Spot the Nina time: the top and bottom rows of unchecked letters have SHOPPING PRECINCT. Inside the grid, there’s MARKS and SPENCER, along with BOOTS and BORDERS (although I guess one or both of those two could have been happy accidents). Has anyone spotted any more shops?
A very enjoyable puzzle but I still don’t really understand 2.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 9 | LOADS,TONE – another spelling of “lodestone”. |
| 11 | N(LIFT I)*Y – NIFTILY. |
| 13 | BO(O)TS – a “bot” is a type of malware (others are viruses and trojans) which allows a remote attacker to control a host machine. |
| 14 | H(ANY IDEA)*E – HYAENIDAE, another way of saying “hyenas”. I’d never heard of this before and it was the last one to go in so I had all the checking letters in place. |
| 19 | SU(SPEND)ED |
| 22 | SPENCER – a close-fitting jacket and one of Winston’s middle names (the other was Leonard). |
| 23 | [-c]HANDLER – I think this is a very contemporary meaning of the word as it’s not in Chambers Online or the COED. However, “PR Account Handler” does seem to be a fairly common job title – try Googling “pr handler”. |
| 25 | IMPROV(IS)E |
| Down | |
| 1 | SLING,BACKS |
| 2 | HALF-HOUR – not really sure I understand this one: “30 minutes in house or old city”. “30 minutes” is the definition, and “old city” is UR but where does “house” come into it? |
| 3 | [-c]OSSIES – which I guess must be another spelling of “aussies”. |
| 4 | P[-r]OSY |
| 5 | P(BEAR)*AINED – PEA-BRAINED. |
| 6 | IN,F(RING)E – FE is the chemical symbol for iron. |
| 14 | (RICH MY DOPE)* – HYPODERMIC. |
| 15 | (SEES TREATY)* – EASY STREET. |
| 20 | SKEWER – this looks like a not-very-cryptic definition, unless I’m missing something subtle (always a possibility). |
| 21 | MINI,ON |
House is HO, old city is UR. It’s the old half-hour joke!
PS 45 minutes, which we had quite recently, is HOU. Or, by the same token, OUR.
20D I too wondered about this and considered SKEWED and SLEWED before plumping for SKEWER even though the clue is simply a detailed description of the object. Does adding a question mark make it a cryptic clue?
8D Given the Nina, I was left with GE-S and eventually opted for GEMS on the grounds that it is probably the most common word that fits, but even if it is right I don’t understand this one at all. Clue:
Good ideas, original ideas, but not right (4)
Coincidence corner: HOPI here so soon after its appearance in the Guardian the previous week.
I didn’t understand 8 either but I guess I must have forgot to write about it my post. Odd that. Anyway, could an original idea be a GERM? Bit of a longshot but it’s all I can think of that would work with the wordplay.
Re. 8D: Ge(r)ms.
Where a ‘germ’ is a new idea.
I see, thanks. Good ideas are GEMS and original ideas are GERMS. So the G doesn’t come from Good (which is what was confounding me) and I find the “Goodidea”/Gem relationship a bit of a stretch.
SKEWER I read in the cryptic part as the comparative of SKEW (twisted) without being 100% sure.