightforward – and gave us more to chew on than the simple “extra letters spell a message”. That was true for the down clues, giving us a hint to the identity of the unclued 23a which was obviously the key to the puzzle, but those letters then acted as indexes to the across clues (using first or second letters after them) to the locations of two of the mystery person’s “attributes” (aka achievements as we discovered). Names of four people who shared the attributes were finally to be highlighted in the grid.
The main course was (of course) solving the clues, and the plain nature of the acrosses and catching Ifor in a seasonally generous mood meant that solving them was quite a speedy process, and with them in place the downs were not hard either, and that meant that the messages could fall into place easily as well: we were looking for someone who had been MINISTER OF FUEL AND POWER and who had had achievements linked to STOCKHOLM and ANTWERP.
So to the pudding. Google soon led us to PHILIP NOEL-BAKER (the hyphen was needed as a “character” in the indexing so we added it in the grid) who remarkably not only held the government position but won a silver medal in the 1500m at the Antwerp Olympics and received the Nobel Peace Prize – the only person to achieve both of the latter. A bit more Googling led us to QUASIMODO and CHAMBERLAIN as fellow Nobel laureates and PADDOCK and GUILLEMOT as fellow Olympic medallists.
All that was left to do was to add the locations STOCKHOLM and ANTWERP.
At first sight no drinks were served but L’Escargot (21a) will surely have made a decent provision and the clerical half of DASH can assure you that despite its name LOW SUNDAY (the one after Easter) is rarely a dry day after the abstinence of Lent. So Ifor will continue to be a most welcome guest at the Listener Oenophile Club, though we insist that he is sent into the kitchen from time to time to cook us up some more treats. Thanks Ifor, and Cheers and a Happy New Year to all our fellow-solvers.