Listen With Others

The 8 X 8 quickie team became quite excited, this week, when, by noon on Saturday, we had a filled grid with Salome and the seven veils in place. The jumbles of across clues left us with answers that fitted the definitions and were checked by down clues, but, as usual, we had quite a lot of doubt about wordplay that had led to those answers.

12 ac. gave us MELONS or LEMONS (and clearly, it made no real difference which we selected, since S went into the blank space in either case) but we hadn’t spotted the ‘for’ that meant ‘in the place of’ and told us to lose an O from MOONS and add EL. Obvious to you experts, I know.

In 22ac. I still don’t know why CORNET is Homer’s lace, but it is a ‘headdress’ and the letters were confirmed by the second stage of the puzzle.

We thought the clueing was lovely but not easy at all. Take ACINUS, for example. Once we had found a word that fitted with the ‘pip’ of the clue, we still had to sort out that ‘CIN’ was a heard offence in AUS and thus contained in AUS. Clever!

As usual, we scratched our heads for a while at this stage. There were so many Vs, that we decided we should be able to find seven veils orthogonally, horizontally or multidirectionogonally and remove them (leaving an ugly white space at the bottom!) – and that something like THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE would leap out at us. But it was not to be!

The denouement was delightful and astonishing. ACOLYTH had shown up when I was checking the spelling of ACOLYTE and that gave me the clue – and what a surprise when the entire line (with the two required exceptions at H and I) yielded real words and poor, beheaded John the Baptist. This was magic that makes all our struggles worthwhile. We slotted John’s head into its place and found a CHARGER under it.

We haven’t been tackling the Listener crossword for very long, so we are not amongst those who are choosing their favourite out of their last all correct ten years (and, sadly, never will be) – but, for the newcomers, Centigram’s Command Performance undoubtedly ranks among the stars – and we devoted only one whole day to it. But it doesn’t have to be dastardly to be good – does it?

Shirley Curran.