A gentle start to the week as ever. Most of the clues are pretty straightforward, so I’ve only given a few explanations – more can be supplied on request.
Across:
1. GRAFTS. Double meaning.
5. LIME RICK. A limerick has five lines.
11. FAINT-HEARTED (A FRIEND AT THE*).
17. S(CATH)ING.
18. PACK. Wolves is a football team, the pack are rugby forwards.
20. BODY-SNATCHER. CD, but ‘grave’ to me does quickly suggest a cryptic meaning rather than the surface one.
25. TEA DANCE. I guess ‘trip’ here means dance, rather than any drug reference. Tea is old slang for marijuana, but I believe it wasn’t so trippy back in the jazz age.
DOWN:
2. RA PT. The regiment is the Royal Artillery.
3. FAIR FIGHT. A straight definition, really – might have been more cryptic concealed within a phrase.
7. ROTOR. I’m getting bored of palindromes clued with reference to their palindromic nature as the only cryptic element (there’ve been a few recently) – although I must admit this one is nicely phrased.
8. CONVEYANCE. CD – trap = small carriage = conveyance.
12. ELECT ORATE. Not great. I’m not a fan of charades where the word split just hives off the stem of a longer word, playing on the same meaning (‘voters choose’).
16. LION’S DEN. This CD I like – the surface is very neat and misleading, but the cryptic meaning also works nicely.
19. C HOP IN. My other favourite clue – ‘hop in’ = ‘offer of a lift’.
3D: I think you’re being a bit unfair to Rufus here. The ‘normal’ meaning of “Just scrap” is surely ‘only waste material’. Not a very difficult clue, I admit, but it takes some skill to produce a nine-letter cryptic definition clue as neat as this. However, BODY SNATCHER for 20A is pretty obvious, I agree.
Fair point Geoff – there’s a neatness to clue and answer having the same number of letters (4,5).
8D is a good double def no? with CONVEYANCE being both a legal doc and a method of transportation?