Guardian 24,319 (Sat 16 Feb)/Araucaria - River dance
Posted by rightback on 1st March 2008
Solving time: 16:08, one mistake
The fourteen solutions “of a kind” were rivers hidden in clues, with no other indications. GANGES for the first one I spotted, but I wasn’t quite sure of the method until SEVERN and THAMES followed, and it felt a little untidy as the rest of each thematic clue wasn’t adding anything. All the rivers are given below, with the relevant words in the clue; WELLAND, WITHAM and MEUSE were new to me.
Music of the day: The outstandingly mellow At The River by Groove Armada, with apologies to Patti Page.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | BE(REF)T - a good one to start off. |
| *4 | WELLAND; “…is well and truly…” - I thought this was the weakest thematic clue, with the first and last letters coming at word breaks. The Welland is in eastern England. |
| 9 | F(ROB)ISHER - I think ‘royal bird?’ is a pun on ‘kingfisher’. |
| *10 | INDUS; “Wind usually…” |
| *11 | TWEED; “…but we educated…” |
| 12 | MAINE ROAD; “MAIN ROAD” - where Manchester City used to play. |
| 13 | POP + PINS |
| *15 | GANGES; “Pagan gestures…” |
| *17 | ROTHER; “…hero, the romantic…” - perhaps harder for southern solvers. |
| 19 | WAGTAIL (double definition) - Rover refers to a dog in the wordplay here, but the wording is unsatisfactory (’Rover to display satisfaction…’). |
| 22 | SHORT LIST; (LOSS THIRT[y])* |
| *24 | TAMAR; “Get a mark…” - this was the same clue as 2dn (qv); 8dn and 19dn are also identical. It would have made more sense to me if all the rivers had been paired like this, with identical clues for each of two rivers (i.e. two rivers per thematic clue), rather than having several superfluous words in each doing nothing more than creating a surface reading. |
| *26 | RHINE; “…catarrh in early life…” |
| 27 | GRA(TITU[s])DE - ‘Arch emperor’ refers to the Arch of Titus. |
| 28 | MINUTE (= ’small’) + D (= ‘number’). |
| *29 | SEVERN; “…this ever noticed…” |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | BUFF (= ‘Polish’) + TIP (= ‘money’) - not ‘buff-top’, as I put. I didn’t really think this one through; I knew I didn’t know the word (it’s a night moth) but should have looked more carefully at the wordplay. |
| 2 | RHONE; “…for honest…” |
| 3 | FRIED, RICH - as in Nietzsche. |
| 4 | WA(RN + IN)G |
| *5 | LOIRE; “Hoi polloi relish…” - some of the thematic clues stuck out a mile, but this one not so much. I read it before twigging to the theme, and didn’t immediately smell a rat, or indeed suspect something amiss. |
| 6 | AND + ROME + DA (= rev. of AD) |
| 7 | DO(SI)DO |
| *8 | THAMES; “…with a message…” - one of the second overlapping pairs of clues (with 19dn), although in this case even the relevant words in the clue are the same. |
| 14 | PRO + MOTION |
| 16 | NIGHTLIFE; NIGH + (I FELT)* |
| 18 | RAIN GOD; (GORDIAN)* - I should have spotted that this was an anagram much faster. |
| *19 | WITHAM; “…with a message…” - this one’s in Lincolnshire. Thinking about it, I can’t really claim that I didn’t know it as I must have rowed on it! |
| 20 | L + ERNE + AN - I thought this was the hardest clue; unless you knew that the Hydra’s lair was in the Lake of Lerna, you were left looking for a bird to fit any of R?E?, ?R?E or R?E. ‘Rhea’ and ‘ree’ could have worked, as well as ‘erne’, but luckily I correctly discarded ‘Larhean’ and ‘Lareean’. |
| 21 | ASH + RAM |
| *23 | TRENT; “…not rented” |
| *25 | MEUSE; “…Some useful…” - another French river. |
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