Listener Crossword 4858: Lavish Border by Hawk

Now there’s an unusual title – and a pretty scary looking puzzle. I wonder what Hawk has prepared for us this time?

The unconventional layout of the clues, the novelty of the Set A gimmick creating unknowns in how to enter even a known answer, and the uncertainty of where to place them in the grid made this a challenging puzzle indeed. The clues weren’t a walkover either but a start had to be made, and this case we did the conventional thing and looked at the top and bottom couple of the sets, hoping to helped by the symmetry, and then hoping that some acrosses would meerge to which some downs would link.

That paid off in the end, but in between head-scratchings on those we did quite a lot of cold-solving of other clues. Set B more tractable as many of the misprints could be spotted, with ROTATES emerging quite quickly as the likely first word of the message. Getting our eye in on Set A took longer, but we did some counting and established which of each set were going to be acrosses and downs, and were then able to keep a firm focus on looking for an answer of 4 or 5 letters with extras from the wordplay (which didn’t always tell us exactly where to put them in the string).

As a grid-fill started to build, it became apparent where the extra letter strings were going to be and what letters were making them up, which then fed back into the solving and speeded things up. You’ll find a full parsing of the clues at https://www.listenercrossword.com/Years/Y2025.html but this is what we ended up with:

By now we had the full message ROTATES YES REFLECTS NO and the question was, what was all this about? As usual the internet came to the rescue. The”titular entry” was presamably FRIEZE and it turned out that there were such things as FRIEZE GROUPS of which the GREEK KEY pattern (from the unchecked perimeter cells) was an example. After the application of several wet towels, we understood that the these groups were defined by whether they could be transposed (concatenated), rotataed or reflected (on one or both of two axes). Inspecting those in the grid showed that pqbd and dpdp both rotated but that pqbd could also reflect (vertically) so dpdp was the one to be highlighted. (We just remembered that bit in time…)

All that was left was to check that the Greek Key pattern fulfilled the same criteria, and fill in the frieze at the top. And breathe a sigh of relief, trusting for an easier ride next week. But many thanks to Hawk for the fitness challenge and introducing us to a new bit of maths theory.

PS. We forgot about the Oenophile Club. Perhaps because it’s Lent and one of us off the booze. Or trying to be. Let’s look back through the answers and clues. GELATI: nice but no cigar. DROOL: yes, I could do with a drink but where is it? Ah – Weins from Germany even if they do turn out to be “weans”. At least tt wasn’t one of the letter pairs, so Hawk can keep his membership. Just.