Listen With Others

If you struggle to differentiate your Second Cousins from your First-cousins-once-removed then the link to this chart from wiki may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#/media/File:Table_of_Consanguinity_showing_degrees_of_relationship.svg

My struggle solving this puzzle was simply my ignorance. Cousins-German are one’s First Cousins, apparently. I never knew that! In a family tree that makes them ‘One Across’ and hence the excellent Title.

Twenty-one of the 42 clues had one word ‘covertly’ included in German, for example:

• Last line of elf in book amid fantastic lore (6)

… hides XI or eleven as ‘elf’, to clue LIBERO, a footballer who plays behind the backs, with free movement, a sweeper, with wordplay (IB) in LORE*

When I saw CRUISE and MAPOTHER across the centre of the completed grid, I wrongly suspected this was going to be a family name vs stage name puzzle. Close but no! The puzzle actually featured four pairs of famous first cousins, or COUSINS-GERMAN:

• RIP TORN and (Sissy) SPACEK, actors
• (Tom) CRUISE and (William?) MAPOTHER, actors
• (Jane) EYRE and RIVERS in literature, &
• ORESTES and PYLADES in mythology

I sat there on & off for almost a day with a fully completed and highlighted grid, with COUSINS scribbled in the top left of the page and GERMAN in the top right before realising what I had missed. D’oh! That’s the second time in recent weeks where I have fully completed a puzzle and not really known why! [SAUSAGE MACHINE, anyone?]

Finally, on a related topic, I’d like to take the chance to thanks everyone who sent in such kind feedback on our recent ‘Paper Folding’ Magpie puzzle, jointly set as EP with (Encota & Ploy), in the recent Magpie magazine. Apparently it has been completed and constructed on at least three continents (three confirmed ones, anyway), which is a delight in its own right!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota