Listen With Others

Yet another rather unusual grid, We read through the preamble with no undue concern and noted the ‘Iforish’ device of extra words in across clues producing letters that would lead to two messages, one telling us what to enter at 8dn and the other telling us what entering that would entail. I scanned the grid for a sprinkling of alcohol and didn’t find much – in fact only a BAR in ‘Support for women without needing right to be promoted’.  We had to promote the R in that clue leading to BRA so it was a rather reluctant ‘Cheers, Ifor’ until the clue ten further down ‘Lots of fluid from burst blisters after removing skin’ led to an anagram of (b)lister(s) and LITRES. Hearty cheers, Ifor!

Solving as many across clues as possible was clearly the way to go and the three-letter ones went in fairly quickly, followed by WARLORD, GIMME, AFEAR and TABARDS. HEADSHEETS had to be the answer to ‘Bows change these in pursuit of titles’, (HEADS+ SHEETS*) and we were helpfully told that this had to be 10 letters long and tentatively placed the SH in the centre of the answer.

We were producing a message (well, the beginnings of two messages) ENTER RUSSIAN ????  and CYRILLIC CAPI ????, and what was even more helpful, TEA and Chambers gave us suggestions for those long down clues, WITHEREDNESS, AGALACTIA, FIREBRAND, AMOURETTE, REREDORSE and DISFEATURING.

I am sure Ifor didn’t expect us to solve those small clues in reverse but that was, in fact, in many cases the way we did it. 10d, for example, offered us MAHSIR or
MOHAIR and we could see that AHS must be the entry to the first of the downs, nested in MIR – penny drop moment!NESTED! Suddenly it all made sense. We had LAC, nested in GAT, nested in AIA. DISFEATURING was made up of EAT, in FUR, in SIN nested in DIG. Nesting dolls! Surely we each received a set of nesting dolls as a present when we were small.

Of course the unusual shape of the grid now made sense – there was our Babushka!

So SPA went into INN, CAN into ARE, HEM into TIS, ASH into PED, and BAN into LIT and our grid was complete, except that we had to. ENTER RUSSIAN DOLL in CYRILLIC CAPITALS. We had a putative MATRYOSHKA down the centre of our grid and knew we had to be careful after that KOHb of some years ago so carefully checked our capitals with the Russian neighbour and opted for MATPEWKA – or a version of that.

Very ingenious. Thank you Ifor.