Since the entries across the top, and down the left, of the grid were unclued, I decided to start with 1dn Subsistence money invested in debt, taxes (4). BTTA was hidden in ‘debt, taxes’ and I wrote an A beside the clue since BATTA is ‘subsistence money’. 8ac R[E]TINA, 2dn MI[T]HNIC and 13ac MAN[T]A came next, and the top left corner was off with a bang. Unfortunately, 15ac [R]OSINA and 3dn KANDA[H]AR would have to wait to be entered.

As well as GLORIA, there were some straightforward anagrams to be solved with 4dn ERAS[A]BLE (LAS[t] BEER) and 5dn U[N]ABLE (TABLEAU – TA) which helped get the NE corner under way. Getting the top half finished was hindered by the lack of a clue to 2ac. The unclued 10dn looked like it would be GUFFAW, but that hardly seemed thematic to anything, although prefixed as it was by THE made me wonder whether it was a sister work to Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

I moved on to the bottom half of the grid, and was intrigued by 21ac Sloane possibly rebuffed in outskirts of Reigate — crazy (6). Obviously a reference to Sloane Rangers, but HAYWIRE was about an hour away from being solved since I didn’t realise that YAH was a noun as well as an upper-class ‘yes’. 16dn Skull fragment a medical officer found in suspect Albert (9) also had me trying to fathom MO in an anagram of ‘Albert’. That turned out to be A MO in SUS AL (I initially just had ‘medical officer’ leading to A MO in wordplay which I’m thinking isn’t acceptable).

Eventually, the grid was complete … except for the unclued entries. As well as the GUFFAW at 10dn, 2ac M • K E • U • L E looked like it could be MONKEY PUZZLE. Anyway, as is my wont these days, I did everything arse about face. Although I had Entered with a squash and a squeeze, I saw absolutely no reason to Google it! Instead, I tried to work out the ‘illustrative surname’ … obviously an illustrator. I had RFFECLH as well as what was in the circled square of 12ac. Now was the time for Google. I tried CHEFFLER, although I’d never heard of him/her.

As well as some links to unknown Chefflers, Google obliging asked me “Did you mean scheffler“. I said “Yes”, and top of the list was a Wiki article about Tony Scheffler, also unknown to me, but an American football tight end (whatever that is) … almost certainly not the subject of a Listener crossword! Next on the list, however, was Axel Scheffler. Needless to say, I hadn’t heard of him either, although his collaborator Julia Donaldson did ring a faint bell. And so their works MONKEY PUZZLE, THE SNAIL, THE WHALE, ROOM ON THE BROOM, The GRUFFALO, STICK MAN, and TIDDLER were revealed … as well as A Squash and a Squeeze. I had been right about the description containing a thematic item.

Now I had originally assumed that ‘letters ultimately found in … unchecked cells’ meant that one letter would be entered, and since all the unchecked squares in the titles equated to two letters, it was only the last letter that needed entering. Wrong! SCHEFFLER required the circled square to hold both S and E, so there was no reason to think that the other squashed, stuffed, squidged and squeezed squares were to be any different.

So thanks for a pleasant and relaxing jaunt, Wasp, although I’m not about to dash off and buy any of the books!
 

We don’t have access to a library either so what did Julia Donaldson write in addition to The Gruffalo? We’ll have to pay a visit to Waterstones tomorrow to find out. (Well, we’d be doing that anyway!)

Solving went relatively well from our earliest solutions, ‘Didn’t have hot drinks too regularly (5)’ (H[ot]D[ri]N[ks]T[oo]), ‘It detects light element coated in radium (6)’ (RTINA) establishing Wasp, along the way, as a confirmed member of the Listener tipplers’ club with his preference for cold drinks and ‘Not quite last beer drunk? That’s not permanent (8)’ LAS BEER* giving ERASBLE).

We were perhaps lucky in spotting solutions to the longer words. After all, these were generous clues. I am almost relieved when the number of clues is small (only 36 in this case as so many lights were unclued). That seems to mean that the clues will be relatively straightforward as the compiler has to allow his solvers some sort of handle to grasp. The anagrams ‘Gym class tweet confused American bird (8)’ PE + TWEET* giving PEETWET, ‘Cut from stone on wreck somehow (8)’ ON WRECK* giving ROCKEWN, and ‘After big game, one is running north line (10) NORTH LINE* LIONHUNTER almost peopled our grid and we were left with just a few problems.

‘Sloane possibly rebuffed in outskirts of Reigate — crazy (7)’ looked like an anagram with that deceptive ‘crazy’ but we smiled when we realized that the Sloane YAH was being rebuffed and ‘crazy’ was the definition for HAYWIRE (entered as HAYIRE).

Even the extra letters, that had now almost completely appeared, were generous. The two Qs and the Z gave the hints we needed and ‘ENTERED WITH A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE’ rang a memory bell, especially as we had a peculiar unclued light that could spell GUFFAW but seemed far more likely to give us GRUFFALO, a familiar couple of Julia Donaldson titles.

We were left with a dilemma. We found the other titles, MONKEY PUZZLE, ROOM ON THE BROOM, STICK MAN, TIDDLER and THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE but the preamble seemed to be telling us that, of those double letters that were clearly needed in sixteen squares, the ultimate (presumably the second) should be entered to anagram to ANT, BAT, ZOOPHILOUS. We did that but it didn’t quite make sense since that left us with only eight letters of SCHEFFLER, the illustrator (Yes, we had some Waterstones‘ help now and had made his name out of RFFECLH and a putative S) but we needed another E.

We had assumed that the instruction to enter the thematic unclued  entries ‘with a squash and a squeeze’ meant that, like the other entries, letters were to be squeezed out, but clearly not! In order to produce that extra E in the circle in THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE, we would have to squash and squeeze the extra letters in – so that’s what we did. Is this dilemma going to lead solvers astray (has it led us astray?) and are we in the throes of another KOHb crisis? We’ll find out in three weeks’ time, won’t we!

Thank you Wasp for an entertaining work out.

1 GLADE, 5 TUND (a word to me new) and 11 ENCLAVE are solved soon, giving ‘quick’, ‘undeservedly and ‘occasionally’ as the words extra, and it looked like we were on the lookout for quotation. However, the i, o and n didn’t correspond words in their clues to, so perhaps it were just a quote.

I’m not sure that the clues all had in them errors (12ac Will’s tempted Tendulkar — departs after deceptive ball seems OK … -ish), but it must have more than difficult at first sight been to get the grammar wrong or for the clue to read gibberishly.

For once, the lacking smooth surface readings in the clues was forgiven, but they conjured up some interesting images thenoneless and were hugely entertainsome. For some reason, I very liked much 28dn I’s appearing early in French city hawking thongs for RIEMS.

The letters initial of the extra words finally all read Quote and speaker in Brewer should be highlighted. I did suppose the first step ought have been to look for something that stood in out the grid. I did see EGO SUM in row 3, but really didn’t expect the quote to be quite as long as it out-turned. Instead, I looked just up Grammar in Brewer’s, and reward with the words of Sigismund:

Ego sum Imperator Romanorum, et supra grammaticam (‘I am the Roman Emperor and above grammar’).

That was wow! The central six letters of rows 3–9 spelled the quote out, and there be SIGISMUND in the bottom row. A shame that he wasn’t positioned central. But, of course, upon again reading the preamble, that sneaky little word ‘symmetrically’ made think me again. Rereading the entry in Brewer’s showed that it wasn’t just Sigismund any old, but Sigismund I, and the I following his name could be confidently highlit.

Finally, it were only when I started writing this blog that I looked typto in Chambers up, and found that there is such a word: ‘to work at Greek grammar’. All endings had been neatly tied, although suspect I that many of you tied that particular end at the beginning right … right? Many thank for a fun puzzle, Jaques.
 

No, I tell a lie! Consternation was our very first reaction. Have the editors gone completely bonkers? Is that a typo in the title? What would I do if my Grade Seven wrote a sentence like ‘Each of the clues contain an extra word, none of which have less than four letters’? Three red pen howls there, but it gets worse: ‘In clue order their first letters spell a message about what solvers must do symmetrically in the completed grid out.’ Then the first joyous guffaw as we get to ‘Down answer’s …’ Hah – grammar! The fun continued as the grammatical errors piled up in the clues – and what a BRILLIANT idea, Jaques, to select a theme like this where you are freed from that sometimes horrendous task of attempting to give a recalcitrant clue a plausible surface reading by the need to include some atrocious grammar.

I just went back to a communication from an editor where he quoted back at me a totally implausible surface reading – I was going to quote him but the embarrassment is just too great – Did I really write that? Well Jaques did! We get things like ‘I’m completely surrounded, even [occasionally] swimming, chlorine are ingested (7)’ (EVEN CL A)* giving us ENCLAVE. Sadly, though, Jaques wasn’t claiming membership of the Listener setter tipply club – I think chlorine was the only thing he are ingesting!

Solutions just flowed onto the page and we soon had enough letters to sort out some of the down jumbles. I thought I hated jumbles but, a couple of days ago, treated myself to Ross Beresford’s TEA. What an amazing tool it is. Yes, indeed I will use every device on the planet to help solve a crossword; Anne Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, Quinapalus’ website. They add to the fun rather than diminishing it and, somewhere deep down, I have a sneaking suspicion that the game is meant to be about pleasure.

Pleasure it was! QUOTE had appeared in the message with the first five clues we solved. Next came SHOULD BE HIGHLIGHTED and, with TEA’s help, we teased out AND SPEAKER IN BREWER. Instantly Brewer led us to SIGISMUND I and there he was, of course, at the foot of the crossword. ‘Symmetrically’ was such a generous gift to solvers. Almost all our remaining gaps were filled as we fitted ‘EGO SUM IMPERATOR ROMANORUM ET SUPRA GRAMMATICAM’ (‘I am the Roman emperor and am above grammar’). What a delightful story, too!

(Just one mini whinge in parenthesis too! I say goodbye to a wonderful group of International Baccalaureate Literature A students next week as they head for their final exam. They are stars at grammar and all ‘quote’/verb and produce ‘quotations’/noun, and pick each other up if any one dares to talk of ‘quotes’. OK OK, Numpty pedant! Even Chambers allows, now, that ‘quote’ exists INF as a noun, and I suppose Jaques was eschewing grammar.)

All that remained for us was to fill in a few missing letters in the jumbles, and they were particularly helpful too, as we had to have three identical letters in the unches in 15 down, for example, and the I of SIGISMUND told us that they were all Is. Only two of the remaining clues caused a head scratch. ‘One [excused] over sin? Unusual snuggle up and speak whiningly (8)’ COSE + CANT – that was devious, using that variant of sine! And ‘An old bribe, it a negligible [daily] amount turns up (4)’ ‘T + FIG (rev)

Delightful, thank you, Jaques!

Of course, ASH, BRA, EYE, LEA, OBI and YES were almost our first solves but where were the 3-letter spaces? Suspicions surfaced. There were spaces for  four 8-letter words but clues for only two, spaces for eight 7-letter words but clues for only two. Something was going to happen round the perimeter.

We had 36 clues and misprints in 26 of them – almost one in four and then that rather disturbing OTG ZTOG TZCLGAS OUO HZG EUTH OGOGAH CAL UATL LGEUOOCH SGOHGE to solve. There was no clue in any letter-frequency there unless it was all those Os, but there was the capital L on Lgeuooch.

Nothing for it – get solvingI It was a generous set of clues with only the slightest hint of Listener compiler tippling in ‘Take ecstasy in sickly-sweet Manhattan cocktail (6)’ (R + E in ICKY) Oh dear Schadenfreude, mixing the drugs and alcohol! There was a generous smattering of disease, fungus, mental agitation, sickness, shocked staring and sore unopened spots, though. I wonder what those surface readings that we almost skip over unnoticed in our attempts to suss out the wordplay, do tell us about the state of mind of the setter!

MALTHUS gave us the way into the grid, though. That leading M (not one of the ETAOIN SHRDLU letters) so conveniently placed at the start of a word, was likely to intersect with EMOTED. We tentatively began a grid-fill, assuming that those six 3-letter words were going to turn into 4-letter words when the long perimeter ones appeared. That, of course, limited where we could put them – well,  BRA, anyway – there aren’t many places one can put a bra – no, seriously, we tentatively placed BRA? at 7 across. Yes, we were working on a numbered Antony Lewis Crossword Compiler grid. I have said before that I don’t know how anyone solves one like this with just pencil and paper!

I love this jigsaw part of the solve. As the grid filled, words suggested themselves for our solutions that were still missing. B?D?E?E? ‘Did bather, injured, get almost embarrassed? (8)’ Another of those kinky surface readings? Do we have an image of a shark-mauled swimmer worried about his torn nasty little elastic speedo? Ah, no, it was BAD + GE[t] + RED.

A full grid and yawning spaces where those perimetrical 7s and 8s had to go. Whilst the other Numpty worked out the cipher, I attempted to insert all the possible letters and deduce those four words. Neither of us initially succeeded. He was muttering “C, Z, O, L, G, O, S, Z, G, U, I … No, must be doing something wrong …” and I was mumbling, “LASBA?P? – what could that be?”

Fortunately, BOOTH and OSWALD put us out of our misery and the usual visit to Wikipedia introduced us to Czolgosz and Guiteau, so that we were able to insert their four victims. (McKINLEY, GARFIELD, LINCOLN and KENNEDY, with, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald as one that is unproven.)

It remained for us to work out our last instruction. There was a satisfactory sense that this puzzle was rounded off when those 26 misprints were put to good use in a final act of deciphering. I have been attempting to think my way through the order in which Schadenfreude must have set this (I hope he will tell us!) The difficult thing, after he had spotted that those four names would fit symmetrically and had worked out a grid that allowed partial ‘real’ words to intersect with them (Wow!) must have been finding those tough misprints in clue order. Of course, he just added to our struggle by removing clue numbers and originally placing the clues in alphabetical order of their solutions.

USE BLUE SHADING FOR THE ONLY RECENT AND ONLY DEMOCRAT VICTIM. We did.

Many thanks, Schadenfreude.

We were told that there would be four blank entries after the grid had been filled, and I guessed that they would be in the first/last row/column. But, then again, I was probably wrong. It didn’t affect the first stage of solving, so off I went.

As with most jigsaw puzzles, solving the long ones first might help the positioning. Here we had two 7-letter answers and two 8-letter ones. This was at odds with the grid where there were eight 7-letter and four 8-letter entries. The only one that I got at first glance was 5 with its lovely surface reading Black poodle mongrel produced a howling hound (7) giving BLOOPED with ‘hound’ being the misprint for ‘sound’.

Having failed on the long entries, I went back to clue 1 and got ASH, followed by 3 BEAM and 4 Liner heading for Boston foundered somewhere about 300 miles NE of Maine (6). Although it was an easy clue, an anagram of LINER + B with ‘Maine’ having replaced ‘Mainz’, it was a delight to solve. I also loved 6 British artist, breast lover (3) with its misprint of ‘lover’ for ‘cover’.

15 minutes later and I had EDUCE, EERIER, ELANCE, EMOTED and ERGO. I wondered whether the vast amount of Es would have any particular relevance, or whether it was just going to make it difficult to fit the entries into the grid. I was also worried that, with the clues getting solved so quickly, the endgame might be a brute to make up for this.

After about two-thirds of the clues had been solved, I finally got the 8-letter answers. Sitting between ASH and BEAM was BADGERED (‘Did bother’ not ‘Did bather’). 30 was Boundaries surrounding area in at least twelve lines (8). Seeing ‘at least’ in a clue often means that what follows is twice what you’re looking for; in this case, one sixaine is six lines (misprinted as ‘links’), so two or more SIXAINES must be at least twelve lines.

This enabled me to position the clues I had in the grid and finish off the final few. These included 29 Rats are at the centre in separate sections (6) and 35 Sailor’s back from country river (4). Obviously this week I had a problem with indicators of particular letters, specifically ‘are at the centre’ for R to give 29 SHREDS (R in SHED + S) and ‘Sailor’s back’ also for R to give 35 URAL (RURAL – R).

Unfortunately, the definition in the unmisprinted 12 Jody’s name to remain attached to Virginia’s railroad (5) has, even now, totally escaped me. EL (for Virginia’s, ie US, railroad) + LIE (to remain) gives ELLIE, but where does Jody come in?

And so, with the puzzle complete, I had the correct letters for the misprints giving:

C Z O L G O • • S Z G U • I T E A U B O O T H O S • • • • W A L • • • D

Well, the first few letters looked as though I’d made a terrible mistake, but luckily the last few relieved me as John Wilkes BOOTH and Lee Harvey OSWALD revealed themselves. They were the assassins of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, who could obligingly fit into the top of the last column and bottom of the first giving new words in the intersecting across entries. It needed Google to tell me that Charles GUITEAU killed James GARFIELD and Leon CZOLGOSZ assassinated William MCKINLEY, the two presidents slotting themselves nicely into the top and bottom rows respectively giving new words in the intersecting down entries. Oswald is the assassin whose guilt is still unproven.

Finally the instruction in the preamble had to be decoded and followed. The code was:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
C Z O L G O S Z G U I T E A U B O O T H O S W A L D

As can be seen, decoding the instruction wasn’t quite straightforward since several encoded letters could come from different letters of the alphabet: thus, O is the code for C, F, Q, R, U and A for N, X. However, it didn’t take long to come up with:

Use blue shading for most recent and only Democrat victim

This was KENNEDY in the last column, blue being the political colour for the Demmocrats, red being for the Republicans.

My subtitle The Curse of Tippecanoe refers the to death in office (by fair means or foul) of Presidents elected or re-elected in years divisible by twenty. This lasted from Harrison, elected in 1840, through to Kennedy, elected in 1960. Ronald Reagan brought the curse to an end, although both he and George Bush II survived assassination attempts.

Thanks to Schadenfreude for another entertaining puzzle; no brutal endgame as I had dreaded, but enjoyable and informative nonetheless.
 

We enjoyed some of them: ‘Buffalo Bill tours America drawing (6)’ FUSAIN fitted the letters we already had in place so we had to work out what FIN had to do with ‘Buffalo Bill’. Of course the BRB told us that a FIN is a five-dollar bill – great clue! We learned a few new words too: LASSU, SPOD, SPAWL and SNOOLED, but we couldn’t find any hint of membership of the Listener setters’ topers club. Mordred seemed to be setting an example of sobriety.

We once met an ex Brain of Britain who obliged himself to solve crossword clues in the given order and to do the entire Grauniad or Times crossword in his head (while we were still puzzling over 1 across). Our progress, for once, was rather like that and we worked from top to bottom, completing the grid, gleefully, in record time, but with a fearful sense of foreboding.

We had, however, along the way noticed WORD PLAY appearing in the grid. (Clearly Mordred is resolving that issue – for him it is two words!) From the preamble, it was clear that we had to have nine letters left over after we spotted our ‘playfair code phrase’, so it had to have sixteen letters (to make the 25 of the 5 X 5 square). WORD PLAY GIVES FUN seemed promising and no letter appeared more than once in the sentence.

We worked out that that would leave us the letters B C H K M Q T X and Z (assuming, of course, that J and I cancelled each other out). It remained to check that each of those letters appeared only once in the remainder of the grid and Eureka!

We began to exchange the letters of the playfair square with those of the grid and things looked very promising. OASIS became BASIS and HOURS became LOURS but then it began to look rather like the results of those monkeys who, after years of random striking of keys, seemed, at last, to have struck Shakespeare (You know the story “Look Hank! I believe they’ve finally cracked it! ‘To be or not to be, that is thskuh zbtryfyfwhj&mmeho”)

We seemed to be doing what was required but are still profoundly worried that we have missed the final point and that the grid should have yielded real words. However, it was clearly no mean feat to compile a grid with each of those letters appearing once and once only, so perhaps it was too much to expect real words.

Thank you, Mordred. You have given us confidence in our grid-filling ability and we’ll learn in three weeks’ time if we have missed a subtle final move.

It was an enjoyable solve, with some nice surface readings, particularly the obliging Scottish landowners dropping dead in their burial plots (LAIRS). We also had Lady Penelope’s butler at 23dn — Parker perhaps displays such lack of vices, securing regular parts in Thuderbirds — where NO SINS contained just the 6th and 12th letters of thundErbirdS.

I spent longer than I should have done in unravelling three clues. 13ac Girl with duke slipped a wink to Will (5) was obviously ELIAD, but it was some time before I saw that it was just DELIA with the D slipping to the end. 14ac Times when computer program fails both of us (5) was BOTH – BOT (computer program) + OURS (of us) giving HOURS (times). 19ac Three Sisters could be more than one dedicated to pleasure (9) I thought was going to be PLAYBILLS rather than PLAYGIRLS.

36ac Intricate puzzle using A-Z set by Mordred (4) giving MAZE was a gem.

With the grid finished, it didn’t take long to find the code-square, but it took a bit longer to make sure that I correctly swapped the nine letters not in the code phrase WORDPLAY GIVES FUN.

Taken at face value, you could be forgiven for thinking that the setter’s task was just a question of fitting the Playfair code-square in the centre of the grid. But Mordred had set himself a fairly stiff additional challenge. The nine letters not in the code phrase weren’t to be found in the code-square after the initial gridfill. They were scattered elsewhere and had to be swapped with those currently sitting in the code-square. Thus, there could only be one each of B, C, H, K, M, Q, T, X and Z. Making sure that there was only one T must have been a real swine!

So thanks to Mordred for an entertaining puzzle that didn’t involve deducing the codeword from encoded entries. Unlike Rustic’s EV puzzle the following day which it was my turn to blog for fifteensquared!!
 

Everything fell in to place rather nicely; when I got home and realised the poem was called “Lines and Squares” it felt like it was meant to be and I spent the next few days pounding the streets examining paving slab configurations (only a mild exaggeration). Eventually I realised I could take a 12×12 grid with 2 words in each row and column (averaging 5.5 letters per entry, the ‘bear’ minimum), turn it into nine 4×4 squares, displace the middle section and end up with something that looked a little like some of the pavement designs I’d been looking at.

It wasn’t completely straightforward turning that concept into a grid that fulfilled Ximenean unching requirements but with a little trial and error I realised that it was possible, while also obtaining 90˚ symmetry, a pleasing extra. My concern at that stage was that a smarter solver than I might be able to work out the grid pattern without solving any of the clues; hence the decision to present the down clues in alphabetical order of solution rather than conventional order.

Fitting the sillies into the grid (trying to simultaneously visualise the start grid and the final grid) also took some mental gymnastics. I knew I wanted to pay homage to certain prolific bloggers and, as a devotee of Australian soaps in my childhood, I was also keen to fit in a (flaming) galah. Other than that I had a long list of about 12 other silly synonyms that I tried to insert where I could. Not much to say about the clue-writing apart from the fact that I was pleased when “baker’s man’s request = pat-a-cake” (too obscure?) and “Canine penetration makes thigh mark” (too risqué?) made it through the editors’ nets.

The hardest part was trying to make an end-game that wasn’t completely impenetrable. I don’t have much patience for puzzles where you have to spend longer finishing the puzzle than solving the clues and so I didn’t want to be responsible for ‘one of those’. But when I sent the first draft to some guinea-pigs there seemed to be a split between those who spotted the final stage quickly and those who struggled to make it from the completed grid to the completed grid.

So I started to make some tweaks. I made reference to a “thematically appropriate final grid shape” and after further feedback, made it even more precise by referring to it as a dodecagon. Then I added the ‘extra clue’ which I thought might give some help to solvers who were otherwise completely flummoxed. The editors also made some specific suggestions to link the X and Y in the puzzle’s title closer to the “Lines and Squares” to avoid people getting misled with thoughts of co-ordinates.

All of this led to the preamble growing to an inordinate size (118 words in my first draft turned into 182 in the final puzzle) but in retrospect I think it was the right thing to do and I’m gratified to have received comments along the lines of “once you’re there you know you’re there”. Having said that, it’s probably equally true that what is elucidation for one solver is obfuscation for another. So apologies to anyone who was bamboozled (or who took one look at the preamble and didn’t bother starting), but thanks to those who test-solved/vetted it, everyone who solved it and gave feedback, whoever bought my son the book in the first place, Alan Alexander Milne and the architects of London’s pavements.

Ron
 

We were looking for a quotation which somehow referred to characters who were going to appear in a jumble in an ‘extra clue’. (Well, it didn’t take us too long to work out that that had to be a down clue as there were 24 across clues that neatly sorted themselves out into what was going to be a symmetrical grid.)

It got worse when we came to that word ‘dodecagon’ – more of that later!

Even though some of the extra words stood out rather obviously (ECTOCRINE/ NEURATION/ TE-HEED), we didn’t exactly cover ourselves with glory as far as finding the quotation was concerned. We had solved for about three hours before ‘to pretend that they came round the corner’ prompted us that we were on familiar ground – and we are great Winnie the Pooh fans. For years, when I was small, I walked ‘never on the cracks and only on the squares, to avoid being eaten by the bears‘.

‘And some of the bigger bears try to pretend that they came round the corner to look for a friend’ was prompting us that the puzzles theme was lines and squares (X and Y). Of course, all those little bears were waiting to gobble up any sillies who stepped on the lines. Now that we could tease out the extra letters, we had the message 4X (lines) 9Y (squares) CUT TWICE ALIGN SILLIES.

I had used Antony Lewis’ Crossword Compiler to construct my grid and wonder how anyone manages with just pencil and paper. The statement that ‘the initial bar pattern has 90-degree symmetry’ was a gift, as it gave us so many of the words from the lower half that were proving very difficult to solve. (UNGOT – ‘Pickled tongue well-nigh rejected by mat? (5)’ TONGU[e]* – Rejected by ma[t] and CACUMEN ‘Canine penetration makes thigh mark ((7) – [t]high mark C + ACUMEN.

Of course, we had noticed that Ron solidly earns his place in the Listener Setters’ Tipsy Club (well we saw him in the Ring o’ Bells before the Listener setters’ dinner just a couple of weeks ago so needed no confirmation, “Cheers, Ron!”). ‘Loose crock shortened booze up earlier’, ‘Animal may be taken from tipsy chef’, ‘Person in the alcohol club for the first time holds university feast’ he tells us (SCREE, PSYCHE and PURIM).

There were two bars in every column and in every row so even a Numpty could see how these should be moved to create four lines and nine squares, and even a Numpty could see that there were potential words for sillies in the complete grid. ‘Beastly pal mugging that foolhardy nit’ was our extra clue and had to produce six sillies, and, sure enough, there they were. SILLY, HATTER, GALAH, DINGBAT, GOOF and, surely not – fame at last! NUMPTY.

But how numptyish can we be? I had a very clear (and flawed) mental perception of what a dodecagon should be (a twelve-sided figure with twelve angles – I was visualising a regular one, and any numpty could tell you that was not possible here) and attempted to draw diagonal lines on my grid with increasing frustration, finally abandoning in despair and sleeping on it.

That must be why we obsessively solve these puzzles each week. So often, I am made to rethink my convictions. At about 3 a.m. in my sleep, I mentally did exactly what was asked for – CUT TWICE, then counted the sides of the shape I was reconstituting and found that it had twelve sides and twelve angles. Of course, that is what both Chambers and Wikipedia tell me. What’s more, all my sillies were now crossing the lines, or treading on them and sure to be eaten by the bears. (I’m the NUMPTY in the bottom of the lowest section.)

Many thanks, Ron, this was a super puzzle with so much in it.