Guardian 28,396 / Crucible

98 comments on “Guardian 28,396 / Crucible”

1. So many great surfaces. The slight lapse in Swiss punctuality provoking a complaint, the artistic French prison graffiti, the old-fashioned ‘protection in bed’. By comparison the surface for 1ac seemed a bit odd at first – how can a diary be both old and current? – but then I wondered if it was a clever allusion to this Sunday Times exclusive. (Poor old Hugh!)

   Also loved the young Tory psycho and the BLOOD COUNT.

   Thanks Crucible and Eileen.

2. What a wonderful crossword. Two triple definitions and one including word play! Thanks Crucible.

   And thank you to Eileen; I certainly couldn’t parse PANCREAS without your help.

   Happy Thursday everyone.

3. Thanks Crucible and Eileen
   Excellent crossword – challenging but fun. Not too hard to complete the grid, but some of the parsing was difficult. I took ages to remember THE ROBE (marginally unfair?), and I never did parse PANCREAS.
   LOI PROBLEM – I took too long to see the right sort of concert.

4. Very odd puzzle – sat looking at it for ages with just FATTY written-in thinking that I might as well give-up but then other than one DNK (GAMETES), most of the rest came together because the wordplay was so precise.

   Guessing that the theme was related to terms in biology/medicine but not having any knowledge in that area wouldn’t like to say.

   Only one chuckle this morning – BLOOD COUNT.

   Thanks to Crucible and Eileen!

5. DNF thanks to acorn. Never heard of mast as the fruit of certain trees. Otherwise this was lovely fun. Thanks Crucible and Eileen.

6. Great puzzle! Eileen, I reckon REAR is a quadruple definition rather than triple. Bring up / Republican auditor / behind / back. I know one setter is a surgeon, but have checked and see that it’s not Crucible. Favourites were PANCREAS, BLOOD COUNT and CATARRH. Hadn’t heard of The Robe, but THROB couldn’t be much else once the crossers were in. Many thanks to Crucible for the workout, and to Eileen as ever.

7. An excellent and very enjoyable crossword. The BLOOD COUNT was great. 25d THROB also raised a smile, and I really liked the surface of 23a, “Hero fell among stars”.

   Many thanks Crucible and Eileen.

8. Thanks both. I thought “The Robe” was reasonably famous (first CinemaScope release).
   The ACORN=mast connection rang a tiny bell, albeit in a cupboard down a long corridor.

9. I also liked THROB and BLOOD COUNTRY, but I only knew gumbo as something to eat in New Orleans, rather than an alternative name for okra.

   PSYCHO is appropriate, as the Conservative government is a bloody shower!

   Thanks to Crucible and Eileen

10. Couldn’t parse throb, yr fave clue, Eileen, having forgotten about The Robe, nor the one before, vaguely wondering whether cloche was a nickname for a contraceptive device. Otherwise, though, a gentl-ish puzzle, lots of fun. Read the riot act is such a part of the language that it felt odd to remember that it was actual Act. Also forgot about gumbo/okra, so while I say ‘gentle-i,sh’, I wasn’t exactly on top of the parsing. Hey ho, thanks C and E.

11. Thanks for the blog – ADIPOSE defeated my parsing, stuck on ADIT for opening…

    Precisely clued puzzle, good surfaces, a bit above my pay grade.

12. drofle @6 – I can’t see R EAR (Republican auditor) as a definition.

    [Philistine is the heart surgeon.]

13. As with Imogen yesterday, I sometimes find Crucible hard to break into but this one just solved and solved and solved. I’m no student of matters medical so it was nice when slightly obscure solutions like CORTISONE, ADIPOSE TISSUE and COCHLEA came to mind. The linked COCHLEA and CLOCHE were an intriguing challenge and lots of smiles with PRICELESS, INCISOR, STEM CELLS, CATARRH, THROB and PSYCHO. Close runner up for COTD was ACCENT: I looked at Grave and thought wine (before remembering there’s an ‘s’), burial, serious and the penny only dropped when I came back to it.

    But top prize is for the humble ACORN: beautifully constructed and with such a clever definition. Watchers of Autumnwatch etc may have picked up on the fact that last year was a mast year during which certain species of tree (last year it was oak) produce bumper crops as a survival strategy. For those who haven’t come across it before, it’s a fascinating bit of science with the huge outstanding question – given that it seems to happen on a regional scale (as in the whole of Europe) – how do the trees co-ordinate?

    Thanks Crucible and Eileen

14. Eileen @12 – Oh, I see!

15. PostMark @13 how do the trees co-ordinate?
    Using WhatSap?

16. I sincerely hope this puzzle wasn’t the upshot of Crucible’s last meeting with his GP.

    Some lovely definitions here: BLOOD COUNT, ACORN and COCHLEA were a treat. Am I correct in thinking the Riot Act is still nominally extant, but impossible to use properly in this day and age?

    Thanks to Crucible and Eileen.

17. Biology theme was very hard for me, and I needed help from google for the GK. Solved SW corner last.

    Favourites: BLOOD COUNT, BIOLOGY, PANCREAS, PRICELESS, ACORN, GAMETES, ACHILLES.

    New: Sir Henry Tate, English sugar merchant for 21d (never hear df him, but I have been to Tate Modern and Tate Britain); ADIPOSE TISSUE; CLOCHE = a small translucent cover for protecting or forcing outdoor plants; COCHLEA (loi).

    Did not parse: THROB. I am more familiar with classic old movies of the 1930s and 1940s. I think I avoided most of the 1950s movies, which might have sometimes turned up as late night movies 40 (or even 50) years ago.

    Thanks, Crucible and Eileen.

18. Hi Boffo @15 – I had the same lurking suspicion but my research in Brewer’s revealed that it was superseded by the 1986 Public Order Act qv.

19. Enjoyed this very much.

    Only problems were THROB (never heard of The Robe) and ACORN (thought it might be another name for the crows nest)

20. This is probably more helpful!

21. Intriguing re mast years, PM @13… the Norfolk Island Pines here do the same. Every few years they release a blizzard of seeds, the event is city-wide and there is nothing unique weatherwise or otherwise, so what pulls the trigger?

22. Re the Riot Act, I grew up in a Midlands town where it was read out early in the last century. I recall the associated concept that the sovereign was not subsequently allowed to stay overnight in a place in which the Riot Act had been read. I can’t find reference to this in research this morning. Does this ring bells with anyone? (And after being – correctly – ticked off for not coming back to acknowledge someone answering a query of yesterday, thanks in advance to anyone who comments 😀 )

23. Found this tough especially parsing so thanks Eileen for clarifying gumbo, press, the robe and the mast (I had guessed an acorn to be some sort of knobbly thing on top of a ship’s mast) – and thanks PostMark@13 for your link, despite being a fan of Seasonwatch I missed that altogether.
    Speaking of altogether and thinking of 3D, might be about time to dig out my old dvd of Drowning by Numbers (great soundtrack too).
    I don’t quite see MEDIATION = NEGOTIATING (former needs an “IN” unless someone can help me) but otherwise a lot of clever/enjoyable clues, favourite CATARRH whose surface reminds me of audible tutting on the platform here when a train is even one minute late, thanks Crucible.

24. BLOOD COUNT, PSYCHO and THROB were PRICELESS. A really tough solve but very clever.
    The Public Order Act of 1986 is a legal minefield and is continually amended in line with society’s changing priorities: it is certainly very topical at the moment.

    Ta Crucible & Eileen

25. [gif @21: the way Chris Packham outlined the cycle added a further layer of depth to the dynamic, beyond that highlighted in the article. I recall it’s something like this:

    Mast Year: bumper crop so the existing predator population is sated and surplus seeds can survive and germinate. A further consequence is survival through the winter of a greater number of predators.

    Following Year: predators reproduce leading to a boom in population. Trees produce a normal crop. Insufficient food leads to a crash in predator numbers. Few seeds survive but that doesn’t matter as the seedlings that germinated in spring are now growing.

    Following year: significantly reduced predator population begins gradual regrowth. Trees produce a normal crop. Predators don’t eat all seeds so some survive to germinate.

    And so on until the next mast year. Apparently the cycles for oak and beech in Europe are roughly 6/7 years. But it still doesn’t answer the ‘trigger’/communication question.]

26. This slipped in very nicely this morning, with just an uncertainty about the parsing of last one in GUMBOIL. Root or gum infected? I’m actually off to the dentist in half an hour, hoping for nothing untoward myself…

27. Gazzh @23 – you need to read ‘negotiating’ as a verbal noun, rather than a participle. I think they’re interchangeable in a sentence, e.g. ‘After some negotiating / mediation, an agreement was reached’. (I’m taking it that you meant ‘former needs an “ING”?)

    All the best at the dentist’s, Ronald. 😉

28. Thanks to Crucible for an enjoyable stroll after yesterday’s slog, and to Eileen for setting out clearly what my brain mostly lurched at wildly.

29. I’ve usually given up for the week by this point, but first Imogen and now Crucible have kept me in the game. I hope Crucible hasn’t gone soft because they’re feeling a bit poorly, after that little list – although with a background in biology I had an unfair advantage on this one.

    For those wondering about tree communication, plants will pump out all sorts of chemicals to signal to each other that they’re under attack, and under the soil there’s good evidence that roots are in contact with each other – to the point where even trees of different species apparently provide mutual support via something jokingly referred to as the “wood-wide web”. There’s also a theory that the real reason leaves turn colour in Autumn is a signal rather than simply the left-overs once the nutrients are reabsorbed, though to whom and why the trees are messaging I never did discover. The idea that trees can coordinate a heavy crop to overload herbivores certainly isn’t fanciful.

    Ta all for the diversion, and for parsing the unparsed

30. Thank you Eileen@27, that’s very clear and works for me (I couldn’t get past thinking IN MEDIATION = NEGOTIATING as in “the parties were xxx until the early hours”).
    [And thanks again PostMark@25, brings to mind early programming exercises (simultaneous/differential/difference equations, I forget exactly what) on populations of foxes and rabbits, but this has an extra dimension.]

31. A fun puzzle, even if it did bring back memories of too many BLOOD COUNTS. Fortunately they meant that I didn’t need the STEM CELL treatment. [Penfold@15 I’m not sure about Whatsap, but apparently the wood-wide web is a real phenomenon. It’s all to do with fungi]

32. PostMark @13 & 25, Ben+T @29 and Petert @31
    The World Wood Web. Is that just another name for the Internut?

33. This the best week I can remember. Another excellent challenge. Thanks both.

34. [Penfold @15: missed that so thanks to Petert @31: 😀 The phenomenon has been around for millenia though so what preceded social media? Trunk calls? Pigeon post?]

35. Hi PostMark @22 – I’m afraid I couldn’t find anything relevant to what you mentioned but you gave me a reasonable excuse not to do anything else for half an hour!

    Many thanks for all the interesting mast information – and to BenT @29 for your input. I remember hearing about tree communication on the radio a while ago – fascinating!

36. [Eileen @35: they’re communicating on the radio??? ]

37. [PostMark @34 Yes, then more recently they’ve branched out into using tree-mail. I believe Pineterest is also quite poplar.]

38. PostMark @34 According to Eric von Daniken it was people from MySpace

39. Thanks ever so, Crucible and Eileen. I missed the theme, though all the theme words were ones I knew. I couldn’t parse THROB, so thanks for that, and needed a touch of the check button for my LOI, PROBLEM. I’ve heard of the Proms, but they’re not top of mind, so I tried various vowels after R in _R_BLE_ and when O didn’t disappear Bob was my uncle.

    It’s news to me that okra is a tropical plant — it grows in the southern US, which is warm but not exactly the tropics. I enjoyed many surfaces.

40. Very enjoyable, though CORTISONE defeated me. Failed to see the triple def for NOTICE and spent ages looking for non existent wordplay: likewise REAR. I had CELLS and BLOOD for some time before the rest of their clues. Didn’t know GUMBO as a plant, only as a stew.

41. Grand Cru
    Difficulty 7 quality/enjoyment 9+
    What more could you want?

42. Had anyone noticed a chill, a corn, tic, ear, tissue, otic. Plus all the obvious ones from a biology syllabus. Great week now for Paul tomorrow!

43. A great crossword indeed – hard to pick just one favourite but 17a would probably top my list

    Thanks to Crucible and Eileen

44. The clearly apparent theme helped me significantly in what would have been a really tough wrangle with the wordplay: so ADIPOSE TISSUE, COCHLEA, and GAMETES went in fairly easily once my brain was aligned biologically/medically. With the opening checker of 21d as ‘L’, I wasted far too much time doggedly trying to make Lyle work for the sugar magnate, before the “Doh!” moment arrived.
    An enjoyable solve. Thanks to Crucible and to our blogger today.

45. Over-familiarity with sugar producers, and the initial L in 21d, led me to try out words beginning Lyle. Thankfully that wild goose chase did not last too long. Otherwise, a bit held up on the W side until I found out that gumball is not a tropical plant but gumbo is.

    [michelle @17, Tate and Lyle were Victorian entrepreneurs who owned rival sugar factories in east London. The art collection of the former became the kernel of the gallery that bears his name. The two firms merged to become Tate & Lyle in the1920s, which still exists, albeit now under US ownership. It’s one of the most familiar brand names in the UK, and has a virtual monopoly on the production of cane sugar from the Caribbean, delivered direct to its wharf on the Thames right beside its refinery.]

46. Re mast years. Apparently periodic cicadas also coordinate, emerging together either every 17 years or every 13 years. It seems not to be a coincidence that both these numbers are prime, because this means that the two varieties emerge together very infrequently — only every 221 years.

47. [PM @ 25, ta for the Packham synopsis. As you say, the ‘how’ is still a ?. Amongst the great post-Enlightenment successes, I do so love the odd unfathomable, like quantum entanglement, acupuncture anaesthesia and the, er, social media of plants. (I see that Sheldrake junior, Mr Morphic Resonance’s son, has recently published about the funginet; hey ho)]

48. Cedric at 42 – I did! Also spotted a nit in monitor, though that might be stretching the theme a bit too far. Great puzzle.

49. Abelmoschus esculentus Is the only plant I know with four common names: okra, ladies’ fingers, gumbo and bhindi. Okay, the last one is probably more familiar to regular diners in Indian restaurants.

50. A most enjoyable puzzle, even though there were a couple I couldn’t parse, missing TARRY and not being familiar with THE ROBE. Getting virtually all the answers to have some link to the theme was a tour de force. Thanks to Crucible, and thanks as ever to Eileen for the blog including the parsings of those I had missed.
    PostMark@13, grantinfreo @ 10, Penfold @15 and others – actually being serious about the “Wood Wide Web”, there is an excellent account of this in Robert Macfarlane’s absolutely brilliant book Underland (an incredible £6.15 on Amazon, and worth every penny), starting at p 87. It appears that there does exist a class of fungi which send out very fine underground threads which link trees to one another, passing nutrients and chemical “signals” to and fro. Indeed, if you buy bare-root fruit trees, you can also get powdered mycorrhizal fungus with which to treat the roots before planting.
    The nickname “the wood-wide web” comes from a paper published in Nature in 1997 by the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard.
    And (pace Petert @38) that’s about as far from Eric von Daniken as it gets.

51. Brilliant puzzle. I’d never heard of The Robe but it had to be THROB. Top clue from a long list of favourites was ACORN.
    To add to the tree communication conversation it seems fungi also play a big part – Entangled Life by Martin Sheldrake is a fascinating read (well it was to me).
    Thanks to Crucible for a cracker and Eileen for the excellent blog.

52. Sorry ginf@49 and NeilH@50 – you posted whilst I was typing.

53. Good crossword; nice to see some science/medicine for a change.

    I don’t think the ‘controversial’ in the clue to 19 is needed; that surely only applies to embryonic STEM CELLS. Otherwise, adult STEM CELLS are used in cancer therapy etc.

    I was myzzled by ‘the large swelling on root’ – nice clue. I luckily remembered the mast definition from some previous crossword; that helped with ACORN, another that I particularly liked.

    Thanks Crucible and Eileen.

54. I’m not sure it quite works, but given the 4-way interpretation of REAR, I was trying to parse NOTICE that way too. You can be put on notice, and notice is a kind of board.

55. [jvh@ 46: The periodic cicadas was something I was very interested in when I was looking the use of prime numbers in music a couple of weeks ago – Messiaen used prime number extensively such as in the Quartet for the End of Time. I’d not heard of “tree masting” before so started off on the track of wondering if the masts followed a similar prime sequence and hence have now spent hours learning that this has been considered but dismissed. DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.2360 is a good starting point!

    Yet again, I am indebted to 225 for not only the incredible breadth of knowledge but the way it gives one the virtual kick-up-the-bum to go and find new stuff out!

    I do, of course, find this to be… wait for it….. TREE-MENDOUS!]

56. [Dicho @49
    You can do much better than that. Try Wild Arum, for instance!]

57. [muffin @56: thanks so much for that. Incredible. 21 and the entry says ‘…including…’ so there must be more. That led me to the RHS site which lists about 40! I particularly like Kitty-come-down-the-lane.]

58. Only just caught up (having watched two film previews this morning!)
    Nothing to add except my appreciation of a great puzzle from Crucible and of the usual meticulous blog from Eileen.

59. Very nice puzzle. I was a bit cranky about “short time” for t, since “time” alone is standard for t and “short time” is often used for other things. But then again, I wasn’t about to get that one before I got all the crossers and had to reverse engineer the parsing.

60. Lovely puzzle. Thanks Crucible, and Eileen for an excellent blog as usual.

    Nothing to add, but for those interested in tree communication try “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. (Sorry – copying and pasting not working on my phone, but easily found).

61. Muffin @56 [My mistake- should have written edible plants. Isn’t Wild Arum poisonous? Bitter almonds is as far as I go in this regard. ]

62. Thanks to Crucible and Eileen. Needed the blog to understand ACORN and THROB. Should have looked up the dictionary for alternative meanings of mast I suppose, but would never have got THROB as the THE ROBE predates even me, and I cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called young anymore.

    As an aside, I wonder why there are so many drug references in the Guardian crossword? E, for example, could also be clued as ‘energy’, or ‘irrational’ or even ‘transcendental’ (although I suspect these last two might provoke howls of protest).

63. Familiarity with the BIOLOGY/medical theme assisted my solving immensely because I found a good bit of the parsing — CATARRH, THROB, ADIPOSE TISSUE among others — too dense for my abilities. As a result I nearly finished this gem except for ACORN and GUMBOIL. Favourites included MEDICATION, ACCENT, RIOT ACT, MONITOR, and LACTATE. Thanks to both.

64. [Dicho @61
    I thought that you might have meant edible. However they are basically in different languages. I expect you could get lots of different names if you took enough languages!]

65. matematico @62 – I take your point about E = ecstasy but I thought it was particularly apt today. ‘Biblical epic’ and Tablets immediately called to mind Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments – which is almost as far back as The Robe!

66. How does es = art please ?

67. MB @55 What does the sequence of numbers as the “starting point” of your post portend?

    I clicked on the link for Wild Arum and found that 1) one of its names was “jack in the pulpit” and 2) that it was an Old World plant from Asia and Europe. How’s it that I remember jack in the pulpit from woodlands (a favorite word of mine, I’ve just realized) in the Hudson Valley of my childhood. Turns out that there’s a North American plant of that name, and that the native peoples of the region used to eat the taproot, which is only edible if you dry it for a year, roast it for an hour and then grind it up — how does anybody ever discover this sort of thing?

68. Sorry, for the hard of thinking how is press = cupboard?

69. [Muffin @64 True enough. Can I be excused if I narrow it down to edible plants and in my admittedly old copy of Chambers?]

70. phil elston @66: it’s “art in French”, as in “tu es” meaning “thou art”.

    HoofIt @68: Chambers has for “press”, “a cupboard or shelved closet”. Anyone who has worked in the Civil Service will know it – the large metal cupboards in our offices were always called presses.

71. phil elston

    tu es = you are (singular, familiar in French) = thou art

72. ooh sneaky. Tx !

73. Thanks jim@70 comprendez…

74. Lord Jim @70 = you pressed ahead and beat me to it.

    A linen press is also an old fashioned word for a clothes cupboard.

75. phil elston @66 – the clue has ‘art in French’. (‘Tu es’ is the second person singular of the French verb ‘to be’, equivalent to the archaic ‘(thou) art’ in English. As I said in the blog, it crops up fairly often, so it’s worth filing away.

    HoofItYouDonkey @68 – PRESS = cupboard is in Collins and Chambers but I hadn’t met it until I lived for a while in Northern Ireland (where Crucible lives. 😉 )

76. What a lot of crosses!

77. [Eileen @76: a press of PRESSES and a sibilance of ‘es’s.]

78. Yep Eileen-we had our fresh towels and linen in the hot press in Belfast

79. AlanC@78 Same here, I always thought of press as a linen cupboard but Lord Jim has another version as well.

80. [Just in case anyone is still interested, I’ve added a further comment about ‘octopi’ to yesterday’s blog @94.]

81. [Valentine @67; Oh, sorry – I’m in mad academic writing mode and just automatically cited via the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) number.

    It’s a short-hand way of getting to papers, journals, articles. Just prefix with https://doi.org/ and it should take you to the reference. Various referencing tools are able to use the DOI directly so that when you’re writing (lying) about something interesting (boring and irrelevant) you don’t have to go through all the malarkey of writing out the reference.

    Sorry – it was me being a) lazy and b) presumptive.]

82. 17a – just brilliant, thanks Crucible

83. MaidenBartok@81 Thanks. Your answer was neither boring nor irrelevant, but took me down a new corridor I’d never known about.

84. Thanks Crucible and Eileen.

    Can someone explain the middle of the three/triple definition in 24a please.

    Surely I’ve been given THE sack but given MY notice. If I told someone I was giving them “the notice” they wouldn’t think they were being sacked? Doesn’t work for me (no pun intended!)

85. Very nice. I thought ACORN was very clever. Pleased to spot the triple def + wordplay for REAR, but I missed the same in NOTICE. Also had trouble seeing the PANCREATIC parse for a while.
    This did suggest to me that Crucible may have had a recent medical issue that inspired the puzzle. If so, hope he is well on the mend now.
    Thanks, Crucible and Eileen.

86. Eric @84: Given notice = given the sack. Good enough?

87. Thanks, drofle @86 – yes, perhaps I shouldn’t have included ‘one’s’: the expression is ‘give notice’. 😉

88. PS: I think I was perhaps thinking of being given one’s cards, which goes back a long way.

89. Ben T @29 and others.
    [The reason that the autumn colours are so vivid is that it acts as very strong signal to the parasites and predators that the tree is in excellent health. Something I remembered from a superb BBC series, A year in the life of an Oak Tree. All that has been discussed here regarding chemical signals and symbiotic relationships with fungi explained in great detail. Brilliant time lapse sequences too. Seem to have been posted on Youtube, released 2017 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06fq03thttps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06fq03t]

90. [For those interested seeing predator/prey models in action, have a look at Netlogo site, and choose the sheep wolves model from the drop down list, under Biology. Press Set up and then Go. Play with the parameters to see what may happen]

91. [Taffy @89: I remember it well – fascinating programme. Unfortunately it’s no longer available on iplayer, so the BBC link doesn’t work – at least not for me. But as you say it’s on YouTube as The Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor (I’m sure it’s the same thing). It’s 1½ hours long, split into two parts, here and here.]

92. [Thanks Dave Ellison@90 for a more sophisticated version of what I remembered, Taffy@89 and everyone earlier for lots of food for thought and more reading up to do, which will keep me busy over the next few wet weekends!]

93. [Thanks essexboy @91. I “sort of” got it out there, you finished the job superbly. The BBC as it was meant to be and hopefully can still be]

94. Another late comment which no one will see, but it needs to be said:

    I suspect that there a correlation between the quality of a crossword and the quality of the comments that follow it. Crucible blessed us with a gem, and the commenting community responded in kind. You folks have provided enough rabbit holes for me to go down to keep me busy for days on end. This site is blessed with erudition, humour and congeniality like no other that I have encountered on the internet(nut?). Thanks to Crucible for the excellent puzzle, Eileen for exemplifying the true spirit of 225, and to the commenters for the stimulating fun.

95. An enjoyable crossword. LOI PRICELESS and I had to do a word search on the crossers, D’oh! I had to check that THe ROBe was a biblical film, it was before I was born (just!).

96. PhilInLivi 95. I couldn’t get PRICELESS either. Suffering from brain-fade and couldn’t see ‘rocks’=ICE (doh) and had forgotten about PRESS=’cupboard’. Huge number of words fit those crossers: wreckless, frockless, trackless, grockles-y, ok not a huge number after all.

97. Belatedly, thanks Taffy @89 – intuitively that makes a kind of sense

98. You’re very welcome Ben T. I’d very much recommend that you find some time to watch the two episodes that EssexBoy @91 gave the links to. I expected some bland stuff that added little to our knowledge. It was of an altogether different dimension.
    Cellomaniac. Good to see you back. I was the cause of some distress to you a while back. I’m pleased to see you here again. I’ve kept away because of the hurt I caused, not intentionally but obviously it happened.
    Hope Anna returns too. I’ll stay in the background, but really appreciate this site. Big shout to Gaufrid, Eileen and regular contributors here.
    Once again, I am sincerely sorry for having disrupted this community. Please forgive me.

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