An early grid

Unfortunately in the end, with all the other constraints, I could not get a satisfactory grid using DANCES . Either DANCES or JUMBO or FRANZ had to go. I didn’t want to sacrifice JUMBO (that was to be the sover’s job ultimately) or FRANZ, so settled for an example of a dance, which is why I ended up with the less satisfactory REELS. At one point I experimented with LITTORAL adjoining KAFKA, but finally opted for the literal SHORE. I also briefly toyed with the notion of some sort of reference to The Beatles, whose song provided the title of Norwegian Wood, but I already had all the thematic material I could cope with.
My reject folder included over 80 grids (thank God for Sympathy) so this was definitely one of the hardest grids for me to construct. I was keen to retain symmetry but things would have been far easier without it, and I might have been able to construct a grid in which the deletion of JUMBO left real words, so perhaps it was a mistake to resist asymmetry.
I won’t say much about the clue-writing except to say that I hate writing clues for specialist terms like LYTTA – I always find it difficult to marry definition and wordplay in a plausible surface. Many solvers failed to understand the clue to ANANA; it was a lucky chance that I looked up BANANA in Chambers, hoping for something useful to exploit, and discovered at the end of the entries, ‘top banana’, a phrase that was unfamiliar to me but cryptically very useful .
The preamble underwent several revisions. The main issue was to provide enough information to enable solvers to be free of any doubt once they had the titles. I was happy to set an elephant trap regarding the thematic author(s), but I wanted the endgame to be totally fair. The trouble with cryptic representations is that they are not always clear-cut. Additionally, other relevant works might appear in the grid unintentionally. I checked that D wasn’t followed by ARK (After Dark) but could I be sure that someone wasn’t going to find a jumble in some shape or form of the letters SHEEPCHASE (A Wild Sheep Chase)? This is why I ended up being very specific about cell arrangements and title word-lengths in the preamble. The test-solve preamble made no mention of rectangular arrangements, which I added later for further clarity. Numbers were not omitted from the test-solve version, but  one of the testers, Terry Clarke (Ozzie), suggested omitting numbers from the grid and requiring solvers to enter one key number; I took this up because it eliminated any doubt there might have been about REELS as a substitute for DANCES, especially as the distracting STEPS appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid.

Dysart, 20th May, 2102

Anyway, to the task in hand … to somehow beat Dysart this week.

For the first time in what seems an age, the clues were all normal, all entries were to be entered without adulteration, and there were no clashes. In the finished grid, an author and his place of birth would be obvious, together with four of his works. An easy week lay ahead!

I won’t do my usual trick of giving the first clues I solved followed by a statement to the effect that “everything was pretty straightforward after that”. This is mainly because most of the clues were tricky and some held me up for quite a long while.

Instead I’ll just mention the last few clues I got — ones that gave obvious answers, but where the wordplay eluded me for quite a while.

34ac held be up for some time early on because I stupidly just put in IAMBI instead of IAMBS! This made 28dn M-I-S-E-S totally impossible!

15ac Amphibian, name unknown, caught by a thrust was ANURAN … NU (name unknown) in A + RAN (where ‘thrust’ is to be read not as a noun or even the present tense, but the past tense).

45ac Memo: “A person with no regular income is out of the question!” gave NOTE (NOT E); this clue introduced me to E meaning a person with no regular income which I’d not encountered before.

And then there were two clues which completely stumped me: 5dn and 8dn. 5dn was “Traveller’s Rest” perhaps seen to supply cups which was STOPOVER, and 8dn The star entertainer in the line-up could tell you how to get this fruit for ANANA. Help needed on those please.

Finally the end game, and we had to find the author, FRANZ KAFKA and his place of birth, PRAGUE. Of course, we were supposed to think “No Prague, but I know that in the Czech Republic it’s PRAHA”! The trouble is that that wasn’t in the grid either. I spotted JUMBO in a diagonal, but that didn’t help, although I slotted it away for almost certain use at some point.

For me, it was about 30 minutes of floundering before I wondered if Dysart was playing a delicious trick, and I eventually found the Japanese author HARUKI MURAKAMI in the main NE-SW diagonal and near the top of the grid was his birthplace KYOTO. Bingo! And now to find his cryptically represented novels. Dance, Dance, Dance was there as 3 REELS, the 3 being the only number to be entered in the grid; KAFKA ON THE SHORE was there in rows 10 and 11. The third novel to be highlighted took me forever to find. Was it Norwegian Wood or Sputnik Sweetheart or After Dark, all of which gave ample opportunity for cryptic representation? Eventually I spotted NOR OAK in row 5 and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, as suspected, The Elephant Vanishes required JUMBO to be erased.

So, this week, I got the better of Dysart, but he certainly tried hard. A really enjoyable and entertaining puzzle, so many thanks to him for that.

So we solve steadily and with considerable enjoyment, wondering from time to time: ‘The star entertainer in the line-up could tell you how to get this fruit (5)’ ANANA was the only fruit that fitted our ANAN? but I still don’t understand the clue. I had to go to the Internet to understand the irony of ‘Village of Wise Men became a village half-abandoned (6)’ GOT + HAM(let) since the BRB seemed to say that GOTHAM was quite the opposite of a village of wise men. ‘Memo: “A person with no regular income is out of the question!” (4)’ NOTE was the obvious answer but, again, it took me a while to grasp that such a person was rated E in BRB, thus NOT E rather subtly conveyed the solution.

Lovely clues, the rest of them! Dysart, of course, flourishing even more than the usual quantity of Listener compiler bubbly, Armagnac, wild feasting, cups and casks of punch. With glee, we spotted Franz Kafka emerging, appropriately placed in the centre of a row and, after under a couple of hours of solving, crowed with delight. We should have known better! Isn’t Dysart known for this kind of double-crossing?

A full grid, a foreign author identified, and, of course, we all know he was born in Prague and wrote ‘The Trial‘, ‘The Castle‘ and ‘Metamorphosis‘. Time for a glass of some Listener concoction or another and a break for supper.

All through dinner, that grid sat between the rice and the green Thai curried chicken and taunted us. (Yes, I have to admit, these things have invaded our Friday evening schedule and sit there malevolently.) PRAGUE simply wasn’t there even though I carefully read up and down rows, columns and diagonals … HAH! Of course, the rest is history. Didn’t I feel silly when HARUKI MURAKAMI appeared!

KYOTO of course, followed. I didn’t know that, but do know that he won the Kafka Prize, so, of course, the title now made sense. All that remained was to find four titles cryptically represented in the grid. I enjoyed After Dark but, although two friends have recommended it, felt that 1Q84, with more than 900 pages, was mildly threatening. Still, it looked promising as far as numbers went – but NO!

I am sure I am not alone in having found KAFKA on (the) SHORE first, then, of course, deleting JUMBO (which had appeared during my scanning of the diagonals) since an elephant had to vanish (The Elephant Vanishes). Dance Dance Dance seemed a likely candidate for another novel and STEPS appeared, deceptively in 28d (Feelings of offence reflected in teacher’s errors (8) PETS rev in MISS).  Of course, when the final title appeared, I still needed a number, and thus, had to transfer my vote to 3 REELS,producing the 3. What a complicated procedure we had gone to just to get that number!

There weren’t many two-word novels left in the Internet list, and, opting for Norwegian Wood meant that I had to examine all the six-letter rectangles around the letter N.  GINGKO couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination fit the bill, but, of course, NOR OAK did.

All great fun with a lovely twist (at least for silly numpties) and a fine end-game. Thank you, Dysart!

It didn’t help us that the first clues we solved left us entering real words. A quick check with Mrs Bradford told us that WROATH was Shakespeare’s ‘misfortune’ and W + RATH completed the clue, ‘Will’s misfortune with horse-drawn carriage (5)’. We entered WRATH. ‘Act of appeasement: number backed annexing bits of Czech hinterland (5)’ gave us NUM< + C(zech) H(interland). That doesn’t sound like appeasement to me but never mind. MUNCH goes into the grid.

It seemed to be too much to hope for that both the definitions and the entries produced by the wordplay were going to be real words and indeed, our hopes were dashed as wordplay led us to TREENAI, UNHARSING, WINNOWR, CATCINESS and ACTINER.

For me, this type of crossword automatically comes in at about 7 on a 1 to 10 scale of difficulty (with Mash’s Klein Bottle and Sabre’s Knights’ Moves nudging the 10 level).  The words that the numpties gleefully enter give little real help for filling the vast empty spaces on the grid.

Take 1 Across: we have found EMPUS[E] (Fliers might be damaged by such matter) (f)LU[TT]EN(t) (Essentially competent in language, allowed to come and go in Scotland) INA[U]G[U]RAL (Leaving earth, big bird soaring on maiden public exhibition) SHADBE[RR]Y (Persian king spending hot day with old Turkish governor: it bears fruit) and HICAT[E] (Tortoise I see invading cloche, eg). That means that we have the letters ELI?S?H?? for ‘Almost the best taste of India in singular tea plant (9)’ There is more than the usual grumpy numpty head-scratching.

Fortunately A MOONLIT DOOR appeared and daylight dawned (well, moonlight) as school poetry lessons were recalled. ‘”Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor’. So we have a W to complete [W]EL[W]ITSCHIA at 1 across.

We had enough to suss out that we were being asked WHICH POEM A?EDAOO FEATURED A MOONLIT DOOR? Yes, we saw our error later -that AQUAMANILE/AQUAMANALE clue (Servant breaks a quality medieval jug) gave us the word play MAN in A QUALE, but we assumed that our extra letter was A when, in fact, I was needed to produce AGED 100. It was rather sneaky, though, wasn’t it, to use IOO for 100?

Still, we didn’t need that in order to see that THE ISTENERS had appeared in the tenth column, thus prompting us to put a latent letter L in the centre square (and, of course, into the CUEMASTERS title, producing CLUEMASTERS – so Roger and Shane are still alive and well despite Shark’s concern in his Continental Drift setter’s blog!)

We hadn’t quite finished. We had a Spanish province to find at 31 ac and had A?AGN. It had to be ARAGON hadn’t it with the O inserted? But that is a region of three provinces. Hmmm!

Enough grumbling. This crossword earned real admiration for the astonishing  skill of its compilation. I wonder how long it took Tangram to find those obscure words that would produce the letters latent that gave the question. What a feat! I hope he will tell us in a setter’s blog.

A straightforward Letters Latent puzzle here, with subsidiary idications leading to the entered answers. I hoped that his would be fairly straightforward, and I was off to a reasonable start with 16ac STEERABLE entered as STRABL, 19ac LIMACEL entered as LIACEL and 27ac NEEDS, NEES. 33ac Poet’s apparently removing from funeral stand as urn nigh prepared was an obvious anagram, and I guessed that a 10- or more letterd word would have at least one E, and it probably ended with –ING. I got UNH[E]ARSING fairly quickly after that.

The down clues were helped by 6dn Ruined Ionian city, having buried year sign which was an anagram of Ionian city without the Y for year. ATION was almost staring me in the face, and IN[D]ICATION was slotted into the grid.

Steady progress was made with Tangram’s puzzle, but the question posed by the latent letters was slow coming. I don’t know whether we were supposed to get befuddled over the last few letters of the across clues, but I certainly was: GEDIOOFE. Something must be wrong, but of course, it wasn’t, and soon everything was made clear:

Which poem, aged IOO featured a moonlit door?

With a little licence, the IOO becomes 100. I confess that I needed Google to remind me about the moonlit door, but Walter de la Mare’s “Is there anybody there said the traveller”, the opening line from The Listeners, immediately brought back memories of my childhood … although exactly when it was, I’m not sure. Then, as now, it sent a tingle down my spine as I read it.

All that remained was to find THE LISTENERS in the grid, and there they were, minus the L in column 10. Thus the letter making it “homologous with the title” was the L, and it could also be fitted in the title of our puzzle to give Cluemasters, perhaps a reference to Listener setters.

So thanks to Tangram for a very enjoyable puzzle and some good memories, and not too taxing after last week’s tussle with Elgin.

Down clues were normal and clearly the ones to work on. Looking back, I realize how generous some of these were: anagrams (always our favourite route to solving) for NARD ‘It helped in remedying right and wrong (4)’; NOTICES  ’Marks section under review (7)’; YAPSTERS ‘Try peas with special hot dogs (8)’; TRIALIST ‘What’s someone with body and soul and spirit left – is it art possibly? (8)’.

There were two hidden clues too, for ESS and SEDATE  and that ‘French’ clue with the deceptive Dickensian touch, ‘Dodger’s heading for Nancy here is potentially most dangerous (7)’ (D(odger) and ICI EST as they say locally here in the French Jura mountains for HERE and IS. Of course we didn’t immediately solve that clue, we never do see the French ones!

I read, just this week, in a comment made by Kenmac on 15 squared, that the shorter preambles lead him to expect more difficult crosswords. The six lines Elgin gave us were no exception! We had quite a lot of down clues in place and a number of across solutions (TRUSTLESSNESS, BIRTH, BORDER, BREED, EVULSED, LAMAIST, EAST, WEST and ROMEOS) but there were those worrying words ‘Across entries can go in either direction … two entries overlap … there are no clues for entries in one row… one column has been omitted’.

TRUSTLESSNESS clearly fitted in, going backwards on the bottom row (a sigh of relief) and it looked as though the extra column was going to be on the right – so I put it there. EVULSED had an evident location slotting in in reverse three rows above, so we relaxed, assuming that the lower half of the crossword was going to be reversed, the upper half heading forward. We had a glass of wine and a break for dinner.

Moving onward was hard work (was it the wine?) and, at first, our thesis seemed to work as JENNY LONGLEGS echoed TRUSTLESSNESS (producing that extra J at the start). I decided, at this point, that we were in Phi country again, and were going to have a grid that needed to be seen as a cylinder, with words circling. This was a lucky long shot!

It was about an hour later that those letters seemed to be resolving themselves into JUDGEMENT SEAT. Yes, I know we didn’t need to reinsert that line but it is in my illustration above – I like the highlighting! This, if course, helped us fit in those last few difficult little words, CAUKER, TARDY, CADEE and TEA SET which disobeyed that notion about one half reversing, but did fill lots of gaps.

There was a moment of delight when we realised that the centre line of the crossword was going to be palindromic with REDDER in the centre of SEMEMES. Now that is spectacular compiling isn’t it?

Almost there! We fitted STRAIT and STITCHES in and saw that they shared the letter S and thus fulfilled that line in the preamble ‘Note that two entries overlap!’ We had been playing with a potential HECTOR SEDUCEE on the corresponding line (symmetry-wise) in the top half of the crossword but there was a rather smelly numpty red herring there.

The Internet produces ballad evidence of Hector upbraiding Paris ‘you pretty boy, you evil seducer’ but he didn’t seduce Hector did he? We scratched our heads and wondered why those extra words BIRTH, BORDER, BREED, EAST and WEST had appeared in the solutions. Daylight dawned almost simultaneously as we recited Rudyard Kipling’s Ballad of East and West,

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

So that was what HECTOR was doing up there. He needed to be face to face with another strong man (and even share that H with him!) HERCULES completed our grid.

Thank you Elgin. This was very challenging indeed and most enjoyable too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<strong>Raich
 

I’m leaping to the end of our solve – but, in a way, we did. After two weeks of fairly challenging clues, Raich’s Claim was a welcome gentle romp. In fact, Numpty No 2 was solving so fast and furiously that I was kept busy simply writing and checking the solutions as they came along.

That’s a good thing, too, as I had never heard of NIEBUHR, ‘Theologian misrepresented “Burn in hell”? Lines cut (7)’ Clearly we had an extra N here as well as the lines the clue told us to remove. DEEPAK was not a familiar name to me either, but it fitted the clue, ‘Indian guy went up and stripped oaks (6)’ So he ‘peed’ upwards as well as removing the O and S from [o]AK[s]. That final K was the gift that led me to spot KINNOCK, and, of course, ELECTION (with four peculiar unches) appeared at once.

We should have immediately hunted for the J of Major, but there has to be a numpty red herring and I searched vainly for a while for the Iron Lady – but ‘No No No’ – no sign of Mrs Thatcher. Of course, though, there was the usual Oenophilic Listener setter tipple in what I thought was the most complex clue ‘A gin meld without Collins penning left-hand player’s part’ (7, 2 words). I had submitted my entry with a putative TONE ARM in it, when a friend explained to me that this was TOM (Collins) penning, or surrounding NEAR (which is the left hand). I learn something with every Listener solve!

Mr Major duly appeared and suddenly we were in 1992 election country and memories were stirred. Wasn’t that the election when true blues were predicting ‘bodies in the streets’ if the Welsh gentleman won and wasn’t there that famous Sun headline ‘Will the last person to leave the country please turn out the lights!’ What dirty tricks, indeed.

Of course, IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT! We had to work backwards to find the U of SUN in the NZ bird clue, ‘NZ bird by tent – one that’s flashy and unrefined (5). There wasn’t a ROGER joke this week, not a Kea but a T[U]I next to GER.

Now how slow can the numpties be? We had BARONESS, NINEPINS, NINETTE and NETWORK as our solutions to those four top corner clues and the helpful prompt that ‘Numbers in brackets are the lengths of grid entries’. Rule NUMBER ONE (Read the preamble!) but did we instantly put two and two together (and make 1992)?

We were puzzled and tried to remember whether it was called the SHAM, EURO, FAKE or WHAT? election. We remembered that we would probably have had a Scot, John Smith, as our Prime Minister, had he not unfortunately died shortly before – but no banana. We had to break for dinner before that lovely little final twist made sense. Oh the joy of the Listener pdm!

Many thanks, Raich. This was a very fair and enjoyable crossword.

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

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

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

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

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