Elgin’s previous Listener was the entertaining A Change of Clothing with its Wallace and Gromit theme (and not Batman and Robin as many indications in the puzzle implied). I managed to solve it without too much of a sidetrack. About 6 years ago, however, there was his infamous Asylag, which attracted a very high error rate. It was before my current Listener solving streak, so I don’t know how I’d have got on … but I suspect I’d have failed.

Well, that was then and this is now. However, a slow read of the preamble and I realised that Elgin seemed to be in a quite a vindictive mood: not all across answers appeared in the grid, they were in alphabetical (mot grid) order, they could go forwards or backwards, one row wasn’t clued, two clued entries overlapped, and one column was missing. I was thankful that we were at least provided with some sort of diagram in which to enter our answers. But where to start?

I was somewhat relieved that the first two across clues were pretty straightforward: clue A was McGonagall’s simple name of ballad is regularly forgotten, leading to AEFALD, and clue B Origin of radio telegraphy in Bosnia-Herzegovena was BIRTH. But where they went, and in what direction was anybody’s guess.

So, I decided that I should deal with the downs first, since they were at least numbered and fixed. 1 EARTH, 3 YAPSTERS and 9 DICIEST were easy to spot. I don’t know whose puzzle first alerted me to ‘Nancy’ referrring to the city in France, but it now jumps off the page at me, and D + ici est gave me DICIEST. About ten more clues, mainly downs, came next, but after that, progress was in–cred–ib–ly slow!

I placed TRUSTLESSNESS across the bottom of the grid, since a number of down clues seemingly prevented it from going anywhere else. If it did indeed intersect with SEDER at 18dn, that presumably meant that the first letter was to be dropped and thus represented the missing column. However, in this puzzle I felt that there was precious little that could be taken for granted. I was beginning to get a trifle frustrated with the whole enterprise, but my curiosity had already been piqued.

It was a shame that I didn’t quickly get the entry across the top of the grid, the other 13-letter entry. Flier from Perth’s spinner to fielders stumped me for ages. Was Perth referring to Scotland or Australia? Was the definition ‘flier’ or ‘fielders’ (my guess was that it was the former)? And where did all the other across clues that I had solved fit into the grid. Head and brick wall came to mind.

After about five hours of solving over two days, I still had about a dozen clues to solve. However, I had discovered that across entries were to go in the grid cyclically, with answers running off one side of the grid and appearing at the opposite end of the same row. Even so, fitting them all in the grid was finnicky to say the least.

I don’t know how much easier the puzzle was for those solvers who twigged the theme from BIRTH, BORDER, BREED, etc. For me, EAST and WEST were not enough to trigger the leap to Kipling’s Ballad of East and West:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

As I write this blog, I notice that the crucial phrase is spelt without its first E: ‘Judgment Seat’, but Chambers has it as judgement-seat. Even without the J of ‘Jenny’, JUDGEMENT-SEAT was obviously the contents of the missing column.

I was unsure of the ‘overlapping’ clues for a long while … with emphasis on the ‘long’! I had spotted HECTOR in row 5, and he was part of the row without clues, and for some reason, I pencilled SEDUCEE immediately after him. So whom did Hector seduce? Unfortunately, my pencilling of ‘seducee’ was quite heavy, and it stayed in the grid for a ridiculous length of time … until Chambers declared that there was no such word! It was only when I realised that it went left to right but that its opposite number, STITCHES, went the same way, that I spotted my error and with the ‘two strong men standing face to face’, that part of the conundrum resolved itself. We had STITCHES and STRAIT plus HECTOR and HERCULES sharing their first letter. What’s more, they were at the end of the eartH … OK, not ‘ends‘, but I was happy.

Finally, after over twelve hours of solving, I had the completed grid.

However, one question remained. although it was one that we hadn’t been asked … what to do with the SKY in the top right!? I reread the preamble a few times: ‘One column has been omitted from the grid shown’. ‘Shown‘. Was that just the editor’s style, or was something else being alluded to? I eventually decided that EARTH and SKY needed to go east and west and stand presently at the judgement-seat. That needed a pair of scissors to cut the grid into two and have them running down the central two columns of the grid next to each other. That seemed quite drastic and a major bit of information that was actually missing from the preamble. I was probably digging myself a nice hole!

I have to say that I ummed and aahed for some time. After all, the third line of the ballad indicated that there was no east or west. By this time my brain was nearing meltdown and I decided to go the whole hog. I did indeed cut the grid in two and stick the two halves together to represent earth and sky standing together at God’s judgement-seat. Having done that and about to pop my entry in an envelope, I decided to ignore the ‘solvers are not required to reinsert it [the omitted column]‘ and prepared another grid with JUDGEMENT-SEAT running down the centre. After all, ‘not required’ implied to me that it was an optional step rather that a forbidden step.

And that was my submitted solution and the end of this, for me, gargantuan puzzle. I went from ‘this is ridiculous’ to ‘what the hell is going on’ to ‘they’re having a laugh’ and eventually to ‘I hate this puzzle’. That was followed by ‘oh that’s what it means’ and ‘well … I think I quite like it after all’! Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong, I have to congratulate Elgin on another masterpiece. It really would be interesting to know how many of the hurdles that were put in our way were there from the puzzle’s initial concept.

As I said at the beginning, at least we were given a grid to fill in … this time!
 

Nothing at all complex about setting this puzzle, but I’m happy to provide a setter’s blog.

I thought it might be a nice idea to plan a puzzle around what is a pretty famous newspaper headline: IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT. This appeared after the 1992 Election when the Conservatives won, unexpectedly so since Labour had been predicted to win right up to polling day. Especially because of the unconventional spelling, it was essential that solvers should be able to track the quote down. It was brilliant therefore to find it was in every edition of the ODQ since the headline was written.

I had in mind from the start using a ‘numbers for words’ substitution to give ’1992 election’ in the grid. I then tried to put the quote in the grid itself for the solver to highlight along with ’1992 election’. This proved extremely difficult but I eventually made it with the I (2nd last letter of the quote) crossing the I (6th letter of election) with its path through diagonals.

It would be very important, especially in a puzzle like the Listener where solving records are kept, that highlighting would be unambiguous. While the quote was all there, I thought it would require quite a complex preamble to ensure this. This was further complicated by the fact that the two parts to be highlighted crossed. In particular, the solver would have had to be told in some way that the T in election (which adjoined the I) was NOT the (final) T in the headline.

So I abandoned that idea for the one that finally appeared, ie extra letters in the wordplay for 17 clues giving the quote which solvers were to write below the grid.

I then decided to put MAJOR and KINNOCK in the grid to give 24 cells in all to highlight. MAJOR was put above KINNOCK to symbolise the outcome of the election.

The trickiest part of constructing the grid was to find suitable answers for those entries where words were to be changed to numbers. This was particularly hard as the four cells were adjoining and they could not be left unchecked. I aimed to find answers where the letters did not mean those numbers, ie I was looking for answers where the letters in the number appeared together just by coincidence. In the end I managed that with three of the four, barONEss, neTWOrk, NINEtte, with the other being NINEpins. Only when these answers had been settled, did I try to construct the rest of the grid while the part where the numbers were remained unchanged.

All that remained then was to write clues. Two test solving volunteers independently tackled the puzzle and both made invaluable suggestions – many thanks to them. When the puzzle was finally ready for submission, I noted that the 20th anniversary of the headline was in April 2012. In its previous preparation, date had not been a factor. So in my covering note to the Listener editors, I mentioned that April 2012 might be an appropriate date, while saying that the puzzle had nothing to do with the Titanic.

Many thanks to them for publishing it on what was very close to the 20th anniversary.

<strong>Raich
 

A Raich puzzle this week, so we were assured of a good, solid puzzle and hopefully a nice PDM at the end, perhaps of a Titanic nature. Raich’s last Listener was Les Six and was all about the presidents of the Fifth Republic. A 14×14 grid, and 58 clues, 17 of which had an extra letter not to be entered. These would spell out something to be written in the space below the grid captioned Claim. Then a contest and two protagonists to highlight. What could be simpler?

A positive stampede tthrough the clues this week, made relatively easy by over forty of them being normal, ie unaffected by extra letters in the wordplay. I managed to solve over twenty in the first half hour. Even pencilling 32dn ODOMETER didn’t hold me up for too long, and I soon managed to rationalise it as ODOGRAPH.

I then slowed down significantly. This was primarily because I didn’t highlight the bit in the preamble that said “Numbers in brackets are the length of grid entries”. This should have alerted me to the problems I was having with the four sneaky clues in the top left. I suppose one rule to adopt if things are going a bit slowly is to reread the preamble, and I eventually did this. After that, BARONESS, NINEPINS and NETWORK fell into place, and my suspicions of a Titanic theme seemed to be confirmed, with 19•2 near the top of column 4.

Well, a few clues later, and I found that we weren’t back in 1912, but much more recently in 1992. There in column 4 was 1992 ELECTION, and one of the great surprises of recent British politics. This meant, of course, that the two protagonists were winner John MAJOR and loser Neil KINNOCK, to be found in a couple of NW-SE diagonals. It seemed strange that we just had to enter the extra wordplay letters under the grid, exactly as they were spelt out in clue order It’s The Sun wot won it. No special intuitive leap required there (thank goodness).

The other Sun headline, which I think was even more well known, was the one on the day of the election: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”. By the way, no need to feel sorry for Neil Kinnock. Along with his wife, Glenys, they both landed cushy jobs in Europe and are now firmly ensconced in the House of Lords.

And so another entertaining puzzle by Raich, showing how a simple theme can be made into an enjoyable puzzle.
 

My debut Listener – how long have I waited to say that! Indeed this was almost a debut puzzle as it was the third one I set about four years ago. Although I can remember where I was when I set it (I won’t bore you!), the difficulty now is that I cannot remember why I thought of the puzzle. I don’t think it was based on a Listener puzzle using outlines of places, as I had only been solving for about a year, but I do remember thinking that the outline of Africa could be constructed using the letters of the word.

I got an outline of Africa and placed it over a large grid and worked out that it needed to be slightly longer than it was wide and therefore plumped for a 13×12 grid. But how to choose the letters? What if Africa was an odd-one-out. Continents – not enough. Countries – yes, although there are far too many. European countries were the way to go. I sat down with Chambers looking up all possibilties preceding another word, and listed them in length order. Highlighting every occurrence of A F R I and C in each, I could work out a possible symmetrical grid using every down entry. However I soon realized that if I were to use every down entry, I would never make the across entries into real words. There was no point in using only a few down entries, so I went for across jumbles. Luckily the grid could work this way ensuring symmetry. Solvers on the whole are not keen on jumbles, so I wanted to make the clues easier. I thought of cluing these with the wordplay producing the jumbled form. I had never seen this gimmick when I set it, but I have seen it since.

I sent the puzzle off to John Grimshaw in December 2008 and never heard any response until Shane came on board when he and Roger discovered several “lost” puzzles. Thankfully the editors decided they would re-solve them (not actually knowing if it had been solved in the first place).

Here comes the debate. Solvers on the whole have given positive feedback and so I am pleased it has gone down so well. However, several solvers noticed the connection very early on. I can assure you the comments would have been very different if you had solved the original format. The grid fill was not an issue with the editors, but the denouement proved too difficult with my initial preamble. This merely stated that the solver had to find an odd-one-out, without any extra pointers, which proved to be a stumbling block. I had to agree with the editors that the theme was enjoyable enough without the added difficulty and the extra leap would merit criticism. Talking of editors, I don’t think anything happened to Roger at the end of the Listener dinner (see 20 down) but has anyone seen him since?

Shark