Guardian 24,391/Araucaria - Herbal medicine
Posted by rightback on 24th May 2008
Solving time: 45 mins
This was the hardest Guardian prize puzzle for ages and I thought for a while that I was going to fail it completely, with less than half of the grid filled. Eventually I realised that ‘nick of time’ at 22dn was incorrect, and after that I started to make some slow progress. A few clues I’m not keen on, but probably no more than usual for this setter.
Music of the day would be The Dambusters March by 23ac, but no link again I’m afraid as I can’t seem to fix the sound on my machine.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | A NAT[ional] [an]THEM A[re] - at the time I thought this was a hidden clue, but it’s actually ‘Extracts from’ the words in question. This is anathema to me; cf 23ac. |
| 9 | BASIL (double definition) |
| 10 | HER + B[rother] - I didn’t know herb bennet, so the reference to 3dn was no help for that clue. |
| 11 | NEOTERICAL; (NOTE)* + ERIC + AL (as in ‘et al’) - difficult word, too hard for me until I’d cracked 23a. I’m not sure about AL for ‘others’; this seems a bit like cluing (e.g.) K as ‘Kingdom’ because UK stands for United Kingdom. See also 22ac. |
| 12 | ROBERT - my last entry, also very tough as I’d not heard of herb Robert. |
| 14 | ROSE + MARY, two defs - one of the few relatively easy clues, and even then only once HERB was in place at 10ac. |
| 15 | WELCOME; “WHELK UM” - rather under-checked (only 3 in 7) and a difficult homophone; ’speech to X’ meaning ’sounds like X’ is questionable, but that wasn’t the reason this took me so long. |
| 17 | [s]EDITION |
| 20 | METEORIC - I guess this is an allusion to the phrase ‘meteoric rise’, and to the fact that meteors tend to come down to earth rather than go up. Not my favourite clue. |
| 22 | JACK (= ‘boy’) + ET (= ‘and’) - like ‘others’ for AL in 11ac, I don’t think ‘and’ for ET is really fair. ‘Version of one in 23′ is a reference to COATES (= “COATS”) in the next clue. |
| 23 | ERIC COATES; [p]ICCO[lo] in (EASTER)* - if I hadn’t heard of Eric Coates (who composed, amongst other things, the Dambusters March) I very much doubt if I’d have finished this crossword. I finally got this from the definition when I realised my error in 22dn, which was lucky, because the wordplay is terrible (’piccolo part’ for ICCO?). |
| 24 | TIDE; rev. of EDIT[ion] - I actually quite like this clue (ignoring the meaningless surface reading). I had T??? so was expecting the T to be from TIME (24dn) but actually it’s a reference to the phrase ‘Time and tide wait for no man’. |
| 25 | PUKKA; “PUCKER” |
| 26 | TRIM + MING - another hard one. I’d been through several Campbells, including Alastair, Donald, Darren and Soups, before remembering MING. |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | ONCE MORE (double definition) - a good surface reading, but the two definitions are exactly the same which makes this a poor clue. |
| 2 | STAB; rev. of BATS - ‘turn crazy’ almost always indicates STAB or STUN. |
| 3 | BEN + NET - my penultimate solve. Elizabeth Bennet was the main character in Pride and Prejudice. |
| 4 | SAVOURY; “SAVORY” - I thought I knew the herb ’savory’ but needed all the checking letters to be sure. |
| 5 | O + B(S)ESS + ED |
| 6 | A (= ‘one’) + STIGMATIC - not just a double definition as I assumed when solving. The story of St Francis receiving the stigmata is here. |
| 7 | AL[is]TAIR - one of the brightest stars in the sky. |
| 13 | ECCLES + CAKE (=’ soap’) - I got ‘cake’ quite early on but struggled with the first word. I guess ‘piece of church’ refers to ‘ecclesiastical’ or a related word, but this is hardly fair (cf 8ac, 23ac) |
| 16 | MARJORAM; MAR[y] + JO + rev. of MAR[y] - solved by enumerating 8-letter herbs. This was about 5th on the list. |
| 18 | OVERDONE - I needed all four letters for this, and a post-solve Google search to explain it. Mistress OVerdone runs a brothel in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. |
| 19 | ACE + TATE - should maybe have been quicker with this one. |
| 21 | EU + ROPE - hard. I needed two definite and one probable crossing letter before seeing this, and still took a while to twig that ‘eu-’ is a prefix meaning ‘good’ or ‘well’ (from the Greek). |
| 22/24 | JUSTIN + TIME (= ‘thyme’) - putting in ‘nick of time’ here really held me up. |
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