Elitism by Zero

What the junior coffee break team is learning, as we continue to challenge ourselves with the Listener crosswords, is how carefully we need to consider the preamble if we hope to complete the second stage and find whatever we have to highlight, draw or colour in some way.

‘Elitism’ gave us an initial problem, too. By midnight on Friday we had a grand total of four solutions that we were sure of. We slowly filled the grid, each clue giving us a moment of delight when the wordplay produced a word like ‘BODHISATTVA’, ‘SEWEN’, ‘TREIF’ or ‘CADE’. Our first positive reaction to ‘Elitism’ was the superb quality of the clueing – but what hard work! We were left with gaps at 2d and 34ac. The brilliance of 2d, (WHENUA) once we had understood that we were to take decreasing quantities of ‘where’, ‘nutrition’s’ and ‘available’, astounded us. What a fine way to construct a solution! The parish priest took us even longer and we are still not sure of the wordplay.

21 letters did emerge but, as usual, we were stumped. We did not have the experience to highlight the extra letters in the grid as we went along (which, of course, produced the required 4-word phrase scattered in fourteen columns), so we had a fine mishmash of rather clotted cream running down the side of our clues with that one D and one L (and a mere thirteen extra words). CRÈME DE LA CRÈME was as obvious as the star cross’d lovers a couple of weeks ago – but how to get it into a phrase?

Of course, cream floats, but we thought that we might have already performed the necessary gymnastics when we realised how to reduce our 21 letters to 14. All the same, the remaining phrase and theme were not clear. It was midnight when I understood that the letters had to be physically redistributed to the top line. Even then, it was not, at first, clear whether I simply had to switch them with a top-line letter or to move all the other letters down accordingly. Fortunately, I did the second operation first.

Sheer joy and amazement – I even woke the sleeping half of the junior coffee break 8X8 team to show him the second phrase that had appeared on the penultimate line – and he, naturally, pointed out that THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE had appeared too!

I wonder whether Zero’s ‘Elitism’ will be one of the Listener crosswords that the veterans nominate as the highlights of the year. For us it has certainly been the star of our first few weeks’ solving.

Shirley Curran

I must write the Junior 8 X 8 team’s blog before I read the comments of all those gurus on Derek’s message board who will certainly have found this one too easy. We thoroughly enjoyed it! After all that cold solving of previous weeks and the terror of our first mathematical (where, in fact, the pentominoes proved to be quite diverting), it was a pleasure to have a complete grid by the end of Saturday – with reservations – serious ones!

We had spotted surplus letters all through our solving, but the solutions fitted so well together and the definitions were so clear that we thought it would all sort itself out in the end. We had found YEAST, HOPS, MALT and TAP WATER and assumed some sort of quaint letter was going to give us another potential ingredient of beer or whisky. Of course, we should have realized much earlier that we were working with a 22-letter alphabet – obvious, really, since a ‘related word’ had to go into the space at the bottom of the grid after twenty-one letters were spotted.

We let it lie fallow for a while and focused on the Sunday AZED, then resorted to highlighting and isolating extra letters in the anagrams – a funny set. YOD was what gave it away, followed fairly quickly by VAV. Light dawned and with it, understanding of the wordplay and big hint in the title (HEBREW). I wish I could come up with that kind of inspired title! I still don’t know why we found SIN twice (once 40 ac. and potentially again in 4d. where we found an extra SIN).

It was a chore, but quite an enjoyable one, to work through all the clues again to find the remaining letters and, ironically, the last two that were missing were ALEPH and ZAYAN – (two five-lettter ones) so we had to go all the way to the end in our alphabetical search.

Very fair, we thought, well put together and useful – perhaps now we will know our Hebrew alphabet.

Shirley Curran.