Listen With Others

Awinger’s third Listener this week, the last being a celebration of Wigan’s one and only FA Cup win back in 2013. This year’s final will have been held the week before this blog appears. [Spoiler alert: Leicester City will have won it. Ed.] Football not being my thing, I was pleased to see that we had a puzzle based around the old Microsoft Operating System.

About half the clues had wordplay omitting one letter of the answer and these would give two words. Four examples of one would reveal the outcome of a hypothetical example of the other. Luckily the clues were fairly straightforward. A few of the acrosses followed by several downs enabled the top of the grid to fill out quickly. MINICABS and EVENTUATED then snuck down and into the bottom left corner and from there across the bottom.

Of course, things didn’t go quite as quickly as that sounded but you get my drift. 27ac Balkan instrument essential for playing us lullabies (5) for which the wordplay was (playin)G US L(ullabies) was ambiguous since the answer could be GUSLA, GUSLE or GUSLI. I assumed the endgame would resolve it. 9dn Missing second half of pictures, that’s scary (6, two words) took a bit of time for me to determine — (pho)TOS + EEK. I particularly liked the surface reading of 45ac Aussie nuts just as much eaten by Poles (5) for NANAS. That just left the empty cell to fill in the bottom left where TEAS crossed MIENS.

The non-wordplayed cells revealed PARTIES (that resolved GUSLI) and ELECTION. It didn’t take long to identify GREENS, LABOUR, LIBDEM and TORIES in the grid, and only a little longer to see which way round all the replacements needed to be. Putting a neat X in the empty cell to give TEXAS and MIXENS finished things off, although the grid didn’t happen to reflect how I wished the political landscape in the UK to be. And it should be noted that it was very much an English landscape!

And such a shame that we weren’t dealing with the heady old days of Microsoft DOS!

Thanks for an impartial political puzzle, Awinger.