We find Arcadia in the IQ and Magpie series and I see that this is his third Listener puzzle. Obviously all about Star Trek …
… though in fact winning the Dash Red Herring Award for 2026 so far. What was the real theme though? This was tricky.
No clue numbers, though a speedy scan of lengths available, matched with clue lengths, quickly establishes that the five rows where we will be inserting a bar and entering our words jumbled are 1, 3, 6, 8 and 11, and the column will probably be the last one. We will also have to change five, six or seven letters (33 in all) in each jumbled row or column.
So we know where we are looking for misprints – in each of the other answers’ clues (definition or wordplay!) and we need to use the corrected misprints to produce a message spelling ‘a thematic source and the names of two ships’. This was a complex compilation – a real challenge for this Numpty.
Some clues were generous: ‘Transatlantic bird with gold nest (5)’ AU DEN, so we had a bArd, not a bIrd. ‘Italian plugging value of the ecu etc (6)’ Putting IT into RATE gives RATITE (‘of the emu etc.) so we have an M for the C. ‘Place with popular fridge serial toper stocks (5)’ RIALTO was hidden there so it had to be a Bridge, not a Fridge. Then we get ‘Softy’s pal, short gentle pooch originally (5)’ S WEE P(ooch) gave the ‘pal’ of that puppet Sooty, an O for that F. ‘Arms station in India …’ was clearly going to be THANA (don’t we learn that word from the number of times it appears in crosswords!) so a Y for the S of arms. TeAse became TeNse snd greEt became greAt and the last eight clues had given us the name of a ship – AMBOYNA.
Of course we had that toper stocking the fridge amongst those clues and we had already seen ‘Negligent partygoers going forth finished drinks, mostly drunk (12)’ (with an N for the F of forth) giving DISREGARDFUL, and we’d been to La CHAMPAGNE (as a French indicator) in an across clue, so Arcadia left us little doubt about his right to remain among the Listener oenophiles. “Cheers, Arcadia!” Mind you, those two clues were definitely not easy and it took quite some headscratching to see the Champers one give REMEUERS (a new one even for a Francophone) meaning turners needed for bottles of the stuff while they mature from the subtractive anagam of RUE DE MAREUIL + E (from “base”) minus IDEAL. Brilliant but sans doute recherché. While DISREGARDFUL from “Negligent partygoers going forth finished drinks, mostly drunk” is FULL = drunk, after DID for “finished” drinks (contains) SREGAR = RAGERS reversed, they being Aussie partygoers according to Chambers. I’m taking “going forth” as a reversal indicator with some trepidation though so I may be hallucinating all this… (hic!)
Co-solver Wiki, given the AMBOYNA, produces the ANTELOPE and the theme, Gulliver’s Travels but it is still a challenging solve to fill the grid and find that those were the ships in NOVEL BOOK ONE AND THREE.
Then there is the task of unjumbling and changing letters to find five of the locations Gulliver visits in books one and three, and the unfortunate STRULDBRUGS who inhabit one of them.
Wiki, of course, gives me LILLIPUT for book one, and LAPUTA, GLUBBDUBDRIB, LUGGNAGG and BALNIBARBI for the book three locations. Clearly, to fit all those Bs and Gs in, retaining real letters in the intersecting words, is no mean feat (of solving, as well as compiling) and we see where to put the missing bars.
What an achievement, Arcadia. Thank you.