Listen With Others

There was a happy murmur from the other Numpty, “Just three lines of preamble!” and he was soon slotting in BURKINO FASA, OMSK, GEORGIA, TOGO, saying “it looks as though it is places that are thematic”.

I, of course, constructed a grid in Crossword Compiler (that usually helps when we have several letters of a solution – it can suggest the full answer, as can TEA) and read through the clues to check that Aedites reserves his place with the oenophiles. This proved to be somewhat troubling. ‘Indian temporary no longer to serve tea (5)’ gave that old crossword chestnut KA + CHA and we could wonder what he was serving instead. We found Mexican dough, an egg, potato pots and a couple of types of fruit, a sealed food container, and ‘Cook free fish incorporating old shell-less mollusc’ (DORIDOID indeed – where does Aedites find such words?) – but alcohol? Oh dear no. But then cheers, Aedites, ‘Asian port raised rogue cases (5)’ I’m not sure I fancy Asian port, I suspect the Douro region does it better but a couple of cases? Why not. Of course that gave us another place CAD raised plus CA = cases DACCA but it did have a definition – ‘Asian port’ so we wouldn’t enter that one ‘fully capitalised’.

We were really floundering. These wordplay only clues were clashing almost everywhere with the ones that had to ‘be entered using lower-case letters’ and the penny didn’t drop – that short preamble had disguised rather well what we needed to see. At last NEW ZEALAND seemed to want to go in as WELLINGTON. Speedy gridfill now with the help of Wiki (I wonder how many solvers could have told us that NOUAKCHOTT was the capital of Mauritania. How very clever of Aedites to have selected fourteen countries where the capital had the same number of letters as the country itself.

(I used colours to indicate the upper and lower cases – it made for a pretty grid.)

That, I imagine, is why we didn’t have to put DACCA in caps. even though I believe it is the capital of Bangladesh.

Thanks to Aedites – for us that was a challenge.