Listen With Others

The very small grid could be a lovely little thing or a rather frightening one with almost ten lines of preamble and that name Pointer above it. The other Numpty is slotting solutions in thick and fast as I scan the clues for evidence that Pointer retains his place amongst the Listener Setters Oenophiles – and of course he does, with ‘Lie about this alcoholic drink: “It’s a nonalcoholic drink”(4)’ We put LIE around MEAD to give limeade and ignore the lie: cheers, Pointer!

In under an hour, the grid is full with just that unclued light and the four words that cross it puzzling us – but that isn’t a criticism. This is a magical little grid fill with a fine gimmick. We have almost all of those nine letters omitted from the wordplay and TEA has prompted us that the map is giving us a place between the ATLANTIC and the NORTH SEA (yes, we realized that we had to jumble TANTALIC and SHERATON though, in fact, we back-solved to find the original clue answers that we were jumbling).

We had a cottage at Brae, not so far from MAVIS GRIND, some years ago and the other Numpty spotted MAVIS GRIND on the bottom row of our grid and there was that most appropriate word, ISTHMUS, giving us three letters to complete 17d and prompting us that it was just A STONE’S THROW from the Atlantic to the North Sea at that point (I don’t think I could throw a stone so far but you probably could!)

So there it was, a delightful litte map to draw and colour. What a gem. Thank you, Pointer!