Listen With Others

Only nine months since MynoT’s last Listener based on the German phrase Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort meaning No answer is still an answer. Of course, it doesn’t indicate whether it’s the right answer or not, otherwise blank grids would flood the offices at St Albans.

This week, all the across answers had to be jumbled to fit a pattern to be deduced. I’m always wary of preambles that require my deductive skills to be put to the test. Luckily, however, it seemed that the down answers were to be entered normally, but 29 clues led to extra or missing wordplay letters leading to an instruction.

Starting with the downs, I managed to get a fair few dropping from the top row. DAH and FINAGLED came next in rows 2 and 3 and it immediately looked possible that the left side of the grid could contain the letters A–M and the right N–Z.

As usual with a MynoT puzzle, it was relatively tricky clue-wise. That led to it being relatively tricky grid-wise as well. It was only when the rather strange looking instruction became clear that some ambiguities could be disambiguated: Colour A to H Gules, I to P Or, rest Vert. So it wasn’t A–M and N–Z after all.

As a (somewhat superfluous) helpful hint, the circled cells could be unjumbled to give FLAG OF. I think gues, or and vert gave made that clear. Anyway, Google to the rescue, since I’m not an expert on flags of the world. It turned out to be the flag of GUINEA, not Mali. So the pattern was the flag — deduction success.

Thanks, MynoT.