4016 – Motion by Samuel
Posted by Listen With Others on 3 February 2009
Having a stab at the Listener is getting to be a habit with the junior coffee break Sun 8 by 8 team. We liked the look of Motion from the start and bumbled our way to 16 solutions in the first hour. HAIRNETS started us off (do all those Listener aficionados that we read about head straight for the anagrams as an ‘easy’ way in?) That, of course, gave us the method for moving and finding the letters (SKELL to KELLS), though we wasted time attempting to see which words could have moving beginnings or ends. (Too many!)
We were already troubled by CRUXES not intersecting with BAYEUX, and by the peculiar configuration of ?OPIA where we needed PIANO, but we didn’t draw the obvious conclusion.
There was a certain satisfaction with this one, as we were able to build the grid up steadily with no major bouts of frustration, though we had a fine red herring when 1 across seemed to produce NO NAPS (related to Antes, or bets, and No naps in the sense of covers and bets).
DIVISION LOBBY leapt into place, and, with it, THE NOES HAVE IT. Then, with habitual junior coffee break team dullardry, we were stuck. Were we expected to replace NO with IT? The 27-letter description of the motion was a rather odd jumble of letters (we are, sadly or happily, at the solving level where we find the solution then have to somehow relate it to the evidence – are we alone there?)
We slept on it and I woke in the middle of the night muttering ‘AYES TO THE RIGHT, NOES TO THE LEFT’ and with astonishment, worked out that it had 27 letters. Now we cockily decided that we could finish but, of course, the real work was yet to come.
Some of those elusive AYES and NOES were already in place. CANOPY, SNOB, E-LAYER and GNOME came easily, but what a struggle to find VILAYETS. The real stinker was DONNOT (“What has a ‘do nowt’ to do with a fine gentleman?” we fondly asked – of course, Chambers gives us the answer.)
So there we are again – success! We found Motion particularly rewarding because so many words intersected, giving us confirmation for clues we had solved. As usual, we were astounded at the ingenuity of the setter performing the mental gymnastics of shifting all those AYES and NOES, and, as usual, we wonder how the regular Listener solvers manage to keep on performing what, for the 8 by 8 coffee-break team is a real struggle. Back to our 8 by 8s!
Shirley Curran
