Listen With Others

Dysart’s puzzle previous puzzle was only six months ago, and was all about Benjamin Britten’s work, War Requiem, incorporating poems by Wilfred Owen. That was the Listener’s Armistice Day puzzle. This week, it appeared that some artistic skills would be required. (In hindsight that’s putting it mildly!!)

Across clues were in normal order, downs in alphabetical order of answers. 20 clues omitted a letter in the wordplay, and these would spell out the name of a work which we needed to sketch. Our drawing would need to be “guided by three words that appear twice or more in the grid.” That sounded daunting.

Cutting to the chase, the work was Leonardo da Vinci’s L’Uomo Vitruviano, as spelt out in the grid by the letters omitted from wordplay.

Hands up those who spotted that the grid, as printed, seemed to have sunk a bit on the page?! I certainly didn’t. Of course the reason was that the instruction spelt out by the initial letters of down clues in conventional order required us to Draw circle centred on dot and that circle strayed outside the top, left and right edges of the grid. The three words appearing twice or more in the grid were ARMs (4 of them), LEGs (also 4) and TORSOs (twice) so it was necessary to ensure that our drawing went through those cells. It was also necessary to draw a head in the large square at the top of the grid.

This drawing was featured in a Magpie puzzle by Pieman 15 years ago entitled Circling the Square. That was an E-grade on the Magpie scale, ie a tad hard! Luckly, this wasn’t too tough, so thanks to Dysart for a fairly forgiving workout.

However, if my initial attempt at drawing the man on my grid was anything to go by, some of the submissions must have made da Vinci turn in his grave! No doubt they provided JEG with some amusement though.