Listen With Others

What a pleasure to see the return of Nudd. We murmur contentedly about the succinct preamble. 42 clues, so that tells us that we will have to find misprints in the definitions of 28 of them that will tell us how to modify the remaining 14 for entry into the grid.

We guess that we’ll be simply jumbling those 14 solutions or entering them in reverse or head to tail, but oh dear no! IVIES and SANEST go in normally, since they have produced misprints but that gives V?N? where we would like to enter IRAQ. Those two letters have both moved on 13 in the alphabet and we should have twigged at once, but we had sadly decided that ‘Feed quite a lot around noon (5)’ gave us the Bard’s SE SE around N = SENSE, so we had a FEEL/FEED misprint. How easy it is for an early blunder to add an hour to a solve.

It was some time later that the emerging message ADVANCE USING CLUE OPENERS VALUE prompted us that we needed MUCH around N for that clue = MUNCH, so all fell into place and we were left with a few grid holes to fill by reverse solving; how had ARBA come from ‘Magazine only partly for No 10 (4)’? Of course counting 13 (= M) backwards from ARBA gave us element No 10, NEON. Similarly, PEPPER had appeared in our grid and it was a speedy count backwards by 4 that gave us LALLAN (ALL in LAN) for a Scottish word for a flat area.

ALL DONE (see 2d) but did I forget something? Of course I had checked Nudd’s retention of his right of entry to the Listener bar but with such an old hand (and a previous joint holder of the Ascot Gold Cup as Rood, with Shark) did I need to? I got right to the last clue ‘Form of spirit seved up by local in Japan (5)’ giving us JINNI which led to POTTO, before being able to raise my glass. Cheers, Nudd and thanks for a different challenge.