Guardian 29,840 / Paul

70 comments on “Guardian 29,840 / Paul”

1. Having read the blog, I’m glad I gave this puzzle a miss.
   I think the definition for VEGA is just “sun” (i.e. a star); it’s a percentage of radioactive gases.
   I can’t help with the other gaps in parsing.

2. CIDER
   in+it (CIDER)=insider (caught)
   (agree with Eileen’s parsing)
   VEGA
   Took the def as sun (a star). ‘percentage’ as a hidden indicator.
   TRAGEDY
   Took ‘seemingly invisible to youth’ as aged.
   Dark matter as the def.
   THE LATTER
   Took ‘other, not the first’ as the def (but what’s underlined by Eileen
   could well be intended one. Maybe a CAD)

   Thanks Paul and Eileen.

3. Thanks for the elucidation of 1d. I hadn’t recognised it as a double definition. 1a also eluded me, as I’d forgotten that puri was an Indian bread and I spent too long trying to find a synonym for money (as ‘bread’). I usually manage to get on Paul’s wavelength, but struggled today, though did enjoy MARSEILLE and TERRACOTTA. For VEGA I think the definition is just sun, as VEGA is a star (i.e. a sun). Thanks to Paul and Eileen

4. Paul on top form today, and luckily for me I was on his wavelength. Loved GHOST STORIES and THE LATTER, but I concede the latter (!) might not be universally popular. Solved with a smile on my face, which is so often the case with Paul.

   Thanks Paul and Eileen

5. I agree with your parsing of CIDER, Eileen, and with muffin @1 on VEGA. TRAGEDY I think the def is just ‘dark matter’, then the idea being that old people seem ‘invisible’ to the young. I’m not sure about the ‘it’ part of AGE LIMIT either, though, unless it’s clued by ‘that’s what’ – but that would seem back to front.
   But yes, I thought this was mostly Paul at his most enjoyable – TERRACOTTA and GHOST STORIES stood out for me. Thanks P&E.

6. AGE LIMIT
   Took ‘thta’s what’ as IT, but agree with moh@5 that the order seems to be the other way round for IM and IT.

   Got it:
   That’s what I am=I’M IT ….IMIT after AGEL.

7. I don’t see a problem for ‘I’m it’ for ‘that’s what I am’ in AGE LIMIT.

8. I had 16d as A GEL with I’M IT (that’s what I am) following (after). The “after” is a bit redundant, but it helps the surface.
   Thanks to Paul and Eileen

9. Great fun as ever, and like Eileen, I appreciated the Halloween flavour.
   Loved GHOST STORIES especially.
   I took ‘that’s what I am’ as one thought so = I’M IT
   and VEGA as 25% of radioactive gases
   Thanks to Paul and Eileen (especially for help with CIDER)

10. I love Paul’s puzzles and this one was no different. I thought CIDER in 9A might be a reference to the book Fantastic Mr Fox. I had the same pieces as Eileen in 16D but it seems that IT is structured to precede IM. My favorites were TOILET TISSUE and MARSEILLE. Thanks Paul and thank you to Eileen for a great blog.

11. Agree with KVa @2 on his parsing of TRAGEDY and I agree with the comments above about AGE LIMIT. I had the right half almost completed last night but nothing on the left, so thought I would struggle this morning, but it all fell in quite nicely, except the NW, which it seems stumped a lot of people on the G site. Eileen has pretty much covered my favourites and I would add CIDER, MARSEILLE and GOAL AREA. Did you mean to split TERRACOTTA Eileen and you have Turn of the Screw as the answer rather than WARDER in your preamble? Another brilliant offering from my favourite setter.

12. Utterly meaningless to me, as usual.
    Respect to anyone who could do this.
    Thanks both.

13. KVa beat me to it. (And I don’t get an edit my post?)

14. I forgot a shout out for ESPRESSO. Sixth Sense and The Others are both chilling GHOST STORIES. Brilliant clue.

15. It’s all very clever and clearly has depths that I cannot plumb, but will someone please explain the use of ‘surface’

16. AlanC @11 – I obviously automatically separated TERRACOTTA, as that’s how I always think of it. I’ve amended that and the other foolish error in the preamble – thanks.

17. SILENT NIGHT
    A minor point
    place=SIT
    LENT NIGH put in SIT

    exHarper@15
    The surface of a clue could be a bland (but grammatically correct) sentence or it could be
    telling a joke or a story. You can enjoy the surfaces as much as you enjoy solving the clues.
    An expert will ‘soon’ come around to explain this better.

18. Thanks KVa @6, Tomsdad and DuncT – you’re right, of course, about I’M IT, I was wrong to try to split the phrase ‘that’s what I am’.

19. exHarper @15 – I’m sorry, I overlooked your query.

    You’ll find a clear explanation at this (very old but still very useful!) site:
    https://www.crosswordunclued.com/2009/06/surface-reading-cryptic-reading.html

20. Apologies Eileen @16: I meant REDRAW, what a double act! 😂

21. I agree with @1 and @ 12.All I could solve was TANGELO,ESPRESSO and EYELID.l just bypassed the rest and after reading the blog and comments this setter is definitely on my “to avoid ” Christmas wishlist!

22. Mystified by 1d as neither part of the DD means anything to me. I understand PICKLE as a difficulty, but a rabbit hole has an entirely different meaning, and as for the little monkey I’ve no idea.

    I didn’t liked ‘blotted’ as an anagrind, unless it’s an allusion to ‘blotto’ (drunk).
    AGED=’seemingly invisible to youth’ is far too vague.

    Those aside, there was a good deal to appreciate in this, which is not always the case with Paul.

23. Nice blog, Eileen. I was thinking it was more like vintage Halpern and agree on all the ones you liked. I suppose LATTE only gets a yellow card these days
    Wasnt bonkers about CIDER or TRAY but a return to form.

24. Hi AlanC, again – oh dear, it’s not my day! I’ll try again. (Funnily enough, when I finally came to write the blog, I read my entry as RED RAW and wondered what on earth that was!)

    copster @23

    🙂

25. 😊

26. poc @22

    Collins: ‘pickle – Brit informal a mischievous child’ (= ‘little monkey’ – see here: https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/little_monkey.html )

27. I was convinced that PICKLE had to be a triple definition which led me on a vain search for rabbits called Pickle. I agree with POC about rabbit hole.

28. I’m confused by the rabbit in the PICKLE clue. Surely it’s just hole for the second def? Perhaps ‘in rabbit’ goes with ‘little monkey’, ie it’s a word you might use while chatting, but not formally. Hopefully there’s a more convincing explanation.

29. Great fun as always with Paul. I liked LATERALLY and GHOST STORIES in particular.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

30. Ah, the weekly chore of resentfully struggling through Paul’s output.
    Customary homophone whinge only because grey tapes is not unequivocal where I’m from.

31. Outclassed by Paul today, a little beyond my pay grade, I’m afraid. I did manage to fill half of the grid, but once I had employed the Reveal button I could only sit back and admire some of these. Take a bow all of GHOST STORIES, TERRACOTTA, REDRAW, AGE LIMIT, WINEMAKING, MARSEILLE and LATERALLY. All stonkers in my humble opinion, though it felt as if I was looking on from the sidelines a bit today. Couldn’t work out the parsing for PURITAN or CIDER either, so many thanks Eileen for the clarification. And to Mr Halpern, of course…

32. This was tricky, with a flash of inspiration needed to think of WARDER and finally open up the NW. But loads of fun – Paul on great form.

    Thanks both.

33. To add to my comment @14, Beloved and The Ring in TANGELO are also GHOST STORIES. Genius.

34. ….as is A Christmas Carol.

35. Some great clues today, the standouts for me being NITS and GHOST STORIES, both excellent.

    Eileen: “I know LATTE is not coffee” — it is in English! — “espresso coffee with frothed hot milk” (Chambers).

    Many thanks both.

36. Lord Jim @35

    I was merely trying (as I think you know 😉 )to forestall a resurrection of the rather tedious debate we’ve had here from time to time. I should just have kept quiet – but i never learn!

37. I’m very sorry, but I missed the first go-round on this. Since LATTE is a kind of coffee (drink, not bean), what’s wrong with it? Cryptic logic allows kind-of as well as synonym. Tx.

38. Great stuff from Paul.

    Slowed down in the NW corner which accounted for the majority of time. Guessed PURITAN, PICKLE (I call my little monkey this) and CIDER but was reluctant to put them in. Eventually just plumped for them and when I could justify REDRAW and LED ASTRAY I was pleased to see ‘check all’ agreed with my work. Thanks for the blog explaining them.

    Nothing fills me with more dread than ‘hole?’ Included in a Paul clue.

    My favourites are broadly similar to Eileen’s

    Thanks Eileen and Paul

39. I liked this a lot, and made typical paulian progress: a handful of straightforward ones, then draw a complete blank, then slowly proceed. LOI was PURITAN; I had to look up PURI but nothing else could possibly fit.

    Faves were TOILET TISSUE (one of those impenetrable-looking ones which turns out to be very nice), GHOST STORIES, TRAGEDY (“seemingly invisible to youth” – brilliant), and ESPRESSO.

    AGE LIMIT was clever and I didn’t really understand the def at first. But now I take the specific question “how old can I be (to be allowed to…)?” to somehow be an equivalent of the concept of age limit.

    For IDEAL I took bonce as head i.e. the lead, so “shaving of bonce”, rather than meaning “just the b” (which is the usual reading of “shaving”), actually means “decapitate the other word” (which coincidentally happens to begin with “b” too).

    I didn’t see the depth of NITS so thought it was just a very weak CD (with heads being a misdirection for headteachers). Silly me!

    A couple of niggles though. Like others, I don’t get the rabbit hole and can only assume that what James@28 says is the intended take. For GOAL AREA – I thought the “- is it?” part was unnecessary and in fact unhelpful; without it the clue would be a lovely &lit. And as per poc@22, I assume blotted =blotto and hence drunk/anagrind, and indeed I didn’t query it when I solved it, but upon thinking about it I’m not sure anyone uses blotted in that way.

    Good fun overall. Thanks both!

40. I don’t really understand all the negative comments regarding Paul’s puzzles. He is by a country mile my favourite setter from all the broadsheets, and I always make sure I go out and buy the physical copy rather than complete online whenever I see his name, because I know it is going to provide a proper challenge that I wish to savour. He sometimes defeats me but I always learn something from the process and find his ‘crabwise’ clue writing most inspiring. This was definitely on the easier end of his spectrum (relatively speaking!) and took me a good hour full of highly satisfying PDMs! Bravo, Paul! Please never change!

41. Recent Paul puzzles really haven’t been for me: a couple of DNSs rather than DNFs, and plenty of others abandoned well before completion.

    Today was a different story, and I was one reveal (METE) short of completion. Still needed to come here for the parsing, but a rare occasion in which I was either on Paul’s wavelength, or something about the clueing was on mine.

    Quite an effort to get there, but engagingly so rather than being a slog.

42. Dr. WhatsOn @37: what Eileen was referring to was that on previous occasions people have (pedantically?) complained that LATTE “really” means milk. Which it does in Italian.

43. me@39: I’ve got it. In an FAQ for an age-limited event, one of the headings might be “How old can I be?” or equivalently it might be “AGE LIMIT”. Hope that helps someone else too.

    Lord Jim@42, indeed – and if people started to refer to a milky tea as just a “milky” (I’ll have a milky, please!) and then that entered the lexicon, then milky would be a perfectly acceptable solution to “tea” too. Anyway, time to heed Eileen now😅

44. After staring at it in disbelief for 10 minutes I solved 2, 4dn and 12ac.
    I then gave up.

45. ‘I get it, it’s like a joke only not funny’ was a phrase with which my circle of wits teased each other in my halcyon days. I always think of that when doing Paul’s crosswords. I can do them, they’re well constructed but they’re not much fun. I know some love him and some hate him, I just find him ‘meh’ as the yoof would say.

46. Does lead astray mean to trick? One is encouraging someone to do something bad, the other is to fool or hoodwink surely? They don’t seem synonyms to me

47. Tough — I only got halfway. Too many tricky/vague definitions — 1a PURITAN (“Starchy”), 18A GHOST STORIES (“They’re all dreadful” — yes, a brilliant clue), 1d PICKLE (both “Little monkey” and “rabbit hole”??), 5d THE LATTER (“but this” — although I did get this one), 16d AGE LIMIT (“how old can I be?”), 17d GOAL AREA (“is it?”). No complaints, though — it’s a fine puzzle of a difficulty level that I aspire to be able to complete. I really mustn’t let setters keep fooling me like this! 🙂

48. NOLU @46

    It can mean either – see here: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/to-lead-someone-astray

49. I can’t understand why some don’t appreciate Paul. Far and away the most ingenious of the Guardian setters IMHO, and even though I was caught out by the little monkey (we have a different name for them on Merseyside) and PURI=bread, I appreciate that others would get them both.

    Best puzzle of a good week. Thanks both.

50. A challenge but a great one for me. I wish my LOI had been TERRACOTTA, which was so good that I exclaimed “oh! TEA!” out loud in front of my students as they were filing out of class, but it was METE because I forgot that the MET is a force. Lots of other good ones too.

    I did need the help to parse CiDER and PICKLE (part of the reason for the slow start), and am as confused as everyone else about “rabbit”… though “pickle” = “little monkey” is unfamiliar enough that it was a bung anyway.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen!

51. Oxford languages:
    Rabbit hole 2. .
    used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
    i.e. “in a pickle”

52. I thought the rabbit hole might be a reference to Alice in Wonderland.

53. Xerxes @51

    Thanks – that’s how I took it.

54. Thanks, Eileen for sorting out CIDER, although I really should have remembered the limerick about the old lady from Ryde who ate so many apples she died (the apples fermented inside the lamented and made cider inside ‘er inside).

55. muffin@52, I think it is.
    Xerces@51 right – but one can be (and usually is) deep down the rabbit hole without necessarily being in a pickle. It’s more to do with being drawn into something, and doesn’t necessarily mean that one’s in trouble. I think everyone including myself who’s queried this clue uses simply ‘in a hole” to mean “in a pickle”. I regard the two concepts as different (albeit not a million miles part).

56. Agreed Jack@40 and oofyprosser@49!

57. Absolutely hated it. Couldn’t get even one clue.

58. For those listing GHOST STORIES, I don’t think anyone added The Turn of the Screw. But no one reads Henry James any more–who has the time?–so I guess that’s not surprising.

    Also Beloved, by the late Toni Morrison.

    Anyway, it’s unusual to see a Paul puzzle with a theme that he’s not beating you over the head with.

    Full list (I think) then:

    Beloved
    The Ring
    Turn of the Screw
    The Sixth Sense
    The Others
    A Christmas Carol
    The Woman in Black

    …and LULU isn’t a ghost story, but contains enough deaths that it probably could have been!

59. [For the record, I saw the Britten opera adaptation of The Turn of the Screw as a teenager when I was in Sydney. We wanted to go to an opera at the famous opera house, and that’s what was playing. I have never read the novella; Henry James works I can truthfully claim I have read in their entirety are limited to Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and The Ambassadors, with the latter chalked down to a summer spent in Poland in my early 20s with only my parents for company. It’s the best novel I’ve ever read that I would never recommend to anyone! No, it really is great, but…not exactly a page-turner, let’s leave it at that.]

60. MrP @59
    I remember a story about an English lecturer asking a student how she was getting on with a Henry James novel (I forget which one). She said that she couldn’t put it down. Surprised by this unusual response, he asked why.
    “Because every time I put it down I forget who everyone is and have to go back to the beginning and start reading it again”

61. Muffin @60: it’s funny because it’s true!

62. I always enjoy the process of trying Paul’s puzzles.
    Occasionally I get the thrill of managing them all, often I can scarcely get ten, but mostly – like today – I get a fair number, some without fully parsing and have to give in and reveal.
    I always learn more about crosswords when doing it, almost always find a new phrase, word or expression and always turn to this blog to get the explanations.
    When I get a clever one, I feel very pleased with myself and when I learn something new I’m grateful. There’s always a good joke – I really enjoyed GHOST STORIES and GREAT APES, and some base humour.
    What’s not to like? (Well fair enough, there’s occasionally a soundalike which only works for sassenachs but I can forgive that and there weren’t any today).
    Thanks Paul, Eileen and everyone else who fills in gaps.

63. mrpenny @58: I did mention Beloved @33 but thanks for listing the other 2. I should have noted the excellent The Woman in Black but I don’t know The Turn of The Screw. Although I studied English Lit at Uni, I always gave Henry James a wide berth.

64. I also enjoy this blog to see what gets people animated. My kind of people, taking things so literally.
    But really, if you were to ask someone what drink they want and bring them back a hot milk, I wouldn’t expect much thanks for the multi-lingual accuracy

65. Really, Alan C @63? No Henry James at Queens? Shocking. He was one of my star authors when I wrote finals at a university not all that far away in 1972. Go on; try ‘The Turn of the Screw’ now. It is never too late. You can get it on Gutenberg.

66. Balfour @63: I did try The Ambassadors but ran out of steam, however I will accept your challenge and get back to you.

67. AlanC @ 66 I grant that The Ambassadors is a tough introduction to James’s oeuvre. I started with the earlier novels – Roderick Hudson, The American, then Portrait of Lady. The Spoils of Poynton is also pretty accessible. Good luck!

68. Just finished. Took me hours. 2 long train rides. Lucky guesses cider, pickle and mete. Thanks for the parsing

69. Thanks Eileen.
    Entirely fair but also entirely beyond my ability. I got half a dozen and maybe could’ve got a few more, but I could’ve worked on this for weeks and not got some of them. the sort of puzzle that makes me realise I’m strictly National league compared to the Premier league of those who completed, well done all who did.

70. Paul’s offerings are always slow burns for me, but today’s was slightly quicker. I still always have to come here for the parsing of several clues, but when I see them explained it actually makes me admire him all the more. I did like TRAGEDY., although as someone who is aged I like to cling on to the idea that I’m still visible. Thanks Eileen, I do love your blogs.

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