Listen With Others

I believe we have encountered one compilation by Craft in the Magpie where we had to use pinyin – so we were mildly daunted to see his name at the head of this crossword as we prepared to join the gang of Listener setters and solvers at the Inn in Bridge of Allan for the first gathering of the annual Listener dinner in Stirling. We were driving through southern Scotland in glorious sunshine which lasted for the whole event, and managed to complete most of the grid before the festivities began.

We were in the Stirling Court Hotel, on the University campus but it was UNIAT that held us up. Our solution could only be UNHAT or UNIAT, ‘One may use non-Latin form for moss mixing word order up (5)’ We found the mOss/mAss misprint and UNIAT had to be the solution, but it wasn’t until breakfast the following morning that we understood that ‘AT UNI’ was mixing up the letters. How clever!

SPRING FORWARD – FALL BACK appeared in those corrected letters and we realized that we were being told to highlight FALL in reverse. We had realized, early on, that GREENWICH MEAN was appearing down the centre of our grid and BRITISH SUMMER very nicely slotted in with all real words. (Sadly it was the morning after the dinner that we lost our hour and had to get up promptly – and there is a tradition that continues the ‘post-dinner’ celebrations until the early hours, or even until the sun rises.)

It was a relief to have a gentle but polished crossword to solve on this special Listener weekend, so many thanks to Craft.

Did I forget something? Craft is a new Listener setter. Can we admit him to the Listener Setters’ Oenophile Elite? Oh dear, oh dear! I scoured the clues rather gloomily. Craft will have to ‘pull his socks up’ or fill a glass or two. Not a drinkable drop! It wasn’t until I filled out a grid to mail to Mr Green that I saw that VINEW had changed to VINES. Well there’s great potential there. If he cultivates his garden there should be positive results by next year.