Listen With Others

Waterloo’s pseudonym should be Mister Quirky since the themes for his puzzles are somewhat off-the-wall. Do you remember last year’s Alcoholic Baseball Player with its Mrs Malaprop style clues, or OO! Spectacles? from 2015? The titles of his puzzles are enough to cause a chuckle.

There’s not an awful lot to say this week. It was a fairly small 11×11 grid but with 55 clues, many leading to entries of just two or three letters. Moreover, the preamble told us everything we needed to know, namely that every entry was to be treated thematically in the same way as the title. Thus letter sounds were replaced by the letter itself.

My first pass through the clues got me just over half slotted in, only 1dn PRESENTIMENT causing an ambiguity with just one EN needing to be reduced to N. However, with 47ac GSTIQLATED and 8dn DCNTRALISED the grid was filling nicely, although I was a bit slow on the uptake with 1ac PNYFRTHING.

The last clue I got was the enjoyable 33dn Born with innocent uninitiated character (6) for NHURE. Other entries that I liked were 28ac PADA (payday), 40dn FSQ (fescue) and 41dn CWA (seaway).

All that was left was to correct 22ac The Spanish sherry, unfinished with delicate charm (5) which I had carelessly entered as LFEN instead of LFIN! My last task each week is to carry out a full check of every clue to ensure that both definition and wordplay make sense. I started this after misspelling RANGATIRA in Samuel’s puzzle last year. A close call this week.

Thanks to Waterloo for another entertaining and slightly wacky puzzle.