Listen With Others

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.

Well, I’m totally in awe of Oyler’s ability to produce a puzzle like this. What an amazing feat of construction, even allowing for the unchanging digital sums and products, and the palindromes. I think that whatever talents we solvers must call upon to reach a solution pale into insignificance when set against the skills Oyler must have employed to set it.

Instruction for me is among the very best of the numerical puzzles that I’ve encountered since I embarked on my Listener journey – which started with numericals. It provided a steady solve, with no slog; even 20ac, which looked as though it could be tedious, was easily resolved with the help of 9ac, which enabled me to get 18dn.

I even impressed myself by finding an error at 13ac when I reversed the entry; another error at 3dn showed me I had written in the original entry for 3ac incorrectly. I was pleased that I could diagnose and correct the error without starting again!

Thanks Oyler for a great puzzle

Despite their brilliance, I can’t say I look forward to the quarterly numericals. Words are my métier, and numbers are a struggle, requiring me to overcome a slight number/date dyslexia and also engage the detail/calculation half of my brain, which strongly prefers a snooze to a workout. But they are part of the deal, and I’ll believe they’re good for me, so here we go.

Not, however, with a moment of intuiting first, and in the mysterious way these things work, I formed the opinion that a reversal of the grid would be the last step, as indeed it proved. Had I been more of a mathematician I would have noted at that point that the heavy use of digit sums and products, and indeed palindromes, was going to make that an easier miracle of construction that it might otherwise have been , but it’s still enormously clever of Oyler to pull it off.

The issue this time wasn’t finding a way in – there were plenty – but keeping track of all the cross-referencing and mutually checking options, which made it rather like a Sudoku, and indeed I made plenty of use of the trick of writing all the possible numbers in the squares and erasing them when they didn’t work. 

Happily (sic) the Happy and Lucky numbers were listed, and the necessary lists of options of cubes, primes and so on weren’t too long or complicated to scribble down the side of the page.

I got about half-way doing this and then felt I was slowing down, so looked for a back door. Setting up a chart of the possible letters that might appear in the message for the entry squares I already had proved instructive. There emerging at the beginning was RE… I couldn’t resist putting in REVERSE and indeed reverse-engineering those ‘down’s’ using the result. And looking at the other letters I had and the likely word patterns, REVERSE ACROSS ANSWERS fitted nicely, and worked a treat in the grid.

The only real trap I saw (there may have been more…) was that I had put 88 in for 26a, which didn’t work when reversed, while 81 did in both reflections. And if I’m honest, the dyslexia meant I made a total pig’s ear the first time round when trying to write in the reversals. At least I noticed.

The only moment of amusement was when I got fed up with 6d “Has 8 factors including 1 and itself”. I decided to ask ChatGPT. I’m pleased to say the result was gobbledygook.