Being Wimbledon fortnight I suppose we might have had strawberries sometime but instead we got a single straw[berry] plus a lot of other berries. Pity there was no cream to go with them!
I found this a mixed bag with some very easy clues and some which took a little time to unravel. There were a few typical Cinephile clues (eg 25a and 19d) and one which I have been unable to parse or even understand fully (17a).
Across
1 LAID PAPER LAID (ugly, in French) PAPER (journal)
6 BLACK cd
9 GOOSE cd
10 AD NAUSEAM *(AN) USE (custom) in ADAM (first man)
11 NEONATALLY NEON (gas for lighting) A TALLY (score)
12 CRAN cd
14 WHORTLE RT (right) in WHOLE (complete)
15 TROUBLE T (time) ROUBLE (money)
17 TAYLORS ??? – there is a ‘Taylor Series’ in mathematics and the merchants’ guild could be the ‘Merchant Taylors’ Company’, one of the Great Twelve Livery Companies of the City of London, but I don’t see where ‘golden apples’ fits in nor can I see what is the definition and what is the wordplay.
19 CATALAN CAT (pet) ALAN (boy)
20 RASP cd
22 TRAUMATISM *(I MUST A) in TRAM (vehicle)
25 EARTHWORK *(EARTH) = ‘heart’
26 ENROL hidden in ‘gardEN ROLlers’
27 ROWAN cd – Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
28 ELEVENSES LEVEN (loch) in *(SEES)
Down
1 LOGAN G (good) in LOAN (advance)
2 ICONOLOGY NO LOG (record) in I (one) COY (company)
3 PRECAUTION *(A TEN P CURIO)
4 PLACATE LAC (senior airman) in PATE (head)
5 RINGLET RING (bells) LET (hire)
6 BLUE cd – a reference to the Conservative Party (I assume)
7 ANEAR AN EAR (a listener)
8 KOMINTERN *(MINOR KENT)
13 CONTRAVENE *(COVENANTER)
14 WATER BEAR WATER BEAR[er] (removing hesitation from Aquarius)
16 BILLIARDS ILL (sick) I (one) in BARDS (poets)
18 SCROOGE EGO (personality) ORCS (killers) reversed
19 CHUCKLE CHUCK (Berry, musician) LE (the, in French) and C (caught) HUCKLE[berry] (American berry) – two sets of wordplay
21 STRAW cd – Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice
23 MULES dd
24 WHIN H (hospital) in WIN (success)
Hi Gaufrid,
Have to admit that I solved many of the thematic answer without recourse to figuring out the wordplay, so thanks for the enlightenment. In contrast, KOMINTERN came purely from the wordplay, as I recognised the word but not the meaning.
17A is a triple def’n. The two elements you cited, plus a variety of apple.
See (http://www.allaboutapples.com/varieties/var_t1.htm#taylor)
Hi smiffy
Thanks for the link. I had considered the possibility of a triple definition in 17a but I had no luck googling for a possible link between ‘taylor’ and ‘apple’ (I was either not using the correct search terms or I didn’t plough through sufficient hits). That just leaves the quibble regarding the mathematical reference which is usually referred to as the ‘Taylor series’ rather than ‘Taylor’s series’.