Tramp’s puzzles are always fun to solve and blog, and this was no exception. A couple of tricky bits of parsing, and an ingenious long anagram, which is something of a trademark of this setter. Thanks to Tramp
| Across | ||||||||
| 1 | APPEASE | Take off clothing quietly – like sex naked and calm (7) P (quietly) in APE (to copy, take off) + AS (like) + [s]E[x] |
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| 5 | BLIGHTY | England through winning match (7) LIGHT (a match, as in “have you got a light?”) in BY (through) |
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| 10 | PERU | Land every uppercut in left side (4) PER (every) + the left side of Uppercut. The letters of Peru are found in order in uPpERcUt, and I spent some time trying to justify this as the wordplay |
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| 11 | E-CIGARETTE | I get erect when excited hugging adult that might be hot in drag? (1-9) A in (I GET ERECT)* |
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| 13 | DISMALLY | Home-improvement work with little drilling, sadly (8) SMALL in DIY |
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| 14 | PLACE CARD | Lay down part of hand – one folded at table? (5,4) PLACE (lay down) + CARD (part of a hand) |
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| 16 | LIBRA | Supporter following most of top stars (5) LI[d] + BRA |
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| 17 | SPAIN | Holiday resort surrounded by country (5) SPA (holiday resort) + IN (surrounded by) |
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| 19 | BIG CHEESE | Older children learn about English name (3,6) BIG (older, as in “big/older brother”) + CH[ildren] + reverse of SEE (learn) + E[nglish] |
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| 23 | JACKPOTS | Bowls over grass to get prizes (8) POT (cannabis, grass) in JACKS (as used in the game of Bowls) |
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| 24 | UPSIDE | Winning team getting advantage (6) UP + SIDE |
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| 26 | REMAINDERS | Unsold books and souvenirs outside front of airport (10) A[irport] in REMINDERS (souvenirs). Remainders are unsold books offered at a lower price |
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| 27 | ACTS | Book performers (4) Double definition |
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| 28 | CURTEST | Extremely short experiment on rat (7) CUR (rat) + TEST |
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| 29 | TRIPODS | School gripped by teacher retiring after last of one-night stands (7) [one-nigh]T + POD (school, of |
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| Down | ||||||||
| 2 | PREVAIL | Can holding on then playing, win? (7) RE (on) + V (versus, playing) in PAIL (a can) |
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| 3 | EQUIP | Prepare ecstasy and crack (5) E + QUIP |
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| 4 | SCEPTIC | One questioning pussy stopped by opening of catflap (7) C[atflap] in SEPTIC (full of pus, or “pussy”) |
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| 6 | LIAISE | Contact newspaper: passage having line moved to top (6) I (newspaper) + AISLE with L moved to the top |
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| 7 | GRENADINE | Enraged drunk covering up wearing syrup (9) IN (wearing) in ENRAGED* |
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| 8 | TUTELAR | Protecting a turtle at sea (7) (A TURTLE)* – this word reminds me of the lines “Three little maids who, all unwary/Come from a ladies’ seminary/Freed from its genius tutelary/Three little maids from school” from The Mikado |
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| 9,12 | KIDDERMINSTER CARPET | Flooring Keir Starmer – depict end, primarily lost to Reform (13,6) Anagram of KEIR STARMER DEPICT [e]ND. Kidderminster was the centre of the carpet industry in the 18th century, and Kidderminster Carpet was “a reversible carpet with no pile, with the pattern showing in opposite colours on the two faces” |
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| 15 | CLICKBAIT | Attention-seeker online to get on with bachelor needing sex (9) CLICK (get on) + BA + IT (sex) |
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| 18 | PLATEAU | Item of crockery placed on gold table (7) PLATE + AU |
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| 20 | COURSER | Horse and cocaine runs through old addict (7) C[ocaine] + R[uns] in O[ld] USER |
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| 21 | SEDATED | Relaxed and went out after a lot of sex (7) SE[x] + DATED (went out) |
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| 22 | POUNDS | Folds money (6) Double definition – the first as in folds/pounds for animals |
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| 25 | SCAMP | Rogue to con prince (5) SCAM + P[rince] |
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Thanks Tramp for the fun and Andrew for clearing up the parsing
I hadn’t thought of pounds as in sheep etc folds, and despite being a G&S fan did not know that meaning of tutelar
Specially liked clickbait.
Thank you Andrew. The long anagram at 9/12 was brilliant. Didn’t know KIDDERMINSTER CARPET but figured it out. A deficit in GK meant I couldn’t see the possibilities, but determined not to put it in an anagram solver, well not all of it.
Happy to solve this and parse with my own little brain, although it was a bit stretched by Tramp
I went down a rabbit hole with GRENADINE. Thought it had to be something to do with wig/syrup, slang from cryptics. Wigged with something in the middle? Wrong! So much simpler, mostly an anagram, and I did know ”in” meant wearing,
Same experience as paddymelon, searching around the wig-related corridors of my brain and finding nothing. And then the penny dropped ref GRENADINE. Ref the long anagram, it is not often I can take pleasure from being within 20 miles of KIDDERMINSTER – not normally something to crow about – but it does mean I am familiar with the CARPETs.
A slow start with CLICKBAIT being my first in but everything solved in the end – and nearly everything parsed. I never got my head around how BIG CHEESE was put together. The usual high quality cluing we’d expect from this setter. And ‘sex’ three times before breakfast to boot.
Thanks both
Thanks Tramp and Andrew
A few I didn’t parse (I tried to justify PERU from uppercut too). APPEASE and PREVAIL were the others.
Favourites DISMALLY for the construction, and LOI POUNDS for the misdirecting “folds”.
Ingenious and entertaining and, as PostMark @4 observes, cluing of the standard we expect from Tramp. So good that it’s easy to excuse the horrible grid with nine lights having a majority of unchecked letters.
The long anagram is quite brilliant, however sad its subject matter.
And I can spend the day feeling that as I managed to parse BIG CHEESE (though not quite getting there on SPAIN) I can’t be losing it altogether 🙂
Thanks to Tramp and Andrew
Not many comments so far, suggesting that others found this as challenging as I did – but ultimately so rewarding. I was quite disappointed to find that I’d actually finished, although, like PostMark, I never did fathom BIG CHEESE and couldn’t believe that SPAIN took so long to crack – a massive ‘doh!’ moment.
The Starmer clue was outstanding among a plethora of splendid clues. Too many favourites to list but I’ll just mention TUTELAR – like Andrew, I immediately thought of the three little maids.
Huge thanks to Tramp for the fun and to Andrew for a sterling blog.
[Minor point in 29a, Andrew. POD usually refers to a school of cetaceans rather than fish.]
Gratified to find that others found this as tricky as I did, with REMAINDERS being my FOI on my initial pass through the across clues. I join in the acclamation of KIDDERMINSTER CARPET even if I’d never heard of them. A brilliant feat. TUTELAR needed teasing out as well, not being a part of my vocabulary or a G&S fan. Pleased to parse BIG CHEESE, but I now see that I needed Andrew’s help to parse PERU. Thanks to Tramp and Andrew..
I had a slow start but it all gradually emerged with lots of penny drop moments and clues that seem obvious in retrospect. I found the long anagram crucial to get into a couple of the corners, but it took a while for my brain to click. The “in” in grenadine was very nicely disguised and I never found it. Top marks from me.
Also, I think “online” needs to be included in the defintion for CLICKBAIT.
Misdirection masterclass today. Lots of dropped pennies. Always thought TUTELAR referred to teaching, so something learned. Tough but fair. Thanks both.
Reading through this rather apprehensively early on, there seemed to be more than one or two references to Sex and Drugs. But not enough Rock and Roll for me. Failed DISMALLY, though that was actually one of the few clues I did manage today. I have heard of Axminster, but not KIDDERMINSTER in the world of floor coverings. And a newspaper hidden almost invisibly away as the I made LIAISE unreachable. But the Reveal button showed there was much ingenuity in the setting today, so well done to all those that saw things through….
Solved LIAISE from wordplay, with misgivings. Surely the grammar isn’t right? Doesn’t it need a preposition like ”with”? You don’t liaise someone.
Splendid puzzle with liberal helpings of how’s-your-father. The usual clever constructions and shiny surfaces which we expect from this setter. The long anagram is a gem, but there are too many other great clues to list.
Many thanks to Tramp and Andrew
I was another who found this challenging. BLIGHTY, in particular. A great puzzle, though.
paddymelon @14: LIAISE = contact, more or less, if the verbs are used reflexively: ‘they liaised’, ‘they contacted’.
ronald @13. I also wondered what the rest of the crossword would bring after reading the clues. But it turned out pretty benign. Tramp is a tease.
Lots of fun – thanks both. In 18d I think the definition is “table” (geographical feature): PLATE is the item of crockery on top of AU.
Certainly challenging but I am on a long train journey so glad for it. Certainly not a speedy solve and I may have given up if not confined to the railway but rewarding when the answers came.
New to me KIDDERMINSTER CARPET
Favourites today DISMALLY, JACKPOT and CLICKBAIT.
Thanks Tramp and Andrew.
Yeah Protase @ 17. But liaise/liaison implies interaction.
Agree Quirister @19 about PLATEAU. I think our esteemed blogger may have mis-underlined the definition.
– Quite correct – I’ll fix it. A
Very entertaining – I especially liked DISMALLY for ‘little drilling’ and TRIPODS for ‘one-night stands’.
In PERU, like Andrew, I stared for a long time at ‘upPERcUt’ – a Paddington stare maybe.
Thanks to Tramp and Andrew.
I’m surprised there haven’t been more comments about 11ac. Damn near choked on my coffee when I read that one 🤣🤣🤣
What a brilliant crossword!
Much cleverness on show here, the long anagram being especially good. However I have a couple of quibbles:
BLIGHTY does not mean ‘England’. We’ve been over this before. Chambers: “1. Home, 2. The home country, 3. A wound necessitating return home”.
Is the jack in Bowls considered to be a bowl? I would have thought not.
High quality cluing although difficult for me, especially the SW corner. Lots of sex: I liked ‘take off clothing’ in APPEASE, the drag queen with her/his E-CIGARETTE, the BIG CHEESE with older children, the retiring teacher with his TRIPODS, the SCEPTIC pussy, the great anagram for KIDDERMINISTER CARPET, and the old addict with his COURSER.
Thanks Tramp and Andrew.
poc @26; the ODE: British English an informal term for Britain or England; Collins: England; home
Thanks to Andrew for the super blog, as always and to him and everyone else for the kind comments.
I wrote this puzzle in February. Despite having about fourteen puzzles ahead of it in the queue, I asked for it to be bumped up the running order in case Sir Keir Starmer didn’t survive as PM.
Originally, the definition for the long anagram was based around “crossing floor in the House”, but, I didn’t like the “H” and I thought the clue was contrived, so opted for “flooring” instead.
For “e-cigarette”, the definition involved “smouldering” but the editor pointed out that these devices don’t actually smoke so I came up with the “hot in drag”, which I was pleased with.
I had lost my mojo with crosswords. I hardly did any solving at the end of last year. I happened to solve a couple of Filbert’s Sunday puzzles in the Indy and that ignited my love of clueing: I think he’s a superb setter. He writes neat clues, with smooth surface readings and sound grammar, which, to mind, is what every setter should aim for.
Mitz informed me the other day that it’s fifteen years since my first Guardian daily puzzle was published. I cringe when I look at those early puzzles.
According to Collins, Blighty can mean England.
Neil
From Collins:
7. (bowls) a small usually white bowl at which the players aim with their own bowls
Thanks Tramp, and Andrew too of course. I found this tough going but lots of fun in the surfaces and very rewarding when it all, eventually, came together. As it were. I totally agree about the excellence of Filbert’s puzzles, but I always get enormous enjoyment from yours too, so please keep at it!
How pleasant of Tramp to visit the site and shed light. And may thanks to Andrew for parsing many clues I found impenetrable.
many (sorry …)
[Ref BLIGHTY, it strikes me that, whilst the English language is internationally used, Blighty is/was probably a term only ever used by the British and maybe specifically the English. Is there any evidence of it being used by nations other than the British or, indeed, by Scots, Welsh etc? Chambers notes the word is derived from Hindi so I guess brought it came into the language via the Raj]
BLIGHTY, or more specifically, Old Blighty, was a well known phrase for England here in Oz in my youth. Like others, I found this tough but got there in the end. Fortunately, I separated out CARPET from the fodder, then the MINSTER part, at which point KIDDER leapt out at me. Until then, I had very few entries. Thanks, Tramp and Andrew.
In a word, hard. I laboured through it with word finder assistance. Nho TUTELAR, nor of COURSER as a horse. Failed to parse PERU and SCEPTIC. Dragged up Kidderminster as a carpet type from somewhere in the memory banks.
Liked CLICKBAIT and DISMALLY.
Thanks to Tramp and Andrew, and good to hear from Tramp @29 & @30.
I have a vague memory that there was a chain of stores called Kidderminster Carpets in the 1970s that advertised regularly on the telly. Does anybody else remember that, or am I imagining it?
I’m still struggling with BIG CHEESE. Either the expression means something other than I believe, or the definition “name” is extremely loose. (People routinely complain here when something is clued as “boy’s/girl’s name”, and this is even looser than that.)
Can anybody enlighten me?
poc @26: Re BLIGHTY – not for the first time, Chambers is guilty of terminological inexactitude. It’s a corruption of the Hindi word for ‘foreign’, and was applied to things not native to the subcontinent. As many of these were introduced during the British Raj, the word was taken by expats as a colloquial term to mean ‘British’ or ‘Britain’. It can only mean ‘home’ to a UK citizen. I’m sure it is never used to refer to the US, for instance.
Hard, but, like Staticman1@20, I am on a long train journey, so did not mind it taking long. I needed this site to help me parse a few. In 9d,12a, I got lost trying to anagram prime minister and wondering where the rest of the letters would come from. Never heard of the carpet, so needed to reveal this one. Also never heard of Blighty for England.
Thanks, Tramp and Andrew
Good stuff all through. Thanks to setter and blogger.
Ace @38 I think “name” here means somebody significant in their field, i.e. a recognisable name. I hope that helps.
Staticman1 @ 20: You “might have” given up but you didn’t. You “may have” given up the next Guardian crossword by this time tomorrow.
Barretter @43: Your language is foul but mine is Fowler. Oh how we love a pedantic prescriptive grammarian 🙂
jacob@37
They still exist but doubt they ever have sold a “Kidderminster Carpet” They sell discounted carpets, vinyl and wood floor coverings mainly from Warehouses in Kidderminster, Solihull and elsewhere in Midlands.
A real tussle but very rewarding; glad I stuck at it. Favourites: E-CIGARETTE, DISMALLY and TRIPODS (because I finally remembered the synonym for “school”). Failed to parse PERU, APPEASE and (blushes) SPAIN. Thanks to Tramp for the challenge and Andrew for the enlightenment. It’s been a good week this week, so far.
Thanks Andrew. 5 was impenetrable to this Yank but I see my compatriot Kurt Vonnegut got there in Slaughterhouse Five when describing British POWs about to be repatriated:
They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what proud, hungry, BLIGHTY-bound Englishmen should be.
Always appreciate the setter popping in so special thanks to Tramp.
I don’t see this anywhere else, so I parsed Peru as PER (every) + U (uppercut on left side). I find that more satisfactory.
Oops. Just saw that in the original. I always get blinded by alternative parsings!
I read 23A as being Jack (slang for heroin) over pots (bowls).
Challenging today. GRENADINE was well done. I got stuck looking for the syrup/wig connection too, but it’s that synonym, only used in the surface instead!
CLICKBAIT was my favorite. Both the long anagrams (KIDDERMINSTER CARPET, E-CIGARETTE) required crossers before falling and were both satisfying. LOI was POUNDS. Bit surprised it wasn’t written as Money folds, rather than the other way round.
Thanks, A&T. Tramp, I miss your old themed puzzles. Any chance of another sometime?
Thanks Tramp for a great crossword that would have been well-suited in the prize slot. This took a bit to unravel and I eventually revealed the nho 9d. Favourites included APPEASE, DISMALLY, EQUIP, CLICKBAIT (COTD), and PLATEAU. Thanks Andrew for the blog.
As Tramp says, a reputable dictionary offers “England” as a definition of Blighty, and that’s an absolutely satisfactory justification for a setter to use. But I do question the dictionaries here. I can’t imagine a citation where the term is used to mean “England” rather than “Britain”; for instance, has an Englishman in Inverness or Swansea ever talked of “going back to Blighty” on his journey southwards or eastwards? I think it’s exclusively used by British people overseas referring to Britain, (and although it’s nothing to do with the derivation, I suspect the alliteration is one reason the term caught on).
Tough! I can’t remember what was first in but KIDDERMINSTER CARPET was early. I too separated the carpet part and the rest jumped out, catalysed by something in the back of my memory.
Lots of great clues. I liked E CIGARETTE, TRIPODS, CLICKBAIT and PREVAIL. I didn’t parse BIG CHEESE because it was near the end and I knew it was right. Lat in was LIBRA.
Thanks Neil and Andrew (not to be confused with Andrew Neil, or even Nell McAndrew)
This was a very fun puzzle though definitely I needed a bit of help getting to the end. The way pussy was used in the clue for sceptic made me feel a little ill.
The past master of smut, thanks Tramp and blogger . COD 29a, brilliant surface.
In 1968 the Ximenes clue-writing competition required clues for GRENADINE. Three entrants shared first prize with the rather neat “Pineapple rings in syrup”. And although Collins and Chambers define a jack as a white ball aimed at in bowls (see Tramp@30), I believe it’s black in crown green bowls (or it was when I was a lad).
What a struggle. I think this is the first time I’ve attempted a Tramp puzzle and if I have tried one before then this is the first time I’ve completed one. I should be happy but actually feel somewhat deflated. Obscure definitions and very very tricky constructions all over. My ‘improver’ brain is shredded, thanks for that Tramp. Thanks Andrew for the explanations.
In the “Kidderminster carpet” clue, is the “lost to Reform” just to make the surface nicer?
This racy crossword was a lot of fun. Took me all day, so a good, satisfying challenge. Lots of delightful mind-bending surprises along the way. Pretty much all the clues were outstanding, so no favourites to report. Well done Tramp, and thanks. Mojo definitely working! 🙂
Thanks Andrew for a great blog
29,994 — continuing the countdown! 30,000 next Thursday
Frogman@59, re 9/12, “end primarily lost” is the instruction to remove the first letter from “end”, making the anagrist KIER STARMER DEPICT ND (as in the blog). “To reform” is the anagrind. Hope that helps!
Glad you all enjoyed it, too clever for me.
That was a cracker. Took a while to get started but was pleasantly surprised to find the skittles then started tumbling in quick succession. Loved the Starmer anagram and Tramp’s rationale for jumping the queue.
LOI was JACKPOTS.
I don’t know anything about bowls/bowling, but I do have an Irish wife, who parsed it as “the jacks” = toilets = bowls. Worked for us!
I kept thinking that I was doing a Cyclops in Private Eye.
Yes this was tough, only just completed this morning, with Mrs. E spotting some of the best e.g. BLIGHTY, and remembering that the JACK is the smaller, white bowl first delivered in the sport as a target.
Cheers one and all.
Sagittarius@53: my point exactly. Blighty to me does not specifically mean England. I do take the point about dictionaries, but the common use of England where Britain or the UK is the right term annoys me and I think I reacted to that.
ravenrider@42 Yes, that seems plausible.
How does BA and IT equal sex?
Mig @61 Thanks. I did realise it when I got up this morning. Silly me.
Cg @68. BA is Bachelor (of arts) , IT is sex
Agreed, Crispy 70.
As in “had IT orfe” as Camilla might say.
(There’s food for thought, ye setters)