How delightful – a Listener whose theme is a double-action pedal harp. Ten out of 10 for originality! Thanks too to Hedge-sparrow for reminding us that there is more to Ravel than Boléro. I’ve now enjoyed listening to his (Ravel’s not Rob’s) Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet.

Like the Introduction and Allegro, 19 Down started gently enough, then got a bit more feisty as we grappled with the double act clues. I thought they melded together pretty smoothly on the whole, especially 1,38 down “Drunk, carelessly relaxed politician exits exotic Asian chariot, one led by horse” giving SLUED and ARABA. I enjoy learning new words, and SLUED was definitely new to me. ARABA rang a bell, though I’d long forgotten what it was.

Overall 19 Down gave me an enjoyable workout and an endgame which didn’t require too much teasing out, though I did have to look at some pictures of double-action pedal harps to make sure I had the strings going in the right direction.

I also observed that Hedge-sparrow’s harp points the same way as the Guinness harp, rather than the harp used as the emblem for Ireland (I understand from a tour of the brewery in Dublin a few years ago that this was a deliberated decision by Guinness). The Guinness harp’s strings seem to be at a very peculiar angle though! Mine are vertical, which I’m glad to see is in harmony with those of Shirley and Vagans.

THEe first puzzle I blogged on was 4701 so it seems I am now starting my second year. Poor readers. Do let me know when it is time to retire (again)…

It’s certainly not Hedgesparrow’s time to retire as this was a pitch-perfect puzzle for the Dinner weekend: an interesting theme, nice graphics, and not too hard to do during the hangover.

I couldn’t resist trying to find the extra words before tackling the clues themselves, and the double entry from them in fact meant that that wasn’t too difficult, so I had the messages and theme and a good idea of what the graphic would be before I tackled the grid proper.

At that point 11d was a (no doubt intentional) life-saver: an easy and unambiguous clue that could be inked in straight away. Building on that, and watching out for where the expected words of the graphic were forming, meant that the rest of the fill was quite quick as well, and the way the strings were handled was very neat. Fitting in so much thematic material led to a few less usual word choices (MAHE, ARIF – once I realised it wasn’t RAFI, also an Arabic name, ESRC and the wonderful SOSNOWIEC for instance) but it was worth it. The clueing was all fair and above board with the double action nicely lined up. I’m glad I don’t have to go on tour on with a monster, and try to avoid wearing lavender accessories with my CLERICALS, but both brought a smile.

Come again soon, Hedgesparrow!

Thanks to Nutmeg for this enjoyable, educational puzzle. I hadn’t realised so many of the objects in the asteroid belt had names.

Several clues stood out for me

• 1ac      ACCIPITER: Hawk caught and beheaded songbird in maple tree – what a smooth surface reading
• 8 dn    RAKER: Profligate gambler’s term for croupier, perhaps– sneaky use of profligate gambler
• 9dn     TETRIS: Baselessly, head teacher raised game – I had TENNIS and PELOTA (not sure why now) at first
• 13dn   TEETER On reflection forward virtually weightless rock – this took me ages, such a clever clue

13dn held me up but the end game took me even longer. I was looking for an O but ASTEROID gave me M. It wasn’t until I spotted ASTEROID BELT on the diagonal and calculated the values of VESTA that I could prove I had the right letter. “Lies on” rather than “lies within” in the rubric would have helped I think. Lovely puzzle!

A strange title… I wanted to pencil in “and” before “far”, so why wasn’t it there? I tried Googling the phrase as it stood but that got me nowhere. When the theme turned out to be THE ASTEROID BELT (arrowed: top left to bottom right) the drift of it made sense as (contra those exciting Sci-Fi films) the average distance between them is about a million kilometres, but I am awaiting further elucidation as it may well be more subtle than that.

Since the clashes were the only “gimmick” the plan was to dive in and find them. Pencilling lines along the entries where the stated word-length was longer than the entry (thankyou for that Nutmeg!) gave an indication of where some where going to be, and seeing that 1a was amongst that set of entries, the top left was the place to make a start. “Hawk caught and beheaded songbird in maple tree (9)” sent me scurrying to Bradford’s to look at the longish list of words for hawk and falcon etc, with one of those likely to be the definition, with the wordplay being a word for a songbird without its leading letter inside one for a maple tree. ACCIPTER and ACER, with (P)IPIT in the middle met the bill nicely. 

Then on to the down crossing with 1a, with 5d marked as thematic. “Only provider of coating for former magistrate (8)” propelled me to Bradford’s again to look at the equally long list of magistrates, and JUSTICER made up of JUST (“only”) + ICER “providing of coating”. Nutmeg can be relied on for neat and interesting clueing, which often uses a turn of phrase rather than a simple dictionary definition, which makes the clues classy and rather more difficult than I making them sound.

Anyway, looking at where the two words met we had JU starting 5d and PITER ending 1a, so JUPITER it was. (Incidentally another classy feature was that the emerging words were always built from the fragments without anagramming. Nice.) So – heavenly bodies, Greek gods, or some other more abstruse set? HERA emerging from HERoes and AHORSE in 11d made me think it was gods and goddesses, and the full set proved to be JUPITER, HEBE, HERA, IRIS, IDA, VESTA, DORIS, CERES, METIS, EUROPA, EROS and MARS. As the list grew the divinities idea started to look awkward – what a strange selection – so I turned to heavenly bodies. At first the presence of both planets and minor bodies threw me, until I remembered that THE ASTEROID BELT lay between JUPITER (at the top in the grid and MARS at the bottom. The asteroids hardly have a fixed pattern so as far as I can see the arrangement of the grid is perhaps better described as “representative” than “approximate”.

The only one of the asteroids to lie on the diagonal was VESTA. 22+5+19+20+1 = 67 =2 6+26+15, with O as the 15^th letter in the alphabet replacing all the heavenly bodies, and the puzzle was complete.

The hardest part of the solving for me was in fact keeping my head clear as to whether I was looking for the letters to make up an entry, or the letters to make up the asteroid. Often the key to entry was deciding on the correct element of the clue that was the definition (so “battle” in 31a or “on the continent” in 32d), which the clueing style often disguised well. The only one that proved resistant to parsing was 13d “On reflection, forward virtually weightless rock (6)” where TEETER “rock” is surely the answer required by the crossing letters but the wordplay eludes me.

Many thanks indeed to Nutmeg for another fine puzzle.