Listen With Others

How good to see Quinapalus back on one of his rare Listener visits. It seems that we haven’t seen him since 2018 and this will be only his seventh Listener but we know when we download it that we are in for a treat. Of course he retains his place with the Listener oenophiles. The very first clue we solve is ‘Order Tempranillo to replace plain _____? (6)’. We subtract the ‘plain’ from the ‘Tempranillo’ and find MERLOT. It’s ‘SEMIARID’ (7d) here in the throes of a heatwave that has lasted for two months (35 degrees every day) with not a drop of rain, so a glass of Merlot or Tempranillo is very welcome. Cheers, Quinapalus.

When we solve those five answers that contain a jumble of a thematic item from a set (LOW BORN giving us BROWN, HOLY WELL/ YELLOW, SERENGETI/ GREEN, SUBLET/ BLUE and DREAM/RED) we suspect that this is another snooker table and that a lot of reds, and a black and a white are going to be symmetrically disposed, especially as ‘Imagine mark on baize and some paper (5)’ produced the jumbled RED but also prompted us about the D shape on the green baize. Nice red herring!

However, with no frustrating gimmicks, just a handful of corrected misprints, and a thoroughly enjoyable set of clues, Qunapalus fills our grid and the verse finally emerges GEN THIRTY-SEVEN, THREE, KJV (I imagine we weren’t the only ones struggling to get that V from a clue that had spelled out TWIT – we had gone for DUD – not DIV!)

Finding the verse: ‘Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.’ explained Envy to us (the reaction of the brothers) and prompted us that our theme was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour DREAM COAT (yes – we saw the two words in our grid). This was the exciting moment of this solve. Another visit to Wiki to get the lyrics of the dream-coat song and I find:

It was red and yellow and green and brown
And scarlet and black and ochre and peach
And ruby and olive and violet and fawn
And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve
And cream and crimson and silver and rose
And azure and lemon and russet and grey
And purple and white and pink and orange

And there are the initials of the colours, ready to be circled in their symmetrical design in my grid – a spectacular piece of setting. Many thanks, Quinapalus!