|
Clues by Pickles and Grid by Gin
Theme: A tribute to our yearly calendar
The winner of the December puzzle is Andrew Wyss of Leeds.
This was a witty puzzle to finish the year, and we may surely be permitted to blow our own trumpets once in a while. Both Gin and Pickles may in places be felt to be courting controversy; Frank Paul and Alan Tunnicliffe too, perhaps?
Someone much cleverer than your reviewer will have seen, earlier than he did, the point of the wonderful picture by Mr Tunnicliffe: it is a fox, to celebrate the supplier of most of our gorgeous calendar pictures, Graham of that name. Whether the sorely-tried chicken-rearing community — my father always kept twelve, and we had charts of laying statistics on the kitchen cabinet door for over thirty years — and the rabbit-owners will be happy to see the fox staring them out with just a suspicion of a drool, I am not sure.
And that sets the theme for the puzzle: it is an inward-looking — though celebratory, not navel-gazing — piece of crossword craft. We are looking at ourselves trying to outfox the setter, who is looking greedily at us. Something close to us is being celebrated. Did we look anxiously around and behind us? Maybe that was just me…
Solving begins with the description of the CALENDAR as ‘vague and clear’ — I love the misleading italics, though some may not — and continues with Pickles’s delightful self-mocking Day 3 for CLUED. To link CLUED with the game Cluedo and to proclaim his own guilt is something which seems obvious in retrospect, but was beautifully found.
We then get a series of clues referring to setters and elements of the Calendar’s charitable aims, culminating in the clue for SIRIUS. Brilliant star indeed, though some of the Ancients, had they been tackling his puzzles, might have felt he qualified rather as a planet, following his interesting and unruly path through the heavens…
Am I imagining too much, or is it the continuation of this theme that sees the ‘Easter Egg’ required by the rubric to be… just that: EASTER EGG, nicely concealed at 12ac and 14d? I believe this last self-reference foxed a few solvers. I hope they had a think and another look, and reasoned perhaps in this way: ‘This grid is odd in places. Why is the back rank of the top layer so strange, and why has Gin made an up-word start at 23, not 34? And why are we told to look for relevant solution locations instead of looking for Easter Eggs per se? These people are usually quite clear when they ask for things, so why…’ I am reminded of the Tolkien characters looking for the magically hidden entrance to the Mines of Moria, and wondering, as their enemies came ever closer, what was meant by “Speak, Friend, and enter”. Of course, it is one final piece of self-reference.
My favourite clues are those for RECORDS — beautifully self-referential and respectful, and a nod to the much-missed original of the RPM Trophy; OGLED (it just made me laugh); the very neat &lit clue for SHAKO; the undeniably true one for SISAL; and that for RED NOSE DAY with its excellent play on the word comic.
Our Turkish supporters may be or may not be outraged to see their President turned into Plastic Sam by Frank Paul’s drawing, but the clue to which it related was a splendid example of the Cryptic Definition: the phrase a ‘groaning board’ (which the online site The Word Detective suggests is 17th-century in origin) gives a lovely picture of those directors round their table having a good old moan, when it is the process of what makes a Fat Cat which is the allusion. And it is one of those strange pieces of linguistic history (see guinea-pig, canary etc.) that the American bird with which our boards have often GROANED at this time of year should have been given the name of Mr Erdoğan’s country: it’s no wonder that his government is keen to insist on Türkiye instead.
So this was an unusual, thought-provoking, varied and amusing puzzle. Not something we should do too often, perhaps, but a satisfying way to round off the year.
AGC
Grid Solution
|
