Cineraria's avatarCineraria

Born in 1963, I began with crosswords as a little boy by “helping” my grandfather with the puzzle in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I have done American-style crosswords since I was a teenager, and I enjoy many other types of word puzzles, including cryptograms and acrostics. I cannot remember when I discovered cryptic crosswords. I used to do the Guardian puzzle every day, but being a lawyer by profession does not leave me a lot of time to indulge my deliberate yet desultory solving method. I have been doing the Guardian Prize every Friday and the Azed every Saturday since 2020, and the Genius every month since 2018 (typically succeeding, but admittedly with some DNFs). I was even gratified to be a Genius winner a few years ago. I have learned an awful lot from studying the post-mortems on fifteensquared. As for other interests, I have a large collection of origami books, and I like folding the most complicated models I can find.

Financial Times 18,052 by BOBCAT

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Bobcat is often a challenge, but I think this has to be the toughest Bobcat grid I have ever solved, with some very unusual devices in play. Please let me know if I have missed any tricks.

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Guardian Prize No 29,685 by Paul

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Self-referential Paul crosswords like this got me hooked on cryptics, however many years ago now, but I think this is my first opportunity to blog one. Until the key word comes to light, they can be very tough to solve.

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Financial Times 17,996 by PETO

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While this seems to be a perfectly ordinary set of fine cryptic clues, for some reason I felt as though I were reaching into the depths of my solver’s bag of tricks to complete this puzzle from Peto, concluding with a couple of iffy parsings at 9A and 16D.

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