Enigmatic Variations No. 981: Pub Crawl by Shark

Now I enjoy a good pub crawl, as much as the next (semi-)alcoholic, apart from the inevitable morning after, but I found this one particularly tough going – almost like suffering the hangover whilst you are out enjoying yourself!

Nineteen corrected misprints would lead to a well known verse, an adaptation of which was then to be found – with four ‘appropriate actions’ then carried out – two to answers before entry in the grid, two to produce the ‘final’ grid. Solvers were then to highlight the surname of the adaptor (which last point I missed in my initial reading of the preamble – schoolboy error! – thus invalidating my posted entry…doh!)

All familiar enough EV devices to experienced solvers, maybe a little daunting to beginners, but in combination and with no indication of how many devices were being applied to each clue – and, for me, some fairly stiff clueing in itself – I think this all combined to make this a toughie. By the Friday, I had only managed to fill part of the NE quarter, and had 7 of the required 19 letters. If I wasn’t blogging this one, I would have thrown in the towel at this point, and I did consider sending an SOS to the EV team, to see if anybody would cover for me.

Some hard slog, intensive use of Chambers, and a fair wind eventually cracked it – with the 19 letters giving ‘…half a pound of treacle…’. Several clues seemed to have a superfluous ‘M’ – ‘that’s the way the money goes’ – so surely it was just a case of removing those Ms, finding the weasel – and maybe some tuppenny rice?

However, there were two answers – SAUTERNE and WERNERITE – which were 4 letters too long, and two – FRY and TINT – that seemed 4 letters short for their entry. Back to that ‘adaptation’ and, with a bit of Googling and Wikipedia-ing, I found it:

Up and down the City Road,
In and out The Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
W. R. Mandale (also attributed to Charles Twigg)

So the Eagle (ERNE) came out of those two long words, and into the short ones – and, after a bit of searching, DRYTIC in the top right corner came down to be CITY RD. Removing WEASEL diagonally from bottom left resulted in real words spanning the gaps. And, too late for me, Mr Mandale appears in an L shape from the only ‘M’ that wasn’t removed – which explains that little mystery…(only the surname was asked for, but there is ‘WR’, his initials, just above the MAN):

Phew – enough to drive one to drink! Many thanks to Shark for such a stiff challenge, and such a wonderful piece of grid/theme construction. My office is just at the bottom end of City Road – might need to pop up the Eagle for a bit more research…!

(Not completely sure on the parsing of 22D – grateful for any better suggestions)