Usual high quality fare from Dac: excellent surfaces, good clear wordplay, and at least one I have failed to get.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | FLIGHT CREW — F+LIGHT+CREW(e) — “Those serving in air” is an excellent definition here. It naturally runs into the next word, “force”, and led me to think of (the) FEW once I had the initial F. |
| 11 | GREENGAGE — GAG in GREENE — a plum. |
| 13 | TRIDENT — I’D in TRENT — river one. |
| 15 | EMETIC — ITEM< in EC — an EMETIC is a drug causing vomiting. EC = European Community. |
| 16 | FORSOOTH — S+O+O in FORTH — river two and an excellent old word. |
| 24 | LASAGNE — SAG(e) in LANE — “country way” is LANE rather than RUSTICA as the surface might suggest. |
| 28 | STUMBLING — (MUST)* + BLING — BLING is showy jewellery. I saw the ING ending and pencilled in RING having ruled out EARRING. It took me a while to see BLING and then the obvious initial anagram. |
| 30 | ? — ST+?? or ?? in ST — “Though guided by saint, one may go downhill fast(4)” Any ideas? STEP springs to mind but I can’t justify the EP to myself. It looks like this is SLED from S+LED. |
| 31 | SAINT PETER — (TAPE ISN’T)* + ER — he was described as a rock. |
| Down | |
| 2 | IMAGINE — G in I+MAINE — fancy = IMAGINE |
| 3 | HIGHSMITH — HIGHS + “myth” — I think this refers to Patricia Highsmith though I don’t know her work. “story-telling” leads to the homophone of myth. |
| 7 | PLACEBO — PLACE+BO(y) — The definition here sort of needs the whole clue but the clue itself isn’t &lit… |
| 8 | SWEATSHIRT — (T+WEARS THIS)* &lit —…but this one is and is elegantly simple. |
| 14 | VERBALISES — BALI in VERSES — my favourite clue, just for Dac spotting Bali in there. |
| 17 | STEAMED UP — S + TEAMED UP |
| 18 | ANGELICA — ANGEL+I+CA(ke) — the definition here can only be “decoration” though it’s hard not to read “cake” as doing double duty. |
| 27 | WEAR — double def. — the third river and the one I can’t quite see from my window though I can see the tree-lined valley. |
I thought 30ac might be SLED.
Thanks, that’s sounds spot on. I always forget that S can mean saint. Thus it is S+LED = “guided by saint”
1A – I first filled in GROUND CREW, which seems to work fine with the clue if you take the definition as “Those serving in air force”.
SLANG
It seems that Dac is using “large number” to clue N. Why the “large”? The surface is marginally better, I suppose, but it looks to me as if we are being unnecessarily misled.
n = large number A point that did occur to me too when solving. In maths n is generally an unspecified number (integer) but the concept of largeness is there in say “to the nth degree”. In support of the setter, Chambers does say “implicitly a large number (informal)”.
Excellent puzzle, as always from Dac, which I found a bit harder than normal.