Listen With Others

A delightfully neat offering from fellow LWO blogger – thank Shenanigans!

A word needed to be shifted in roughly half the clues before solving, and it was the first letters of these that were to give us Solvers the hint of what to do next. I counted up the total number of clues (49) and realised that there were therefore 24 even ones and these were my candidates for the clues with moving words. Fortunately I had guessed correctly …

About two-thirds the way through, my first letters read:

O-QLP–RTLOY
THEGO–TWEEN

I could readily make sense of the second half, so had a chat with Auntie Google about that book/film/whatever entitled “The Go-between”. But initially I couldn’t make sense of the first half. It looked much like the Author’s name. I checked out the O that I’d derived from 44ac’s clue

Oddly set upon in shout from excluded …

… and realised I’d moved ODDLY instead of EXCLUDED. That let me spell L.P.HARTLEY correctly and still gave me EUOI as a shout from the even letters of the fodder, which was good.

Eventually I twigged that O-Q was the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (ODQ) and felt a right twit! The most famous quote by a mile from the book’s Prologue is:
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there“,
which seemed a great candidate for the puzzle.

With a couple of clues left to solve I had noticed much of ‘THE PAST’ on the trailing diagonal of the grid and wondered if it could be replaced with a country whilst still creating real words throughout. I spent a little while trying to shoehorn AMERICA into the spaces then settled on AUSTRIA.

That left the two unclued Downs at 14d and 24d. By this stage they read
H-STE- and -IGH-Y. Taking ‘THEY DO THINGS’ as the shared anagram fodder for these two gave a few options:
HOYDEN TIGHTS
STONY THIGHED
HYING SHOTTED
HOSTED THINGY
HOSTED NIGHTY.

The only pair I could find to fit involved neither tights nor thighs, so HOSTED NIGHTY it was 🙂

A gentle puzzle, cleverly using an excellent quotation thematically: another classic Listener from Shenanigans: thank you!

Cheers all,

Encota

PS And do the ‘moving’ 24 clues ‘go between’ the other 25? Apologies Dave, I’d missed that nicety entirely!