The winner of the June puzzle is Steve Trollope of South Australia.
I must start with the top left of the calendar page, and the remarkable additional clue which Graham Fox—or Rikki, or Jolt?—included in the background picture! Well—to quote the song—whoever it was, I’m a fan. [It was Graham Fox - Ed.] My amazing personal story with this puzzle was that when looking at the twenty-year anniversary and the collection of coloured bowls, I got the idea—perhaps through a strange subliminal suggestion—that we might be dealing with the Goblet of Fire. Not so, of course, it was the next (fifth) one in the series, in which the school really begins to descend into something like the last days of the Roman Republic and we realise that Ms Rowling is definitely no longer going to pull her punches. Once you know the theme, the ‘Potter’ allusion is obvious; however, as very often with these ingenious background pictures, nothing was given away to start with… But the idea that one might send a calligraphed and illustrated request for one phoenix C.O.D. ‘as ordered’ is, I think, from the top drawer of absurdist humour. Hats off, Mr Fox and all.
And before considering the purely cruciverbial elements, may I be perhaps the n millionth to express my own appreciation of J K Rowling’s achievement: her plotting, characterisation and nomenclature are first-class and she deserves at least some of the fortune she must by now have received from the series and its cinematographic adaptations.
The clues themselves were not as difficult as I had expected. Tramp is one of the Guardian’s most tricky setters, loving complicated word-play—as well as the occasional risqué reference, as we see here—but he has been kind with us.
Here we meet desires, ‘fake knockers’, turnings-on and buttocks, and I have omitted the ultimate example out of good old British reticence.
It is hard to agree with the self-mocking clue of Day 28—but what a nice composition that is! ‘Is boring’ must of course be read in a different way in order to see that the E at the end of ‘puzzle’ is making a hole in STEP—for ‘tramp’ to give a word meaning ‘dear’. Brilliant. Another lovely one is that for NOX at Day 16, with ‘turned on by’ generating NO and X. My favourite among the ‘normal’ clues while I was solving was, however, that for SURREAL: I love a clue which tells a story; we see the same sort of thing with TREBLE and VEHICLE, where the surface reading gives us something whose intrinsic interest just holds us up for a moment, rewarding us with a little hint of the pleasure of reading even while we are wrestling with clues. For the setter to amuse us is surely a vital part of crossword composition.
It was on solving a couple of the undefined entries that I realised what the puzzle was about: Day 20 was the clincher, but I had got it from Day 10, at which point I saw the ‘order of the phoenix’ alluded to above.
That did not prevent Day 26 from giving a nice smile (something from which the late and excellent Mr Rickman had to abstain on screen).
The Easter Egg carries a serious point perhaps: Potter himself is ridiculed for keeping ‘EXPELLIARMUS’ as his go-to defensive spell, but perhaps in the longest of runs there is no solution to the ambition of nakedly aggressive tyrants but disarmament? Unfortunately, that is unlikely to come about any time soon: quite the reverse.
Which leaves me to comment on Frank Paul’s lovely clue, which, as so often, I have only just worked out! Your reviewer and picture-clues enjoy something of the relationship between Arthur Weasley and Muggle technology—love, admiration, but too often incomprehension. I believe this example of an analogy can be expressed as GOOSE : GEESE :: NOOSE : NIECE.
Thank you, Tramp and Rikki: it was a nicely thematic grid, and a decorative show for the kitchen! I enjoyed it very much, solved it in one sitting, which surprised me, and made me think that I will go back to the books at some future point. Now I have put enough Dark Marks on the screen, and I feel the effects of the Veritaserum wearing off, so I must go back to my normal self—which, on this surprising June day, means reading in the sunny garden and wondering what on earth July’s might be about.
Nutmeg (Margaret Irvine) has been a marvellous setter for the 3D Calendar from 2014 until 2023. Ten years of consistent brilliance. Three of your current 3D team have had their grids clued by her: Nora (Bozzy) once, Jos (Jolt) twice and myself (Mang) thrice, including this year’s June 2023 puzzle. We are so grateful to her, and of course all the other professional setters, who give their services free to support the calendar and with it our two charities. In my conversations with her she was always very constructive, willing pretty much to take on any topic and very friendly and supportive. I remember her chuckling warmly when I suggested she clued Bozzy’s ‘knitting’ puzzle remarking that "it was nice to get a women’s subject for a change".
As a tribute to Nutmeg we shall be releasing an extra 3D crossword in either July or August. Bozzy has designed the grid and Shirley Curran, who sets for the calendar as Curmudgeon, has clued it.
Shirley, who was, along with Nutmeg and Arachne, a member of that small group of professional lady setters (all of them regulars for the calendar), has written, with input from Enigmatist and Vagans (a friend of both Shirley and Nutmeg) the following tribute to Nutmeg.
We met her twice - once at Doc's birthday party and the second time at a gathering for the awarding of the annual Inquisitor of the Year shield. I remember how she was like a magnet. Just about everyone there, on hearing that she was there, longed to be introduced because we all regarded her crossword setting as top class. She was surrounded by admirers from start to finish. I think she was a favourite setter for enormous numbers of solvers, both for her delightful themes in the thematic crosswords (a favourite of mine appeared in 2013 in the Magpie— called Porkies—and it used the theme 'The more he looked, the more Piglet wasn't there'—referring to Pooh) and for her gifted clues. She was many people's favourite Guardian setter. Ifor said to me "Wasn't she the one who wrote that wonderful clue 'One is so tired of editors' (SO TIRED*)?"
She and I communicated quite a lot but mainly just to welcome each other's crosswords as they appeared—in the Magpie or Listener, say. She would send a few warm, congratulatory words and knowing how 'good' she was, I would prompt her to compile for the ladies' weeks and the 3D Calendar Puzzles series and she did so readily despite a fairly heavy compiling schedule.
A good church friend of Nutmeg’s writes: “I was very sad to hear that ‘Nutmeg’ aka Margaret had died. I was in touch with her when I started setting as I am a poor maker of grids and wanted to know if I could crib and alter one of hers. It turned out that we had quite a bit in common, both being church folk with (amazingly) some common acquaintances, and—she confessed—both preferring clueing to gridding, so that a number of hers also began life elsewhere. She of course was an acknowledged clue-mistress and she signed off by saying, perfectly, that 'Basically I'm trying to entertain rather than baffle, and aim at providing the type of clue that I appreciate as a solver.’ We certainly did appreciate her puzzles and were well entertained by them. May she rest in peace and rise in glory".
Oh Margaret, how we shall miss you!
Upcoming deadlines
Entries for the July puzzle by Enigmatist and etc are due byJuly 31.
