I didn’t know whether the title was trying to tell me to expect another gardening theme, or whether it was trying to reassure me that it wasn’t. A read through of the preamble didn’t seem to indicate that any horticultural knowledge would be required so I guessed that I was on safe ground. Each clue contained a misprint and they would lead to a quotation with a part missing. The misprints could be anywhere in the clue, either definition or wordplay. Although such clues can be difficult sometimes, they can also be quite entertaining, and give the setter ample opportunity to deceive. I know from past experience that Hypnos’s puzzles can be quite tricky. Although he has set a number of EVs, Inquisiitors and Magpies, this is only Listener number two (the first being 4057 Inside with its porridge theme).

1ac was typical of the problems that were to be faced: They baffle revolutionary reserve holding line. The corrected misprint could be raffle, waffle, deserve, or indeed devolutionary … plus a whole host of possibiities like pine, lone, live and link. So I ignored 1ac for now and went on to 6ac which was likely to be horse depicter rather than Norse depicter, and that could only be STUBBS. I decided to linger in the top right corner for a bit, and 6dn STOWE and 8dn BROTH were soon slotted in.

It’s always fun when the setter conceals a misprint in a word that forms part of an anagram, and 9dn was probably one such clue Transporting aid once ruined the boats. Here again, the corrected word could be one of many possibilities, although knowing that the answer began with B (from Stubbs) did reduce the options: I reckoned that boots and brats were the most likely. Of course, I was wrong. Getting 23ac VELCRO a bit later made BAT-HORSE look like it would be the answer, but it wasn’t in Chambers … at least, not under bat! For some reason I was assuming that both it and ‘batman’ were derived from the flying creature, rather than from a French word for packsaddle and therefore had their on entries. VELCRO was another entertaining clue, with the answer being hidden not in novel craft, but in novel croft.

I won’t say that progress was quick, but then I rarely do (last week’s Dipper puzzle being very much the exception). There were some good clues and, I have to say, some deceptive definitions to be found, like:

 
I found that what the corrected letters were spelling out took some unravelling, especially the second half. DRAT and BUT seemed to be lurking, but I decided that the last word was probably POPE. There was only one thing for it, and that was to look through all 11½ columns of Alexander Pope’s entry in the ODQ. Luckily I soon came across An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and “‘Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’” Indeed, the corrected letters spelt out Who breaks upon a wheel with a butterfly missing.

So where was the missing butterfly? According to the preamble, it was in the grid “in an appropriate form”, presumably that of either a butterfly or a wheel … or possibly a Rorschach ink blot! Despite guessing, correctly, that wheel was most likely, I failed to see anything obvious, probably because I was starting in the wrong place. I resorted to Chambers Crossword Dictionary. I’ve said before that I like the way this reference book lists words by length, and here I was looking for a 16-letter butterfly. Well it didn’t have any more than 15 letters. Hmmm. I sat back in my chair and pondered. Believe it or not, I pondered for about five minutes before I decided to consult Bradford’s! There I found three: Camberwell beauty, chequered skipper and tiger swallowtail. The Camberwell beauty was soon being highlighted in a wheel shape around the centre of the grid.

Thanks to Hypnos for an enjoyable, if tricky, puzzle. It took me about 3½ hours to finish the grid and a further 20 minutes to eventually find the butterfly. Just as last year had a fair number of science-based puzzles, I’m now wondering whether the editors are getting us ready for a year of horticultural themes!
 

OK, not really a Listener blog,  more of a plea.

The February Magpie has just hit the (virtual) newstands, and with it a very worrying editorial from AJ (Mash) concerning the future of the publication. It appears that subscription renewals for 2012 have been much lower than normal, and if this does not improve, then this may be the Magpie’s final year.

So, I’m sure all crossword lovers will join me in saying:

If you haven’t tried the Magpie before, head over to www.piemag.com, and have a go at the sample puzzles that can be downloaded. And, if you like them, please subscribe – only £35 for the year, with pro-ratas available. £35 for 72 puzzles top quality puzzles a year – why wouldn’t you subscribe? Even if you only solve a handful of those, it’s still as cheap as chips.

If you have subscribed before, but haven’t renewed, why not renew now? Again, even if you solve only a few of the puzzles, it’s still worth it.

The editors are also keen to hear any suggestions for ways to increase the readership, so I’m sure they’d love to hear from anybody with any ideas. And, of course, from anybody who would like to subscribe.

It would be terrible to see the Magpie come to an end after ten years of publishing such an ecelectic range of high-quality word and number puzzles, featuring most of the setters who appear in the Listener, Inquisitor and EV.

Besides, if the Magpie did come to an end, I’d be forced to find some people with whom to start my own monthly subscription puzzles magazine. It wouldn’t be as good as the Magpie, and I’d have to commit so much time to it that my wife would probably divorce me. So for the sake of my children, please help!

The first puzzle of the year, and it’s another offering from Dipper. And yes, it’s about gardening again … not one of my favourite pastimes (and that’s putting it mildly). Initial letters of extra words spell out the title of a horticultural book with other information to be found.

A quick run through all the clues, and I got half a dozen across entries and the same number of downs. That was a pretty poor show, but was probably due to the ‘interference’ of the extra words. Luckily, these entries gave enough of a skeleton for solving to progress quite quickly. In fact, very quickly — the puzzle was finished in just under an hour and 40 minutes.

Near the end, I looked at the initial letters of the extra words that I had identified: MAN••ING•OWI•••LA•TI•GOFKI•C•E••A••ENS. It didn’t take much guesswork to deduce that the title of the book was Manuring, Sowing, Planting of Kitchen Gardens. It didn’t seem to be a particularly catchy title, and I suspected that it wasn’t one of last year’s bestsellers.

Having completed the grid, there were just the the two unclued entries to complete: RI•HAR• and •ARD•NE•, so it looked like some guy called Richard Gardener. With no additional references given in the preamble, a quick check in the ODQ was called for, and revealed that it was actually some guy called Richard Gardiner, born c1533, and the full title of his book was Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens. In fact a search on Amazon reveled a reprint with the following even less catchy title on the cover: Profitable instructions for the manuring, sowing, and planting of kitchin gardens Very profitable for the commonwealth and greatly for the helpe and comfort of poore people. Gathered by Richard Gardner of Shrewsburie (1599). So how did he spell his name? Anyway, I’m guessing that he was the Percy Thrower of the 16th century.

It was time to check my entry clue by clue to make sure that there were no silly mistakes lurking. 1ac Shrill noise, according to Scots, made by most of stuff I installed in Motherwell school was SCREICH, the extra word being ‘Motherwell’. Well that didn’t work!! SCH for ‘school’ was there, and an I, but ‘most of stuff’? It should obviously be CRA(M) I in SCH to give SCRAICH. I had jumped to the conclusion that ‘shrill noise’ was SCREECH, but with an I in it. Chambers has:

screich, skreich see skreigh

Percy Thrower on Gardening Club

skreigh, scriech, skriegh, screich, screigh or scriech (Scot) n and v (to) screech, shriek.

The entry in Chambers that tells all is:

scraich or scraigh (Scot) vi to screech, to make a scratchy sound. n a screech; a scratchy sound [Cf scraugh, skreigh]

Easy to be confused … and get it wrong if you’re sloppy!

So, a pleasant first puzzle of the year from Dipper, and luckily not requiring too much horticultural knowledge.