4009 – Three Rings by Franc
Posted by Listen With Others on 13 December 2008
by Shirley Curran
Monday: We can cope, on a good day, with AZED. The Speccie, Grauniad and co. are our regulars, but we aren’t in the Listener League – we follow the impenetrable discussions with awe. Still, I set straightforward circular ones, so this circular grid looks tempting – we can always write a mini blog for LWO about the desperate floundering of complete beginners.
Three Rings – that looks hopeful – a circus. The inventor? Barnum – Phineas Taylor Barnum – forty letters in the venue of his début THE SCUDDER MUSEUM NEW YORK CITY – brilliant. We’ll work on that – has to be his last two names in the inner circle. A few easy clues in circle two confirm that we’re on the right track – ACROBAT, CLOWN, FIRE-EATER – but we’re stuck there, can’t see any jugglers or trapeze artists and we don’t know what order to put them in. (Animals appeared for us on Tuesday, and even then, we were struggling with the fact that some were plural and some singular – we thought the poor lonely monkey was perhaps a King in ‘moneys!)
Delighted with ourselves, we solve a dozen radials and, after a bit of a quandary over what the ‘jumble’ means we complete some blocks of four. Why the quandary? ORANGE clearly goes inwards and ONAGER is the jumble but it is also an anagram of orange and all the words we have so far found (except CHORAL) have possible anagrams – so are we looking for anagrams? We decide not, but clearly we need those rings to tell us which way to feed our words in. We’re on the point of abandoning.
Tuesday: A few desultory, frustrated dabbles and more breakthroughs – the fourth circle begins to yield – FRATELLINI, MAJOR, …
Then disaster! The LE we have in two consecutive centre slots precludes Barnum and even Bailey won’t fit with what we have further round. So we set off on our second wild goose chase. Philip Astley is the British circus inventor – 12 letters – great! We produce about half the radials but they are still a list at the side of the page. How do we slot them in?
The JESTER (35) clears the way for us. His J in the second circle has to intersect with JUMBO (yes, we got the dumbo clue – not surprisingly!) and, at last we’re in business. Ring two is almost complete BUT Philip Astley is a no no. It’s the ULE in the inner circle that leads us to try JULES on the Internet and hey presto, we have LEOTARD and THE CIRQUE NAPOLEON IN PARIS. (Shouldn’t we have seen that at once? – We do live in France!) The rest is a matter of fitting it all together.
It isn’t all plain sailing. By Tuesday evening we are left with six radials to complete and a confusing space in our circus families – who are these ?CON??LLOS? We stay up late juggling letters until we have a single letter space to complete and one last impenetrable clue – and do we put OOLITE or OOLITH in our jumble?
Conclusion – if we managed, it must have been far easier than usual but we did enjoy it. Now we understand rumours that teams of people work together. And it’s back to the Sun Junior Coffee Break 8 by 8 for us.
shirleycurran@orange.fr
