A lighthearted puzzle from Qaos, with great cluing and witty surfaces throughout.
Qaos puzzles usually have a theme and this one was easier to spot than they sometimes are – Guardian crossword setters, past and present. Qaos, impressively, has managed to include sixteen [at least!] in both clues and answers – and, in three instances, two in one clue. Familiarity with these setters is in no way essential to the solve but makes for added enjoyment for us aficianodos.
Many thanks, Qaos – I loved it!
[I need help with parsing 18dn.]
Across
1 Tramp, for example, coming back from special spot (7)
SPLODGE
S [special] + PLOD [Tramp] + a reversal [coming back] of EG [for example]
5 In Texas Union, does fashion mean suits? (7)
TUXEDOS
Anagram [fashion] of TEX [Texas] U [Union] DOES – I think. Edit: I can’t even count! – it’s U [united] in TX [Texas] + an anagram of DOES – as I originally had it ; thanks to JohnR @2
10 Try dancing to salsa, feet moving for exercise (4)
YOGA
Anagram [moving] of last letters [feet] of trY dancinG tO salsA
11 Company has party on board? What odd characters! (10)
SCREWBALLS
CREW [company] + BALL [party] in SS [‘on board’]
12 After first half of Enigmatist puzzle, one sees stars (6)
GEMINI
Anagram [puzzle] of ENIGM[atist] + I
13 Listen to rock, no good being unable to leave home (8)
NESTLING
Anagram [to rock] of LISTEN + NG [no good]
14 BASIC compiled two directions as co-ordinate values (9)
ABSCISSAS
Anagram [compiled] of BASIC + SS [two directions] + AS
16 Illegally takes back furniture (5)
STOOL
Reversal [takes back] of LOOTS [illegally takes]
17 Judge has opening for God (5)
JANUS
J [judge] + ANUS [opening] – for the Roman god of openings [and closings]
19 Rich, topless in El Salvador — such waste (9)
EFFLUENTS
[a]FFLUENT] [rich, topless] in ES [El Salvador]
23 They manage sir’s pain (8)
ASPIRINS
Anagram [manage] of SIR’S PAIN
24 Boatman finally presses mute with debut of Ginger Spice (6)
NUTMEG
[boatma]N + an anagram [presses] of MUTE + G[inger]
26 Traditional London food the desert contract delivered (7,3)
JELLIED EEL
Sounds like [delivered] JELLY [desSert – misprint in the clue] DEAL [contract]
27 Mischievous fellow to choose one out for you (4)
PUCK
PiCK [choose] with the i replaced by U [you] – which has caused some discussion – now resolved, I hope – in the last two days
28 Dinner function government is winding up (7)
TEASING
TEA [dinner] + SIN [function] + G [government] – I’m sure this is going to open up the familiar regional discussion about what we call the evening meal
29 Heads will roll after Guardian loses middle ground (7)
GNASHED
Anagram [will roll] of HEADS after G[uardia]N
Down
2 Saw pair getting six balls bowled (7)
PROVERB
PR [pair] + OVER [six balls] + B [bowled]
3 Middle Eastener who’s a bit of an egomaniac? (5)
OMANI
Contained in egOMANIac
4 Try small drinks, they twitter (7)
GOSSIPS
GO [try] + S [small] + SIPS [drinks]
6 Foolish international group: “We welcome terrorists” (6)
UNWISE
UN [international group] + WE round IS [terrorists]
7 Monkey about with game of chance, knocking heads off ornament (9)
EPAULETTE
A reversal [about] of APE [monkey] + [r]OULETTE [game of chance] Edit: another careless oversight – my thanks to Derek Lazenby @43: it’s [ro]ULETTE, of course: knocking heads off – which, again, I saw originally
8 Run estate wearing sunglasses in Florida (7) off
ORLANDO
R [run] + LAND [estate] in OO [wearing sunglasses]
9 Great northern runner? (7,6)
BRENDAN FOSTER
Cryptic definition: Brendan Foster is a [great] runner from the North and founder of the annual Great North Run
15 Catholic church upset over books lacking bishop trials (9)
CRUCIBLES
Reversal [upset] of RC [Catholic church] + [b]IBLES [books lacking bishop] Edit: a reversal of C [Catholic] + URC [United Reformed Church] + [b]IBLES [books lacking bishop]
18 Address otherwise neat Spartan (7)
AUSTERE
I’m struggling here: could AU be [French] address and STERE an anagram [otherwise] of STEER [neat]? I’m sure it’s simpler than that! Edit: ‘address’ indicates a homophone, so ‘otherwise’ = or = AU [but not for those with rhotic accents] and there’s further discussion about pronunciation of the first syllable of AUSTERE, too – see numerous comments below] + STERE [sounds like steer = neat, as I had it].
20 Tips of nectarine and orange, all cooking in fat (7)
LANOLIN
Anagram of N[ectarine] O[range] and ALL + IN
21 Golden syrup runs clear, when poured into hollow tube (7)
TREACLE
Anagram [runs] of CLEAR in T[ub]E – not quite synonymous: I remember being ticked off as a child for calling golden syrup treacle – but I’m not complaining
22 Good time catching good bird (6)
PIGEON
PI [good – short for pious] + EON [time] round G [good]
25 Band’s recordings (5)
TAPES
Double definition
Thanks Eileen and Qaos.
I can’t help with 18, but where does the UC come from in the parsing of 15?
5a has to be U[nion] in TX, with (DOES)*?
I took a long time to see the theme, in spite of Tramp in 1a!
Great blog – and a challenging puzzle from Qaos, as usual (for me).
Also, 5 is an anagram of TX + U + DOES, giving TUXEDOS 🙂
Oops, sorry JohnR, we crossed. But I like your parsing better than mine anyway!
Many thanks to Qaos and Eileen. Did anyone else have ABSCISSA*E* at 14 Ac? Isn’t it a possible alternative (two directions being S & E)?
Steve B @1
I hadn’t noticed that [careless] omission but, now it’s pointed out, the short answer is I don’t know – any offers?
Re 5ac: I had that right initially and it got lost between the solve and writing the blog.
judygs @5
I wondered about that, so I checked the solution on the website. I didn’t really like SS being ‘two directions’.
18dn: Or + Steer
14ac: Absci + SS + as
15dn: Have no idea where UC comes from
On second thoughts, AS is part of the wordplay – which is why I chose that version originally.
PaulW @8
Thanks for 18dn.
We crossed re 14ac.
I’m working on the UC!
CURC can be Christ United Reformed Church or Covenant United Reformed Church (Calvanism), not very likely, but Catholic need not mean RC.
Eileen @ 9 and PaulW @ 8
Yes, I do – and did – see that, but thought the AE ending was more elegant 😉
Would love enlightenment on UC and AUSTERE!
Austere – AU = hey you (address)?
Thanks Qaos and Eileen
I usually enjoy Qaos puzzles, but not this one. Mostly my fault – I( was baffled by too many parsings and entered answers from definition and crossers (or, in the case of SPLODGE, from crossers only!). The misprint in the clue for JELLIED EEL didn’t help, but I don’t think I would have seen the homophone anyway.
Lots of looseness: Apes are no closer to monkeys than humans are; why “sunglasses” in 8d – “glasses” works better for O O; BRENDAN FOSTER, fine runner though he was, is from such a different era that rather more than “Great northern runner” would have been needed by many, I think; as Eileen mentioned, TREACLE is not the same as golden syrup; “being unable to leave home” is a rather loose definition for NESTLING.
TEASING was my favourite, despite me not equating tea with dinner!
Sorry folks – in 26ac “desert” should be “dessert”. A typo from my original submission and a clue I must have re-read a dozen times with the same “letter blindness”.
18d ‘Address’ is used to mean ‘sounds like’ presumably. The first 4 letters of ‘crucibles’ read backwards give Catholic plus United Reformed Church.
Cookie @11
Thanks for putting me on the right track: I now think it’s a reversal of C [Catholic] + URC [United Reformed Church].
…oh, and CRUCIBLES are only “tests” in a metaphorical sense – they are in fact small heat-resistant bowls for heating substances in.
[A student of mine once wrote in a practical account “We heated the powder in a nickel crucifix”]
AUSTERE is soundalike (address) of OR STEER
Still don’t get UC in 15d.
Fun solve otherwise – missed the theme – as ever.
Thanks to Eileen for the blog.
Great puzzle with a gathering of past and present.
I prefer ABSCISSAE as the two directions are different-its a latin noun afterall.
copmus @ 20
I tried ABSCISSAE first, but I couldn’t explain the A – where do you get it from?
Thanks, Logomachist @16 – just pipped me re 18dn!
re 18dn: I think that’s what PaulW @8 meant.
muffin @18 – Chambers gives the figurative definition ‘ a severe test or trial’.
copmus @20. ‘Abscissa’ started as a Latin word but is now also in the lexicon of English and English makes the vast majority of the plurals of its nouns by adding ‘(e)s’. You wouldn’t insist on ‘basilicae’ and ‘fasciae’ I imagine.
Eileen @22
Yes, but I would have liked a hint that the figurative sense was required.
muffin @21
BASIC + SE/SS + AS
judygs @25
BASIC + SE + AS doesn’t work, as it puts the E and S in the wrong places (“absciseas”). I was thinking BASIC + S and SE for the two directions (not using the “as”), but that left the A unexplained.
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Brendan has featured in almost every BBC athletics broadcast since his glory days in distance running, he is no dinosaur!
Like Copmus, I prefer ABSCISSAE….. the A is from ‘as’. But I agree on the looseness of NESTLING, and TEASING is a favourite of mine.
muffin@25
I felt that ‘compiled’ could cut both ways!
As a one-time time Cockney with a Maths degree, abscissae and jellied eel were write-ins, although I had to revise the first, and wonder at a singular jellied eel.
Nutmeg and Puck sidetracked me to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, till the penny dropped. Thanks Qaos for a fun solve, and Eileen for the blog
AUSTERE sounds somewhat like OR STEER.
I was brought up where TREACLE is the black stuff and SYRUP isn’t. A useful distinction. I moved to where this distinction doesn’t exist. Offered treacle tart, I turned it down, only to find that it was what I call syrup tart, which I could have enjoyed.
Thank you Qaos and Eileen.
I really enjoyed this puzzle, especially searching for crossword setters and trying to work out some of the parsing.
TREACLE seems to be a general term for both golden syrup and black treacle (molasses).
I am definitely in the ABSCISSAE camp.
Thanks Qaos and Eileen. Blimey Qaos, you must be posh, guvnor! In my manor we pronounce the start of AUSTERE as “oss”
Thanks to Qaos and Eileen. I enjoyed the setters theme (though I did not see all of them) and found the device helpful at times when encountering items new to me (e.g., BRENDAN FOSTER, SPLODGE). Still, I found this puzzle a big challenge – and not just because of desert-dessert – so I had to guess at AUSTERE and GNASHED was my last in.
Thanks both.
I very much enjoyed this puzzle and was sorry when it was over. Like others, the parsing of 18dn stumped me.
While I’m sure the parsing of 1ac is the correct one, OED has ‘to splodge’ meaning ‘to tramp’. A parsing of SP+LODGE is just about possible, although that would make the ‘for example’ a bit superfluous, unless one then regarded the whole clue as an and-lit.
We have just done this over lunch and loved it. We picked up the theme, but missed several of the ones you saw, Eileen. Brendan Foster was the last in. We knew him as a runner, but had to google to find that he started the Great North Run. We are chuffed that we managed to parse everything for a change! It was definitely abscissae when we were at school _ in the distant past. Lovely crossword and blog. Thanks all
Thanks Qaos and Eileen
I cottoned on to the theme fairly early (unusual for me) but still only identified 9 of the usual suspects.
I too had trouble parsing 18d.
Like judygs@5 I went for the classical Latin plural but worked out the parsing as provided by Eileen. Unlike orange@30 I am not a cockney but I do have a maths degree and 30 years teaching in university and this may explain my insistence on the spelling ABSCISSAE.
Afternoon all! Many thanks for all the comments and to Eileen for the blog – always appreciated. Glad you spotted the ghost theme early today.
You’re correct that there’s 16 thematic items it total (17 if you include the whole page) with apologies to my colleagues who didn’t make the puzzle. I felt fitting more in via single-letter indicators would have been going too far.
Shirl@34: I’ve long since learned to check Chambers for pronunciation. For “austere” it has the “au” part being pronounced like “aw”. Thankfully, there’s always scope for regional variations to keep life interesting.
I’ll leave you with a question. My original version of 27ac was “Goodfellow to take one out for you – capisce?”, but how fair do you think it is to have a foreign word for a homophone indicator?
Best wishes,
Qaos.
Enjoyable crossword with a theme that I seem to remember has been tried in the distant past – maybe it was a puzzle where Guardian setters were mostly apostrophised in the clues rather than the solutions. Anyone else recall it?
I had ABSCISSAE first too, till it didn’t parse. The homophone was OR STEER for me as well. BRENDAN FOSTER I thought was a bit over-literal until I read here of the play on ‘runner’; not sure that it strengthens the clue enough though.
Qaos @39, the first thing I would have done with ‘capisce’ would have been to look it up in a dictionary, which kind of defeats the point. Oh, and I must apologise for calling you an Indie setter when we met at the Parcel Yard, not that Indie setting isn’t an honourable trade too. It was my worst social faux pas since congratulating a colleague on her (unstarted) second pregnancy. Mistakes you don’t make twice.
And it was nice to be reminded of the likes of Gemini and Janus too.
I am a bit puzzled by the question concerning the original “Goodfellow to take one out for you – capisce?”
I read the clue as it was printed in this way.
1 The definition is “Goodfellow” and the answer PUCK is confirmed by the theme.
2 The wordplay of “To take one out for you” must be read as replacing I with U.
In the version of the clue as it was printed, that operation was performed on the word PICK which is a synonym for “choose”.
In the original version, reproduced above, where does one find “PICK”? How does “capisce”, meaning “understand?”, come into it? And where is the homophone?
A very enjoyable crossword, with an unusually obvious theme by Qaos standards, but a few that required a bit of thought. TEASING was last in.
Thanks to Qaos and Eileen
All good clean fun.
But people? A site full of nit pickers and no-one saw [ro]ULETTE?
For once I saw the theme, and I needed it to confirm CRUCIBLES before I saw the reversed (C + URC) part.
For JELLIED, I was misled by the typo as I felt that even with those first 4 letters it couldn’t be from JELLY … but I probably wouldn’t have seen (heard?) the sound-alike anyway. Like Shirl @34, I don’t pronounce the start of AUSTERE to sound like “or” (or “aw”), so that parsing escaped me too. I did wonder whether perhaps “address” was referring to Australia’s web address, “.au”.
As an ex-mathematician, I thought of “abscissae” first, but the parsing requires ABSCISSAS as Eileen indicated.
Although I too think of treacle as the dark stuff, golden syrup is still just a pale form of treacle – a much nicer form in my opinion (Wiki)
Thanks, Qaos and Eileen.
Derek @43
I must ask you to believe me that that is indeed the way I parsed 7dn originally: ‘headS off’ = take off the first TWO letters. My head was clearly all over the place this morning and I felt like deleting the whole thing and starting again when the comments started rolling in.
But, like you, I’m surprised that I got away with it for so long – must be because there were so many other things to pick holes in.
IW @41
I think here ‘take’ means ‘pick’.
Thanks for dropping in, Qaos. My sympathies re the “letter blindness” today and apologies for all the slips. [I think the original version of 29ac might not have gone down too well.] 😉
Hi Eileen,
Yes, it’s amazing what gets through even when you think you’ve checked things many times over.
As for the original version of 26ac, when researching how familiar people might be with “capisce” I found this gem from The Simpsons:
Brodka: Hey, kid: one more thing. If you ever set foot in this store again, you’ll be spending Christmas in juvenile hall. Capisce?
Bart: [silence]
Brodka: Well, do you understand?
Bart: Everything except “capisce.”
That rather sealed it.
If 14 had been “BASIC compiled with two directions as co-ordinate values (9)”, everyone would have been happy then, no? Somehow, I’m guessing not 😉
Fun puzzle with an easily spotted theme for Grauniadistas. I didn’t spot them all. I even went looking in the 4-letter lights for Paul and was disappointed he wasn’t there. D’oh!
Well done, Qaos, for getting so many in. Thanks to Eileen for the blog.
I appear to be in a minority of one because I didn’t like this at all even though I- sort of- spotted the theme. LOI was TEASING which I thought a lousy clue- and I’m a Northener! Oh well, perhaps tomorrow—.
Having looked at the link and its many inadequacies, I cannot imagine that anyone on this site would want to participate in this.
Peter Aspinwall @48
I’ve waited until now to respond because I hoped someone else might have replied but I didn’t want this thread to end on such a negative note.
As I said in the preamble, recognition of the theme should not affect enjoyment of the puzzle at all. I don’t understand your ‘even though I – sort of – spotted the theme’.
I’m surprised that TEASING didn’t arouse more comment, as I suggested in the preamble. I live in the Midlands, where the two are, to some extent, interchangeable. I can’t accept that it’s ‘a lousy clue’ – I really liked the definition.
Thanks Qaos for an enjoyable solve, and Eileen for the parsing of CRUCIBLE (eventually:)
Muffin@14: ‘being (creature) unable to leave home’ seems to me a good clue for NESTLING. If it were able to leave home it would be a fledgling.
Clever. Not a success story for me with only about half a grid completed. However, the blog is fascinating and a great read. Congratulations to those who saw the theme. While I don’t know some of these solvers, I think it would have helped me along had I spotted it. Thanks to Qaos, Eileen and the many constructive critics who added depth and understanding.
Gonzo @51
I didn’t mean that the definition was incorrect. I meant it was loose. A nestling is one of many “beings unable to leave home”.
In defence of what otherwise might be one of the weakest “cryptic” clues in a long time, might I suggest a possible allusion to railways in 9d. My first thoughts were to whether there was a famous locomotive that plied the Great Northern line. I do have an anorak, but do not get out enough to be able to visit my trainspotting friends to check.
Also nice to see a reference to a monkey (7d) in the setters puzzle
Thanks Qaos and Eileen.
Good fun, and I did spot the theme even though I am not familiar with setters from more than 3 years ago.
I resolved 18 as AU – the Internet domain for Australia (address) – + an anagram of STEER (neat) although I see from Qaos’ post above that the simpler homophone was intended.
16 could have been STOOL or LOOTS so had to hold back my entry there.
9dn seemed hardly cryptic but as the key clue I suppose that’s OK.
ABSCISSAS was my new word of the day so thanks for that.
Thanks Qaos and Eileen
A very enjoyable puzzle that held me up for an elapsed couple of weeks with the general / local knowledge based 9d. Was going to claim slight unfairness until coming here and seeing the ‘flashing-lighted theme’ (that I didn’t) which would have gifted the first name of the founder of the Great North run.
Continue to be impressed that a setter is able to insert the number of theme words that has been done here, especially one which hasn’t resulted in oodles of obscurities.
Could not parse the CRUC part of 15d, getting trapped in the RC-Catholic line of thinking and it was only at the last minute that I saw the homophone (although it’s not the way that I’d pronounce) with AUSTERE.
Good fun !