Hypnos has had about 20 puzzles in the Indy and EV series over the last eight years; however I believe this is his first Listener, so I’m expecting good things.
The preamble was quite tortuous, with links, more links, a theme word and a thematic example; plus some clues under the headings Alternative and Associative, and not forgetting some extra letters in the down clues to deal with. As is my wont in such circumstances I dived straight in with the acrosses; at least they were normal, unlike the Alternatives and Associatives which also had an extra letter.
SUMERIAN, NEUTRALS and NALA came quickly. Not that I’d heard of NALA, but it was an easy alternate letters clue. I wonder who first came up with this clue type? I don’t think it’s been around that long, and is basically a sort of variation on the hidden clue, but with words like ‘alternate’, ‘oddly’ and ‘regularly’ instead of ‘in’ and the like. Generally they are as easy to solve as the standard hidden clue. Those three were the only acrosses I solved on my first pass so I made myself more coffee (it’s Saturday morning) and tackled the downs. Whoopee three more: COFF, ICER and IDEALLY. LIMPET and IDES next, and the top right was under way.
It seems to have been a recurrent theme, both here and on my Enigmatic Variations blog, that about now I say something to the effect that “progress was fairly slow”. I won’t disappoint you, although it has been slower! It was nice to see ALASKA defined not just as state, but as ‘detached state’. Just ‘state’ is a bit of a pain (after all there are 50 of them); nor am I fond of clues which have ‘man’ or ‘boy’ to indicate Alan or Peter or Bert. What is it that makes one name a man and another a boy? Probably interchangeable, but they get my gander!
The bottom right corner took ages, but a couple of clues elsewhere also stumped me for too long. Firstly, KNIT (Turning to leave Spain, bungle contract) was TINKER (bungle) – E (Spain), reversed (with R as the extra letter): it seemed to have all the elements for the clue, a starting word, an omission and its indicator and a reversal indicator, but they just seemed in the wrong order to me, and ‘to leave’ does not mean ‘leaving’. Then AGITATO, a perfectly fine clue (A GIT + (N)ATIO(N), with the I dropped), but could I see that at first? Dropping parts of a word when you’ve got extra letters floating around certainly taxes the brain!
Meanwhile, the extra letters in the down clues spelt GRID IS GIVEN STIR IN HOLE. This led to PORRIDGE, and given the title of the puzzle, a prison theme got my vote rather than breakfast cereals. Also it seemed likely that the Alternative clues led to synonyms for porridge, and the Associatives were linked in some way. Although lengths were given, they were the lengths of the grid entries not the clue answers themselves. I’d managed to solve most of them on and off while tackling the main grid. One of these was normal, and the extra letters in the others gave UPSAAND. SPANDAU is the name of the German prison where Rudolph Hess was kept for a little while; it was demolished as soon as he died in 1987.
Finally, there was the variant of the theme word to be highlighted and an accessory. BROSE and THIBLE were fairly easy to spot in the shape of a spoon. Putting the thematic example, SPANDAU, and thematic item CLINK below the grid finished the puzzle.
I must say that I thought a couple of surface readings a bit odd (Agitation enveloping festival to get sources of dye?), but they were made up for by ‘Dandy and Beano ultimately kept by former pupil’! All in all then, not a bad puzzle from Hypnos, and certainly an interesting theme. I wonder what made him think of it?
