Listen With Others

Friday at 16.00 heard the usual groan from the Stripey Horse Z???A (5) team. ‘Not another with no numbers and no bars!’ However, for once, we read the preamble carefully and there were two optimistic signs. ‘All grid entries are real words’ and ‘the 10 x 10 sub-grid has 180-degree rotational symmetry’.

The code looked even more promising with an isolated 2. That must be A! Is it possible that we are dealing with the keyboard of a mobile phone? We shelved that till later and set to with the solving. TIER, A-PROPOS, ERADICATE, ENQUIRIES, ESPECIALLY, TOMCAT, SLUR, NOODLE, IDEAL and PREORDERED fell into place. This was far more approachable clueing than we have been favoured with in the last few Listeners.

Thanks to Anthony Lewis' Crossword Compiler

‘Bars and numbers should not be entered.’ However, when we constructed a grid with bars,  the rest simply fell into place. Clearly, the long 8 and 9-letter words were crossing the centre; this fixed the shorter words and gave us a few more ALLAYED, EASTER, COERCE and RERAN.

Deciding which letters needed to fall to the bottom of the grid or leap to the left side was fairly straight-forward, too and MOBILE PHONE and PREDICTIVE appeared. We had been struggling with the clue, ‘Tense UK retailer shunning new lines (4)’ for a while but realized (with a rather curmudgeonly grumble) that this was a reference to the fashion house  NEXT who had to ‘shun new’ and get a T from ‘tense’ – and so we had TEXT.

Predictive text – Oh dear, I hate the way it proposes all sorts of silly things I never intend to say and, with a great struggle, have managed to bury it among the buttons on my loathed mobile phone. Do I honestly have to resurrect it? I decided not, and, as the dog’s body of the team, laboriously worked out the message by writing down all the possible letters – quite a rewarding task – though long!

So we had to ‘Join centres of consecutively numbered cells with curves and complete the shape using two straight lines. A three-word slang phrase must be written’.

The shape that appeared looked vaguely like a fashionable mobile phone but it had to be a bone, so the DOG BOD of the title must be DOG AND – Cockney rhyming slang. How nicely that tied it all together.   All that remained was to fill our remaining gaps.

What, no red herrings? Of course, we had. DOUBLET had seemed to be a fine solution for ‘Twin left in sporty car — old Ford Model (6). We hadn’t taken a fine tooth comb to the wordplay and removing a T produced DOUBLE. Of course, that meant that we couldn’t fit in P(L)eat. We seemed to have fallen at the last fence until COUPLE(T) resolved the problem (though the definition doesn’t really seem to fit). SADIST, too, escaped us for a while. Clearly, the cruel person was a sadist, but I needed a night’s sleep before SA’ + DIT, taking in S fell into place.

All-in-all, though, this was not a difficult solve, even for our limited abilities, its bark was worse than its bite. That is important, we think. There must be some Listener crosswords that are accessible to teams like ours. I did have an excuse for getting out the coloured pencils again, too. Thank you Xanthippe!