Listen With Others

After last week’s long, hard solve, we were glad to see that Vismut was this week’s setter with a mere five lines of preamble that repeated (five times!) the word ‘link’ that we had already seen in the title. She was certainly making sure that we got the message and giving us a very broad nudge about the theme.

We had solved almost all of the numbered clues before we faced the linked ones (yes, there was the word again!) The first of those was very generous, telling us with IMAM that an M was the link we neeed (with IMA clued and OWRA) ‘Mosque officer at first is mortified/ after barrow boy regularly served up alcohol (4;5) MOWRA, we discovered, was alcohol distilled from flowers.

Alcohol! And further down those clues we found ‘Production of smash Chinese drink made artificial and neutral when brewed across islands (6;13) That gave us SAMSHU and UNNATURALISED with the wordplay for both words lacking the U. Clearly Vismut retained her place in the Listener Setters Oenophile Elite. Cheers, Vismut!

The letters emerging as links soon spelled MARY MACARTHUR (good to have a lady setter highlighting a female cause). I knew of her as a suffragist but needed Wiki to explain her support and success in CRADLEY HEATH, over the STRIKE of the WOMEN CHAIN MAKERS and there were three links of a chain in our full grid, giving us those words.

Amusingly, we hadn’t seen how the numbered clues were linked and feared that we were missing something until the other Numpty, with a smile, pointed out that the last letter of each clue was the first of the next – so yet more thematic chaining with a comical message or non-message emerging; THERE IS NO MESSAGE HERE. Great fun, thank you, Vismut.