Listen With Others

We read the name Dysart with pleasure. This was going to be a set of challenging but very fine and fair clues with something delightful at the end – and it was just that.

I didn’t have to read very far to confirm that Dysart retains his membership of the Listener setters’ oenophile outfit. ‘Rum’s all to be packed by American soldiers – special characters (5)’ gave us AURAE, followed by ‘Noise from knocking sailor over, so long drunk! (7)’ We returned the TAR over and said TATA (so long) – RATATAT. Drunk already on rum! Soon after that we read, ‘County receiver carrying empty file sees bottled liquid concentrate (13, two words)’ This sounded hopeful but it gave just COFFEE CONCENTRATE – well, I imagine the drunk needed that. Cheers, Dysart.

My current whinge about setters is the gimmick that requires solvers to have a full grid before they have to re-organise clues that were put in alphabetical order, in order to find a message. To my mind, this removes the pleasure of spotting a message that progressively emerges during the solve. In this case, we discovered that we had to DRAW CIRCLE CENTRED ON DOT and that dot eventually turned out to be the navel of Leonardo da Vinci’s L’UOMO VITRUVIANO. However, there was a second message – a title produced by omitted letters. That title was much more difficult to find as we are never much good at spotting the extra letters that are required to give a solution. But it was a second prompt to the theme.

Had we needed a third prompt, we had TORSO, ARM and LEG adding to a convenient total of 38 cells, and, of course, Wiki kindly provided models for us to copy. That explained all those consecutive Rs, Ls and Es in the grid and what a lovely final touch the da Vinci man was. Thank you, Dysart.