Chalicea is in mid-flight, so another member of Team Dash has been despatched to intercept this puzzle by new setter Axes. What will he make of it?
Is Axes a he, she , they or … it? It can’t be long before an AI agent infiltrates the Listener and sets a puzzle. But with no info from the setter’s name, or the title at this stage, what can we learn from the preamble?
Ten clues contain an extra, thematic word. The rest have a surplus letter which give a phrase hinting at how to highlight a group of cells, the highlighting to be extended to where the group originates, and two straight lines drawn through the 8 cells that contain its source. Plus “a few grid letters are omitted in wordplay for both answers containing them; draw a thematic shape to link them.”
So far so opaque, deliberately so of course so as not to give away the theme too easily, A glimmer of a light was beginning to dawn in my unconscious, but it wouldn’t crystallize so I went on to the clues.
These were a good set, and the basic grid fill proceeded fairly quickly, taking an hour or so (I’m no lightning solver). It was good to see that a “parson nearly accepts a[c]t in giving sacraments to those in danger” (14a: VIATICA) even I wasn’t sure what the “a[c]t” was, and that there was a “Secularise la[g] here in French southeast” (2d: LAICISE) though I will need to fact-check that with Chalicea. Perhaps the Papal visit is having an effect. (And again the surface was fun but I wasn’t sure how a lag could be secularised.) The “Kirk’s successor” of 5d proved to be Picard giving PICARIAE for the “flying order”, and Star Trek is a sort of religion for many folk I suppose.
Enough of the clerical musing and back to the puzzle. With the grid filled, the extra letters spelled out RICHARD OF YORK GAVE BATTLE [IN] VAIN, and the mysterious omitted letters were the S in ASHSTAND and OMASA, the Y in PIGEYED and ETHYNE and the D in ODDITY and SCANDI (the crossings removing any ambiguity), which joined to give a triangle.
My brain now finally sparked into action, the prism and rainbow (there were ROYGBV in the right-hand column) reproducing the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from 1973 (so in copyright and no image here, sorry). And yes, the artwork only used the six colours mentioned.
I nearly forgot to get the triangle the right size so that the LIGHT RAY coming into the prism from the left can have the whole of RAY drawn before it meets the colours – and nearly forgot too to extend the initial coloured lines I drew into the segments that I think the preamble and album cover are calling for. The discipline of writing a blog helps!
There was also the tricky question of how far to extend the coloured segments. By the laws of physics separation happens at both the first and the second physical boundary (and the album cover has a sort of smear across the top of the triangle representing this) so I have gone with that, although in so doing the source (LIGHT RAY) and the refracted beam overlap. I predict howls of anguish if a firm view is taken of one alternative being right and the other wrong …
But what of those extra words which proved to be SPEAK AIR RUN TIME GIG MONEY US COLOUR DAMAGE and ECLIPSE? I remembered some of the music but needed Wikipedia to tell me that they match the track titles
- “Speak to Me”
- “Breathe (In the Air)”
- “On the Run”
- “Time””
- The Great Gig in the Sky”
- “Money”
- “Us and Them”
- “Any Colour You Like”
- “Brain Damage”
- “Eclipse”
Unsurprisingly it’s a theme that has been used before:
- “Anniversary” by Nudd in Crossword 539 (2023)
- “Storm Front” by Jambazi Inquisitor 1307 (2013)
- “Joint Wisdom” by Rok Listener 4051 (2009).
You can look up the details in Dave Hennings’ Crossword database. But this was a worthy addition to the set and a worthy theme, and many thanks and congratulations to Axes. The sacraments cited above will have included wine so welcome to the Listener Oenophile Club and do say hello at Llandudno.