‘Prior to entry, all clued across answers must be thematically adapted in one of two ways (ten of each)’. We are learning! That doesn’t mean throw your hands up in despair. No, do the logical thing and count the letters! Wonderful! Half of the words are going to have at least one letter added and half of them are going to lose one.

Einstein deep in thought over Hedge-sparrow's Metrical Variations

This was our best performance yet. Within minutes, the Scottish nuclear physicist in the team had spotttted POTTTTAGE, and the Shakespeare addict had VI(L)LIAGO. AVER for ‘cattle’ came up in a crossword sometime this week (Isn’t it odd how all the setters seem to latch onto an odd word like that at the same time?) so we had AVERTT, and, of course the cattle were lowing, to give us MOOTT.

EINSTTEIN fitted in on the bottom row but we were not behaving like the sharpest pencil in the box, and we had almost completed the grid before SPEED OF LIGHT leapt out at us. Look for a C, said Mr Physics, and, of course, SPECIAL RELATIVITY was there, where it should be.

The irony is that we had TIMR DILATION but not the complete phrase, with LENGTH CONTRACTON until Mr Physics explained Einstein’s special relativity concept. Why TIMR? That clue ‘support a tree’! I am still naive enough to suspect that a compiler is going to have TEE as the support and give us the extra letter that is in TREE. But no, of course, it was TEE + A and the extra letter was the E.

We had completed the grid and highlighted our C before we managed to work out which clues gave us the 17 letters of the puzzle’s theme. Back-to-front junior 8X8 coffee break easy clues team tactics – as usual! Even then, some of the word play escaped us. 32d. ‘Check over trace of whisky stolen in Scotland’. We knew the word STOWN but failed to see that SIT ON was a Chambers’ meaning of ‘Check’, giving us the extra I.

I loved the clue for MOELLON, ‘Big cats head to head, going after master mason’s rubble’. Here we had LEO and LION with their heads meeting, following M the master and producing MOELLION from which we had to remove the I for the thematic phrase and squeeze in the two LLs into a single space. (And yet I know that some of the Message Board gurus are going to claim that this was an easy romp – “Pencilled it in on the train home”-style).

Well, thank you, Hedge-sparrow. I loved it – especially the chance to get my pencils out and allow Einstein to overlook the whole thing.

This is Hedge-sparrow’s third Listener puzzle, the previous two having the themes of astronomical worm-holes and Charles Darwin. I enjoyed both of them.

This puzzle had across entries to be entered thematically in one of two ways, with extra letters suggesting the two methods. Unusually, the clues gave answer lengths, and comparing these with the entry lengths gave ten that were one letter too long, and ten that were either one or two letters too short.

The clues seemed to be fairly easy to start with, and yielded eight acrosses and ten downs on the first pass. Of the acrosses, four were of the too-long-for-their-entry type: HILLSIDE, NELL, VILLIAGO and ALLOW, and the double-L’s (?) seemed likely candidates for reducing to single L’s for entry.

29dn’s definition “one from Asia Minor” had me admitting (ashamedly) that I didn’t know exactly what constituted Asia Minor! It seems it is pretty much just modern-day Turkey. Another half dozen clues revealed the doubling-up of the letter T in the remaining clues. The exact nature of the theme still eluded me until the extra letters spelt out TIME DILATION and LENGTH CONTRACTION. If any further hint was required, there was SPEED OF LIGHT across the middle of the diagram, and good old Albert at 41ac. It didn’t take too long to see SPECIAL RELATIVITY in the shape of a large c, the symbol for the speed of light, as in E = mc².

I particularly liked the big cats going head-to-head at 18dn (LEO and LION joined at the L), and Idle type verbally attacked in Post Office at 4dn was (G)OT AT in PO. 24dn was obviously LASTLY, but it took me ages to work out how the clue was contsructed, hampered as I was by not having come across LAST with the meaning of a load weighing about 4000lbs. So some good clues in the puzzle.

A good puzzle from Hedge-sparrow, albeit fairly easy. Giving the answer lengths certainly helped, although I don’t think entry lengths would have made the puzzle that much harder. Also, a couple of across answers containing both a T and double L might have been fun, but I suspect that the grid was tricky enough to construct as it was.