‘Phony?’, I said, ‘I bet one of those eight-letter words is telegram’. But of course, I had forgotten that when this lovely quick solve was almost all in place and we had VIEWS, GENIC, POINT, VI?OR, SC??E, TY?ES, PATHS and CA?TS to tie together with a common link. However, for us, that was the last stage.

Our grid, all prepared for solving with the five and eight-letter words highlighted, looked rather like a little piece of tartan (some naff and daffy modern clan) and the junior 8X8 team was away like the hound that spotted the hare, solving almost as fast as we could read the clues.  Wonderful Wasp! – We needed a break like this after last week’s bell-ringing. The eight-letter code words were simply fun compared with some of the Listener hoops we have been jumping through since we did our first tentative solve almost a year ago.

There were some unusual words there, though. We know all about PECCAVIS, UNTRUSTY UNGOTTEN things, UNREPAIR and USERNAMEs, and the ARCHDUKE gave us no trouble, but Wasp must have trawled his Chambers to find THEREOUT and ABIDANCE. It was the helpful way these clues intersected that made ‘Phoney’ such a rewarding fill – certainly the one I would recommend, so far, for the terrified newcomer hovering on the Listener fringes.

We kept a careful check of those extra digits (the correct ones) and produced another eight-letter code (78784767) Is this a misunderstanding of the preamble on our part ? It says ‘The eight correct digits can be arranged to encode a word associated with an element of the puzzle. Well, yes they can, but so can the extra letters. SPURIOUS leapt out at us immediately, because of the four letters from the 7 group, but then we saw that the corrected letters themselves spelled SPURIOUS.  So what? It is perfectly normal for the Junior 8X8 team to take the steep and thorny way. Of course, Bradford suggested SPURIOUS as another word for PHONEY – Nice!

We learned that INCUDES is the plural of INCUS and we were almost there EARLY ON FRIDAY EVENING! Oh yes, there was the usual red herring or two. We had to link those eight rather disparate five-letter words. First of all, they seemed to all appear in a genetic, biological or communications context when we simply fed them into Google. Too vague. They seemed to pair up VIEWS/POINT, TYPES/CASTS but VISOR/GENIC? We began to fiddle with numbers. When encoded, did they all add up to the same number? (Another idea for some demented setter?)  Fortunately our wise friend suggested attaching a common prefix – back to where I started!

Thank you Wasp! We loved this neat, polished little puzzle. If only the Listener would give newcomers more of this level of difficulty and tempt people to have a go at the holy of holies.

Aedites is one of that rare breed, a setter who seems at home with both standard crosswords and numerical puzzles. In November last year he had Euclid’s Alogrithm (4010) with its vast array of clues, which totally defeated me and was one of my (many) failures last year. There was also Call Changes (3814) in 2005 which had, like this puzzle, a bell-ringing theme.
An interesting entry technique whereby all letters have been allocated to one of the groups C, D, E, F and G, and are entered using the letter to whose group it belongs. Luckily the clues were, at least to start with, fairly straightforward, and I had about a third of the entries completed in about twenty minutes, in which there were about a dozen clashes. It was fun watching the five groups develop, but somewhat deflating to see my initial solving rate slow to a crawl. JEZEBEL (BEZ back in JEEL) and VERSE (CONVERSE – CON) took longer than they should have done. It’s also interesting how my brain works in initially analyzing a clue: I read ‘Designed sixty walks planted with trees …’ and the idea of an anagram didn’t even cross my mind. I mean, the letters of SIXTY can only be arranged in one way surely. So XYSTI came very late in the day. I think QUICKTHORN, AMMO and FEISTY were the last answers to be slotted in, AMMO being particularly troublesome as I have only known it as an abbreviation for bullets, etc, rather than military stores in general.
So, finally the grid was complete, and the two blocks of changes were fairly easy to find in columns 3-7 and 9-13. Highlighting the lightest bell (G) in each permutation gave a couple of identical curved lines which looked to me like a pair of women’s breats rather than anything to do with bells! Even now, this requirement of the puzzle seems weak and superfluous, but that’s probably because I’m missing something.
On to the question that is answered by the left, centre and right columns of the grid. I thought this would be a relatively simple final step, but after half an hour that idea was discarded. I had TALL something WITH A something AND BELLS. Quite a few attempts later, and BUILDING and TOWER appeared, and gave a definition that wasn’t quite as obvious as I had hoped. Church, chapel and belfry didn’t seem exact enough. Perhaps it was like the old joke: What’s brown and sticky … a stick, and the answer was bell-tower. The previous bell-themed puzzle, Call Changes, had CAMPANILE as the word to be written under the grid. Surely this wouldn’t have the same word! But Chambers defines it as ‘a bell tower, esp a tall one’ (my emphasis), and that was good enough for me.
All in all, an entertaining puzzle from Aedites, probably at the easier end of the spectrum for him. I was just about OK with the final steps, although, as mentioned above, the highlighting seemed somewhat superfluous.

Checking of my Listener entries for this year has continued, albeit at a very slow pace. It is such a nerve-racking task that I can only check four or five at a time. So far I am up to 4043, with an all-correct run of 32 going back to December. I just hope that John Green has received all my entries; I hear stories about various sorting offices going on strike and fear the worst!