Listen With Others

As one might expect from his pseudonym, most of Hedge-sparrow’s Listeners have had a flora or fauna theme. I wondered what environmental bent this puzzle would have. [Ha! Ed.]

Here we had a group of six with double clues, only one of which was given a clue number. The entry method for each pair of clues was that suggested by the group they belonged to. Well… I’m not exactly a physicist (in fact, I’m not even vaguely one), but I felt smug when, after a few minutes thought, the theme popped into my head. I knew that quarks came in pairs and remembered there was up/down and bottom/top but needed a google to discover strange/charm.

Alll that was left was to solve the clues and slot them into their correct entries in the grid. I identified the quarks associated with each set fairly quickly but even so, exactly what went where provided some nice entertainment with some good clueing from H-s.

Having got my smug hat on fairly early, I was woeful in not spotting the TOP in STOPWATCHES as I entered 1ac after 2dn TAIL and 2probably-up VIOLONCELLO. All came together very neatly although I wondered why Auguste Escoffier was chosen as the French chef in 11dn/25dn Heating vessel used for Vietnamese dish of duck meat, about to be replaced by Escoffierian article (4;6) ANTE/OMELET. I’d also not heard of FOGGY BOTTOM and PYCNON before.

Among some entertaining clues, my favourite was probably 31set1 UK zoo’s keeper initially replacing dead reptile is returning with migratory quail’s dry fruit (9, two words; 7) with its somewhat bizarre surface reading, but leading to WHIP SNAKE [WHIPSNADE with K(eeper) for D] and SILIQUA [IS< + QUAIL*, migratory=wandering].

I forgot to mention that the clues that had to be jumbled — set 3, strange/charm — had a misprint in one letter in the definition of one of the clues. This spelt out raluvof which unjumbled to give flavour, which Chambers gives as “(in particle physics) any of the five, or probably six, types of quark”. That’s quantum physics for you! The origin of Quark itself is given as “From word coined by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939)”. And what a stroke of luck that the STRANGE and CHARM could be anagrammed to GARNETS and MARCH, although they were part of the up/down set.

Identifying the six types of quark in the grid, together with QUARKS itself, was a pleasing end to the puzzle with (Murray) GELL-MANN and (George) ZWEIG (who separately proposed the quark model) from the circled letters going under the grid.

Thanks for an enjoyable puzzle, Hedge-sparrow.