Listen With Others

“Malva” we said – does that mean birds? (Or birdies? But we didn’t think of a golf course ‘Of Course’ at this stage – that came after rather a lot of head scratching when we had a full grid, a sardine and a couple of large birds attacking it at almost midnight.)

I didn’t really need to confirm Malva’s right of.admission to the Listener Setters’ Oenophile Outfit as I believe he earned that earlier this year. However, I did my customary hunt and there was ‘port’, ‘Lett succeeded hiding in part of harem in port (6)’. By this time we had understood that we were removing two or three letters from the solution or from a word in the clue. We opted for LETT(er) in ODA, giving ODESSA. Not much port there. A more convincing quantity of GINS was upturned in ‘Count fish traps backwards (4)’. We decided it was a COUNT(ry) fish, a SNIG. A rather muted “Cheers, Malva”. Clearly there might have been a few EAGLES and ALBATROSSES but no hole-in-one, when Malva would have had to buy a round for everyone in the clubhouse but we’ll settle for the port and gins.

Filling the grid became easier as we progressed and long words like NYSTATIN, HEPATICA and SPATTERDASH and BANDOLEONS were offered to us by TEA or Crossword compiler using the letters we had, but it was the short words like HAFT, FIAT, SORRA and TETRA that proved to be the most difficult, since we didn’t have the reassurance of word length provided. Still, we soon had AR, IDE and NS as the alterations for the three italicised clues and those jumbled to a SARDINE.

That creature  might not be happy to see either of the ‘examples of a strand in the theme’. We could see a potential CAT, an ERNE and an ALCATRAS in the grid but it took us a long time to suss that two of those were an eagle and an albatross – so the penny dropped – they were what were clipping off the tails of the poor sardines, or being two or three below par ‘of course’.

An interesting new device, Malva. I must remember next time a grid is giving me trouble – just choose a few long words and chop the ends off when I get to a bar. Many thanks for the last Listener crossword of the year.