Listen With Others

Thanks first of all to ‘Miss Terry’ for a very cleverly constructed puzzle.  My entry looked like this:

If you recall, several answers had to have a jumbled emotion subtracted from them before entry into the Grid.  For example, at 37ac, the Answer was NATIONLESS.  Spot that a ‘Mixed Emotion’ is within it – in this case ELATION*, i.e. N(ationle)SS, remove that and enter NSS into the Grid.

The two final ‘unused’ emotions from the clues were HOPE and WOE, so jumble them together and make Whoopee.  [Is it only me that can hear Sid James cackling at this stage?  Err, Yes.  Ed.]

I tried to picture the construction process.  Have I guessed right that it was (roughly) the following?

(a)         First spot that several real words can be made from pairs of words that describe some form of emotion

(b)         Pick pairs of such words of equal length and slot them symmetrically into a grid

(c)         I can’t quite picture the next stage.  Is it pick words where a jumble of one of the emotions used in (a) forms part of the answer and slot them in next, along with two extra ones that involve HOPE and WOE?

I was half-fooled by the clue at 37a:
What an unflagged vessel might be as Nelson engaged with it.
With NELSONIT* yielding INSOLENT, I pictured HMS Victory ‘in the Solent’ and tried to convince myself that being INSOLENT was ‘emotional’, sort of!  Luckily, however, once I knew that I had to add the letters ELATION* to one clue then NATIONLESS soon appeared as a much more credible alternative!

And I also missed that I had already subtracted ANGER* from 34ac.  The consequence of this was that I spent a good half an hour trying to shoe-horn ANGER into my Last_One_Parsed at 2d.  I already had ENA in the grid here but couldn’t find any suitable anagram of (ENA+ANGER)*.  I felt a right idiot when I spotted what I had missed – both the clue’s implicit reference to 35d and the  –ANGER* I’d already written in the margin against 34ac.

And finally I am sure there must be some half-decent ‘making whoopee’ joke to be made at the end: I’ll leave that to any passing ‘Carry On’ ex-scriptwriters.

Cheers all,

Tim/Encota