It’s the Listener dinner weekend puzzle and traditionally it’s an easy ride – but here’s the maestro Twin who can make amazingly complex constructions. So will it be sink or swim for us?
The very short preamble tells us that there is a surplus word in each clue, and their third letters (Twin loves that sort of thing!) give an instruction. That’s it. Start solving.
Happily the solving progressed quite speedily with the extra words well integrated but not too hard to spot. To take 1a as an example: “O boom! A reed’s essential in pieces – these are among woodwind (11, two words)”. “In pieces looks like an anagrind, and is, with O BOOM A REEDS giving OBOES DAMORE, to be found of course among the woodwind. That leaves “essential” as the extra word and S as the first letter of the message. (And yes SHADE does turn out to be its first word.)
We’re off to a good start, but you may have felt like us that the wording of the anagram clue felt a touch contrived: we couldn’t do better but suspect that Twin would have written a different clue unless some constraint was applying. And we do happen to remember that this is the setter who produced a Magpie puzzle in which all the clues had words beginning M A G P I E, and as Gemelo he likes to work with clue constraints too. But what’s going on here? No idea, so we press on.
Eventually the full message emerges as SHADE CHARACTERS SUGGESTED BY TITLE AND CLUE WORDLENGTHS. We’re not much the wiser. The shading is presumably in the grid, so we stare at it – and see the very large number of Ps and Is. We do a trial shading of just those and lo and behold 22/7 appears. Pi!
But what about the ISH and the wordlengths. The PDM comes as we drop off to sleep, and checking in the morning, yes, the whole set of clue word wordlengths gives the set of numbers which are the beginning of those after the decimal point in pi: 14159265359 etc. I’m afraid we’ve left it for someone else to check the whole series, but – Wow!
And… as your blogger realised by accident rather late in the day reading something else quite unrelated, the publication date of 14th March or 3.14 as they say across the pond is Pi Day. Cool!
All that’s left is to remember the highlighting and check that alongside the tea and meerschaum there is – good – a visit to the tavern, so Oenophile Club membership cards in hand we hope Twin and everyone else at the Dinner has a suitably convivial time.