My three-month old son Dylan helping me with last Saturday’s Indie crossword.

Solving time approx. 15 mins. I think this is the second time I’ve blogged an Arachne puzzle on a Monday. As in the last one, the surface readings are all good, and most of the clues are scrupulously fair, although I’m a bit stuck on the wordplay of a couple.

Across
1 GREATER LONDON (Enter Gordon al)* - I had to have a few crossing letters to get this, as ENGLAND and GARDEN both stood out from the anagram fodder.
10 AMNES(names*),I(s),A
13 DRAVID,IAN - not a clue for non-cricket lovers! Rahul DRAVID is the Indian cricket captain, although (now Sir) IAN Botham is probably famous enough outside cricket these days.
16 SWIVELLED - being SNIVELLED with N (soN finally) replaced with W(eek).
18 SONG,CYCLE - Imagine, perhaps (the John Lennon SONG) + CYCLE = age. I checked afterwards in the dictionary for that definition of cycle, and it’s there.
19 SNAFU (fauns*) - Army slang, I think. Situation Normal, All F***ed Up.
20 A(dvice),NCHORAGE(no charge)* - which leaves “the roads” as the definition??? I don’t get it. [Ilan confirms that "roads" can be a synonym for "roadstead", which is a partly sheltered anchorage.]
24 DENT(tend*),ATE(eat*) - Bats and nuts being the two anagrinds.
26 ROBERT,BRIDGES - Robert the Bruce was king of Scotland about 700 years ago.
Down
2 RENDITION - I got this from the crossing letters, but don’t understand the rest of it. I thought perhaps there might be an anagram of it meaning “dubiously legal”, but if so I can’t see it. [Explained by Stuart and David in comments - "extraordinary rendition" is the dubiously legal (more like illegal by the sound of it!) extraction of criminals from one state to another for "questioning".]
5 LOOK,AL,IKE - Cockney rhyming slang: butcher’s (hook) = LOOK, boy = AL, once a president = IKE (Eisenhower).
6 NEEDINESS - similar to 16ac. N(ationalist) replacing S(ociety) in SEEDINESS.
7 OK,API - OK = fine, but I don’t see where API comes from.
8 HASTINGS,BAND(”banned”),A - former dictator of Malawi.
9 GR,AND,DAUGHTER(the guard)* - I’d never noticed that anagram before - must be very useful.
16 SACRAMENT(o) - O = Oscar is a phonetic alphabet letter.
21 CONDO - short for condominium, and found in the name “CONDOleezza Rice”, the US Secretary of State.
22 EDGAR - from King Lear. Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom, a beggar.

The Eye Crossword normally takes every opportunity to be rude, funny, and disrespectful to authority, just like the magazine. Often there are references to in-jokes, magazine nicknames, fictitious Eye columnists etc. that mean it can be hard to finish without being an Eye reader.Sometimes there can be quite hard straight cryptic clues, but on average these seem milder than (Cyclops alter-ego) Brummie’s work for the Guardian (but watch out for the Christmas special - that can be a monster). I suspect the requirement to squeeze clues to fit the Eye’s style means they are restricted to a smaller number of possibilities, thus become easier to solve with familiarity. For my part it’s probably the Eye Crossword that has led to me being a keen solver - it is great fun and can be a real hoot! I’d rate this crossword as averagely hard for the Eye, and averagely rude, and averagely funny, so a pretty representative example with which to start the blog.

From today we will be blogging the Cyclops puzzles that appear in Private Eye magazine. This represents a shift from our current policy of covering puzzles that appear in national newspapers but it’s a cracking puzzle and I’m a big fan of it so I thought: why not? It’s a prize puzzle (the prize is £100 cash so it’s definitely worth entering) so naturally we’ll be posting after the closing date.

As regular solvers will know, the main aim is to be lewd and/or scurrilous so readers of a sensitive disposition should look away when the blogs appear. There’s an excellent introduction to the magazine at it’s Wikipedia page and we begin with puzzle 342, which our guest blogger, beermagnet, will cover.