Inquisitor 1611: Keep Recycling by Hob

25 comments on “Inquisitor 1611: Keep Recycling by Hob”

1. Home shortly is Hom, a chef

2. Yep, that was a good one. A desperate stab at the girl’s name at 10d gave me a little grief with the endgame – which apart from the Porridge reference required frequent trips to Google and Wikipedia – but apart from that finished without too much ado. FORT is green raised a smile at the close.

3. I spotted STANLEY first, then NORMAN, then FLETCHER. Google gave me the rest. Failed to spot the additional help from the initial letters of the clues.

4. Thank you James #1, I have amended the blog.

5. I wonder if IN A RUT is: ‘groovy sticker is so’ for definition + RU (are you texting) is [contained] in ARUT, so a groovy sticker is in a rut like RU is in a rut.

6. I only managed to stumble on the theme with the “initial help from some of the clues” (thank you Hob) and then quickly completed the crossword with numerous references to Wikipedia with the exception of 10d. I’ve never heard of Netta as a girl’s name and cannot find Nesta in any dictionary. Is this a girl’s name as well? I’m not sure this is entirely fair or are there lots of Nettas and Nestas out there unknown to me. In true cryptic fashion I thought that I was looking for a composer as the scorer so was disappointed not to find anyone which could fit the clue. I also didn’t manage the end of the end game and identify Fortis Green as a shared location and therefore, of course, the title remained a bit of a mystery.

   Thanks to Hihoba (especially for the explanation of the title) and Hob

    

7. Howard L @6: Chambers gives Netta, Nettie, Netty as diminutives of Annette, Antoinette, Janet, Jeanette.

   Thanks to Hihoba for the title (which I didn’t really dwell on) and to Hob on his/her Inquisitor debut. I spotted the two big hints from the initial letters very early on, and so The Kinks and Fletcher were readily apparent. Fairport Convention took a while to dig out, and Fortis Green tied up the loose ends nicely.

   I feel sure that Hihoba would recognise “Meet on the Ledge” and “Si Tu Dois Partir” were he to hear them, even if he didn’t know the performers. (No idea about IN A RUT.)

8. Everything solved except for the Stanley/Nesta bit. Hmm.

9. Thanks HG@7. Still no Nesta though. On a related issue I use the Chambers app and, unlike the paper version, it has never included a list of names. I now find that the latest version of the app doesn’t include the appendices either, so I will have to dust off my very tattered hard copy to be able to find the Greek and Hebrew characters and the chemical elements which seem to crop up so regularly in crosswordland. I could use Wikipedia but it was always so helpful to have a single source. Don’t software developers  know their customer base?

10. I thought this was a well-constructed puzzle with a satisfying endgame.  The initial gridfill was very straightforward: I did much of it in outpatients without access to any resources, paper or online.  The initial letters of the clues pointed the way and it wasn’t long before The Kinks emerged.  I was aware that Fairport Convention also started life in Muswell Hill but while FAIRPORT was easy to spot, CONVENTION required a few alterations before it emerged.

    My only quibble would be the use of the word “altered” in the instructions when what was meant was “replaced by”.  And changing Bould (another North London reference) to Mould was in a slightly different category to the other alterations, as your highlighting makes clear.

    Like you, Hihoba, I couldn’t adequately parse CHEF or IN A RUT, but things seem a little clearer now.

    Thanks to blogger and setter.

     

11. The phase I enjoyed the most was finding where the letters of REMAINS should go, allowing for the fact that a word could have more than one of its letters changed. In my first attempt at this I put S at the beginning of the word LOOT instead of at the end – a plausible solution, but wrong as it turned out.

    It was when I saw NORMAN STANLEY FLETCHER, but with T instead of S, that I realised I had to move the S. I now had all 43 cells accounted for. I saw ISLAND GIRL early on but thought it was a red herring.

    Although I knew nothing about the groups, except for a few catchy songs by The Kinks, I did know something about Porridge, being a fan of it. My loss at this point was not spotting what the initial letters of the clues spelt out – congratulations to Hob for achieving that feat, and sorry I didn’t do it justice. I had to find the Muswell Hill connection common to the two groups and the individual by looking them up (not previously being aware of Fletcher’s former abode).

    I couldn’t guess what a ‘shared location’ of four letters might be and was inclined to give up at that point. I’d done enough looking up of Muswell Hill just to prove the connection. But I thought the setter, rather than make us dig down further into Muswell Hill, might have used a slang or local name for that part of London (N10). I rarely try speculative searches for these puzzles, but this time I decided to put that question to Google. Amazingly, the first search result told me that Muswell Hill is slang for Bill, and in the relevant era the Bill were known as the boys in blue. I liked my solution and found BILL in two places in the grid, albeit not neatly in a line like FORT.

    So I missed FORT (I would never have found Fortis Green or seen its significance) but I enjoyed this puzzle nevertheless.

    Thanks to both Hob and Hihoba.

12. It took me a while to complete the grid and I had the same problem as most in justifying 18A & 7D. However, I am sure that James @1&5 is right – I think the definition for 18A is a bit iffy but the suggested parsing of 7D is ingenious.

    I was grateful for Hob’s “initial help” to get me started on the end game. I had no idea about the Fortis Hill connection, so was also grateful for Wikipedia to help me put the final cherry on the cake. I am wondering whether Hob has a personal connection with Fortis Hill which gave him/her the initial spark for this idea and (to me) fairly obscure link.

    Highly enjoyable with a fiddly but satisfying end game. Thank to H and H.

    PS If Hihoba had not been the blogger, I would be wondering if he/she/they might have provided our setter!

13. A nice puzzle. I filled the grid and saw NORMAN STANLEY FLETCHER and I found the Muswell Hill connection from wiki before I saw the first letter thing. After finishing kicking myself over this, the rest was easy. I like the way the title explanation revealed itself right at the end.

14. I’ll confess to being someone who, if the endgame feels overly demanding, can be quite quick to surrender. But there are some puzzles which are oddly ‘sticky’, and seem to force you to keep trying, and this was one of them. Though I didn’t quite make it to the central fort (I won’t explain where I went, it’ll take too long), I found it a very cunning construction and thoroughly absorbing. The ‘initial’ cluing help was invaluable.

    Many thanks to Hihoba and Hob.

15. A friend kindly sent me this puzzle which I found most enjoyable, as I am a big fan of THE KINKS and familiar with FAIRPORT CONVENTION. I had heard of “Porridge” with Ronnie Barker but had to google FLETCHER to find his character’s full name. I worked out Muswell Hill as the link, decided that green would be the colour due to FORTIS GREEN and a pub called The Green Man (figuring it might have been the one NORMAN STANLEY FLETCHER ran after his release). This led me to colour in the word ERIN in squares that all touched! Wrong!

    I do now appreciate very much the play on words in FORT IS GREEN (and the link to “Recycling” in the title of the puzzle). But I still quite like my answer too, as ERIN seemed to fit as a location and as it is called the Emerald Isle, it made sense to me to colour it in green. I did think it would have been neater if there had been an Irish connection but couldn’t see one.

    I am still not 100% sure that I got all the changes of letters correct but I was impatient to try to move to the end game. So I might have been a bit imprecise with the ones that I figured didn’t relate to the theme solutions. But I found the whole puzzle a lot of fun.

    (Just wondering though about the word “contiguous” – I would have thought it meant that the answer needed to have all squares touching – as mine do in ERIN if you read it anti-clockwise starting at the square to the left of 13. To have the letters for FORT in a line rather than all touching might have been more fairly clued as “adjacent”. Sorry if that sounds a bit like sour grapes.)

    I liked the fact that Hob used the word REMAINS as part of the puzzle – we have certainly heard that word a lot in your recent political news.

    I enjoy Hob’s crosswords in the Independent so it was great to see her as the setter here. Many thanks to Hob and of course to Hihoba (I needed help with some parsing, and obviously to realise that my final answer was actually wrong). I also enjoyed all the comments by other puzzlers.

16. [Alan B@11, I thought your “boys in blue” leading to BILL was also a fun and ingenious alternative.]

17. I should have added that Fairport Convention is named after a house called Fairport, where Simon Nicol’s father had his surgery. The fledgling band used to rehearse upstairs. The house was in Fortis Green Road, as was the house where the Davies brothers lived when growing up. I had the pleasure of seeing Simon Nicol and the current Fairport line-up on their spring tour earlier this year.

18. Thank you, bridgesong#17 for that connection between Fairport Convention and Fortis Green. I had a feeling that the connections were incomplete. I just stumbled on the following section in a wiki article:

    Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks are from Fortis Green. Dave released a solo album titled Fortis Green in 1999.

    The group Fairport Convention started off at the family home of Simon Nicol. The house, Fairport, is on the south side of Fortis Green near the junction with Tetherdown and Fortis Green Road.

    The fictional character Norman Stanley Fletcher of the BBC sitcom Porridge was revealed to be resident of the Fortis Green area in the episode Men Without Women. He was being escorted home from Fortis Green Police station in the direction of Fortis Green Avenue by police officer Sergeant Norris.

19. Interestingly AlanB@11 mentions ISLAND GIRL (which emerges when the E of KEN is changed to I) which is a John Elton, himself a north Londoner, song.

20. Julie
    Welcome to these puzzles and blogs.
    I think I can explain why FORT is in contiguous cells and what ‘contiguous’ means, although there might be some disagreement among setters and solvers.
    What I call the main or first meaning of ‘contiguous’ in dictionaries, as it would apply to two cells in a crossword grid, is ‘touching along a side’. By simple extension, four cells are contiguous if each or any pair of letters is contiguous, as in FORT in the grid and also as in both instances of FLAN formed from the same letter ‘F’.
    There is a further ‘extended’ or ‘loose’ meaning (my descriptions) of ‘contiguous’, namely, ‘touching along a side or at a corner’, and the word BILL in the top right of the grid (just to take a purely random example) is in contiguous cells according to this alternative definition.
    I believe the Inquisitor takes no stand on the definition of ‘contiguous’ in the preambles of puzzles. I was caught out once since I started these puzzles, but never again! From memory, I think the looser definition has been used only twice since I started these puzzles in March last year.
    I hope this helps.

21. Me @20
    That was to ‘Julie in Australia @15’, of course.

22. I enjoyed this.  I got most of the end-game, thanks to Hihoba and commenters who for pointing the numerous Fortis Green connections and tit-bits that passed me by.

23. Thanks Hob – this was great fun.

    We only started looking at this on the flight back home. The grid fill was fairly quick but we then had some difficulty. Bert noticed one group and Joyce spotted the other. With no internet access we had no way of finding the link to Fletch. We completely missed the ‘initial’ advice!

    We had spotted FORT and realised it was linked to the title but it wasn’t until we had access to the internet that the last piece fell into place.

    Thanks Hihoba.

24. My thanks to Hob and Hihoba. Coming in late, I feel almost ashamed to admit what luck I had with this one. Guessing that a “thematic shared location” with an associated colour might well be a GREEN, and seeing MUSWELL HILL in initials of the early across clues, set me Googling for a Green in that area of London — quickly leading to the Wikipedia article on FORTIS GREEN, which sort of spelt it all out. But finding Fletcher’s full name took a little longer.

25. PS: Since there were no instructions to highlight anything other than FORT, I was surprised that the published solution on Saturday 21 September showed all the thematic cells highlighted and mentioned FORT as “the only colour-specific highlighting” without the expected formula “other highlighting is for information only” — implying that all the other highlighting was also required.

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