Guardian 26,593 by Puck

46 comments on “Guardian 26,593 by Puck”

1. Most enjoyable solve for a while. Too many goodies to name.

   In 26a I took “what looks like another” to mean DOUBLE.

   Many thanks both.

2. Thank you manehi. I hadn’t parsed 9/3/23 so thanks in particular for that. I had parsed 26ac as “what looks like another” (Double) + “used Ford” (Crossed). That did leave with a spare “in”, but I wrote that off to ease of reading.

3. ThanKs manehi.

   Mostly OK, though I thought 4d overly clunky with a poorish surface.

   11a won’t work for much longer – there are now almost three bridges.

4. JollySwagman and engineerb: thanks re 26ac, that does work better. Edited.

5. Thanks for a great blog, manehi.

   [Re 12ac: S and E are opponents, not a pair, in bridge, hence the ‘No’ in the clue.]

   This was Puck on his very best form – I loved it from start to finish. Sometimes, going back to parse a clue can be a bit of a slog but here it was sheer joy, especially in the laugh out loud 8 and 9,2,23dn – both excellent clues.

   I ended up with more clues ticked than not, so can’t possibly mention them all.

   Huge thanks, as ever, to Puck for loads of fun – I loved the wit of 1ac!

6. Thanks Manehi 12Ac you’ve missed out the “no” from the clue – the point is that South and East are NOT partners at bridge they’re opponents.
   Thought trapeze was a bit feeble but some good clues here – specially liked the definition of Jeffrey Archer!

7. Thanks manehi. Not sure why I didn’t rejoice over this. Three of the long peripherals went in soonish. Got 8D by guessing (missed the ‘that’)’ ditto with 4D (missed the OO spectacles) – both praiseworthy in hindsight. Found 17 and 19D clunky.

8. 19D doesn’t work for me unless there is some other explanation for the removal of the “DIS”. I find the definition of 4D a stretch as well. It might have been OK if the question mark had come straight after “0-0”, I think. I found some of these clues a bit over-contrived – mostly easy enough to fill in, but (unlike Manehi) I couldn’t summon up the energy to work them out.

9. I don’t follow 19D either. Otherwise, an enjoyable solve as always. Thanks, Puck and manehi.

10. OK, I’ve been agonising over 19dn for 20 minutes now, and think I might just have something…possibly!

    The strange word in the clue is ‘conversing’, as it is not needed with ‘orally’ already being the homophone indicator.

    Also conversing is in inverted commas. (I know “conversing” orally helps with the smutty surface reading, but Catch disease orally in swingers’ bar (7) works just as well for that).

    So, what if the inverted commas were there to excuse turning the adjective ‘converse’ (opposite) into a verb: conversing?

    So the ‘converse’ of ‘disease’ is ‘ease’, which when heard ‘orally’ could be ‘EZE’.

    Catch       disease, after “conversing”   orally       in swingers’ bar (7)

    I think that works.

11. Thanks Limeni, edited – I’d managed to think of “conversing” as a possible reversal indicator which just didn’t work, but the “opposite” meaning escaped me

12. I found this puzzle easier to solve than to parse so it was not a very satisfying “solve” for me. And I gave up on 10a, 22d and 4d (that clue made my brain ache!)

    I needed help to parse 11a, 17d, 26a, 8d, 19d – I still don’t understand it and don’t even want to any more!

    I liked 2d and 21a.

    Thanks Puck and manehi

13. Just spotted that the four long clues are all bridge related

14. Very good, some cracking clues.

    JP @13 DOH!

15. Count me as another who found this easier to complete than parse. I confess that the longest answer was biffed as soon as I had the H checker of the first word after my FOI, FORTH, and I never did bother to try and parse it properly. That’s my loss because it’s an amusing clue. Limeni@10 is almost certainly right about how TRAPEZE should be parsed, but that’s another one I didn’t bother trying to parse, as was GLASSES, my LOI. I thought the JEFFREY ARCHER clue was a gem.

16. Thanks Puck and manehi.

    This puzzle was A BRIDGE TOO FAR for me. I managed to solve most of the clues, but parsing was another matter.
    However, I enjoyed it, especially EYESTRAIN (after reading the blog), CRIME WAVE and BEETLE OFF.

17. Great thanks Puck, for a sparklingly witty crossword, and manehi.

    After getting 1A, I was distracted for a moment at 2D by the American name for the same VW (the Bug).

18. Thanks Puck and manehi

    Good fun even when having to parse after seeing the answer e.g. with 8d which was very clever. I was puzzled by 19d so thanks limeni et al. for the parsing of that.

    The bridge theme seems possibly also to include ‘gondola’ and ‘trapeze’ and (via dentistry) even ‘false’.

19. Is the game in 4d not an anagrind? As in game leg….

20. Not my best effort, having failed to spot the hidden “agree” in 7 down, despite having assiduously looked, and in fact continued to do so until had all the crossers. Just one of my many spectacular stupidities today, but I thought it was an excellent crossword when I finally finished it, bar the 10X in 17d and the eze in 19d’s trapeze, shame to spoil such good clues with unnecessary obfuscation, I thought.

    Thanks to Puck and manehi.

21. Thanks Puck, fun puzzle.

    Thanks manehi; some of the parsing was a bit abstruse, I didn’t much like the GLASSES clue, my LOI.

    I particularly liked EYESTRAIN, DOUBLE-CROSSED & JEFFREY ARCHER.

22. Thanks Puck and Manehi. Easier than usual for Puck, partly because the long clues went in relatively quickly without recourse to the wordplay – I got 8dn with only one crosser (A). As a former Edinburgh resident I particularly liked the combination of 11 and 26, and enjoyed 4 and 14. Only held up by believing my own propaganda and putting in “Stink Bomb” first.

    Oh and with my internet name I suppose I should put a word in for 2dn …

23. Oh dear, so messy and bitty.

    I did like 26 however. It was a pity that this kind of neatness is so rarely seen in the other clues (for me).

24. Where the parsing is so convoluted, it turns the puzzle into a superior quick crossword. I prefer puzzles where the cryptic element is a help rather than a distraction in spite of some very clever clues here and a fairly easily solved puzzle.

25. Enjoyable as ever from Puck – seemed tough at first but A BRIDGE TOO FAR and THROW A SPANNER IN THE WORKS wee suggested by the enumeration and once a few crossers were in place it all dropped out fairly easily, apart from a couple of tricky parsings. Particularly liked GLASSES and JEFFREY ARCHER. Last in was FALSE.

26. Very soon 11 across will not apply. The third bridge is being built!

27. PS Forgot my manners – thanks to Puck and manehi.

28. Very enjoyable, although like others I couldn’t parse one or two. The GLASSES clue was very clever, but a bit too much so for me. Favourites were JEFFREY ARCHER, SUPERHERO and CRIME WAVE. Many thanks to Puck and manehi.

29. There are some nice clues, but 8d, 17d and 19d are too contrived for me. Like TH @24, I prefer the cryptic wordplay to be a help to solving, at least when I spot the twists, not something that provokes a “What the —!” when finally explained by the blog.

    TENT as “wine” was new to me, but no complaint about that as I enjoy learning new words through crosswords, even when I am unlikely to ever need to know them again except when doing other crosswords.

    I like the use of 26a in the clue for FORTH – that was a PDM. 0-0 as the definition of GLASSES is a nice reversal of the more common use of “glasses” or “spectacles” to clue “OO”. I like 9,3,23 too, even though I missed the construction of “IN”.

    Thanks to Puck, manehi and everyone who added explanations.

30. I managed to parse everything in retrospect with the exception of JEFFREY ARCHER which I thought was quite fiendish. LOI CRIME WAVE. I rather enjoyed this.
    Thanks Puck.

31. As usual, I had difficulty parsing solutions (most of them already mentioned but also ORANGEADE) but for a change I did get WIGAN without any aid from Google and enjoyed the process. Thanks to Puck and manehi.

32. Thanks Puck and manehi

    In addition to those mentioned above, I think there are some more bridge links:

    23A Wigan has (or had) a pier, which could be seen as a single-ended bridge

    4D Glasses have a bridge between the lenses

    8D Bridges generally have arches, so could be said to be archers

    Could gas lamps be seen as the bridge between candles and electric light?

    OK, maybe I’m stretching things, but then again maybe not

33. I did enjoy this puzzle, although the upper left was a problem. “Beetle off” isn’t an expression I know, and Jeffrey Archer didn’t make the news here. Several very clever clues otherwise.

    Incidentally, everyone here would enjoy this. It’s an ad for Scrabble, and I feel vaguely bad posting a link to an ad, but—oh, just trust me and click. You’ve known me long enough to know that I don’t spam. Link.

34. Westdale

    That’s the way I saw it too (game in 4d)

35. The somewhat wacky definition, plus that trope’s re-use to mean OO, plus LOST not being the anag-ind but a (little-used) single-letter indicator for L, plus the old use (not in Collins) of GAME to mean (presumably) ‘with a permanent injury’ as anag-ind probably made that one a bit tough. But I saw through GLASSES in the end.

36. Sheer delight, unalloyed pleasure, etc. Brilliant crossword

    Many thanks to Puck and to Manehi – not the easiest of blogs!

    GLASSES was my laugh out loud solution. For a while I shared Cookie’s concern that 2dn might have something to do with fly = bug and the definition might be “Fly!”, hence
    “B—r Off!”

37. What an appaling mess. My wife and I tried this indepentently. After 40 minutes we both had NO answers. After 40 more minutes we gave up – still no answers.

    We came to fifteensquared. And tried to work out the answers without looking at the explanations. We managed to work out about 6. At least half of these clues were virtually un explainable. Even the suggested solutions were unbelievable.

    We have 4 degrees between us. I don’t expect to get all the answers, but this puzzle is for crossword geeks. There is no enjoyment value in this for the average solver.

38. I wasn’t goung to bother commenting on this as I’d nothing much to add.

    However I couldn’t let the “appalling mess” of “4 degrees” go without comment.

    This definitley wasn’t an appalling mess, in fact I found it quite well clued, enjoyable and eminently solvable.

    Since when has a “degree” helped with a cryptic crossword? Unless of course some Uni now offers a BA in Cryptic Crosswords (I wouldn’t be surprised!)

    Why not just say you didn’t like this puzzle rather than make judgements for all “average solvers”?

    I do like the idea of being a “crossword geek” though 😉

    Thanks to manehi and Puck

39. Well, we have at least one Don.

40. Hi all,

    Nice XWord. Can someone explain to me how though you get crossed from used Ford? Can;t seem to place it 🙁

    Thanks to Puck and Manehi

41. Alex: “Ford” in the sense of a river-crossing

42. According to Collins online:

    http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/game

    (scroll down to #2)

    a less common word for lame ? “game leg”
    Word Origin
    C18: probably from Irish cam crooked
    Synonyms
    lame, injured, disabled, crippled, defective, bad, maimed, deformed, gammy

43. Some support for Jim Dale @37. A bit of a mess to the extent that many of the clues in this puzzle were solvable only on the basis of separating out the definition element from the cryptic element, with the latter providing no help and serving mainly to get in the way of arriving at the solution. Just an after the fact appreciation of the cleverness of the setter.
    For instance, was there ever any hope here that solvers would get the ADE before the ORANGEADE (17d) or the EZE before the TRAPEZE (19d)?
    It is odd that one of the defining features of crossword geekery (for me) would be pride in the skill of turning a cryptic crossword into a quick crossword.

44. Van Winkle @ 43

    Although I mostly agree with you I can’t see that this supports Jim Dale.

    Of course the seperation of the wordplay and the definition is vital to solving a clue. However in all but the simplest of puzzles it is the setter’s aim to make this a little more difficult. In fact misdirection plays a vital part in the pleasure of solving a good puzzle.

    My real point is that I foound it galling that the reaction to failing totally on a puzzle was to criticise the setter. For the first 10 years or so that I failed to complete a Guardian cryptic my reaction to failure was to get the answers and try to see why I couldn’t succeed. (Of course it was a little more difficult then as we didn’t have the internet, messageboards or fifteensquared to provide the guidance of experts!)

45. We are all allowed to give our opinions on particular puzzles, and there will never be total agreement, but Jim Dale @37 seems (to me) to have gone completely OTT. Other than the few clues that I and others have mentioned, I don’t see this as an unusually difficult Guardian cryptic. As always, specific references to UK geography or cultural references to politicians, films or games like bridge may cause problems for some solvers. However, most of the clues use fairly standard cryptic crossword techniques, so I am surprised that Jim and his wife could only understand six of the clues even once they had seen the answers.

    “At least half of these clues were virtually un explainable. Even the suggested solutions were unbelievable.”

    Really? Although I feel that 8d, 17d and perhaps 26a are near to impossible to understand fully without seeing the suggested parsings here (though obviously some solvers did manage them), TRAPEZE was the only one which left me unconvinced even after reading the blog.

46. Thanks Puck and manehi

    Completed this one over the weekend … and was obviously on Puck’s wavelength because it was all over and done inside an hour, which is unusual for me with this setter – he usually takes much longer – in fact I only recently finished his May puzzle.

    Was able to parse most of them, if not fully – then mostly – missed the I (current) N (name) in the long one, missed the THAT from Thatcher in 8d, didn’t see why the ‘DIS’ disappeared from ‘disease’ – just knew it did in 19 and didn’t fully understand the DOUBLE in 26.

    I don’t mind getting answers either way – by working out what the answer is from the cryptic part or by seeing the definition and reverse engineering the parsing … you need to be able to do both with this fellow !!! Actually spotted the theme for once as well – which I think also runs through the surfaces of a few – 12a, 13a and 20a.

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