Listen With Others

We haven’t had a full-body workout for a while, so I welcomed Queen. With the help of Qat, and the two bookending answers BEECH MAR[T]ENS & STADTHO[L]DERS, I made speedy inroads.

Spotting (belatedly) the 180^o symmetry helped hugely too!

The clues were a bit of a (US) curate’s egg. Sunny side up included 8ac MA(I)OL(I)CA and 40ac (T)URBI(T)H – which could as well have been (T)URPE(T)H, HEP being another condition best avoided – and over easy included 22ac HAME(D). I still haven’t worked out the wordplay for 3ac BORD(A)R, and 39ac sent me on a wild goose chase to ENVELOP (office = loo). I’m sure NLA is an office but not in my Chambers.

I hope QB is right – I guess space constraints precluded finding a synonym for Bee in “Title Bee”.

I enjoyed Queen very much, liked the grid, and appreciated the workout. I hope Rebel doesn’t wait another 16 years before publishing his next Listener.

But please, please, no Canadian artists unless they are Céline Dion, Michael Bublé or Alanis Morissette. So many different letters, when added to SATH in various places, lead to an invitation to listen to the artist on YouTube. An invitation which I declined, needless to say.

And she turned out to be a relatively obscure (to me at least) painter!