A rare appearance by Fed in the Prize slot this week.
Fed is perhaps better known as the comedian Dave Gorman. He is now a prolific setter in The Guardian and elsewhere, but I think that this may be his first appearance in the Prize slot and hence is the first time that I have blogged one of his puzzles. Timon and I found much to admire in the variety of clues on offer, with a few tricky parsings, but I think that all is explained below. If there was a theme, it has eluded us, but I did notice that ADIEU appears as a possible Nina in the fourth line. I hope that is just a coincidence.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | MALAISE |
Discomfort of man guarding Ladies at intervals (7)
|
| Alternate letters of lAdIeS inside MALE. | ||
| 5 | ISOLATE |
I run down to take old set apart (7)
|
| O(ld) inside I SLATE (I run down). | ||
| 10 | PLAICE |
Caught what might be flat fish (6)
|
| A homophone of “place” (which might be a flat). | ||
| 11 | ACCUSTOM |
Charge when docked before Cruise. It’s what adaptors do? (8)
|
| ACCUS(e) (charge) TOM (Cruise). | ||
| 12 | AND |
Also covered by Ian Dury (3)
|
| Hidden in Ian Dury. | ||
| 13 | ARCHED |
Main journalist is bent (6)
|
| ARCH (main, as in Archbishop) ED(itor). | ||
| 14 | DIATRIBE |
Dreadful people broadcast stream of abuse (8)
|
| Sounds like “dire tribe”. | ||
| 15 | DEBUT |
Spooner’s horse expected to make first appearance (5)
|
| Spoonerism of “bay due”. | ||
| 16 | FIG LEAVES |
Flipping image on computer goes to show what First Lady wore? (3,6)
|
| GIF (rev) (image on computer) LEAVES (goes). | ||
| 19 | APPENDAGE |
Saw boxes open having made over pub’s entrance – need attachment (9)
|
| P(ub) and (o)PEN all inside ADAGE (saw). We weren’t entirely comfortable with “made over” as a deletion indicator for the O of open; perhaps someone has a better parsing? | ||
| 21 | ODEON |
Working next to Lyric Theatre (5)
|
| ODE (lyric) ON (working). | ||
| 24 | GRAFFITO |
Writing on the wall? It’s hard work entertaining female I love (8)
|
| F(emale) I inserted into GRAFT (hard work), O (love). | ||
| 26 | ASTRAY |
Occasionally Lady Astor starts and nothing goes wrong (6)
|
| *(lAdY (occasional letters of lAdY) AST(o)R (nothing goes)). “starts” is the anagram indicator. | ||
| 27 | OWN |
Have to swing regularly (3)
|
| Alternate (regular) letters of tO sWiNg. | ||
| 28 | WINDMILL |
Turner’s Dutch landscape feature? (8)
|
| Cryptic definition and definition. | ||
| 29 | CLINIC |
Bromide he wanted by visiting health centre (6)
|
| IN (by) inside CLIC(he) (he wanted). A cliche could be defined as a bromide. | ||
| 30 | USURPED |
United beaten – starters in Amorim’s side seem lost, displaced (7)
|
| U(nited); SURP(ass)ED (omitting starting letters from Amorim’s Side Seem). This was the last one that we parsed. | ||
| 31 | BLUE JAY |
Judge adult getting into children’s cartoon bird (4,3)
|
| J(udge) A(dult) inside BLUEY (children’s cartoon). | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 2 | AT LARGE |
Worried about prisoner crossing river, getting free (2,5)
|
| R(iver) inside LAG (prisoner), all inside ATE (worried). | ||
| 3, 20 | ACID HOUSE PARTIES |
I do supply with Es I purchase at raves (4,5,7)
|
| *(I DO ES I PURCHASE AT). “Supply” is an anagram indicator; it’s an adverb, not a noun or a verb. | ||
| 4 | STEADY |
Succeeded with tea and sympathy ultimately being unwavering (6)
|
| S(ucceeded) TEA anD (sympath)Y. | ||
| 6 | SOCIALLY |
Crafty, ringing round before agents left – in a friendly way (8)
|
| O (round) CIA (agents) L(eft), all inside SLY (crafty). | ||
| 7 | LOSER |
One doesn’t win exciting roles (5)
|
| *ROLES. | ||
| 8, 17 | TROUBLE AND STRIFE |
Dutch fighting berserk Dane first (7,3,6)
|
| TROUBLE (fighting) *(DANE FIRST). Both “Dutch” and “trouble and strife” are slang terms for a wife. | ||
| 9 | PADDLING POOLS |
Angrily pop all sodding inflatables? (8,5)
|
| *(POP ALL SODDING). | ||
| 17 |
See 8
|
|
| 18 | ADDITIVE |
Extra in uplifting musical flexibly did splits (8)
|
| *DID (flexibly) inside (splits) EVITA (musical, rev). | ||
| 20 |
See 3
|
|
| 22 | OCARINA |
Seat for one artiste essentially jamming on a musical instrument (7)
|
| CAR (Seat – the Spanish brand) (art)I(ste) all inside (jamming) ON A. | ||
| 23 | CANCEL |
Tin Church, Laragh’s source for scrap (6)
|
| CAN (tin) CE (Church) L(aragh). | ||
| 25 | FADER |
Group of footballers embarrassed about being dimmer (5)
|
| FA (group of footballers) RED (embarrassed, rev). Dimmer here is a noun. |
19ac you make the O (over) of ‘open’ a P (pub’s entrance), ie ‘open’ becomes ‘ppen’. Enjoyed this, sincerely hope it’s not ADIEU.
Took one sitting, but a rather long one. In the end, entered OCARINA out of desperation, but couldn’t see the word play. For crossing CLINIC, couldn’t see the IN.
Some clues were quite remarkable, in particular ASTRAY, ADDITIVE and GRAFFITO.
Tx.
Is this maybe a tad too contrived in places? A bit “out there”?
Some great clues here. I always miss the trick used in APPENDAGE.
I’m sure I’ll have missed something, but isn’t there an extra “one” in 22D? It seems to work fine without it, just using the I in the middle of artiste?
Hard. I filled in all the squares correctly again but had to wait to come here to understand rather too many for my own self respect. Still not convinced about 19a.
10 does not make a lot of sense. Where is the homophone indicator? “What might be flat” cannot equate to “place” – would love to hear how.
Made OVER (O) pubs entrance (P). It is not deletion, but replacing O with P.
*(lAdY (occasional letters of lAdY) AST(o)R (nothing goes)). “starts” is the anagram indicator.
I believe there is no anagram. Starts just means that ASTOR without O starts, followed by AY from lAdY
29. Is “wanted” really a deletion indicator, and “by” an insertion indicator?
22 what is “seat for one”? How does that become CAR? Even if SEAT is a Spanish car, what happened to “for one”? Is SEAT a single-seater car?
Well! This was a thing of beauty. I continue to be a huge fan of Fed’s puzzles, and although I can understand why some find them contrived, personally I find them cleverly constructed (it’s probably the mathematician in me – and in Fed, I believe). Combine that with concise, witty surfaces and you get something very elegant.
I made speedy progress, and then spent longer on the last two, USURPED and ASTRAY, as on the rest of the puzzle combined. There can’t be many words that fit the checkers for USURPED and yet would one come to me? And even when it did, the parsing was pretty fiendish… one of only two clues I wasn’t taken with (see subsequent comment), but maybe it’s sour grapes!
As for ASTRAY, I parsed it as per the blog and was going to quibble (removing a letter after anagramming is a no-no), but it’s clear that the correct passing is that given by Shafar@9; chapeau for that!
Thanks both
Shafar, as for your queries:
CLINIC: “Bromide he wanted” is CLIC[HE] without the “he”, i.e. “Bromide lacking he”.
OCARINA: “for one” can mean “for example”, so “Seat for one” clues CAR because Seat (properly styled as SEAT so Fed’s been a bit naughty there) is an example of a brand of car. Definitions by example have to be indicated somehow; setters use a variety of devices, including “perhaps” and a “?”. “For one” is quite common too, and here it was beautifully disguised.
PLAICE: “place” for “flat” was the other one I wasn’t much taken with. “Go back to my flat/place” maybe. Perhaps there’s more to this one.
Shafar #11 “Seat for one” as in “I could name several makes of car – Seat for one”.
Another great puzzle from Fed, with great surfaces and wordplay. Chewy enough that it took a few sittings. Favourites 1a MALAISE, 10a PLAICE (flat fish), 21a ODEON (Lyric Theatre), 26a ASTRAY (Lady Astor), 31 BLUE JAY (our beloved Canadian baseball team, which should have won the World Series this year)
19a APPENDAGE is delightfully convoluted after retro-parsing. Anyone solve it directly from the wordplay?
Shafar@7, Do you want to come over to my flat/place? (as AP@13) Homophone indicator is “caught”
APPENDAGE
Agree with Hadrian@1 and Shafar@8.
ASTRAY
Agree with Shafar@9
PLAICE
‘caught’ (in the sense of ‘heard’) is the homophone indicator.
My flat is my place.
CLINIC
@10
‘wanted’ to indicate that CLIChe lacks he.
‘by’ is interchangeable with ‘in’ (I am coming in my car/by my car….someone should have a better example).
by visiting=IN visiting/IN is included in
OCARINA
Seat, for one=Seat, for example/say.
Sorry. I was typing for a long time, and I see that almost all queries of Shafar have already been answered.
Thanks Fed and bridgesong.
Not much to add to AP@12.
Thanks, fed and Bridgesong for a difficult but entertaining puzzle
Just a final couple of observations:
I had to look up why a “Dutch wife” might be a real wife rather than a plastic one, and of course it turned out that it isn’t; dutch stands alone for wife and apparently that’s not from Cockney rhyming slang.
I learnt that Lady Astor was the UK’s first female MP and a controversial one at that; so the surface for ASTRAY was quite pithy.
Laragh turns out to be a pretty obscure (or pretty, obscure) village in Ireland which does indeed have a tin church, a one-of-a-kind, apparently.
I found this difficult. Completed it in the end but a few were not parsed so thanks to bridgesong.
Favourites were: ACCUSTOM, FIG LEAVES, DEBUT, CANCEL
I don’t get why a cliche could be described as a bromide and why “main” = “arch”
Thanks both
Fiona #19: arch = chief (e.g. Archangel Gabriel, arch critic) and chief = main as in “he is the chief/main culprit here”.
One of the meanings of bromide (new to me today too) is platitude and a platitude is a cliché.
[Was it Churchill who had the witty banter with Lady Astor … ?]
Excellent workout, thanks Fed and B&T.
I couldn’t parse CLINIC and didn’t know the expression TROUBLE AND STRIFE (or Dutch for wife) but there couldn’t be much else given the crossers. Otherwise, not too taxing I thought but very enjoyable. LOI T&S and DIATRIBE. There might be something medical going on (MALAISE, SOCIALLY/ISOLATE, CLINIC) but probably not enough for a theme… Thanks Fed and bridgesong!
Thank you Mary Wackdean @ 20
Get it now
Fiona # 19 To answer more precisely, bromide is used as a sedative, so it has also come to mean a dull and boring person. From there comes the meaning of the kind of thing they might say, like a platitude or some other dull remark. And this has crossed with your kind acknowledgment!
Thanks Fed for an excellent prize. I enjoyed clues such as ACCUSTOM, FIG LEAVES, ODEON, LOSER, & ADDITIVE. I needed an anagram maker to solve PADDLING POOLS; I was stuck on ‘inflatables’ being ‘dolls’. (Thank you Bryan Ferry!). I needed a word finder to solve USURPED & couldn’t parse CLINIC but these were minor stumbles in an overall worthwhile puzzle. Thanks bridgesong for the blog.
As well as ADIEU, nearer the bottom there is also TAT-RR (tata???) – maybe contrived but also suggests a farewell *sob*
TS@25 I love Bryan Ferry. But inflatable dolls/dolls? NHO and something to explore. Yet another chance encounter for new knowledge thanks to Fifteen Squared
Glad to see a number of people here having trouble with some of the parsings. I had a number of clues where I couldn’t quite make the wordplay work, but could get close enough that it had to be right – OCARINA (fair enough, I’ve even driven a Seat once, but that didn’t come to mind), CLINIC (I’d buy ‘by’ = ‘in a’ but not just ‘in’), APPENDAGE (yes, I see that now, thanks, Hadrian). And I was reluctant to write in PLAICE because I just couldn’t see the link to ‘flat’. But again, fair enough, I’m convinced by KVa’s ‘my flat’ is ‘my place’ example.
But apart from the quibbles, which probably reflect more on me than the puzzle, an enjoyable challenge with some very nice clues. Nice to see an Australian cartoon get a mention, by the way. And it’s a good program. Thanks Fed and bridgesong and previous commenters.
[Martyn @27: For Your Pleasure, the 2nd Roxy Music album, includes a song called ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’. From the song: ‘Inflatable doll, lover ungrateful, I blew up your body but you blew my mind’]
Perfect for my (medium) level of solving. Fed has become my favourite setter, consistently provides me with several ‘aha’ and smile moments when the penny drops. I was very smug at the end when I realised I’d parsed everything. APPENDAGE and OCARINA were the last to fall.
An example of place/flat in the chorus of ‘Live It Up’:
Hey yeah you with the sad face
Come up to my place and live it up
You beside the dance floor
What do you cry for let’s live it up
Blue Jay! 😊
KeithS@28, “he walked in/by the light of the moon” probably gets me close enough.
Thanks, bridgesong. This cleared up how OCARINA parses. Generally a puzzle at the right level for me. Thanks, Fed.
‘Dutch’ is an abbreviation of duchess, as a man may refer to ‘my old duchess’ – there’s a music hall song about ‘me dear old dutch’.
Grantinfreo@21 – Lady Astor: Winston, if I was married to you I’d give you poison. Churchill: Nancy, if I was your husband I’d drink it.
Tricky but doable.
New for me: BLUEY = children’s cartoon character.
I could not parse 29ac.
22d – I did not parse the ‘artiste essentially’ bit having wrongly parsed the for one = 1/I so my parsing sort of made sense but I wondered, why the artiste 😉
Very enjoyable but difficult for me. Happy that I nearly completed it. Thank you to those here who have answered all my parsing questions, especially ‘seat for one’ which is a brilliant misdirection. And thanks to Fed. I hope it is not Adieu.
A really enjoyable effort from Fed and just about doable for me. I’ve had the misfortune of sitting through an inordinate amount of BLUEY episodes, whilst babysitting; avoid at all costs!
MANU FC continues to be the controversial gift that keeps on giving in cryptics and USURPED is the ‘Best’, I can remember, although their form has improved somewhat of late. Three months ago it would have been on the button.
Like KVa @16, I took caught to be the homophone indicator for place. Didn’t know that meaning for bromide although I had the crossers to make the solution clear. ACID HOUSE PARTIES, ASTRAY and APPENDAGE were also great clues and thanks Hadrian@1 and Shafar@9 for parsing them.
Ta Fed & bridgesong.
I found the use of Artiste for picking just an I a wonderful misguiding waste of the word.
I really admire Fred’s ability to make plausible surfaces from complex wordplay. I hope that the Adieu is not his valediction.
AP@18: Lady Astor was the first female MP to take her seat, but the first one elected was Constance Markievice in1919. As a Sinn Fein member, she did not take her seat.
[poc @40: I only remember her as Countess M. A fierce, fascinating lady of Anglo-Irish stock, she was sentenced to death for her part in the Easter Rising, only to have it commuted to life because of her sex. When told of this it is reported that she replied “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me”].
Smashing puzzle and super blog. Many thanks to F and b.
Our FOIs were STEADY and AND and we limped home with USURPED, but alas and a lack, we had eight entries not fully parsed until a little later with OCARINA and APPENDAGE the most obdurate. Many favourites, but special mentions for DIATRIBE, DEBUT, CLINIC and ADDITIVE.
Many other points have been addressed by the multitude of bloggers who have, as usual, pre-empted my own lazy Saturday morning start – so many thanks to you all! Only one last thought regarding Lady Astor: I can well remember hearing the ballad called The D-Day Dodgers sung by the Ian Campbell Folk Group at University in the early sixties – all part and parcel of the early days of the protest movements!
[AlanC @41 and poc @40 See also Yeats’s poem, ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz’:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
…
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant …]
[gif@21 Wasn’t there also: “Mr. Churchill you’re drunk!” “I may be drunk, but in the morning I’ll be sober, and you, madam, will still be ugly”]
I thought this was a joy from start to end. It took me a number of sittings over the weekend, which is just what I want from a Prize crossword.
I’ve been so impressed with this and other recent crosswords from Fed that I’ve started working through his older puzzles in the Guardian archive. I find his style of setting to be just right for me – clear instructions on how to build the solution, with lots of wit included. I particularly like his use of more modern terms, like “computer image” to clue GIF.
ASTRAY was my loi, which I eventually parsed as per Shafar @9, and I thought it was a fabulous clue.
I do hope the ADIEU Nina is not a parting message
Many thanks to Fed and bridgesong.
Dr. WhatsOn @44: I believe that Churchillian exchange was with Bessie Braddock MP
Thanks Fed and bridgesong. I thought for a long time I wasn’t going to finish this without cheating, but finally did, in spite of a few unparsed. The same few as those explained so well by others above.
I made steady progress in the first half. Like some others above, I couldn’t parse some of the later clues, but they were gettable from definitions and crossers. I am with with those who found it a bit too contrived, but at least I finished it, unlike last week.
I enjoyed ACID HOUSE PARTIES..take that how you will!
Thanks Fed and bridgesong (59th street?)
I enjoyed the tricky parsing with the exception of “by”=”in” @ 29a.
30a had a clever misdirection in that, although Amorim is currently manager of Man United, it was irrelevant. I briefly thought I might have the wrong club as there’s a partial anagram of Spurs in the answer.
My fault that I failed to parse half of 15a. I can’t remember when I last said “debut” out loud but I’m pretty sure I pronounced DEB as in Deborah. I was also slow to spot “due” as I started by thinking it was “deboo”, sidetracked by Jim Maxwell, Australian cricket commentator?
Dr Whatson@44.
MikeB@46 is right. Allegedly the full exchange was.
Churchill: Bessie, you’re ugly.
Bessie Braddock: Winston, you’re drunk.
Churchill: Yes, but tomorrow I shall be sober.
Thanks to Fed and bridgesong.
I surprised myself by getting and parsing all of this, albeit rather slowly, USURPED and ASTRAY went in probably on Weds !
Thanks to Fed for the challenge, bridgesong and numerous contributors on here for further finesse in extending the parsing.
AP @18 — I’ve actually been to Laragh, though I missed the church; it is also home to a kid-oriented waterpark called Clara Laragh – what fun!
Various commentators dredge out surely apocryphal exchanges between Winston Churchill and various ladies, inter alia Britain’s 2nd elected female MP Lady Astor. Why persist in delight at boorish misogyny of Britain’s main modern hero figure?
Congrats on the name check Jay@32!
es 51:
👍
That said, there are some good ones. If I remember rightly there was an occasion when a pedant requested a fuller explanation of some matter, which WC dutifully gave. The response was “I’m sorry, Sir, but I’m afraid I’m none the wiser” to which the rejoinder was “No, but considerably better informed”. Or such words.
I tend to agree with John#48 etc all, who use the word “contrived” in regard to Fred’s method of obscuring the answers. To a certain extent that’s what we expect a setter to do, but does it have to be as hard as this? Take ‘open having made over pub’s entrance’, for example. Yes, that’s a clear instruction to change the O in OPEN to a P, but the only hint that it’s an instruction is that the phrase is actually gibberish in the real world. Isn’t the hope that the setter will disguise their meaning within something that almost makes sense in English, and we then try to work out what it means in crosswordese? Whereas Fed is giving us the crosswordese in the surface, which strikes me as unfair. Or have I misunderstood?
Thanks Fed anyway, maybe one day I’ll get on the same wavelength, unless this really is AD & IEU. 🤔 And thanks to Bridgesong & Timon as ever. 😁
Etu@53
I’m afraid you don’t remember rightly.. It’s a nice riposte but it wasn’t Churchill; iit was F.E.Smith as a barrister in response to a judge who said “i’ve been listening to you for an hour and I’m none the wiser”.
Ha ha I mistakenly thought this puzzle was this weeks while looking for the parsing of 9,21,17. Read the intro blurb, noted the ADIEU comment, thought it referred to Ms M Mone, and then noticed that line 13 reads TAT OWN RR which I read as ‘Trashy things own Rolls Royces’.. which might apply to her also..
THEN.. I noticed that it was last weeks puzzle.. Sigh..
Sheffield Hatter @54, it’s not gibberish. If something is made over it has been given a makeover. I rate Fed’s facility with cryptic syntax highly.
Thanks bridgesong and thanks all.
It’s not the first time I’ve been in the Prize slot – I was also there in August with a puzzle blogged by Eileen.
In/by providing an explanation as to why ‘by’ = ‘in’, the setter hoped to satisfy some people’s quibbles.
AP @13 – I genuinely didn’t know that Seat was supposed to be styled SEAT – but if What Car, The Irish News and Top Gear can all call it Seat then I don’t think it’s all that naughty.
I found this quite straightforward and at the point I’ve reached with Fed, I’d be sticking around until I’d finished anyway. I was held up by the cartoon for a while which was embarrassing once I saw it. All very good fun. My favourite setter, nice to have Prize discipline imposed.
Thanks, Fed, for dropping in (or by!) and sorry that I overlooked your previous appearance in the Prize slot. You make no mention of the ADIEU Nina, so let’s hope it is just a coincidence.
Oh, and just to add… no theme was intended and any Ninas spotted are entirely accidental. It’s certainly not adieu.
Fed@61 YAY! 🙂
sheffield hatter @54 I guess surfaces are subjective. Yesterday’s puzzle received some praise for its surfaces, whereas I didn’t care for them at all. As I mentioned @15 I love Fed’s surfaces, finding them coherent and funny. He manages to craft creative wordplay into surfaces that actually have some meaning in the real world
For 19a APPENDAGE, it seems that the entrance to the pub has had a makeover, but it’s not quite finished. A new attachment that will allow the new sign to light up (say) has been delivered, and it’s been so well packaged that they have to use a saw to open it
One little sentence that contains a delightful story!
26a ASTRAY, Once in a while, when Lady Astor gets up to speak, she follows the script perfectly and everything’s fine. Most of the time, though, she manages to put her foot in her mouth and offend everyone in the room
9d PADDLING POOLS, The instructions for blowing up the inflatable animals were so frustrating — they might as well have been written in gibberish! I was so fed up I went around and popped every single one of those sodding inflatables. Grrrr!
Okay, I’ll stop now… 🙂
Pino 55,
Thanks! 😊
I see a lot of discussion about PLAICE but no one seems to have spotted that PLAICE is in fact a flatfish which makes the clue very neat.