Part of the work of a thematic crossword compiler (an easy kind of work, admittedly, but work all the same) is to come up with ideas for puzzles. Maybe I’m alone in this, but after setting my first three or four puzzles, I found that everywhere I go, everywhere I look, everything I see, everything I hear, one of my first thoughts is ‘could I make a crossword out of that?’ Invariably the answer is a resounding ‘no’, or an even more resounding ‘are you insane?’, but one night a few years ago, I started thinking about names or pseudonyms that might be of the same length.

My wife was sitting watching Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get tougher than this!’ Gregg Wallace is fond of shouting. Doesn’t it, Gregg? Really? I’d love to lock him in a room at gunpoint, tie his arms behind his back, set a pack of vicious dogs on him, tell him he has to make a perfect chocolate fondant in the next half an hour or he gets shot, and then see just how tough he thinks preparing a slap-up meal for an ‘ingredients expert’ in a TV studio really is, compared to that).

Anyway, I digress. So, I started jotting down related names of the same length. I joined what must be a very long line of setters who rue the fact that JEKYLL and HYDE don’t have the same number of letters, wondered why Superman (8 letters) was inconsiderate enough to come up with Clark Kent (9 letters) when Dave Kent would have done just as well for the purposes of anonymity, and then happened to glance down at a copy of that day’s Times, where, in the sports section, I suddenly saw the sentence:

“Cassius Clay, on his conversion to Islam…”

counted up the letters of Muhammad Ali, shouted out “crossword setting doesn’t get tougher than this” (I swear that, on the television, Greg Wallace turned to face the camera with a startled expression as I yelled this out) and a puzzle was born.

I always try to shoehorn as much thematic material into a Samuel puzzle as possible, and so over the next few days my mind worked overtime. First of all I went scurrying off to my study to find ODQ, and see if any Ali quotations had made it in. I’m not sure why I bothered – some of his sayings would have been well-known enough even if they weren’t in ODQ. “I’m the greatest” and “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” seemed the obvious ones. I’d already decided on converting CASSIUS CLAY to MUHAMMAD ALI in the grid, and the clear thing to do would be to make this change complete the quotation.

Initially I looked at getting these diagonally in the grid, but, being honest about it, so many puzzles have thematic material on the diagonals, that I thought that something different was called for. A count of the letters in “float like a butterfly…” gave 32, which could be arranged in an 8 by 8 square, and this was obviously the shape of a boxing ring. Within seconds, I had a title for the puzzle which would strike a chord with old-school Listener solvers, ‘Squaring the Circle’, as a boxing ring is square. This elicited another triumphant yell, but by this time both Emma and Gregg were obviously used to my exclamations, as neither of them batted an eyelid.

At this point I thought for a few days, to see what else I could come up with. A few nights later, I had come up with the idea of the grid containing RUMBLE inside JUNGLE and THRILLER inside MANILA, in homage to perhaps the two most famous of Ali’s fights, and other dingbats were coming into my head (eg SNYLISTON vertically in the grid being ‘S on NY LISTON’. I decided to have a trawl through YouTube at Ali’s old fights, and when I saw the referee starting the Ali/Bugner fight, and he cried out ’seconds out, round one!’ at the start, I had an entry gimmick for my clues. I did toy with having some clues ’round two’ or ’round three’, but this seemed too complicated, so I abandoned this pretty quickly. The link between COOPER and FOREMAN appeared in my brain at this point, I abandoned the jungle and manila ideas, and tried to get a fill.

Cripes. It was a nightmare.

This took four or five months of on/off work, hindered by the fact that the letters of the quotation were so unhelpful. I even gave up at one point, set another puzzle, and came back to it. Maybe somebody more skilled at grid filling than I could have come up with something better, but there was only one possible arrangement of the quotation in the grid that allowed checking letters to be completed by MUHAMMAD ALI arranged linearly, and that arrangement was not nice. Either the average entry length got too low, or I filled myself into a corner, so to speak. Eventually, and having to accept that the non-Chambers FAT FARM would have to be in the grid, I got a fill. The one saving grace was the present of KNOUT entered as KOUT in the bottom left hand corner, which made me chuckle. I’m easily amused.

Cluewriting was okay, with only half or so of the clues needing ‘conversion’ before solving, although a few of these were tricky. I had a late panic when I saw an article spelling MUHAMMAD as MUHAMMED, but I knew that I had already checked this spelling in ODQ, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Ali’s official website, Wikipedia and older versions of Collins, so all was okay. My test solver liked it, and then it was off to the Listener. I had been concerned that, as the puzzle was about a living person (and a living person in fragile health, at that) that it might get rejected on these grounds, but some time later I learned that it had been put into the portfolio after I’d rewritten a few clues for the first vetter.

I had previously toyed with keeping the puzzle under my hat, so to speak, for another 10 years or so (Ali’s 75th birthday was due in 2018), but I was pleased that it was scheduled for the weekend of his birthday (if not a landmark birthday). The title of ‘Squaring the Circle’ got lost somewhere in the process as I was concerned that it might give the game away. Indeed, one piece of feedback received did postulate this as an alternative title to the puzzle, so perhaps it was a good thing that I eventually settled on ‘Conversion’.

Just about a year ago, when the ‘Stripey horse, Z???A (5)’ team started to seriously attempt these weekend-consuming Listener crosswords, we would probably have abandoned this early on. Not so this time. We had actually cold-solved twenty-three clues, not far short of half the crossword, before we began to have an inkling. Did we have some premonition of the satisfaction that was in store for us if we persisted? Samuel’s ‘Playtime’ last June, with those lovely dropping pennies, was tremendously satisfying. And so we laboured on.

It was a different type of penny-drop-moment this time. The lights were subdivided to hold all those extra down letters, then subdivided again to fit in across solutions that didn’t coincide and

Muddling along

we were fearing that our across clues were going to be the dreaded jumbles, until two areas of the grid began to make sense. The ORTI of STORTING (18ac) seemed to appear one light further on, intersecting with the O of SEASHORE, the R of EYESORE, the T of ST KITTS (what a wonderful clue – ’skis three times round island’!) and the I of INYALA. Could it be that we were docking the last letter and shifting it to the start? We attempted the same trick with UPON, intersecting with KNOUT and OLEOS and it worked!

No, we were not out of the woods yet. Clearly down clues had to lose a letter. Even we could see that. However, docking the initial letter soon proved fruitless – ASSET at 1ac (now rendered as TASSE), needed the S of SEBAT and we needed that I for INYALA. So, clearly, we had to dock second letters. From this point on, solving was sheer pleasure and we soon had a complete grid – with, of course, two or three problems.

FAT FARM was a fine solution and fitted the clue perfectly. ‘Even (obviously FLAT) having lost a pound (L), advanced money (FAR M) for health spa’ (7, two words) (Does this count as an & lit clue?) However, for some inexplicable reason, we couldn’t find the word in Chambers. We had another word we couldn’t find in Chambers – PLASTOME at 25d. However, that didn’t fit the clue either and we were wisely prompted to look again for our misprint.

Ah yes, the misprints! We had a complete grid before we spotted that wonderful FAOAT LIKE A BATTERFLY: STING LIKE A BEE! and realized that we were in the boxing ring, with CASSIUS CLAY in pride of place at the top. The conversion was legendary and MUHAMMAD ALI completed the quotation correctly for us.

Only then did we reconstruct our misprints and find SECONDS OUT and, with Zebra-team-red-herring-lack-logic, we still could not find ROUND ONE, (We had the CACTUS as a spiky plant, too – which gave us ROUND ?KE) . Oh dear!

More joys were in store. The strange word at 15d resolved itself into F(O)REMAN, so evidently that other clue without a definition, ‘Company nearly works’ was CO with OPER (nearly OPERA) and as the cherry on the cake – or the final punch on the nose, we learned that Muhammad Ali was celebrating his 67th birthday as we solved. Brilliant! This one must surely rate among the stars of the year.

“All answers must be amended prior to entry.” It’s the kind of rubric that sends a shiver down my spine: misprints (but only in some of the clues), answers to be amended, and mysterious references to “professions”, a “workplace”, and multiple “conversions”. But these things usually become clear in the end, so let’s get started.

28d FEASTED
27a Feel upset confining female sailor allowing relation in wards ⇒ EFFABLE (misprint O)

These two would intersect if EFFABLE were amended (e.g. by jumbling or by rotation to the right by one or two letters) so that one of the “F”s was in the fourth cell.

21d Tamed canine, deeply disturbed ⇒ YCLEPED (misprint N)
38d OLEOS
37d KNOUT
19d INYALA
6d OPIUM
3d SEASHORE
2d SEBAT
1a ASSET

ASSET intersects with the first letters of SEBAT and SEASHORE, but only if the two letters “S” are in the third and fourth cells. Let’s suppose that every across answer is rotated by one cell to the right, so that its last letter moves to the front. That would make 5 across, “Bowled out for 7, Boycott’s ruptured earholes?” O_ _C_ _ _ _. I don’t fully understand the clue but it seems to be an anagram of BOYCOTT with B (“bowled”) replaced by something clued by “7”. Maybe a reference to 7 down? Anyway, the definition must be “earholes”, so maybe it’s OTECTOMY, with the question mark indicating a punning definition (the holes are the ones left by the removal of the ears).

Let’s fill in what I’ve got so far, assuming that down answers are amended by deleting one letter. See right.

4d See Tory base reeling having lost tense, ugly election perhaps ⇒ EYESORE (misprint R)
31a CLASP
24a REPLACEABLE
25d Polite strike is broken by a drunken sot ⇒ PEASTONE (misprint O)
44a Desirable bachelor lost out relaying to the stars ⇒ SIDEREAL (misprint T)
12d Nurse king, perhaps, caputured by dyed-in-the-wool Afghans ⇒ OLAF (misprint O)
23d Every diamond’s a sham ⇒ ALLICE (misprint D)
32d Spicy plant hoards he leaves for you in Paris ⇒ CACTUS (misprint K)
36d NACRE
39a Showing revolution is all over in France ⇒ STOUT (misprint S)
41a Little Larry’s more sexually attractive naked ⇒ UTE (misprint O)
35d Letter’s eaten by that old bear’s head ⇒ YEST (misprint E)

So far, all the down answers that I’ve been able to enter have had their second letter removed. Also, I have across misprints *O*DS*O*T* and down misprints *R*O*NDO*KE. The across misprints could start SECOND. Is it SECONDS OUT ROUND OKE? That can’t be right! The misprint at 32 down must be N: a cactus is a “spiny plant”, not a “spiky plant”. So the misprints spell SECONDS OUT ROUND ONE. The subject of the crossword must be a boxer (maybe ALI that I can already see at 23 down?), and his “workplace” mentioned in the rubric must be the boxing ring.

So I’m instructed to take SECONDS OUT of the down clues, and move the across clues ROUND ONE. Let’s apply the instructions to everything I’ve got so far. See right.

43a UPON
10a T-BAR
17a FAT FARM
16d Student chased by onion seller, initially he wallows in regret ⇒ RUSHEE (misprint U)
21a HERESY
18a STORTING
11a Lame deer gets in for the onset of estrus ⇒ ILK (misprint S)
1d TORAH

7 down is OUTCASTE and 5 down is ST KITTS, but neither fits. It must the case that OTECTOMY is wrong, which is a relief because I didn’t understand how the clue works. Aha, “7” clues the obscure Roman numeral S, and the answer must be OTOCYSTS. This word is missing from the 2003 edition of The Chambers Dictionary. (FAT FARM too.) Maybe it’s time to buy the 2008 edition?

13a I start to see conveyance returning from trek ⇒ CASSIA (misprint E)
14a Bank owners without a pound must be targets for firing ⇒ CLAYS

I don’t fully understand either of these. In 13 across, it looks as though I’m supposed to reverse “I”, “start to see” = S, “conveyance” = SAC, but where does the A come from? In 14 across, the definition is “targets for firing”, i.e. CLAYS in the sense of “clay pigeons”. But the rest? Either “bank owners” = CAYS and “without a pound” means “around L” or else “bank owners” is something like CALLAYS from which “a pound” = AL has been removed. But neither possibility seems right.

Nonetheless, both of these answers must be right because they reveal CASSIUS CLAY across the middle of row 3. And there appears to be a BATTERFLY in column 3—indeed much of Ali’s famous quote FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, STING LIKE A BEE can now be seen going anticlockwise in a square, with a couple of errors where it intersects with CASSIUS CLAY. I guess we’re going to end up fixing those errors in the final step of the puzzle.

20a AEDES
22a Sexy rector’s inside with a lot of berks ⇒ STREAMY (misprint C)
9d SPAYAD
12a ADO

15 down is FOREMAN. Here is one of the “professions that was found wanting”. The other must be COOPER, and sure enough, it slots in at 40 across.

26d ANTLIONS
45a STOSS
29d SANGRIA
29a When queen gets out, special tail section tilts ⇒ STAINS (misprint N)
33a ANALECTA
42a I am on the trail of river otter band ⇒ RIM (misprint U)
30d SEALCHS

In 30 down, ‘divers?’ (even with a question mark) seems a very weak definition for such an obscure word.

Now the grid is complete, what about the final step?

The rubric says, “On locating the subject of the puzzle in the grid, solvers must carry out a conversion (the source of which was itself a conversion). This completes, in the shape of the subject’s place of work, a thematic quotation that must be highlighted.”

So what do I do? A further application of ROUND ONE to CLAY would get the L into the right place, but it looks as though I would need to apply ROUND THREE to CASSIUS to get the U into place, and there’s no justification for this. Maybe I need to apply the instruction SECONDS OUT in a different way, by removing the letters “S” from CASSIUS CLAY before rotating. That doesn’t work either.

Maybe I need to pay attention to the repetition of the word “conversion”? Cassius Clay was a convert to Islam, and when he converted, he famously converted his name to MUHAMMAD ALI.

It’s a carte blanche puzzle, with one letter to be removed from a word in each row and each column (and moved to the margin), just to make things a bit more difficult. At least all the grid entries are real words. So let’s get started.

I have to confess that I’m no great shakes at cold solving. A first pass through the clues yields only five answers: COERCED (from which the only letter that can be removed is the D, leaving COERCE); EASTER (which could yield ASTER, EASER, EATER, ESTER); BAIRN (⇒ AIRN, BAIN, BARN, or BIRN)*; SARIN (⇒ SAIN, SARI); PLEAT (⇒ LEAT, PEAT, PLAT, PLEA).

* I might have been able to make faster progress had I checked all these words in Chambers, since this dictionary is lacking BAIN (OED: “A quantity of water or other liquid placed in a suitable receptacle, in which one may bathe”) and BIRN (OED: “The portion of a clarionet or similar musical instrument into which the mouth-piece is inserted”).

By good fortune all the deletions from EASTER yield _ _ _ER, and it looks as though it’s possible that COERCE intersects with the E. With nothing else to go on, let’s guess that this is right, and put in as many bars as I can deduce from the answer lengths.

It seems likely that the long down answers cross through the C and O of COERCE, and sure enough, they are ESPECIALLY (⇒ SPECIALLY) and PREORDERED (⇒ REORDERED), and this make it possible to get the long across answers, ENQUIRIES (⇒ ENQUIRES) and ERADICATE (⇒ ERADIATE).

The digraph QE in column 3 looks very unlikely, so I put in bars around the Q. I solve a few more clues: COUPLET (⇒ COUPLE), TOMCAT, APROPOS, NOODLE (which has a very nice triple clue, “Simpleton spent dole on some pasta”).

There’s four-letter down clue (“Greenish, endlessly twitching, eyes”), that from its position in the list of clues (comes after NOODLE but before the last two five-letter clues), I can deduce must have its first letter on row 5. So it’s either URP_ or EI_ _. It’s EINE (“Greenish endlessly” = EENI and “twitching” is the anagram indicator). And the symmetric answer is SLUR.

Putting in SLUR and EINE forces some more bars. Because no letters were removed from either SLUR or EINE, there must be other words in columns 4 and 7 (so that some letters can be removed from these columns), and that means there can’t be a four-letter word at the top of column 8 (because there aren’t enough clues to have a four-letter word at the tops of both columns 7 and 8).

Then I make a mistake. Somehow I’ve decided that there’s a three-letter answer on row 4, to the left of COERCE, so that on row 3 there’s a five-letter answer on its own. This allows me to put some more bars in. Wrongly. Next I get REAM (⇒ RAM, REM) and since this lacks an L it can’t intersect with SLUR. So I can put more bars in, but this leaves the grid rather poorly connected.

Surely a respectable setter like Xanthippe wouldn’t set a grid like this? It’s beginning to look as though I have gone wrong.

Yes, I’ve definitely gone astray. I need to put BAIRN at the top of column 2, and REAM at the left of row 4. But there’s no way for these to intersect, no matter which letters I remove. So I was wrong about the location of REAM. It must be on the right of row 3 instead. So backtracking, I get this:

The thematic word at the left of the grid is _ _[EA]DICT_ _ _ which looks like it could be PREDICTION or PREDICTIVE. I wonder if the theme is PREDICTIVE TEXT? Yes, TEXT goes at the lower left (“Tense UK retailer shunning new lines”).

Let’s decode the title using T9’s online translator:

364 263
DOG AND

and the instructions:

5646 2368737 63 2667328848359 68623733 23557 9484 287837
JOIN CENTRES OF CONSECUTIVELY NUMBERED CELLS WITH CURVES

263 26675383 843 74273 87464 896 78724448 54637. 2 84733
AND COMPLETE THE SHAPE USING TWO STRAIGHT LINES. A THREE

9673 75264 747273 6878 23 9748836 86337 843 4743.
WORD SLANG PHRASE MUST BE WRITTEN UNDER THE GRID.

The slang phrase must be DOG AND BONE, with the lines we’re instructed to draw forming a picture of the BONE.

So could the other thematic entry be MOBILE PHONE? That fits with BAIRN (⇒ AIRN), EASTER (⇒ ASTER), PLEAT (⇒ PEAT) and SARIN (⇒ SARI). That’s good enough for me, let’s fill it all in.

I find it can be a bit of a slog when I’ve worked out the code and the theme and know what I have to do, but I still have big blank areas of the grid, knowing that the remaining clues are the most difficult ones. But duty calls: back to the grindstone.

ECLAT appears for the second time in today’s Times: it was also in crossword 24,430.

SADIST seems quite sadistic, using two obsolete words, “no longer save” = SA and “old poem” = DIT.

“Judge acquitting Frenchman after one French impression” eventually yields IDEE (⇒ DEE) after much thought. I think it’s “judge” = DEEM, “acquitting” = removing, “Frenchman” = M, “one” = I, and “French impression” = IDEE.

“Guide with base moved down on printer’s plate” must be STEREO (⇒ STERE). I get “printer’s plate” (short for STEREOTYPE) but the wordplay eludes me for a long time. Eventually I figure it’s “guide” = STEER, “base” = E, “on” = O.

But one of the clues is beyond me. “Prop primarily supporting one edge of hide” must be SHORE (⇒ SORE). “Prop” = SHORE, “primarily supporting” = S, but how does “one edge of hide” = HORE? Someone, throw me a bone here.

Rule number one with a Listener is: “Read the preamble, and then read it again”! You can then start the puzzle, but only after you’ve read the preamble for a third time!

I spent about an hour steadily solving the clues, marking the various possibilities for letters dropped from the acrosses and downs. I then read the preamble again: “All grid entries are real words”! D’oh! This made the puzzle so much easier and I finished the grid in another 15 minutes, to reveal MOBILE PHONE in the row at the bottom of the grid, and PREDICTIVE TEXT in the column to the left and the penultimate across entry. And thankfully no need to mark in the bars, just a long string of numbers to decode. Mobile phone to hand, and the instruction was decoded as: “Join centres of consecutive numbered cells with curves and complete the shape using straight lines. A three-word slang phrase must be written beneath the grid.”

The picture was obviously meant to resemble a mobile phone … wasn’t it? Luckily it wasn’t long before I looked at the title for the third time, which decodes to “Dog and”, giving the phrase to be entered under the grid as DOG AND BONE, and a simple picture of a bone to be drawn in the diagram. Commiserations to any non-British solvers who had problems with ‘Dog and Bone’, Cockney rhyming slang for ‘telephone’. They would likewise probably have wondered about Next being a UK retailer! Of course, any Americans out there are also probably perplexed by ‘mobile’, as opposed to ‘cell’ (how unromantic). Apparently the Germans call it a ‘handy’.

My final task was to sort out the clue Prop primarily supporting one edge of hide? I have a rule now that I don’t send an entry in until the wordplays in all clues have been fully resolved; I put GASPS a couple of years back when it should have been GASPY. The answer here was obviously SHORE, and primarily supporting was almost certainly the S. It must have taken half a dozen visits to the clue before I saw that one end of hide was ‘h or e‘!

A good puzzle from Xanthippe whom I’ve just about forgiven for somehow tripping me up in week 3 of 2008 with the Solitaire puzzle … week THREE! This was a nice simple theme with lots of little strands coming together neatly at the end.

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!

So here we are with the first puzzle of a brand new year … a clean sheet as it were, for an all-correct run. Fifty-two puzzles lie ahead, and what a challenge it is again to try and achieve 100%.

First on the list is Mr E, the setter whose golf puzzle from last year was quite a struggle. Part of me hopes that this will be equally enthralling, but without the chance of a silly slip-up at the first hurdle. A quick read of the preamble, and it’s just the sort I like … almost incomprehensible! Two answers, X and Y, plus nine other words spelt out by the initials of extra words in clues, give instructions on what to do once the puzzle is completed. The grid itself has a large square instead of the 5×5 block in the top left corner; at least that means there aren’t as many clues to solve as would be normal in a 13×13 grid. As with many Listener puzzles, the best thing is to start solving and hope that it all comes out in the wash.

ROAM at 18ac and SOLEMN at 14dn give me a good start and enable me to complete the lower left section of the puzzle fairly quickly with ASPIDISTRA, PARTNERED and LENTAMENTE, each requiring two letters to be entered into one of their squares which are to be split in two, like the central one. I’m thinking that these diagonally split squares must represent something to do with the theme, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the large square needs to be similarly divided. Nothing immediately springs to mind though.

ITALIOTE comes next followed by CREMATION with its definition a burning; it reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, although there it was a stoning that all the women took pleasure to participate in! AUBERGE at 28ac gets me started on the bottom right corner. 32ac takes some analysis: Who will bother the queen about measure by [eastern] prince: ER about STERE by P; it is annoying how often I get tripped up by by, where, so frequently, X by Y appears as Y + X. INVITEE and TOGETHER lead me to solve the first of the clues without an extra word: CUT IT at 27ac. Don’t tell me another bit of grid manipulation is going to be required, this time with scissors, and following close on the heels of last week’s origami treat. (I can’t believe how many people at the Crossword Centre found the paper folding exercise so taxing, supposedly never having tried it as a kid. It just goes to show the advantage of being brought up in the 50’s and 60’s when TV was so much less of a distraction.)

BEST-SELLING leads me to string the first three of the double squares together, and a leaf through Chambers reveals CONTESSERATION. This is the dividing of a square tablet in two to form a friendship. So everything’s coming together nicely. The last few clues take a bit of time: HALF, the other clue without an extra word, [FLASH (like a criminal) - S reversed, gives HALF meaning imperfectly]; and ASSOCIATE (AS + SO + A in CITÉ, although I think this deserved something stronger than a ?); and SEGNO which needs reversing with SP (for spelling) on the front to give sponges (sots). The initials of the extra letters reveal OUT IN KEEP ENCLOSE WITH YOUR NAME ON IT.

The full instructions are finally revealed as CUT IT OUT. CUT IT IN HALF. KEEP HALF. ENCLOSE HALF WITH YOUR NAME ON IT. Which is precisely what I did, and again felt sorry for John Green having to store all the odd bits of paper that Listener puzzles are degenerating into!

All in all, bloody marvellous, and another puzzle where you’ve got to ask yourself “Where the hell did he get the idea from??!!” Keep ‘em coming, Mr E.

I have completely forgotten to check the last four entries for last year, but Mr Postman delivered something this morning that means I don’t actually need to!

Namey Namey becomes Mr E's soulmate

There was a fair chance that this was going to be a blogless week for the Easy-clues-stripey-horse-Z???? (5) team. Did I hear a groan of relief from the experts who despair of our floundering bungled solves? After the usual hours of desperate staring at Mr E’s odd grid with the blank corner square, our early solutions took us nowhere.

Expert solvers will probably find it impossible to believe that we could be so blind to the obvious. It took our wise friend to prompt us to read the preamble more carefully. (New Year resolution stuck on the mirror READ THE LISTENER PREAMBLE MORE CAREFULLY!) Of course, there was a reason for those details, ‘both letters in a double cell from part of both the across and down answers intersecting at that cell, when read in the encountered order‘ So that was why the line had to be diagonal! As soon as we understood that the letters were read in one order for the down clues and the other for the across clues, the grid-fill became easy.          

CONTESSERATION emerged in a lovely upward-slanting line of double cells – ah, the joys of ignorance – Chambers explained that and all was clear. Even the message emerged, ‘Cut it out, cut it in Y, keep Y, enclose Y with your name on it’. With backward easy-clues team logic, we understood that our missing solution at 2d ‘Without a bit of stealth, like criminals raised imperfectly’ (4) had to be HALF and the wordplay was explained to us – FLASH (slang for criminal) upwards, without S (a bit of stealth).          

This was not the only wordplay that confounded us. What had Hurok to do with the SUNGOD in ‘Maybe Sol Hurok clebrated with force’, (except, of course, that we needed its H)? We recognised that we were dealing with a TIGON because the word fitted but failed to see that subtle wordplay where AN and English went round it to give us the tragedy ANTIGONE, and we still cannot understand how we get CLIO as the ‘Goddess caught mother of 10 cutting head off’ (eldest). It seems to us that we have to cut the tail off a LION to get the LIO of CLIO. (More cruelty to animals, just like last week’s miserable little stoned wrens!)      

At one stage Mr Math muttered, ‘If Mr E really wants to contesserate with lots of new friends, he should make his clues easier!     

We dabbled with the idea of cutting the entire grid in half diagonally and sending a queer triangle of words, but, in the end, neatly chopped out that tessera and are carefully looking after Mr E’s part. After last week’s birds and this week’s holey grid, we are fearful of what lies in store next week. Thank you, Mr E, for what, in the end, was a very rewarding solve.

The rubric describes five unclued entries that give the theme to the puzzle and which indicate the “main object” to be found. It also mentions, in passing but rather ominously, “the grid’s final construction”, which suggests that a tricky transformation will be required after solving the clues.

So, what about trying to guess the theme of the puzzle from the title? “Rentokil” suggests pest removal, which suggests the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Perhaps rodents and children would have to be removed from the grid in some way? According to Brewer’s, the Pied Piper’s second appearance was on St John’s Day. And St John’s Day is December the … 27th. That’s tomorrow, not today. Is that close enough for the Listener crossword? I’m not sure it is.

(If only I were a regular Listener solver, or had thought to check the Listener Crossword website, I would have seen that this theme had already appeared in July 2009 — number 4041, “Motley Collection” by Merlin — and so was vanishingly unlikely to appear again so soon.)

Anyway, let’s solve some clues, which are all in the form of a definition and letter-mixture. Normally I find these very hard to get started on because of the large number of possibilities to consider. But today 40 across leaps out at me: “a holiday: now we can put our feet up” ⇒ FETE. The intersecting words fall quickly: “giving their anger against Christians” ⇒ IRE; “Eventually fed guests with sweet” ⇒ FUDGE; and in what seems like no time at all I have the bottom half of the grid.

My Pied Piper theory seems briefly promising as I solve “Donations go toward animal charities at Xmas” ⇒ WOODRAT. But it’s demolished when it becomes possible to guess that two of the unclued entries form the thematic phrase ON THE FEAST OF STEPHEN. And of course St Stephen’s Day is December the 26th. So is the theme Good King Wenceslas? Let’s not be too hasty, now, and consider other possibilities. I’m away from home and only have the Concise Brewer’s, which doesn’t have much. The name “Stephen” means “wreath” or “crown”. The British Parliament is sometimes known as “St Stephen’s” after the chapel at Westminster where it used to sit. None of this seems to fit. But Wikipedia’s entry on St Stephen’s Day comes to the rescue with a description of “hunting the wren”. In this Gaelic custom, “wrenboys” catch or kill a wren, and parade it around town on a pole, begging for money and singing a song beginning:

The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds,
On Stephen’s Day
Was caught in the furze

Let’s finish the grid and see if this is right. The top half is a bit harder than the bottom half, with a few words that need a visit to the dictionary. “Feast and sup: Yuletide carousal” ⇒ UPSY is new to me, as are SKEG (“I keel over when keg’s empty”) and ETHE (“oh, it hasn’t been easy since the early Christians decided on it”).

The remaining thematic entries are revealed to be TROGLODYTES (the genus of wrens, so named because of their habit of entering small crevices), and HUNTING THE BIRD. It seems to me that the latter ought to say “WREN” instead of “BIRD”. So “WREN” must be the “main object” that we’re hunting for. And the title “Rentokil” should be understood as “wren to kill”!

What about the “instructions given in the set of clues”? I am embarrassed to admit that it is not until this point, with the grid filled in and the theme discovered, that I notice that the initial letters of the clues spell out “FOLD GRID TO ORIGAMI BIRD SO ONE IS HEAD. SEE WING.” Oops. I had so many clever ideas for doing things with the superfluous words in the clues that I missed the simplest possibility of all.

So it’s out with the scissors and some origami instructions. Taking care that the “1” in the top left of the grid ends up at the head of the bird, I fold a rather dumpy-looking bird — more a plump moorhen than an elegant crane. But sure enough, under the right wing is the hidden WREN, formed from the W of WOODRAT, the R of DESSERT, and most suprisingly and delightfully, the rotated M of SMASHED and the rotated Z of ZION.