Listen With Others

Following on from the previous week’s puzzle from Lavatch, it had me wondering whether Dilwich was a joint effort between Piccadilly, Wiglaf and Lavatch! Unlikely I suppose, so here we had Dilwitch’s second solo effort. It involved lots of money changing hands, and I suspected that Mrs B’s entry for coin, with a bit of help from money, might prove helpful.

1ac was a good start, being an anagram of ‘ten cars meet’. However, having played around with words ending -MENTS, I needed Mrs B to provide METACENTRES, enetered as METAMILRES. 5dn and 6dn came next with IGNOBLE (although I couldn’t see what part of ‘quintessentailly’ might provide the replacement) and RISEN, with the more obvious OBANG hidden in ‘swingboat’. 12ac RASURES/REUROURES soon enabled me to see that 5dn was entered as IGUNITE. I felt that an easy week lay ahead. As usual I was wrong!

The clues themselves were fine, with very good surface readings. I wasn’t initially happy with 8dn [Typecast] founder of triune? (6;5) being UNITER. I felt that ‘of’ as an anagram indicator was a bit weak, although Chambers gives one definition as ‘made from’, so it’s probably just something I’ll have to live with in future. Dilwitch did invoke some interesting manipulative techniques though. I liked 15ac Liner [waiting] in Solent before noon (6;4) where INSOLE was just the letters of ‘in Solent’ before the second n. Even more tricky was 29ac Gin and rum are liquor—ID’s required, or [query] expressed (7;3) where LIQUIDS was LIQUOR + ID – OR, with expressed = forced out.

Sometimes it was the replacement that I spotted first, such as SEQUIN in ‘inquests’ and TENNER in ‘internet’. However, the lack of effective cross-checking for the answer (as opposed to entry) soon squashed my initial optimism, and progress was slow…very slow.

I must say that I found it a bit of a slog towards the end but I eventually finished. I think it took me in excess of 5 hours. However, I dreaded to think how long it must have taken Dilwitch to devise the grid for this puzzle. Having every entry with a currency replacing one from the same country must have been a nightmare.

As I popped my submission envelope in the postbox, I prayed that Dilwitch wasn’t hard at work on a crossword of weights and measures.

For those who want a complete breakdown of the currencies, with places of origin, in this puzzle, here you are. Verification is from Chambers with the exception of POUND/DINAR at 3dn which required a lot of help from Google to track down Sudan and Libya.

Across

Down