Guardian Cryptic 29,567 by Vulcan

86 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,567 by Vulcan”

1. Thankyou PeterO. I agree. Vulcan in top form. Love it. Had to to look up a few bits of UnKnown GK. Tod for fox, and Ketch (ghoulish reading for my Monday breakfast).
   STRIPE: I confess to looking up collective nouns for zebras. I got herd, dazzle and harem, before my morning coffee kicked in.
   PERSEID my LOI. Was thinking about parts of a calculator (summer) and tried all sorts of things with RA ……. IN for the shower. This clue was probably bordering on being unfair, or certainly in a higher category of cryptics, difficult wordplay and perhaps unknown GK for def. But once I got it I really liked it. Per se, in itself. Or course! Wiki tells me the meteor shower is commonly in August, late summer northern hemisphere.

2. And I commend Vulcan for his sensitive cluing of MENTAL BREAKDOWN and the neighbouring HOSPITALISATION.

3. Thanks for LOI KETCHUP, PeterO; I would never have parsed that. Other than that, I found this a quicky, but some on the Guardian site thought otherwise. I didn’t know MEZE.

   Thanks Vulcan

4. Yes, I was one of those hoping for something not too challenging to start the week and found this hard going; as sometimes happens on Monday, more Imogen than Vulcan. I might have heard of the ‘hangman’ (probably not) but the answer to 4d went in from the def and I only just remembered the word PERSEID, though not what sort of ‘shower’ it was. Never heard of DELUSIVE as a word, so that was another hold up. With ‘The Swiss state’ def and a couple of difficult anagrams to add to the mix, this was getting towards the difficult end of the crossword spectrum for me, and I was reassured that some (though not all) commenters on the Guardian site agree, as Dave Ellison @3 points out.

   Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO

5. My geography precluded knowledge of a tod and Goodwood, but a little help from the web got me there. I didn’t find Jack Ketch though, and I don’t think I’ve heard the expression OFF THE WALL. Is it familiar to my fellow Antipodeans?

   Nice puzzle, thanks Vulcan & PeterO.

6. As PeterO has asked, FWIW this is my take on today’s puzzle:
   As a relative (re)beginner I found this about right; it was harder than yesterday’s Quiptic which I knocked off in 25 minutes whereas this took me a good 45 minutes. Only one or two write-ins but most answers were clear once you carefully followed the wordplay, I only had to use check once (3d, I can NEVER see read-throughs!).
   LOI was 15 like, I think, many judging by the Guardian comments. As a a keen amateur astronomer that’s embarrassing but in my defence the seasons are upside-down here, so even after 35 years residence I was thinking of the wrong time of year; many WINTER nights spent looking at the shower in question. 🙂
   Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO.

7. Geoff Down Under @3; I’m familiar with “Off the Wall” meaning eccentric, not heard it used as angry but it was pretty clearly the phrase intended from the clue. 35 years an Australian.

8. My faves: NEUTRALITY (partially for the def, partially for the surface), PERSEID (new word. thought somewhat as pdm@1 did. Of course, it didn’t add up), OFF THE WALL (Fell in place quickly. For the rhyme and reason!!! Excuse my bad idiom) and HOSPITALISATION (singling out this as my COTD).

   Thanks Vulcan & PeterO.

9. I thought this was a great crossword. More difficult than usual for a Monday. As others have mentioned, the PDM took a while with DELUSIVE, KETCH and LOI PER SE. Thanks to setter and blogger.

10. Agree with most that this was harder than usual Vulcan, but also very good. LOI and my favourite by some margin was PERSEID. Only rather weak one was STRIPE.
    Thanks PeterO and Vulcan.

11. I loved this as well. For me the main hold up was due to unknown GK that needed looking up, mainly the hangman KETCH, the shower PERSEID (vaguely heard of it), the fox and the cantons of Switzerland 🇨🇭(not needed, misdirected there!). However the word play was clear enough to help direct the search or to solve.
    Ticks for: the lovely anagrams FEATHERED FRIEND and HOSPITALISATION, the misdirection in NEUTRALITY, the ‘per se’ in PERSEID, the surface of OCELOT, the potential misdirection in BONN and the lovely simplicity of the UN WELL.
    Thank you to Vulcan and PeterO

12. I spent a little time trying to fit ‘canton’ into 13 before I got to work on the anagram properly. Held up longest by 5 and 9, wondering if I was missing a Scottish city somewhere. Agree very much with PeterO’s estimation, that this was a tougher challenge than normally expected with Vulcan as the setter. Thanks to both.

13. Enjoyable puzzle.

    I couldn’t parse 4d hangman=ketch. Never heard of the man!

    New for me: TOD = fox (22ac); GOODWOOD racecourse in Sussex; PERSEID.

    Thanks, both.

14. Did anyone else bung PERT[h] in 5 down?

    Held me up for a while

15. Not a comment on the crossword as I haven’t tried it yet but does anyone who pays for the Guardian app know how to complete the crosswords? They have changed the format today so that the app version looks like the printed paper. I can’t bring up a keyboard. Preferred it as it was! The crosswords and the TV reviews are about all I can bear to read these days so if I can’t do the crosswords, I’m wasting my money.

16. My last two in were BONN and OCELOT, with groans as I parsed them.

    It was about my usual solve time for Vulcan, but I tend to be slowed down by cryptic clues and there weren’t many today. A lot went in fast, then much slower to solve the last few, including PERSEID, which I knew, got from the crossers and the ID ending and back parsed. STRIPE and DELUSIVE I wrote in early, then took out when I couldn’t see the long downs immediately before concluding they were right.

    Thank you to PeterO and Vulcan.

    Amma @15, the Guardian app is working for me, not the crossword app but the paper app.

17. All went in last night but held up by PERSEID for ages this morning. Same experience as others with TOD=fox and Jack KETCH (grisly reading indeed, and considering his trade, it’s amusing that KETCHUP was used in low-budget scare flicks). This was probably the trickiest Vulcan I’ve ever completed. Favourites were FEATHERED FRIEND, BONN and
    HOSPITALISATION.

    Ta Vulcan & PeterO.

18. Thanks Vulcan and PeterO
    I found this difficult and it was a DNF, as I had RESOLUTION at 14d. The definition for DELUSIVE seems wrong. The clue for OCELOT didn’t make a lot of sense, PASS was not at all obvious for “bus ticket”.
    Favourite TO DATE. Surely everyone knows The tale of Mr. Tod by Beatrix Potter?

19. An enjoyable start to the week, thanks Vulcan and PeterO! Although in retrospect I like the surface, I was stumped by 9ac, thrown by the (surplus?) “you need”. I was looking for a place a cat would be needed.

20. Thought FEATHERED FRIEND COTD, a splendid clue, and it took me a while to discover what the actual anagram fodder was there. Wasn’t at all clear how the creature at nine across with nine lives was constructed, but it had to be that from the crossers already in place. PERSEID was a nho and loi, but something learned anew therefore. BONN was a rather good misdirection, I thought. And not everyone might have known about Mr Ketch’s grisly botched jobs, but all in all a good Monday challenge…

21. A tough rubber from Vulcan, I found.
    It’s that naughty grid again….16 of the 24 solutions having opening letters in non-crossing squares. It seems to be a frequent flyer recently, and it surely increases the difficulty level.
    A lovely set of pleasing wordplays, with well-crafted surfaces.

    Re KETCH in 4(down), I thought he was exclusively an axeman, but not so, he sometimes employed hanging.
    15(ac), I thought that the usual reference is the “PERSEIDS”, plural, but my bad again…. the PERSEID shower it is.

    I didn’t like the final word “here”, in 9(ac): unnecessary/ incorrect?
    The single letter S for saint in 19 (ac) is not familiar to me, but I’m sure Chambers must have it.

    TOD for FOX: apparently a NW country term, I read. We have a lot of choice names for foxes up here…..I don’t recall tod being one of them!

    So, I struggled much more than other solvers, I think, but that’s my shortcomings, not the setter’s.

    Ta, V & PeterO

22. A tough rubber from Vulcan, I found.
    It’s that naughty grid again….16 of the 24 solutions having opening letters in non-crossing squares. It seems to be a frequent flyer recently, and it surely increases the difficulty level.
    A lovely set of pleasing wordplays, with well-crafted surfaces.

    Re KETCH in 4(down), I thought he was exclusively an axeman, but not so, he sometimes employed hanging.
    15(ac), I thought that the usual reference is the “PERSEIDS”, plural, but my bad again…. the PERSEID shower it is.

    I didn’t like the final word “here”, in 9(ac): unnecessary/ incorrect?
    The single letter S for saint in 19 (ac) is not familiar to me, but I’m sure Chambers must have it.

    TOD for FOX: apparently a NW country term, I read. We have a lot of choice names for foxes up here…..I don’t recall tod being one of them!

    So, I struggled much more than other solvers, I think, but that’s my shortcomings, not the setter’s.

    Ta, V & PeterO

23. A little chewy for a Monday, I thought, but nothing too terrible. I needed PeterO’s help to parse OCELOT but that was just me not being fully awake.
    A lot to like here; I thought FIRE ENGINE was neatly clued and there were some neat misdirections such as BONN which isn’t a Scottish city.
    I was familiar with TOD and Jack Ketch, which obviously suggests I should have got out more when I was younger. Pace Muffin @18, WordWeb gives “delusive” as “Inappropriate to reality or facts” which I think is close enough. I just thought of Richard Dawkins being pompous about God and bunged it in.
    Agree with paddymelon @2 about the cluing of MENTAL BREAKDOWN and with SueM48 @11 about FEATHERED FRIEND and HOSPITALISATION.
    Thanks, both.

24. Nice start to the week, but must confess having to resort to Wiki for (uselessly) a list of Swiss cantons, and also the grisly background to Jack Ketch, which I hope I soon forget.

    Also needed help to spell CENOTAPH.

    Never heard OFF THE WALL in the angry sense, only ‘eccentric’.

    Must learn that saint can be S or St.

    Many thanks both.

25. I am sure our much-missed Roz has alerted us to PERSEID showers before, so that was my favourite. NEUTRALITY also very good. I, too, wondered about “here” in OCELOT.

26. paddymelon @1 there were certainly a few clues trickier than normal Monday material but that does happen from time to time. “Per Se” is perhaps unknown to some English speakers, but I wouldn’t say it is particularly obscure, and once you have that you can guess and check the answer even if you don’t have the general knowledge. I don’t think that is too obscure either, but as always with GK you either know it or you don’t.

    It’s also a masterclass in writing a smooth and misleading surface for a well constructed cryptic clue.

27. Started off quick, then quickly slowed down. Still mostly finished in good time though, but had to give up on OCELOT and GOODWOOD. I keep forgetting church can be (and more often seems to be) CE rather than CH, but not sure if I would have got there even with it.

    NHO GOODWOOD, nor have I heard the word ‘wood’ used to mean ‘deal’. I figured it must be a wood => racecourse of some kind, ‘good’ didn’t come to mind and a reveal seemed as good as a Google at that point (I wonder if other people feel the same? If it’s your last clue on the grid, do you prefer to reveal it, or look it up? I guess this is partly a paper vs web question, too)

    Not sure I found it particularly harder than usual, but maybe that’s because all cryptics are still difficult for me. I liked PERSEID for the number of interpretations I went through, all wrong, before getting it, NEUTRALITY for the misdirect (I also briefly wanted to put Neuchatel), and UNWELL for the groanworthiness.

    Thanks for the puzzle Vulcan, and for the parses and writeup PeterO

28. Trying to track down why I knew Jack KETCH, I suspect from reading Jean Plaidy, but he appears in Dickens, including Oliver Twist, was synonymous with the hangman through regency times, is a character in Punch and Judy and appears in folk song.

29. Ravenrider @26 – Back in the days when lawyers were allowed to use Latin, someone wryly pointed out that the expression per se caused a certain amount of merriment among some of our European friends. Apparently perse is the Finnish for “arse”.
    (Seems appropriate that it is also the name of an upmarket school in Cambridge).

30. Amma @15 – if you can find the home page of the app there’s a ‘Puzzles’ shortcut which takes you to the crossword, which then works as previously.

31. Great misdirection in 1d and HMHB fans will have enjoyed the reference to the classic “Sh*t arm. Bad tattoo”:

    If you’re going to quote from the Book of Revelation. Don’t keep calling it the Book of Revelations. There’s no “s”, it’s the Book of Revelation
    As revealed to St John the Divine
    See also Mary Hopkin. She must despair

    Cheers P&V

32. SamW @27 – it’s not so much that ‘wood’ means ‘deal’, as that ‘deal’ is an old word for pine, so a type of wood (often used slightly pejoratively in describing cheap furniture before pine became fashionable).

    I’m often not on Vulcan’s wavelength, but I loved this; my top clues, for their lovely misdirections, were among the last ones in – perseid, Bonn (vain search through my memory for a suitable Scottish city), and neutrality (another one tempted by Neuchâtel). I was lucky with my general knowledge this morning, knowing both Ketch and Tod which, like Muffin @18, I was familiar with from Beatrix Potter – it was one of my favourites as a child, with its two thoroughly unpleasant characters.

33. SamW @27: I might be misreading your comment nor have I heard the word ‘wood’ used to mean ‘deal’. but, just in case, deal is a type of wood and is being used in the clue as a definition-by-example. Hence the QM.

34. The acrosses went in smartly, but the downs were a bit of a slog. In all, a great start to the week.
    Pedants’ Corner: 19 APSE is not at the rear of a church, but at the front – ie a curved area beyond the altar. As that’s the way the congregation faces, it can’t be the rear.

35. I got the final N of 5d quite early, but was skilfully misdirected: all I could think of was OBAN, which wasn’t a city and didn’t parse. Ended up revealing that one: d’oh!

    Quite tricky for a Vulcan: the PERSEID summer shower held out longest (we have the winter shower, the Geminids, this week). I haven’t met OFF THE WALL as angry either, but it had to be that.

    SamW@27: “deal” is a catchall description used by timber merchants and DIY stores for various softwoods like pine. Deal=wood does show up in cryptic crosswords from time to time – it has plenty of potential to mislead.

36. A mixed bag – most of the right side went in fairly smoothly, the left not so much. I’d heard of the word WINDLASS before, but not its meaning, so that was effectively new to me. NHO WOOD=DEAL before either, but I see that’s already been dealt with in the comments.

    Got KETCHUP thanks to help from Word Wizard – NHO Jack Ketch (and PIERREPONT would never have fit in the space available) so have followed the link to read up.

    I’d probably have put this more towards midweek in terms of difficulty, but that’s merely an observation, certainly not a complaint.

37. Agreed about APSE – it’s at the front.

38. Ah, thanks all for clarifying the wood/deal situation. Now that you’ve said it, it does sound somewhat familar, but maybe just from a past crossword. I’ll try and commit it to memory this time!

39. Re APSE being at front/rear – if it’s at the front, the main entrance to the church is the rear door?

40. Excellent puzzle from Vulcan, rather more elevated than usual for a Monday, as many have remarked.

    Well constructed clues – with cogent surfaces, apart from OCELOT! That and BONN were last in for me; I was reading the clue as ‘Almost pretty // Scottish city’ – like many of us, I suspect.

    I was also misdirected to Neuchâtel – clever.

    Favourites: CENOTAPH, MEZE, PERSEID, KETCHUP.

    Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO

41. According to Chambers (1999), an APSE is a semicircular or polygonal recess, esp at the east end of a church choir and where in the Roman basilica, the praetor’s chair stood (other definitions on line also suggest a domed roof is required and mention particularly at the east end), so I’m also unconvinced the definition is “rear of a church”.

42. I solved the RHS of the puzzle and then stared at the largely empty LHS, but it eventually yielded pleasurably.

    Who knew that the back of the church is the front? Very confusing. I thought the FEATHERED FRIEND was a great anagram. I quite liked the O CE LOT for the cat, the PERSEID shower, and the OVERALL weighing more than a couple of pounds.

    Thanks Vulcan for the fun and PeterO explaining it all so well.

43. Churches were traditionally built on an east-west alignment with the altar (the centrepiece of ceremonies) at the east end, so that the congregation would be facing east (i.e. towards the rising sun, the symbol of Christ and the Second Coming) during services. The apse is behind the altar, so is even further towards the east and therefore at the extreme ‘front’ of the church. The main door of the church IS at the rear.

44. Since you asked, PeterO: no I didn’t consider this a “gentle start” to the week – but I accept that that comforting predictability has disappeared under the new Guardian crossword editor.
    I completed it, eventually – enjoying PERSEID and the surfaces to 16A and 11A, but much was heavy-going.
    I really don’t mind having to look up the occasional unknown personage or fact, but having to plough through DuckDuckGo several times in one puzzle takes a lot of the fun away. I simply guessed KETCHUP, knowing a ketch is a boat and assuming some nautical nickname was at play.
    I’m no fan of “such&such here” as clues’ definitions – it’s a bit clunky, and UNWELL didn’t feel completely right either.
    And my “well at least I learned summat new” consolation (ooh now I know where an apse is) turns out to be wrong! Oh well.
    And yes, I’m another who misses Roz’s entertaining and informative comments.
    Thank you for the blog – and thanks to Vulcan for the challenge.

45. APSE. 37 Gladys, 39 Beaulieu, 41 Shane….
    Ah. Let’s settle down for a good old pointless debate. Pull up a chair.
    The usual door by which to enter a church is the south porch. Yes you can enter some grand churches by the west door ( which would be at “the back”) but very few parish churches have one that is used! The essential quality of an apse in England is that it is at the east. IMHO

46. NeilH @ 29
    Yes, perse is indeed your backside in Finnish.
    Another one which causes some amusement is the brand name of a well known clothing chain ‘per una.’ Peruna is a potato.

    I liked the reference to adverbs in ALLY. Yes, -ly is regarded as an adverb ending in English. ‘Likely’ however is an adjective. But isn’t it interesting that, due to its ending, it is used more and more as an adverb these days.

47. Thank you Vulcan and PeterO,
    Overall very neat, especially the delusive ‘Swiss state’ (making me think of Ticino), the moreish MEZE and the artfully alliterative ‘far fox fed’ (echoing 1d).

48. Just hard enough to get the brain cells working. Needed the blog to parse my LOI – 4d as didn’t know Mr Ketch. Thanks V & P

49. Just hard enough to get the brain cells working. Needed the blog to parse my LOI – 4d as didn’t know Mr Ketch. Thanks V & P

50. ARhymerOinks@30 – thanks. I’ve now found it!

51. Sorry! Shanne

52. As a mediocre crossworder, that was the easiest I can remember for a long long time – one sitting, and not a single clue whose parsing I had to look up. Although, I did initially wonder about Pert(h)! Perhaps I’m on the same wavelength as Vulcan.

53. Took a bit longer than a usual Monday. First pass through I only had a couple, and steeled myself for a slog. Then a couple more went in, then coffee hit and suddenly they were flying in left and right.

    TOD was the name of the fox in the neglected Disney film ‘The Fox and the Hound’, which I know because my sister named her first dog after him. (?!)

    PERSEID and WINDLASS were my favourites.

54. I knew Ketch but didn’t know he was historical–I remembered him from Punch and Judy (which helped with “hangman” since Punch tricks himself into sticking his own head in the noose). Wikipedia also says that Jack Ketch appears in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle which I’ve read but I don’t remember him from it, it’s very long. (And I wouldn’t have put it past Stephenson to insert a character from Punch and Judy into his historicalish novels.) LOI as I was trying to figure out a reverse of “*U*C*ER” but when I figured out the “UP” ending it came quickly.

    Goodwood I knew from Wodehouse’s “Bingo has a bad Goodwood” so the only unfamiliar thing was TOD, but that was pretty clear.

    Thanks Vulcan and PeterO!

55. More on APSE.
    The thing at the ‘rear’ of a church is the narthex – well, some churches.

56. Thanks to Vulcan for taking my mind off the derby defeat on the train to Euston. Thoroughly enjoyable crossword.

57. I very rarely comment on crossword sites, but had to make an exception for this puzzle. Really good fun with a lot of clever misdirection.
    Thanks.

58. I didn’t find this as difficult as some seem to have. I guess that’s because the only bit of GK here that was beyond my ken was GOODWOOD, but given the crossers and the “deal”, I did manage to get it in right at the end.

    For deal, my usual referent is Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream: “Take from the dresser of deal / Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet / On which she embroidered fantails once / And spread it so as to cover her face.” That poem is also the only place I’ve ever seen the word “concupiscent” in the wild.

    I quite liked the PERSEID and the OCELOT, despite the extra words in the clue for the latter.

59. Glad to see my favourite Monday setter’s name this morning. Had to reveal PERSEID and was not sure about KETCHUP and STRIPE but checker said yes. Some macabre GK reading on Wikipedia this morning to understand how it was right.

    A third appearance of OCELOT this week as well. Have they been in the news?

    One of the best ones I have done in awhile. Cheers Vulcan

60. Since you asked: I consider myself a novice, not good enough to distinguish among setters, and I loved this puzzle. There were many terrific clues, and I finished more quickly than usual. It helped that Ketch, apse, Goodwood, tod, Perseid, meze are all words I’ve heard or used; lacking those, I can see that it would have been more difficult than a usual Monday.
    My only quibble is with the clue for OCELOT: what is “you need” doing in there?

61. I decided “you need a cat here” was the definition for OCELOT: setter talking to the solver, telling him the answer in this case is a cat. Did anyone else think that?

    I’m not usually that fond of Vulcan’s Monday offerings, but I thought this was a really fun puzzle to solve.

62. I had fun with this one and agree it was tougher than some Vulcan Mondays.
    Perseid took me about half the 45 minutes I spent on this.
    I enjoyed the discussion on where the Apse is (see comments above), and was reminded of the “debates” my wife and I have when she asks me to put the suitcases at the “back” of the car boot.

63. Idle thought. I too tried to come up with a Swiss canton for 13d before hitting on the answer. But if the setter was indeed going for a canton, would there be objections that a canton is not a state? I checked a few dictionaries and most called it an administrative division, but Wiktionary has state. So it was a “correct misdirection”, if there is such a thing. Just saying!

64. DrW @63: you are correct, and that’s exactly why I decided against looking up the list of cantons!

65. My first brief thought for 1d was passenger pigeon.

66. Again a since you asked comment.
    Found this much harder than the usual Monday offerings. Finished or almost finished the last 2 Mondays but just got half the down clues today. Thought redefined was an anagram indicator in 1dn and it went downhill from there! Agree some of the across clues straightforward but not a helpful grid. Well better luck next week – I hope.

67. Failed to get Bonn. Doubly disappointed as I am Scottish and used to work in the Small Town in Germany.

    Thanks Vulcan and PeterO

68. It’s a bit late in the day for commenting so I don’t suppose many will see this. Just to correct some of the comments above about Jack Ketch. He was not primarily an axe-man, beheadings had become rare by his time. Rather he was the public hangman in London from sometime in the 1660s up to his death in 1686, operating at Tyburn rather than the Tower. He is famous for botching the beheadings of Lord Russell and the Duke of Monmouth but the cause was more likely to have been the quantity of alcohol he had consumed to steady his nerves. If he had a speciality it was performing the grizzly business of hanging, drawing and quartering that was the sentence for high treason. He is reported to have carried out a large number of such executions that followed the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion and the subsequent bloody assizes conducted by Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys

69. Dave Kirk @68 – well here’s one person who’s seen it. A useful and more complete piece of information than the entry I read, thank you.

70. At 1d I thought at first ” the RAF redefined” meant that an anagram of those 6 letters gave the word Father, and I already had an F in place for the six letter word thanks to OFF THE WALL. But of course this went nowhere. Did anyone else travel along this blind alley for a while?

71. Yes I too wonder how many will see this!!

    IMHO much too hard for a Monday. I had to use an anagram solver for 1d, 8a and 13a to help me having only got 2 on first reading and still failed to finish.

72. After a bit of research following a distant memory of a ‘deal’ table I discovered that deal is a soft wood such as pine. Hope this makes a bit more sense of 24a.

73. Yes, “deal” is a generic term for any “softwood” – i.e. from a conifer. Rather surprisingly, balsa is a hardwood, as it comes from an angiosperm rather than a gymnosperm (conifer)!

74. ‘Delusive’ is a word I have never encountered, but it has to exist because it is regularly formed. My spelling checker has not heard of it either, & autocorrects it to ‘reclusive’! It was my LOI tho I had solved it earlier: I kept hoping it was something more interesting.

75. Happy bunnies here, laughed at feathered friend, windlass and Perseid, couldn’t get ocelot so looked it up. We’ve been on the Guardian Cryptic trail for 2-3 years now The blog is almost as much fun as the crossword itself!

76. Probably late enough to risk this:
    How do you titillate an ocelot?
    Oscillate its tits a lot!

77. Count myself as still a beginner: started on the Quick Cryptics earlier this year and have also been tackling the Quiptics. Getting there and thought I’d jump on a Monday Cryptic as people on FifteenSquared often say the Monday is good for beginners. Have to say I managed today’s although took me a while and some were guesses and then working back for the wordplay, but an enjoyable experience. FEATHERED FRIEND and NEUTRALITY were probably my favourites. Thanks Vulcan for the puzzle and PeterO for the blog.

78. Thanks AllyGally @61, that makes it make sense to me.

79. AllyGally @61
    That is essentially how I read 9A OCELOT.
    thecronester @77
    Good for you: that is the way to stretch yourself, and improve your solving skills.

80. Mr Tod is a fox in one of Beatrix Potter’s books which was a help with that one.

81. You’ve got away with it so far, Muffin, 76…

82. Very nice puzzle. Though it’s suited more to a manic Monday – nothing gentle about it! I was foxed by the more parochial clues like TOD – had no clue of GOODWOOD, but guessed KETCHUP and looked up KETCH on the web. Some ferocious anagrams too! Thanks both

83. Having a crack at the big boy crossword and only took me 28 hours to solve it this time…

    “Swiss state” is a bit cheeky but i’ll allow it. PERSEID was my favourite once i got it

84. Late to this party but in case Vulcan has a read of these later, I thought PERSEID was up there with some of the best clues I’ve seen 🙂

85. I’m in a similar position to thecronester @77 – only been at this for a couple of months. This was an absolute joy of a puzzle – stretching the mind, but all fair and really allowing you to progress the more you filled it.

    I’m developing my skills so expect to have to use some help occasionally – everything I needed help with here was something I felt I learned from, both in GK terms (PERSEID) and in terms of the crosswords hints and parsing after getting some crossing letters (REVELATION, CENOTAPH).

    I was really intimidated seeing so many long clues but once a couple fell into place it really boosted my confidence

86. My confidence was also boosted by comments on how tough this was. Mostly went in fairly smoothly for me…

    …except I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which STUDIES in 2dn, so I missed completing this puzzle by half a clue. Grrr…

    I thought MENTAL BREAKDOWN could have been more simply clued as “Lament health crisis”, with a reverse anagram

    Amused by the discussion of which end of the church is the front — I’ve often wondered that myself! Which door does the congregation enter by? The front door? So the altar’s at the back? But surely the altar’s at the front? So the congregation come in the back door??

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