Two things sprang to mind when I saw this week’s puzzle. Firstly, “Oh dear, it’s Mr Magoo, so a fiendish one is on the cards!” Secondly, “It’s too soon for the next mathematical puzzle surely.” It soon became clear that I was wrong on both counts. This wasn’t a mathematical, and, although indeed by Mr Magoo, it wasn’t too fiendish.

Only some letters of the alphabet were to be entered in the grid, and then it would be necessary to divide it into “different pieces”; no doubt one across would reveal all. Not that it revealed all straight away, as it wasn’t the first clue to be solved. Like last week, we were told the answer lengths , and they frequently disagreed with the entry lengths, so a bit of unexpected help from the maestro.

9ac SOMEONE and 15ac PAIRINGS came first, followed by the superb 20ac Two thousand and thirteen maybe shows this ultimately? (7) for ODDNESS. Both 9 and 20 had 7-letter entries, so, unless there was some real fun and games going on, it looked as though the letters D, E, M, N, O and S were among the letters which were to be entered.

5dn [u]N[k]NO[w]N, 6dn [b]OS[u]N and then back to 8ac IMMENSE. 1Dn DIS[ar]M and at last 1ac DOMIN[at]O[r]S. So I had the theme, and the worrying bit in the preamble about partitioning the grid didn’t seem so worrying.

And so, for a Magoo puzzle, I finished in pretty quick time. A couple of clue explanations held me up a bit. 21ac Reforming navy is sinking Britain in more out-of-fate debt (9) was MODERNIST, being RN (navy) IS in MO (old word for more) DEBT – B (Britain); and 7dn It’s in a way “strained” (9), which didn’t so much hold me up as stump me completely…even now.

All that remained was to divide the grid up into 28 domino pieces, with each of the letters D, E, I, M, N, O and S representing one of the ‘spots’ from 0 to 6. I solved it fairly quickly, even though the bars already in the grid tried to catch me out. It was just a question of taking each domino in turn, D-D first, then D-E, D-I, D-M, etc (or whichever order took your fancy) and seeing if there was a unique occurrence. If not, on to the next one, and starting again, when the list was finished, for a second and third pass through.

Thanks then to Mr Magoo for an easier than normal puzzle. However, it has me dreading his next offering which, I suspect, will be a little trickier.
 

After last week’s Mango challenge, we were hoping for some charming little easy-solve; and we got it. I particularly enjoy the device where the wordplay in each clue indicates the answer with an extra letter that is not entered in the grid. It is easy to forget, when you are solving, that the extra letter is in the wordplay, but, nevertheless, the device gives a cumulative effect as the quotation or message develops.

We were particularly lucky this time, as, starting from ANI (which appeared as I printed out the grid) ‘Bird specimen from VenezuelAN DIstrict (3)’ – hidden with an extra D – we soon had enough letters to guess at ROUND AND ROUND, and the ODQ helpfully completed the quotation from TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion: ‘ROUND AND ROUND THE CIRCLE COMPLETING THE CHARM’.

At this stage, we should have thought about THE CHARM and related it to the title CHEFS but it was, sadly, some time later that we realized that CHEFS was simply ‘F in CHES’. Oh what a clever and sneaky little title. Charm was there in the second clue too, and it wasn’t until I read through the clues to see whether Cubic was a member of the Listener Tipsy Setters’ Club (sadly, he doesn’t seem to be; there wasn’t much alcohol in his clues!) that I noticed how the birds were flying to and fro. There was that ani, and he had Egrets and a Brown bird, as well as other wildlife, one pig, a shot deer, jellyfishes and a repellant snake as well as a headless old skeleton (of what, one wonders!)

Perhaps those birds in the clues were a hint. They were certainly thematic but we had an hour of happy solving before we had to grid stare for a while to find that out. It was quickly evident where those cells had to be left blank as the intersecting clues provided the other letters. Clearly we had six blank cells in what could, with a stretch of the imagination, be warped into a circle. The Numpty imagination was not stretching very well and we had to have a dinner pause (and a glass to compensate for Cubic’s TT mode) before light dawned. We were looking for a charm of finches.

The Finch family of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird came first. There were SCOUT, JEM and ATTICUS. Clearly another finch family had to be symmetrically opposite and, with a bit of lateral thinking, there they were: REDPOLL, TWITE and SERIN. All that remained was to attempt to convert those 32 squares into an appropriate shape. The quotation said ‘Round and round’ so I did my best.

A gentle and enjoyable solve. Thank you Cubic.

Another new setter this week in the guise of Cubic, and hopefully there would be nothing that would tempt me into making another silly mistake like putting Newton instead of Gessler under the grid as I did in Mango’s Nuts and Bolts. (My only slight relief is that I don’t seem to have been the only person to have messed up.)

Everything this week did seem pretty straightforward, with extra wordplay letters that would spell out a quotation. Six answers were too short for their entry length and would need completing. Finally, a bit of drawing would be required.

My first solve was 11ac Hidden depleted uranium found in South American country (5) PERDU. As I went to enter it, lo and behold the entry length was (6). A quick check with the other clues, and there were exactly six where the answer length was too short, one across and five down. It looked as though the resulting empty cells would be unchecked letters otherwise there would be more than six. I confidently wrote in PERDU· at 11. I felt that Cubic was being generous with this bit of free information. The empty spaces looked as though they would form part of a circle in the grid, but that needed to be filled before everything could become clear.

Unfortunately, not all the clues were as easy as 11ac, and I had only about eight of each of the acrosses and downs in my customary first quick pass through the clues. However, with SPOOM, SPAER, ANI and ODIST, these gave me a strong foothold in the top left corner, and from there everything spread out nicely.

It wasn’t too long before I had the beginning of the quotation: R·und·ndr··n·, and my ODQ obliged by giving Round and round the circle Completing the charm from TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion. It was an unexpected bonus to reveal the remaining extra letters in the wordplay with only about half the grid filled.

I was impressed by the entertaining surface readings that Cubic presented us with, especially the scrambled embassy call (34ac ALLOCATE), the smelly stew (39ac OLENT) and the dirty rugby player’s boot (4dn MUCKLUCK). There were also a couple of tricky constructions. 21ac So I regulate opening of channel, keeping back river in full flow? (10) was an &lit and anagram of (S[O] I REGULATE C[hannel] – R (river)) and 31dn Turn out almost the best possible team dropping aged back (5) was EVERT, being EVER[y] (the best possible) + TEA[M] – AE< (aged).

With the grid complete, it didn’t take long to see RED POLL, then TWITE and SERIN, forming part of the 32-cell circle. They were all birds; indeed they were all finches. That left SCOU··E·ATTICU·. Given that all grid entries in the final grid would become real words, my initial guess was for PERDUE at 11ac and PENNATE at 2dn, but that seemed to indicate SCOUT, JET and ATTICUE. Of course, PERDUS and PENNAME gave the required members of the Finch family from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: SCOUT, JEM and ATTICUS.

The trickiest part of the puzzle for me was drawing the circle accurately enough for it to significantly go through the 32 cells but only through the points between the cells containing O/L, E/S, O/U and T/I.

Thanks to Cubic for a fine debut.