Listen With Others

Last year’s puzzle from Phi gave us Lennon and McCartney’s When I’m Sixty-Four. If you remember, there we had clues to 8-letter words coiled together to form eight 8s. Another interesting trick this week with double clues (in thematic order of course) which led to two answers that needed to be unjumbled to reveal two successive unclued across entries.

Not much time this week for the ups and downs of my solve, except to say that I really wondered what gobbledygook the unclued acrosses were trying to reveal. Of course, most of the letters that the down entries gave for those would soon be overwritten by the unjumbled answers to those double clues.

I was somewhat lucky when it came to the endgame. [Not unusual for you. Ed.] Mind you, having seen that the unclued entry in column 2 started OUA, I assumed that it was another word that had been somehow encoded and consequently dismissed it for the time being. Consequently, I didn’t get the nudge that Phi obligingly put in front of me with OUANANICHE.

Having eked out the answers to most of the double clues, I had a go at unjumbling them into two separate thematic words. Starting with GRIPPE KITBAG, I had KIPPER pretty much staring me in the face and that left GITBAG which swiftly resolved into BAGGIT. Twenty minutes later, and the SAMON LADDER was in place with GRILSE, LIGGER, SAMLET, BAGGIT and KIPPER rising through the grid and making new words in the process.

Thanks for a good workout, Phi.