At first sight this wasn’t too threatening, even if we saw a carte blanche and read, in that relatively succinct preamble that there would be a pair of unclued lights, clues entered in four different ways and three misprints – but that was a long, long time ago! This puzzle has taken us far longer than any other so far this year. We had cold-solved all but five of the clues when the other Numpty, after a grumpy growl, tipped his second coffee (accidentally) over his messy solution grid and stomped off to bed – well after midnight – muttering that Listener guidelines for setters tell us that no more than half the clues should require cold-solving before we get an inkling about filling our grid.

Of course, I had checked that Yorick with his first clue ‘Ethnic criminal seizing heart of Adriatic region of Italy (7)’ giving us CHIANTI, qualifies for his oenophile setter’s seat near Stratford next year. He had more alcohol, ‘Nick Nolte’s name before trendy acid/alcohol combo (5)’ where we extracted the T as an extra letter, ‘nicked’ the N and were left with OLE + IN. No wonder we got a ‘tipsy old fool’ (WIGEON) ‘Judge that is tipsy old fool (6)’ WIG + [I]E ON in that third set of clues – after mixing the Chianti and Olein! Cheers, anyway, Yorick – see you at the bar.

We realized that those three misprints were going to tell us which of our sets of clues were going to be entered with an EAST/WEST FLIP, a NORTH/SOUTH FLIP, in ROTATION or NORMALLY and I had surmised by a lucky long-shot that the first group would be normal and started to slot some of those in but I abandoned in despair with two misprints found but no idea what Dad for Bad, and heaPs for heaDs were telling us. I glanced at the Cheaters and Bleaters website and saw that one solver was announcing that he had completed the puzzle, and saying how he had appreciated it. I would have to sleep on it.

Isn’t the mind a wonderful thing! T’other Numpty woke me this morning saying “A lower case D is an east/west flip of a lower case B isn’t it? … and a D rotates a P” so set three must flip east/west and the last set rotate. We have to find a similar misprint in set one or set two and we have the mode of grid-filling.” One of our five missing clues was the SMEIK clue (My uncle lived in Arbroath and Arbroath smokies were part of my childhood but I don’t think I ever heard of the SMEIK that was used to smoke them!) Of course the misprint was there, ‘Modest enterprise by family packing preserve, as for fish in Arbroath (5)’. The KI[N] were Backing, not Packing in their SME – just the misprint we needed, so the third set had to have a north/south flip to convert a p to a b.

Home and happy! You must be joking. I seem to have a blind spot when it comes to spinning or upending letters. We were actually the test-solvers of a recent Magpie crossword that required the same and I had the solution notes but still managed to get it wrong. The normal ones were easy; thank goodness they were numerous, and the group requiring an east/west flip went in with only a little reflection but putting a north/south flip into REINS, OLEIN, FORNENST and PLEON was a real head-scratcher even when I had a mirror handy and the groups colour-coded (as in the grid I have inserted above). Of course I sent poor Mr Green a normal one but I wonder what sort of a headache marking this one will give him!

The bloggers on Big Dave’s website give stars for enjoyment and difficulty. Whilst I really admire the skill that went into the compilation of this grid, I can only give Yorick a generous ** for removing our happy solver smiles and a bulky ***** for filling half my weekend.

This was Yorick’s third Listener. The previous one was over three years ago and titled PQRST?. It required us to draw a Parallelogram, Quadrilateral, Rectangle, Square and Trapezium in the grid, together with a Rhombus to finish it all off. I seem to remember that it was quite a tricky puzzle, and after reading the preamble this week, I guessed this would be as well.

There were four groups of clues, each entered in a different way as revealed by extra letters in the wordplay in one of the other groups of clues. Two entries were unclued, but analysis of the number of each length showed that they were probably one 8- and one 10-letter entry. Since all the other clue lengths agreed with what was in the grid, I thought it unlikely that letters would be added or lost. And don’t forget there would be three misprints to find which would identify the transformation for the entries in that group.

The first part of this puzzle was basically a jigsaw since the clues in each group were in alphabetic order of answers. Thus nothing could be entered into the grid. The first bit of help I got was when the extra letters in wordplay from Group 4 looked like they would be Normal. Meanwhile, Group 1 had Eas.wes..lip and would fairly obviously be East-west flip. Looking at Group 3, where I had …o…u…, I guessed that could be North-south flip, although the flip was possibly something else.

A bit later, and the remaining extra wordplay letters from Group 2 looked like being Rotation — whatever that might mean. At first, I wondered if it meant letters moving from one end of the word to the other, much like “cycling” in clueing jargon.

More cold solving followed, and with about three-quarters of the clues in the bag, I tried a grid fill. Starting with the normal entries (from Group 1), I was amazed that everything else could also go in somewhere, albeit back-to-front or upside-down. Group 2 looked as though it was the east-west flipping group, but both CHOICE and HEATED only fitted by being inverted. But that couldn’t be right since FORNENST had to be one of the four 8-letter across entries.

However, the gaps in my answers could now be finished off. This enabled HO.T.TOIT in the first column to become HOITY-TOITY, and Yorick’s cunning plan suddenly revealed itself to me. Flipping applied to both across and down entries, such that east-west flipped down entries were flipped about their vertical centre, and north-south flipping was about each entry’s horizontal centre. Thus HOITY-TOITY could be flipped about its vertical axis and could also be a member of the normal group. Likewise, the top row had BEDOCKED, flippable north-south, not BEDUCKED which couldn’t also belong to the normal group.

And rotation meant each entry had to be rotated 180°!

All this meant that some letters like H and O could be flipped or rotated unchanged, whereas A flipped horizontally unchanged, but vertically or rotationally became inverted. But which group was which? Well, despite the first misprint I identified changed packing to backing in the last Group 2 clue, that wasn’t the east-west flipped group. No — the p↔b hinted at inversion. In Group 3, bad for dad gave east-west flipping (b↔d), and heads for heaps in Group 4 identified the rotational group (p↔d).

That was the easy part! Ensuring that I got all the flipping and rotating correct took almost as long. [Hyperbole! Ed.] Actually, it wasn’t too tricky — rotating the grid enabled those entries to be checked and looking through the grid from the back enabled the others to be checked, one with rotation, one not. I also made sure that my Ys were symmetrical. All in all, another week when St Albans had a tricky checking week!

A wonderfully inventive and entertaining puzzle. Thanks, Yorick.