Another circular puzzle from The Ace of Hearts. Nudge to oneself – the editors have said in the past that they prefer a circular puzzle to have some sort of circular theme.
So, although it’s called ‘String’, we’ll be looking for something circular.
Perimeter entries are clued by wordplay only and as solving proceeds, those give us TAMBOURIN, LIMBO, HAKA and SALTARELLO, all of which appear to be forms of dancing. We wonder why. And then putative HABANERA and RUMBA apear in the central circle. Chambers tells us that both of those are of Cuban origin and they are dances too. ‘The words in the innermost ring also fit the definition’ – they may not be circular dances but they are laid out in a circle – so we have the theme; but there is a lot of fairly tough solving to find those extra letters that must be removed from each radial clue before that ‘definition of a five-letter word’ appears.
That letter that is removed is added ‘somewhere’ to its answer before entry. That’s what slowed the solving down. Initial attempts to include the letter in the entered word soon failed. OSSIAN, say, would work and EGGAR might have become RAGGED, but there was no mention of jumbles (thankfully) and that would have been expecting too much of our setter, so we decided that it was the entered words that were going to tell us where to put those extra letters. Sigh of relief! The answers are always to be entered inwards.
The Ace of Hearts is not handing us these solutions on a plate. ‘Right to wear thin geta’. The extra letter can only be A but we need to put LEAN round R to give ‘get = LEARN’. ‘Cart circles around space opening’. We remove the C and ART circles around EM to give TREMA = opening. Fortunately the message A CUBAN STREET DANCE PERFORMED IN A CIRCLE emerges and renders solving a little easier. Chambers gives us exactly that definition for RUEDA: ‘A Cuban street dance performed in a circle featuring many turns and changes of partner’. So the title ‘String” = Street Ring: clever! And there is the RUEDA. for us to highlight in our grid. (You may have to re-order some radial entries there, resolving ambiguities.)
This will not be an easy puzzle for our new marker to handle, it was a struggle to check that we had those extra letters intercepting those answers – quite an achievement for The Ace of Hearts to have managed to deceptively include them in the clues and fit them into those enmeshed five-letter words.
Ah, and does he keep his oenophile entry ticket? Hmmm. A careful search doesn’t produce any alcohol, but there isn’t going to be much street dancing in Cuba without a fair sprinkling is there, What is drunk in Cuba, the answer revolves entirely around rum. As the beating heart of Cuban beverage culture, it is consumed straight, mixed with sodas, or crafted into world-famous tropical cocktails so “Cheers The Ace of Hearts!”
“You may have to re-order some radial entries there, resolving ambiguities” – only if you were guessing how to enter the radial words. If you relied on confirmation from adjacent entries before entering the radials, you would have been left with two incomplete entries – the only two where ambiguities could not be resolved – forcing you to work out RUEDA, which they both crossed, before it appeared in the grid; a very nice touch.