Listen With Others

About a year since Nudd’s previous Listener with its Thomas Hood poem No! and its lack of birds, bees, flowers and other flora and fauna. It did, however, remember November. This week, a rather stretched-out grid with a statement to go underneath. Misprints in the acrosses and an extra wordplay letter in one down in each column.

Not much time this week, except to mention my favourite clue, 17ac After late start, flotels thrown up for Arabs (6, two words) for TO SELL (yes, it’s given as such in Chambers) [(f)LOTELS*, def. up for grabs]. Of course, the correct versions of misprints in the across clues seemed to be feeding us gobbledygook with the likes of hply and qgcrbr. Eventually they told us to shade the letters HPLY grey and BNJAUQGCR brown.

Upon doing so, we had Magritte’s pipe (or not) from his painting The Treachery of Images (hence the title). All that was then required was to write CECI N’EST PAS UNE PIPE under the grid, confirmed by the extra letters in the wordplay of the down clues.

Luckily we weren’t required to do anything too fancy on the artistic front this week! Thanks, Nudd.