Congratulations to Charybdis on a 20th Listener puzzle, spread over nearly 30 years! Themes over such a period of time reach far and wide. Last time had us looking up The Merchant of Venice. What this time, and indeed What to Send?
Once we had stopped speculating as to whether an empty envelope, blank grid, set of ashes or tip for the Guineas sold be submitted, we digested the prologue. A carte blanche with clues in alpha order of entries, plus six unclued presumably thematic ones – their location hidden by the carte blanche (which is presumably why it was adopted). Once we have the grid order of the entries, their clues’ first letters give us an instruction and also tell us how to locate a special entry whose “middle three letters are an abbreviation for a title whose English translation is the puzzle’s six-letter theme word”. ¿Qué? All of course will be revealed.
Looking at entry lengths is a good place to start a carte blanche of this sort. The grid is asymmetric and the clues are not in normal order so there is no pattern to be deduced, but the single 13-length clue stood out like a sore thumb especially as it has to go on the top row. Happily it was also an easy solve with “faulty facial recognition” as a definition with only one answer – PROSOPAGNOSIA. Putting that in gave a good leg-up to start filling in other adjacent answers, and generous clueing meant that our first pass solved about 30 with a good number entered in the top part of the grid especially.
At that point it was time to stand back and try and see what was going on. ?ANY was looking like an unclued entry in the second row, and PIERROT was looking possible in column 11. Send in the Clowns! A visit to Mrs Bradford produced BUFFOON, GRACIOSO, AUGUST and COCO to fill some other likely unclued entries, and we were well on our way home.
Checking the emerging clue message and filling the gaps then produced
ONE ACROSS
COLOUR EVERY THEME WORD LETTERED CELL
Neither was a surprise. But just what did that convoluted phrase about the colouring mean? The six clown entries only added up to 36. (A trap for the unwary …) Oooh ‘eck: forget the clown words: highlight the letters of the theme word CLOWNS – and smile! That lifted the puzzle to a whole new level – what a splendid construction!
Favourite clue – and one of the last to be solved properly: “Vulgar argument over Mike following son – being in legless state (8) = SLOWWORM! Such a great definition that had hoodwinked for ages. “Career after Burns’s wedding, perhaps vocally comparable To a Mouse? (6)” [BROOSE = “BRUISE” (mouse) and “Right to consume primarily cereals – Ian might use barley for this (5)” [TRUCE = barley] showed a neat hand in deception too.
A family member is typing up the history of an admiral ancestor at the moment so we will accept “Order on board…” as a tot of rum and be glad to keep Charybdis in the Oenophile Club. (The pseudonym BT is derived from “sea whirlpool” – a near-homonym of C L Poole. https://bestforpuzzles.com/people/c.html)
Thankyou!
PS We hope those we know who actually suffer from Prosopagnosia (it can accompany autism) find all this amusing rather than disturbing – but what a witty use of that theme.