Theme: George Harrison (whose 80th birthday would have been on 25 February 2023)
The winner of the February puzzle is Steve Trollope of South Australia.
Your hitherto faultless reviewer sadly confesses a failure. Not that I didn’t solve the puzzle, but I had to ask for help with the Easter Eggs. The failure was of a type very familiar to my wife, who is often shocked at my inability to see, say, cream in the fridge when it is disguised by a container of an unexpected colour. So I had already considered and rejected Something — which my research had already shown me to be a George Harrison song — because I couldn’t see, after several sweeps, THING — despite having included it in Day 39. Pathetic, and probably pathological.
The other Easter Egg I didn’t manage to find in my research. Puck wants solvers, indeed!
However, my own shortcomings must not detract from the excellence of the grid and Puck’s clues. Clueing something as long as a song title without straining the edges of the calendar box is a great art: but then Puck has always been a virtuoso of wit and phrasing. I loved SURE OF, which works so well because the word redevelopment is such a well-selected anagram indicator — firstly because it does indeed feature the letter E four times, and then also because ‘in redevelopment’ seems to take us away from cryptic solving and into urbanism or some other field. MY SWEET LORD includes a classic misdirection technique, where what appear to be verb and object ‘to judge pudding’ are in fact to be read as part of different phrases.
ERNIE featured a misdirection of a different kind: we were cajoled into imagining that Mr Clapton was referred to, while it had to be the genius of comic timing and intonation Eric Morecambe. HERE COMES THE SUN was another which brought a mixture of laughter and almost resentment at having been tricked. FLY economically brought together two different meanings into a spurious football reference. USA TODAY was beautifully succinct.
There were probably several references in clues which went over my head, but quite properly, without being an expert on the theme I was able to complete the grid. This also is a compliment to Puck, who expertly treads the divide between obscurity and giving everything away.
I should have been an expert on WOMAD, I suppose, since it used to take place in the big hall at Crinnis, very near where I used to live — but I never attended. That beach I associate with the bits of ocean-borne phosphorescence which used to wash up there, rather than these other glittering performers.
Now two more confessions of failure: I did not solve Frank Paul’s visual clue, nor did I confidently identify the seascape location. It could be ‘Here Comes the Sun’ perhaps, but I wondered if George H was associated with some specific seaboard location…
I really like XAM’s grid. Firstly, the Torus manages to provide variety with its round setting while maintaining a good average entry length. Unlike a sphere, which virtually obliges the use of some very short words (see December!), in a torus — basically an infinite cylinder — there is much more continuity of lights. And XAM filled them most expertly. The two bars were far fewer than one might have imagined necessary in view of the enormous number of thematic expressions, and the ‘extra’ cells, for me, did not impinge. Of course it was big - slightly inconvenient to have to keep consulting the back page of the calendar - so perhaps a six-dialled torus might be recommended for future designers. However, it provided a lot of entertainment, not a little head-scratching, and scope for much Puckishness.
HARRISON filled those eight dial centres most satisfactorily, though the clue to that central character was one of the hardest - George has on, round RRI, not any Biblical reference! Is it a coincidence that Puck leads us up the garden path with what seems to be NO SIR ‘on the contrary’? I suspect not.
