How good to see Quinapalus back on one of his rare Listener visits. It seems that we haven’t seen him since 2018 and this will be only his seventh Listener but we know when we download it that we are in for a treat. Of course he retains his place with the Listener oenophiles. The very first clue we solve is ‘Order Tempranillo to replace plain _____? (6)’. We subtract the ‘plain’ from the ‘Tempranillo’ and find MERLOT. It’s ‘SEMIARID’ (7d) here in the throes of a heatwave that has lasted for two months (35 degrees every day) with not a drop of rain, so a glass of Merlot or Tempranillo is very welcome. Cheers, Quinapalus.
When we solve those five answers that contain a jumble of a thematic item from a set (LOW BORN giving us BROWN, HOLY WELL/ YELLOW, SERENGETI/ GREEN, SUBLET/ BLUE and DREAM/RED) we suspect that this is another snooker table and that a lot of reds, and a black and a white are going to be symmetrically disposed, especially as ‘Imagine mark on baize and some paper (5)’ produced the jumbled RED but also prompted us about the D shape on the green baize. Nice red herring!
However, with no frustrating gimmicks, just a handful of corrected misprints, and a thoroughly enjoyable set of clues, Qunapalus fills our grid and the verse finally emerges GEN THIRTY-SEVEN, THREE, KJV (I imagine we weren’t the only ones struggling to get that V from a clue that had spelled out TWIT – we had gone for DUD – not DIV!)
Finding the verse: ‘Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.’ explained Envy to us (the reaction of the brothers) and prompted us that our theme was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour DREAM COAT (yes – we saw the two words in our grid). This was the exciting moment of this solve. Another visit to Wiki to get the lyrics of the dream-coat song and I find:
It was red and yellow and green and brown
And scarlet and black and ochre and peach
And ruby and olive and violet and fawn
And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve
And cream and crimson and silver and rose
And azure and lemon and russet and grey
And purple and white and pink and orange
And there are the initials of the colours, ready to be circled in their symmetrical design in my grid – a spectacular piece of setting. Many thanks, Quinapalus!
We are staying at the bottom of a cliff on Ibiza with relatively limited solving resources and had to drive across the island to the nearest ‘locutorio’ and cope in Ibizenco (the local version of Catalan) to get our weekly challenge – and the moment that I saw a quadruple carte blanche and the name Quinapalus, I knew that it was going to be that challenge. I read through the preamble and gave an awed gasp but did, of course, confirm that Quinapalus reserves his place at the Listener bar: after all, he is a previous winner of the Ascot Gold Cup. ‘Ale is recognised by these kings quaffing one (6)’ gave us SHAHS who were rather surprisingly drinking that beer but we put one (I) into them and got SHIAHS. So cheers, Quinapalus.
INDICES SURDS, MOVE BOTH Xs VERTICALLY, the corrected misprints told us. Fortunately there were five rather high-ranking CERN physicists in our party and I passed my problem over to them. X2 + 7X + 53 = 11/3. ” (Solving a quadratic equation is like falling off a log, they told me – it’s simple.) That’s minus 3.5 and plus or minus the square root of 37 i – that’s just a tad more than 6″. Then ensued a long discussion about exactly where in the grid we had to put those two Xs that we were moving vertically and marking (reasonably) accurately in the grid. I think that word ‘reasonably’ is an editorial addition to avoid another Poat hare. We have to have two solutions so those Xs must move just over the demarcation of their original cells (in TUXES and MIXEN) so that the also complete the words SEXT and SAXE and fill the empty cells and we have our two solutions. Too clever for me! It took us twenty-four hours to solve. I wonder how long it took to set. Many thanks to Quinapalus.
Listen With Others 