Results of the 2022 World Championship and RPM Trophy will be revealed in a separate newsletter later this month.
Review of the January 2023 3D crossword
Clues by Vlad and Grid by Calluna
Theme:Last of the Summer Wine pilot TV episode
The winner of the January puzzle is Ray Gallantree of Chelmsford.
A New Year, a new (and may I say beautiful) Calendar, and a welcome to new solvers with a puzzle by a fresh grid designer and the rightly respected and redoubtable Vlad.
Graham Fox’s highly thematic photograph sets the pattern for a year of sumptuous colouring: here I detect an appropriate touch of nostalgia in this painterly image.
When I sat next to half of Calluna at the 2021 Calendar’s Prizes Lunch, I had no idea of the full extent of this composing team’s expertise and originality. Solvers can be delighted that there’s more to come, while this grid was for me a most welcome innovation. 9x5x5 gives a satisfying proportion to the page: no straining to see the cells, and an elegant layout which will make this page most welcome on my kitchen wall in the least attractive of months.
Nine-letter words are plentiful and varied, as the devisers of Countdown anticipated all those years ago, and with this theme the grid worked perfectly. HOLMFIRTH, the fascinating SIMMONITE and NORA BATTY (in administrative or perhaps Magyar form) satisfyingly framed the subject-matter. Compo, Clegg and Foggy (no room for the others, but you can’t have everything, and it’s with that trio that I remember the series, comforting Sunday-night watching in the 1980s, staving off the return to work the next day) fitted in beautifully.
My first clue solved was CREPUSCLE, though I had to check in Chambers that such a spelling was acceptable — of course it was, though I’d never seen it before. That shock to the system over, Vlad’s tougher challenges awaited. He had saved up a beauty for the central thematic Day 18, which gives no inkling of what is about to be revealed. Roy Clarke’s affectionate, astonishingly inventive and consistent evocations of character are well described. From that point, the six thematics should have become much easier. Vlad shows his great skill in composing such an economical and appropriate clue for the wonderful Bill Owen’s character COMPO SIMMONITE, while the other characters’ clues have a satisfying consistency about them.
There are a handful of easy clues to help us along: EDITING, NAIVE, SISAL and UNTIE come into that bracket. This was well judged by Vlad. Without those, I think I would have struggled with the harder ones, as there are a few relatively obscure words here. It was CUISH which caused me the most difficulty, and, despite having set Judd-based clues myself, I sadly didn’t manage to get Donald out of my mind, so that the parsing of that clue caused me serious trouble until disgracefully recently: that is code for ‘just now’! I am still in doubt as to the exact workings of CLEGG and RETRO, but maybe they will come to me before the Newsletter makes all clear.
Did Calluna have a stroke of luck with LILANGENI, or was the grid plan Eswatini-ready from the start? I was too stuck trying to think of Italian mathematicians who weren’t Leonardo of Pisa to be helped by Frank Paul’s delightful visual clue, and feel about integrals rather as the uninitiated tend to feel about 3D Cryptics. HALFEN, GUIRO, TWEEL and SHOYU were sympathetically clued — thank goodness! A little word here for the lovely clue for RETAILERS, which seemed to dip into Roy Clarke’s other famous creation with Arkwright, Granville and Gladys Emmanuel.
The Easter Egg was an enjoyable one to work out, and having confirmed that the invaluable YouTube stocks it, I shall have a look later. Familiarity in this sort of case breeding affection rather than contempt, I expect that will be a half-hour delightfully spent, even if first editions can be a bit rough around the edges.
Thank you, Vlad and Calluna, for starting the year in a way that is so much more promising than one of those three dear old blokes’ ingenious plans.
