Listen With Others

Tringa’s second Listener this week with a follow-up to his Wine and Water poem from GK Chesterton two years ago (no. 4615, Ancient Mariner). This week we had seven thematic entries (including the three-word entry down the middle), lots of clashes, replacements thereof and a faux pas to resolve. Plus paired clues symmetrically placed.

First pass through the clues, and I was struck by the number of countries and regions peppered through his clues. In fact, looking back at Ancient Mariner, I found that was equally geographically oriented. My favourite clue was 29ac Troublesome Brazilian flies south, pursuing Italian for more money (5) for PIUMS [S after (PIU + M)]. I did, however, feel sorry for the OAPs at 14ac Old women barred from earning income (4) [WAGED – W].

Apart from a brief 1500km detour to Lisbon, Portugal where the River Tagus seemed to be trying to slot itself into the central column, the grid was finished fairly quickly. As well as the Tamar, the obvious thematic entries for me were the Lizard, Mullion, Axminster and Honiton, the first two in Cornwall, the others in Devon. It took a bit of Wiki to identify Bugle and Beer as the other two.

All that was left was to choose the correct letters for the clashing squares and see what that left. It wasn’t initially obvious to me that the clashes were predominantly in the upper half of the grid. Had I noticed that, the endgame might have been a few minutes quicker. As it was, I reckon it took twenty minutes to see what was going on with all that jam and cream.

Rejigging the ingredients to adhere to the apparent preference for their order on scones depending on whether you were in Devon or Cornwall resulted in some new (and in a couple of cases unusual) words appearing. I was left wondering what order the ingredients took if you were on a boat in the middle of the Tamar!

Thanks for a tasty puzzle, Tringa.