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!

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.
 

We couldn’t fill the grid fast enough with not a single moan about the clues. There wasn’t even the usual Listener compiler outpouring of alcohol, just Dipper’s habitual plants, asparagus, fruit, shrubbery, stumps and umbels.

We were briefly flummoxed by ‘Lambs very poor in Arizona wolf up with any local asparagus (7)’ and as, by this time, we had spotted the book title and author, … MANURING, SOWING, PLANTING OF KITCHEN GARDENS by the sixteenth century horticulturalist ROBERT GARDINER, we knew that we were looking for an extra word that began with A. Arizona seemed to stand out. Of course, that was to justify the LOBO< that went before ARY (‘any’ in local parlance) for OBOLARY, since LOBO is US usage.

Our other hiccup was uncertainty about 1ac, ‘Shrill noise, according to Scots, made by most of stuff I installed in Motherwell school (7). We had SCR?IC? and a wonderful range of potential Scottish screeches (skraich and screich being the most viable) but had to be really careful about that wordplay. We decided we were going to put CRA[m] I into SCH and count Motherwell as our extra letter rather than a Scots indicator (sneaky, Mr Dipper).

There was an intriguing clue at 33ac. ‘Heartless Welshman injures terrapin (4)’ I’m no terrapin expert, my expertise stops short at our special variety of fire-bellied toad (not actually toads at all, a different variety, the bombina variegata), at natrix natrix - grass-snakes, newts and the Jura vipers we have in the garden in the heat of the summer. However, EMYS had to be the answer when we removed the R from Emrys, the Welshman.

Why intriguing? Well, can you find Emrys in the 2011 Large Vermilion Volume? Officially, Dipper’s crossword was the first to be using the new Chambers Dictionary. Are the kind editors of the Listener crossword tipping us a wink that we can go on using that lovely list of names that was in the appendices of the previous versions (and not even add a disclaimer to that effect!) I do hope so.

Finished in a little over an hour; almost our record time. The exhortation to SOWE CARRETS (with its quaint spelling) was just where it ought to be to render life easy – right down that diagonal. So thank you Dipper for a gentle opener to 2012. I even had time left to cook dinner and draw a few carrots, with a couple of sprouts thrown in for post-Christmas cheer (well, cheer anyway that I don’t have to smell the horrid things for another year).

His draft preamble and postamble ran as follows:

One word in each down clue requires a shift to a markedly different position before the clue can be solved. Initial letters of these words give a treated lyric (in ODQ6) that describes each down clue’s initial state. It may assist the solver if the answers to asterisked clues [19a, 30a, 12d, 16d, 18d, 20d, 21d] are entered first, with the assumption that a four-letter word has already been entered. The composer of the lyric’s score can then appear illegally. This and all clued entries are counter to a quotation indicated by two unclued entries [1a and 41a]. The composer’s thematic score appears appropriately positioned; solvers must write this (6, 4) beneath the grid and highlight two letters that are doubly relevant. Two down answers [ABIES at 5d, SHINE at 32d] must be scrambled before entry to complete a trio. Chambers Dictionary (2003) is the primary reference.

The last word in each down clue has to move to the front (make ‘a shift to a markedly different position’, or ‘swing’) before the clue can be solved and the surface reading makes sense. Initial letters of these words give “It don’t mean a thing / If it ain’t got that swing” with no vowels. 1a and 41a indicate a quote from Duke Ellington: “Playing ‘Bop’ is like scrabble with all the vowels missing”. LING was the first word entered in a normal game of Scrabble, followed by answers to asterisked clues, allowing Duke to appear illegally (names are not allowed) at 25 across, and scoring twenty five points, with KT (Knight) scoring double. (Count) BASIE and (Earl) HINES complete the trio of aristocratic jazzmen.

With his customary attention to detail, Steve noted that 1a and 41 were overunched, and also listed the pieces in a normal Scrabble set, which we needed later.

I suggested a few improvements to the grid and also suggested Aristocat as the title (ditching Basie and Hines), and John thought that we should “evolve the Scrabble game a bit more”. After much further discussion of numerous ideas, we eventually settled on:

In all but seven clues a letter must either drop out [vowels] or move left/right [consonants] before the clue can be solved (the surface reading often suffers); these letters reveal a quotation in ODQ6. Two answers clued without definition form the first part of another thematic quotation, also in ODQ6. They and the answers to the seven clues referred to above must be entered in accordance with the rest of the quotation. Solvers must finally highlight those seven entries [which include every consonant, including the consonantal Y, in YRDNG]. Numbers after clues refer to the entry length. Chambers Dictionary (2003) is the primary reference.

And John produced the following fill, which formed the basis of the final version:

This all sounds very straightforward, but it actually took us almost a year before we reached agreement.

We then set about writing the clues. As usual, Steve allotted each of us one third of the clues, and created a template document into which we were to write our efforts, each in his own colour (mine being red). We then said of each other’s clues either “That is brilliant” or “Maybe this would be better” or “Total rethink needed” or whatever. Emails flashed back and forth, and eleven successive versions of the clues document appeared, but eventually we reached agreement, after about only one month, in fact.

Aristocat was the last Listener using Chambers 2008 as the primary reference. We were relieved that we squeezed in just before the switch to Chambers 2011. Otherwise two of our clues (22a and 20d) might not have been allowed, as they relied on a 2008 appendix to verify that NANCY is a diminutive of AGNES and AGNES means CHASTE.

We wonder how many solvers will have noticed that it is only vowels that drop out from the clues, only consonants that move left/right. How many will have noticed that the highlighted entries represent a vowel-free game of Scrabble (involving every consonant at least once). How many will have enjoyed the puzzle (we have in fact peeped at AnswerBank and so feel quite confident on that score).

Roddy Forman (one third of Mango).

P.S. We are of course mortified that the clue to 42a failed to indicate two words, in spite of our having spotted a similar error in 23d. A friend has asked why on earth we did not have the puzzle test-solved, when the error would surely have been corrected. Mango has only once had a puzzle test-solved, I think, for a special reason that I cannot now remember. Curiously enough, though, Steve did at the last minute suggest that maybe we should send Aristocat to a test-solver, but I argued that a team of three, not to mention two editors, had no need to bother anyone else. Wrong again, Mr Forman!
 

But it wasn’t easy! As usual, the numpties began in the south-east corner and, with SWEIR (‘So damn lazy up north (5)’) understood what was going on. The N was moving to give me a ‘sweir’ S(on) and the ‘dam’ was the weir. That was subtle enough and there were anther 42 of these little word games to complete! Ouf!  What a clever and original idea, though. I have seen the misprint device used, so that Mangled (anagram indicator), for example, becomes Dangled, but the idea of having every clue move a letter left or right, or omit one, with so many examples of word-play indicators being part of the device was delightfully novel and challenging.

We had ‘Toiled’ losing a T to give us ‘oiled’, ‘Violet’ gaining an L to be ‘violent’ (interesting that the capital letter was allowed to just disappear there!), ‘writing’ gaining an H and ‘writhing’, ‘angling’ becoming ‘tangling’, as well as ‘rap’ becoming a container indicator ‘wrap’. Part of the subtlety was that these were hidden among other tricky moves like ‘ruins’ simply losing its I to become the R of R(uns) and one I particularly enjoyed ‘Grant and Charley, on vacation, chase girl (22, diminutive)’. I didn’t know that Nancy was a diminutive of Agnes (a chaste girl), but liked the way that the randy couple of men became a simple ‘gran’ or ‘nan’ and C(harle)y on holiday with a pure lassie.

I could go on admiring these fine clues – but you solved them for yourself so move on! The p.d.m. came early when I fed my few letters of 24 ac into Antony Lewis’s Crossword Compiler word-finder and Duke Ellington appeared as one of about ten offerings. The ODQ gave him only one quotation: ‘Playing bop is like Scrabble with all the vowels missing’. What compiler could resist that temptation! (One has confessed to me that he has been working on exactly the same theme, prompted by that quotation – well, Mango preempted.)

From there I was on the home straight (but had to gallop for about three more hours!) 1ac had been an awkward PLYN?B?S and 42 L?S?RBBL. Well, I ask you! With them and Duke Ellington in place, difficult areas of the grid became easier, though I have never heard of YARDANG, JAPAN WAX, DISCOVERTURE or XEMA - more words to nonchalantly slip into conversation next week.

Of course Mango had the usual Listener Compiler healthy dose of alcohol. We had ‘Scotch or gin taken till mellow’ – though sadly it turned into a Scotch Tor – a  BEN, the gin drinker was ‘taken ill’ IGN giving us BENIGN. The ‘society crowd in 42ac were drinking ‘cold gin’ and a ‘pint’ in 10d turned into a ‘pin’ – a mere AXLE (Take = R after W in WRAXLE, ‘fight over maT in Devon). Is it that crossword compilers like their tipple, or just that the words for alcohol lend themselves so readily to crossword use?

So what was it all about? I highlighted my seven words that had no vowels and wondered about the other quotation that had appeared: ‘It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.’ I imagine we weren’t supposed to be solving backwards (as we invariably do) and working from Duke Ellington to the quotation. The quotation was intended to lead us to him.

What was the point of all those words without vowels spreading out from the L of ELLINGTON? Aaah, SCRABBLE! Brilliant play! Mango have the X and Y in triple word-score positions. It was a friend who later pointed out to me that, just like Scrabble, this was pangrammatic (minus the vowels, in Duke Ellington Bop mode). Lovely! (But what a good thing that there wasn’t a space below the grid where we had to enter the total score in points of those vowel-less words, or even send our entries on an appropriately coloured grid.)

Thank you Mango for a fine last 2011 crossword.

Here we had the last Listener of 2011, and the last using Chambers (2008) as primary reference before (2011) takes over. Personally, I was still trying to catch up with puzzle solving after the Christmas and New Year festivities, which invariably leave me tired and zonked out (OK … blotto, if you must)! As a result, it was the second Sunday after publication before I started Aristocat, and I prayed that there wouldn’t be any tricky engame to beguile me. There was an interesting clueing device in all but seven clues: one letter had to be omitted or alternatively moved to the left or right before solving. I was sure that I’d come across this latter technique before, but wasn’t sure where. Knowing the fixation that at least one of the triumvirate had with symmetry, I laid odds with myself that there would be twelve of each type of letter movement (left, right or out).

Little did I realise how difficult the clues would be. After all, it was not obvious whether one or two words in a particular clue would be affected. If two words, then the whole ‘sense’ of the clue could change, and I felt that my brain was being deliberately messed with! This was borne out by my first pass through the clues. The acrosses revealed only 14 ETERNAL, 27 EATHE and 39 LAMAIST. The downs started well with 1 PRECLUDE and 3 YRENT, but despite seeing likely letters that needed dropping or moving, that was it. I wasn’t really surprised to see that the few that I solved all involved omissions, and thus just one word changing in their clues.

With the help of 1dn, however, things started moving a bit more smoothly. 21ac was my first clue requiring the movement of a letter: Posh oven returned to base for mother, although it was a sneaky liittle movement, with the M just hopping across the space before it to form other. Still, at least I had a left moving letter, and we were told in the preamble that movements would alternate direction.

19ac Sedate Queen, unwell, in train broken down on outskirts of Zaire (7) was irking me. I kept trying to fit TZARINA to the wordplay, and although TRAIN was there, Zaire was not ZA, and there was no sedate or seated monarch to be found. It wasn’t Bradford’s that came to the rescue, but Chambers Crossword Dictionary. Although I sometimes find the division of words into letter lengths useful (here I was looking for a 7-letter word), in this case it wasn’t. Luckily my eyes wandered a bit and I saw TRANQUILLIZE further down with QU and ILL in the middle. What a stroke of luck! Except that there was now a 12-letter word, obviously thematic, to fit into an entry of only seven spaces. A few minutes later, I finally doodled with ruin left ten at 9dn and up popped INTERFLUENT. These two crossing entries made me feel fairly certain that only the consonants were to be entered; NTRFLNT and TRNQLLZE. But that was thematic how?

Well, the downhill ski to the finish was on, except that those of you who’ve seen me on skis will realise that I’m only a red-runner. In any event, about 5 hours after starting, all the pieces were eventually in place.

The central entry was DUKE ELLINGTON, the aristoc[r]at of the title. The only quotation from him in my ODQ (luckily I have one of the two editions mentioned in the preamble) is Playing ‘Bop’ is like scrabble with all the vowels missing. There is also a reference there to Mills where what is spelt out by the naughty letters in the clues can be found: It don’t mean a thing If it ain’t got that swing (the slang, and lack of jazz knowledge, hindered me for a long time). The music for this 1942 song was written by Duke Ellington.

As the lyrics hinted, the vowels were to be omitted from the thematic entries (symmetrically placed, of course), as they were from PLAYING BOP at 1ac and LIKE SCRABBLE at 42ac, the two clues without definition. It had taken me a bit of time to realise that these last entries were not simple phrases straight from the dictionary. Finally, there weren’t twelve of each type of letter movement as I had surmised at the beginning. Instead, and also thematically, it was the vowels that were dropped and the consonants which moved left or right.

Well, I may not have been right about that last point, but I was certainly right about it being a tough, fair and delightful puzzle. Great fun, guys. And among many fine clues, my favourite:

40ac   So damn lazy up north (5)   (which should read Son dam lazy up north, to give SWEIR)!

Political correctness doesn’t even come close!

There was that mildly disconcerting word ‘transpositions’, but, at least it didn’t say ‘Jumbles’ so we shelved that anxiety. Hmmmm!

It was a partying night anyway so the numpties happily solved a few long clues – ‘Black dog mainly after huge bird that’s stalked (8)’ Well, that has to be B + ROC + COLLI(E) and that will give us an extra L. (At least it wasn’t Brussels Sprouts – Oh dear, that’s tomorrow!) ‘Dog bark, say, lifted tail (9)’ RIND with EG< and BACK gives us RIDGEBACK with an extra N. ‘Poltergeist almost shocking old composer (9)’ That has to be an anagram of PERGOLESI with T extra (I love his Stabat Mater – rather Easter than Christmas, as was the ‘Horse, at first sight rather old, died in festival (8)’ R(ather) O EASTER round D = ROADSTER producing E).

Another easy anagram gave us INDISCRETE,  ’Homogenous work isn’t recited (10)’ and another spare T. We teased out CORNED BEEF from ‘Jailbird and hooligan quarrel about rule that’s preserved (10, 2 words)’  – producing an N from the CON and NED – and lots of shorter words, and shrugged our shoulders when none of these intersected convincingly with each other. Party time.

It was after midnight when I took another look. We had a vaguely coherent extra letter message: ?LL TH? RI?HT ?OTE?S ?UT NO? IN THE RIGZT ……… (Yes, I know now that BELIZE is both BZ and BH – what useful things we Listener solvers ingest, as well as Monk’s healthy sprinkling of wine. He lived up to the Listener compiler tradition with the SOAVE, the ‘cultivated wine in Belize, and the Chief magistrate drinking a lot of ale – even if the wine bar in 4d stayed closed. There was a surprising presence of dogs too!)

That message was familiar. It was Eric Morecambe’s response to Andre Previn, wasn’t it? It boded ill. I jumped to the flawed post-party conclusion that we had to move do, re, mi etc. to the end of clues, or something like that. The prospect was daunting. ORDER, the last word of the quotation, would give a DO and a RE, but so what? REDOR, DORER, EREDO?

Fortunately light dawned in the morning and I understood that all the letters except ABCDEF and G could stay in their preordained positions, but that every word save one, had to have shifted notes. The one was clearly PREVIN as he had only an E. Grid filling was underway. But what a task! So much for my gentle Christmas treat!

The biggest problem was, of course, the missing clues. It is easy to write all the potential letters, squeezed into each vacant square, and eliminate them as they are used elsewhere in the word, but this system falls down when you haven’t solved a clue. We had several we hadn’t solved. I now know that IBEX has a plural IBICES, that there was a star eighties and nineties football player called BARNES and that AMEN CORNER was a fifties somewhat oxmoronic ‘famous Welsh rock band’. Even ARROGANCE had me stumped for a while – ‘Side’ indeed!

I think DOGBEE was the toughest clue of all, but when I commented to a friend who had finished this one long before me, he said “Well, yes, it was tough, but what do you expect? It is the Listener after all!” Well, I have already told you what I expected – a gentle Christmas treat – so I had to produce my own. Thank you, Monk!

Extra letters in the wordplay were straightforward enough, and transpositions were required in every entry, so perhaps two letters swapped for some reason. The quotation (‘exchange’) was in The Oxford Treasury of Sayings & Quotations, which I don’t possess, so I could see Google coming to the rescue on this one.

I was right with my foreboding about how hard Monk is as a setter. Clues were slow to be solved. After 1½ hours, I had less than a dozen: 13dn PERGOLESI (although I’ve never heard of him), 3dn BAIT, 15ac DENE, 9dn RED BOX, 20ac BORAX, 19dn FARE, 25dn BRED, 23dn ZAGREB, 28ac EDDY and 5ac GROCER … although not necessarily in that order. There were some squares where the letters coincided, but there were a lot of clashes, and I suspected that a simple transposition of two letters in each entry would not work.

After three hours of relatively slow progress, I had the following extra letters:

A L • T H E R I • • • • O T • S • U • • • • I • T • • R • G H •

My brain went into random mode for about two seconds and came up with “All the right notes, but not [necessarily] in the right order” from the famous Morecambe, Wise and Preview sketch in their 1971 Christmas Special (so says Wiki). A nice touch in the preamble to say that the quotation was ‘necessarily’ short.

Thus the four unclued entries, suitably transposed, were ERIC (CRIE) MORECAMBE (MORABEMCE) and ANDRÉ (ANERD) PREVIN (PREVIN). It still took another hour to finish the puzzle, plus another half hour to re-enter the answers into a new blank grid to make sure that everything moved around as required.

As I suspected at the beginning, Monk is a tricky setter. Here are some clues that took some time for me to unravel:

So, as suspected, a tough-ish puzzle from Monk — a lovely theme, well implemented and bringing back fond memories. I’m sure that the title is a play on the seaside town of Morecambe, rather than Eric’s joke (without its very risqué punchline): There were two old men sat in deckchairs. One man said to the other “It’s nice out isn’t it” ….
 

We were in the middle of a snow blizzard as I attempted to download Phiz and the power failed and re-failed and re-re-failed, leaving me just enough time to read that preamble. I almost abandoned on the spot! The other Numpty did just that and disappeared to cook dinner.

No, it wasn’t the clues. We had all but five (NABK, ROULES, TERETE, STALL and TRIE) after a few hours of head-scratching and a lot of grumbling. We managed to fit TIE around R (‘Ed’s to turn out, take a bow outside’ (4)) but we got TIRE and decided that that must be a Spenserian version of ATTIRE (in the sense of a smart ‘turn out’) Oh dear the pitfalls! But just look at those words! (And BANIA, JATROPHA, POITREL, PROINE, PHOTS, ATROPOUS – what language is this?) Yes, our blizzard continued so there was no ski-ing today and I’m feeling pretty ROYNISH!

Knights’ moves and things like this get thrust into my camp so I set to work and made fine progress until MARQUETRY and RE-ENTRY refused to make bedfellows. Second attempt: ATROPOUS and ROULES clashed – and so it continued with the light slowly dawning that it was important to keep track of my moves. However, as with those Knights’ moves, the remaining words suggested themselves as I progressed. Apart from that bit of ‘grid help’, this was almost a 100% exercise in cold-solving wasn’t it? What I would have said a smidgin over two years ago when I first attempted a Listener crossword. I dread to think!

Fitting those words in was fiendish, as all but the north-west corner presented problems. NEEDLE (Ah, the Laced Utah alcohol – at least BeRo upheld the Listener compiler tradition of incorporating a drop of alcohol into his clues) went in in every direction before it agreed to live side by side with DIRL.

At last a full grid that seemed to work. Of course, we hadn’t finished. We had to complete another forfeit and copy those unchecked letters into the last little grid. (Just as an irrelevant aside – the Fizz-Buzz game is a wonderful way to teach language-learners to count in their new language – numbers divisible by 3 get BUZZ, 5s get FIZZ – so Un, deux, BUZZ, quatre, FIZZ, BUZZ, sept, huit, BUZZ, dix, onze, douze Oh dear, I’m eliminated! I gather there is a rather more racy adult party game along the same lines too.)

Our first attempt produced a rather odd PHIZOG (obviously that was what we were aiming at) as it had an extra squinty eyelash dangling, so I took myself in hand and coloured and numbered squares as they were used once or twice, finally producing the desired result. (Look at her hideous smile above!)

What a lot of bloggy grumbling about what was in fact a magnificent challenge. What a wonderful feeling of achievement, too, to have got there in the end.

Thank you, BeRo for filling my entire Saturday with this demoniacal puzzle. (Back to ski-ing – it reminds me of my small son’s map of the ski resort when we had stretched him:  - Blue Pistes = fun, Red = difficult, Black = impossible – this was verging on the black!)

There were some easy clues here, though, weren’t there? It was a pleasure not to feel stupid and incompetent for once, as words like CYST appeared (‘Lucy Stoner secures a home for dominant organism’ – hidden) accompanied by DORS (‘mocks antique dodo half forgotten by eminent scientists’ – DO[do] + R[oyal] S[ociety]), PIE (‘chattering bird from island in Peru’ – I in PE) and URSA (‘collection of stars is restrained by our sanity’ – hidden).

I had to hunt for the habitual Listener compiler’s alcoholic tipple but it was there – “Kiss by mother was her ruin” – an obscure reference to the obsolete MAX for ‘gin’ and to the almost equally obsolete notion that vast quantities of inferior gin caused spontaneous miscarriage. (What a lot of useless knowledge we hoard!)

Even better, the long clues yielded solutions fairly quickly too. We soon had our EMMENTALER in place (‘Eternal shambles surrounding two maiden overs with England’s opener – hard cheese’ – an anagram of eternal + MM + E) and the DATAGLOVES (Computer interfaces are a little bit backward with balls, getting 5 for 11′. ‘Data’ gave this one away – a tad, reversed, though we had a moment’s doubt about how the B of Globes was ‘eleven’ – it’s hexadecimal isn’t it?)

No numpty hiccups until we reached CEILIDH, which wanted to go into the grid upside down. After a moment’s consternation (was there really going to be an entire device not signalled by the preamble?) we realized that something similar was occurring wherever we had a C or an H. So much for our initial suspicion that these two squares represented the two halves of a football pitch and that our lawbreaker was going to be offside! (Celtic playing Hibernian?)

We did wonder whether our C was going to be the speed of light and whether Stick Insect had managed to race off a crossword about neutrinos going even faster and get it published without the current Listener 7-month queue (though a CERN friend, who worked on the original GPS timing circuits involved in the measurements of the aberrant neutrinos, assures us that the time it took to feed the neutrinos into the system accounts for that anomaly there has been such a fuss about).

Before dinner, we had our twenty clashes and a full grid. We stared at it for a while and the physicist numpty muttered about ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ but we put our full grid on one side as the Alps have had a metre of fresh snow and even our little ski resort is opening in the morning. An early start is called for.

Coming off the slopes rather cold and leaping into the hot tub set the neurons moving; ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ appeared with a DOOR neatly situated in the centre of the grid.  In response to my total incomprehension, the physicist numpty produced his well-thumbed ‘An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of Gases’, Sir James Jeans, CUP, 1962 (just 17s 6d!) and there it was, clearly explained.

So yet again, a Listener crossword proves to be a learning experience (and this wasn’t quite as difficult to grasp as the Klein Bottle theory!) so it remained to decide which side had to have the warmer particles in it – the H – HEAT appeared on the right (once I had chopped up my original grid and sellotaped it back together with RPRINCIPLEACCELERATO and OFTHEWEDGETHETHINEND producing ‘The thin end of the wedge’ and ‘Accelerator principle’) so I happily put the Hs there and the Cs on the other side.

Many thanks again, Stick Insect for an entertaining puzzle that was not too challenging and that left us some of the weekend for gardening, cleaning, ironing .. Oh dear!