Listen With Others

Once again I have to thank day time TV for the inspiration for a puzzle. “Haven’t you got anything better to do?” I hear you ask. The answer to this is “yes” so it is lucky that I have a very ancient Mum and a not quite so ancient husband who take note of these things when they see it on Bargain Hunt, The Antiques Road Trip, Flog It or some such. I have a very long list to work from now.

The grid design for this one was pretty straight forward once I saw that key words had two consecutive letters in common, so thank you to the crossword compiler Gods for that.

I could see from my draft grid that it might be possible to get the correct number of answers to start and end with the same letter and link the clues in line with the theme to give “Mary Macarthur” and after a bit of juggling the grid was finished to my liking.

I then amused myself and hopefully you by linking the remaining clues in the same way to form “there is no message here”. Little things eh?

After a few weeks writing the clues, (a couple a day you understand, not solidly sitting at my computer. In fact I usually think up clues when I can’t go to sleep instead of counting sheep and it works! I’m soon snoring away. The bonus is that sometimes I even wake up with a half decent clue) the puzzle went off to be tested and for this one it was Hedge-sparrow and Dysart. Valuable input from these two before the puzzle was submitted. My thanks.

There was the Women Chainmakers Festival the weekend this puzzle was published which you can find out about here if you want to go next year: Women Chainmakers

Mary Macarthur was an amazing person setting a great example to all of us by fighting for some very basic human rights. You can find out more about her here: Mary Macarthur

I hope you enjoyed the puzzle and my thanks to the puzzle editors too who always give my puzzles a bit of polish for which I am very grateful.

Vismut.