Listen With Others

We’ve seen Nudd’s colourful and artistic grids before so we greeted the preamble of this one with pleasure. The preamble was not too daunting and the other Numpty was off like a horse that has scented its stable, solving these very generous clues at such a gallop that I could barely write fast enough. We were mildly worried about the speed of the grid fill as we cantered over the finish line with just a handful of word plays still to understand in well under an hour. What fearsome end game did Nudd have in store for us?

I barely had time to check for the alcohol content and Nudd was being rather sly about it. ‘Not to mention the French stock (8, two words)’ gave us ‘LE TALON’ and we guessed that an E was missing from the word play so ‘Let alone’. We assumed it ws a stock of vintage, so ‘Cheers, Nudd!

“A work of art in chalk?” said the other Numpty – “that must be The White Horse of Uffington.” and he disappeared with his grid to mark those missing word play letters while I struggled with the last few clues where we had the answers but hadn’t worked out how. Which of the old words for grey was going to come out of OGREISH? (GRISE, GRIS?)’Antique grey, like a fearsome giant (7)’. Well the final art work resolved that one and we removed the O, E and H, giving us one of the two that had to lose three letters. HSE came out of HOISE when we raised IO (priestess of Hera) skyward and that gave us more evidence that we were going to draw a horse.

‘Draws knowing gesture from brainless American (4)’. We worked backwards from TIES with the S clearly missing from the word play as we needed it for the horse’s lower leg. ‘Twinkie’, said my niece who is here for a ski-break, so we removed wink, and with it our final problem. We joined up those 28 letters with four curves, checked with Google and agreed that this was another fine compilation by Nudd.