Some Christmas puzzles are already appearing, so this week I am putting up one of my own – an Independent daily from 2010.  By chance, it’s another Independent puzzle with a preamble, but I’m not making a habit of it, honestly.

I have a couple of seasonal puzzles in the offing, though next Friday’s Independent may not have an immediately apparent seasonality, even though it is very precise.  The same day (21 December) sees Church Times puzzle No. 1,500, which is also seasonal (I know, I did the grid), and commemorates puzzle no. 1 in the paper in 1989 (also a Christmas puzzle) by uniting the first four setters in a collaborative effort (after 30 years, we’re all still around!).  I debuted with No. 2.  Don Manley, the editor, has an article in the current issue about the genesis of the puzzle.

There are two new setter’s blogs, for Magpie’s Perversity and The Listener’s Gallery.

And that must be that for now: this weekend sees the emailing of the APEX 2018 puzzle, and I need to get on with that.  Regualr recipients, keep an eye on your inboxes.  But there will be an additional post next week with a (seasonal, of course) puzzle set specifically for the site.

In the Southern Hemisphere at least.  Radio NZ Concert obligingly played Vivaldi’s seasonal concerto yesterday, as they do every December 1st, because that’s when summer starts, whatever the weather says (and a thunderstorm today certainly says something, particularly as it took out the power for an hour).

But our garden is flourishing, and in particular our flax plants.  After a couple of barren years, there is a distinct burgeoning, and our largest has outdone itself (photo taken on a day that was very bright but cloudy to boot):

I look up at those and think it’s about 8 feet, but 10 may be nearer the mark.  If I hear it walking toward the house rattling I’ll know the spirit of John Wyndham still lives.

With Christmas on the horizon, I thought I’d put up a Christmassy puzzle this time: it’s from the Christmas issue of the BBC Music Magazine for 2010.  I’m also sending out the postal copies of the APEX puzzle this weekend (fractionally after the last posting date for the UK, which creeps ever earlier), with the electronic circulation to follow in a couple of weeks.  There will be a special Christmas puzzle here on the weekend before the event itself. 

I have also contributed to the special Church Times Christmas puzzle that weekend before Christmas, which happens to be number 1500 in the series as well.  Don Manley will be reviving puzzle No. 1 with, I believe, an article about the puzzle’s 30 years, in the issue a week earlier.

Before that there’s a Times Quick Cryptic on 7 December, though there may also be a Toughie sometime before the next update.  And this year’s BBC Music Magazine Christmas puzzle should be out any day soon.

It’s not often I have to rearrange things to fit in the crosswording, but this has been a busy week, with the result that this is going up earlier than usual.

So, meet Munro.

Munro appears every day in The Dominion Post, Wellington’s newspaper.  He’s drawn by Sharon Murdoch, who takes one clue from the adjacent definition-only crossword, and turns out a mini-cartoon.  As with so many definition clues, you can’t always be sure of the answer from just the clue, so the book does give the solutions at the end.  The book is marked Vol. 1 and Munro is certainly appearing on a daily basis.  I can’t find him on the DomPost website, so you may just have to order him from the local craft bookshop Minerva.

Also in books this week is

This arrived in the post (along with volume 22 of its larger cousin) – The Times is very generous about sending its setters copies.  There are definitely Pedro puzzles in this – haven’t perused its big brother enough yet.  And it’s not just puzzle books – these two came with a free copy of The White Darkness by David Grann.  Grann is one of the best New Yorker writers, and this tale of an Englishman who set out to cross Antarctica solo is excellent, and I still recall it from its appearance earlier in the year.  I may end up buying Killers of the Flower Moon yet.

There’s more – there’s a new setter’s blog up on the site, covering The Magic of Opera from the Inquisitor series a few weeks ago.  And the immediate cause of the rearrangement of things to accommodate crosswording is a fast turn-round of proofs.  Things are not 100% confirmed, but there should be Kcit puzzle in the Enigmatic Variations series on Sunday 18 November.

The new puzzle on the site this time round is one from the Independent in December 2012.  It may have some thematic links to some of the material mentioned above – I couldn’t possibly comment…

The 10,000th Independent puzzle appeared this week, on 31 October, and I was very pleased to have been asked to produce it.  Mike Hutchinson first raised the possibility a little over a year ago, and I immediately sat down and calculated the date (and came up with 24 October…), and put the idea to one side for the subconscious to work on.

One concept was for the clueing to be shared between myself as (probably) the longest-serving Independent setter and whoever was the most recent addition to the roster.  That fell through – no particular reason – it just didn’t come to pass.  And it still left the question of what was to be done with the grid.

A special puzzle such as this has a few constraints.  I recently put up an Independent puzzle from 2011 which had a preamble, an option not available now, as the webpage template won’t accept it.  So there was no opportunity to give instructions.  Any Nina had to be for discovery and could not be pointed to – which is fair enough: the puzzle has to be solved by people for whom puzzle 10,000 is no different from puzzle 7,839, in much the same way that you wouldn’t expect the A500 to be that different a road from the A397.

I toyed for some time with an observation that both M and K had five vertices, so you could have an M sketched out by five Ks and vice versa.  But who would ever see that?  And how many thousands would that represent, anyway?  I also rejected the idea of an acrostic as there was again the question of drawing people’s attention to it (first two answers: READ ACROSTIC, perhaps?).  

I settled on the top and bottom rows of Ks, and side columns of Ms as they would be spotted by those on the look-out for something, while not distracting those not on the look-out for anything but a crossword puzzle.  There are no Ms or Ks elsewhere in the solution grid.  The grid design that emerged gave me the opportunity to sneak in TENTH (O U) SANDS and I was pleased to see that someone at fifteensquared spotted it.

The appearance of the puzzle was overshadowed by the passing of Dac (Dave Crossland) last weekend after a tussle with cancer.  Dac was the regular Wednesday Independent setter, so the 10,000th actually fell into his allotted place.  I remember when I was starting to solve regularly that he contributed to a series of crossword books published by Hamlyn under his pseudonym Smokey.  I also encountered his puzzles in a couple of desk diaries (which may have been produced by Collins) with a week-to-a-page layout recto facing a puzzle verso.  Once a month there would be a themed puzzle (e.g. Christmas) but mostly they were just solid daily newspaper style puzzles, ideal for solving and studying.

However, I only met him once, after a Times competition day, I think.  He did subsequently e-mail me out of the blue to say how much he had enjoyed an Inquisitor puzzle (with such a testimonial I could hardly refrain from putting it up when I was adding to this site).  A great loss to the cruciverbal world.

It has been a busy week of proofs with the abrupt appearance of an Inquisitor puzzle on 3 November, and a Toughie on 8 November.  And the set that arrived just as I was about to type this blog adumbrates a Phi Listener on 24 November.

And the puzzle this time round is another of my unpublished Beelzebubs.  Anyone who is wondering just how many of them I have is merely echoing my own thoughts!

Having spent some time typing up a BBC Music Magazine puzzle, I discover it’s one I already have up on the site, which tells me I’m getting some part of the editorial process wrong.  I seem not to have fully connected it to its BBC page, so that’s rectified, at least.  It was the May 2011 puzzle.

It was the BBC I was going to start with, anyway.  As I note on the BBC puzzles page, the magazine offers good value for subscribing to the paper edition, as you get a CD of pieces every month.  If you get the postal delivery at all, that is – the October issue failed to appear after several weeks.  The staff at the magazine are very helpful, and sent out a replacement – which also took several weeks, before arriving on the wettest day for months.  Fortunately the BBC had put the replacement copy in a nice padded envelope, so all was well.  I have had things arrive in paper envelopes on wet days, resulting in a glossy magazine that is reduced to front cover, a single very thick glutinous mess, and back cover.

And now I’m beginning to look askance at the arrival time for the November issue (not yet unprecedented, not quite, at least).  The delay seems to go hand-in-hand with the non-appearance of the air-freighted versions at the local magazine shop, so on occasion I can’t even get a back-up there.

It also makes you wonder how my entries going the other way fare.  I make a point of having the Listener entry sealed for posting on the Monday after publication to give it the best chance to get across the miles (as it happens this coming Monday is a public holiday, so that’s one day fewer).  How many take several weeks?

Meanwhile, the reduction in the postal service in New Zealand is ongoing.  There used to be two post-boxes en route to the station – both have gone.  The post-box near work that I adopted as my next option was unavailable for several weeks after the 2016 earthquake (not, I guess, a problem for many).  And postal charges have more than doubled over the last couple of years or so.

It seems inevitable that newspaper crossword competitions will have to move to accepting online entries, yet few are doing so.  Enigmatic Variations has an email option, but that’s the only one I can bring to mind.  If the powers-that-be judge cruciverbal viability by the numbers of entries received, then we need to keep entry numbers up by all possible means (or augment these by assessing in other ways: hits on web pages, perhaps).

All of which is also a precursor to noting that I haven’t received my Listener prize from a couple of months ago…

A few changes in the pattern of publication coming up: I will be in The Independent this coming Friday as usual, but the following week sees me move to Wednesday (aka Halloween) – more of that next time.  There’s a Times Jumbo on Saturday 27 October, and I believe I am in The Magpie in November 

Let’s herald Spring with a puzzle that couldn’t now appear (though it’s only from 2011).  The new one is an Independent daily with a brief preamble.  This currently isn’t achievable with the software, which is an interesting state of affairs to be mentioned when your local IT bore gets up to drone on about how much added flexibility recent developments in technology have given the printing industry.  Or any other industry – any other stories of what you can’t do now they’ve ‘improved’ the app or the package?  A little more to come on this at the end of the month.

Wednesday 10 October gives those of you who liked the ‘compare and contrast’ questions in exams an opportunity.  I have a Times daily and a Kcit Toughie in the Daily Telegraph.  See if you can work out the interactions of constant personal and varying house styles.

Now to continue recovering from gardening…

I was musing in an email about not remembering how your own clues work after about – oh – two weeks, shall we say.  On a larger scale is entirely forgetting puzzle themes.  I’m not sure, if I hadn’t found it in my own files, I would have claimed the new one this time as my own.  It doesn’t quite feel like an idea I would have had, though I do like the way I did it.  From my own standpoint I was intrigued to see that I had kept an erroneous copy.  At some point I had made a change – minor, but necessitating two new words at 1 across and down, and I had retained the old grid.  That has been rectified.

It’s an Enigmatic Variations from 2011 this time, and I must admit I have a new EV grid hankering to be composed, as well as an IQ, so this will be a brief update. 

I regularly recommend the Wall Street Journal puzzle site usually for the monthly Cox and Rathvon cryptic.  But it’s worth looking at some of the other offerings.  This week saw the Saturday US-style puzzle themed around cartoons (safe to say that, as the thematic clues gave it away), with the byline Gary Larson.  Hmm – I knew he’d given up The Far Side, so is this a new departure.  Or perhaps an over-confident pseudonym user?

What have we coming up?  There’s a Church Times on Friday 28 September, as well as the usual Independent daily, and Pedro appears in the Times Quick Cryptic slot on 2 October.  There’ll also be a setter’s blog on Phase Shift appearing in the course of this week.

I missed an update due to a busy weekend followed by a bad attack of some viral thing or other (I can recommend not fainting from a standing position, btw).  You end up spending time writing clues, which opens you up to the odd things that are the dictionaries we use.

It’s fair to say that they are characters in themselves – while much is made of Chambers’ fondness for archaic Scottish words and eccentric definitions, you shouldn’t overlook the styles of ODE and Collins (however much my iPad apps for these tend to iron out differences).  It is often useful  to cross-refer, particularly if you suspect Chambers may be ploughing its own furrow.  Editors suggest this but it doesn’t always resolve matters.  Here’s what I stumbled on this week, trying to clue PIPPIN:

Chambers:

1. Something or someone especially nice, attractive, good, etc (old slang)

Now what one person considers old slang another may still use – no one dictionary, ultimately, can be the arbiter.  What does ODE say?

ODE:

I was under the impression it was quite specifically English, though it seems to have graduated to current, at least, so this sent me scurrying to Collins:

Collins: 

Nothing in this line at all.  I went with the original clue in the end.  It does make it hard to resort to the dictionary on occasions, but I suppose we must.  There was the tale that C once misprinted the definition for ‘tutelary’ as ‘projecting’ but in only in some copies of the edition – at which point it turned up in a Misprints puzzle.  And was it ‘identify’ where the whole head-word was mislaid a few editions ago? This was before the furore the other year when highlighted words were erased through an unfortunate application of cut-and-not-paste.

We seemed to be happy to agree Chambers nods in those cases.  Other idiosyncrasies are more pernicious: I remember an editor who declined to accept S=small (Chambers had only M=medium at the time) though it was in both Collins and ODE (as was L=large) – in this instance, Chambers however perverse, was the rule.  Yet here was an everyday usage that the dictionary wasn’t capturing.  The Americans aren’t quite so precise and are readier to extract E and F from their dashboards, as well as a whole range of baseball abbreviations.  The Brits seem happier to argue that “Well, yes, it is used that way, but it’s not in my dictionary”.    

Anyway, missing an update meant I missed telling you of a Times puzzle earlier this week, but there’s a Times Quick Cryptic on 19 September (I don’t believe it is particularly dominated by the letter ar), and there’s also an Inquisitor coming up next weekend (15 September). The new puzzle this time round is from the Church Times and if you enjoy that one there’s a new one due on 28 September.

I found myself wondering about commenting on puzzles this week.  The immediate prompt was an email from another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle, followed the next day by an email from yet another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle, followed the next day by an email from still another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle.  That brought the grand total of such responses this year to – er – three.

What to make of this?  Are Listener setters being crossbred with buses?  Did the inestimable John Green send out the responses to three weeks’ puzzles all in one go?  It still doesn’t quite explain how he managed to select the three who were all going to email me.

John Green, who is indefatigable as well, collates the entries for each Listener puzzle each week.  If a solver appends comments, he either includes them, or transcribes them, adding the solver’s name and (email) address.  If a setter wishes to reply and keep the conversation going then they can.  (I’m not exactly good at that…)

So what we had here were three consecutive Listener puzzles on which I had commented (a hand-written sheet of notepaper from this company), to which JG had appended my email address (though two of the three would already have had it – and yes, I suppose I could append it myself…).  And all three wrote back.  The joys of coincidence.

I always comment on Listener puzzles I’ve solved, and rarely miss the Crossword Club – Magpie puzzles get comments scarcely at all.  The fifteensquared blogs on EV and IQ are also generally unfrequented by myself.  I’ve never quite worked out why there’s such a variation in my responses, though time clearly plays a factor.

I try to be appreciative (honest) though I do find setterly considerations creeping in when I see something that, well, I wouldn’t quite have done it that way…  That sort of comment should really be for a vetter, not a setter.  At the same time, that thought can spark an idea of my own – if that way hasn’t been used, then it’s still open for me.  The ‘Why on earth did they ever think that?’ response tends not to get a comment.  (If you fail to get a comment from me, and you expected one, then of course it’s been lost in the post…)

If you wish to comment on the Times Quick Cryptic on 14 August, or its senior cousin six days later, then you can direct them here.  There might be a Telegraph Toughie before the next formal update as well, but the warning I get of those has always been shorter than my fortnightly schedule, so I can’t always guarantee to let you know of a Pedro.

And finally the new puzzle this week is from 1990: I suddenly found myself thinking about it, and persuaded Brian Head (more inestimability and indefatigability)  of the Crossword Club to let me reprint it.  It’s Dux, from March 1990, but was actually completed three years earlier, so we’re back in the 30-year-old regime.  I will revert to the 2010-11 box next time.

When I started putting puzzles up on this site, I went through my files and extracted the first example of all puzzle series I have contributed to, and put those up over a few months.  And I missed one.

Looking today at my planned addition to the Church Times page, I realised that I have a new one in that sequence coming up just next week (advt – 3 August, to be precise) and it wouldn’t do to tread on its toes.  So I scoured the lists and I discovered that, in my intent to put up cryptic puzzles, I’d entirely overlooked the Independent Concise puzzles I did for about a year back in the mid-Nineties.  So, here is the first of those, No. 2666, from 5 May, 1995.

I doubt I’ll put many of them up, but they are an interesting sideline.  The Independent follows the pattern wherein the first two across entries form a pun.  Puns are notoriously difficult to bring off convincingly for everyone; the concise puzzles syndicated in the local paper have puns which seem to have been constructed by someone who has recently had – or who urgently needs – substantial dental work.

More annoyingly, these puzzles tended to have stipulated grid patterns.  So it was no use coming up with a pun whose components were (7,3) if there were no grids where the first two across entries were seven then three letters.  Jot down pun, flick through grid designs, swear – that was often the way things worked.

Puns are infamously considered petty in the scheme of things, but a good pun is often sublime.  Flann O’Brien’s observation about why policeman keep looking younger – ‘A thing of duty is a boy forever’ – should rock anyone’s boat.  Among the chestnuts in the concise crossword lists, my favourite is ICE AGE – EAVES.  What it must have felt like to spot that…

Beyond the top row, there are other concerns in concise puzzles.  Precision is even more valued – if your entry is _A_E, then the clue must be pretty on the button – while at the same time not being a ‘write-in’.  There should be a leavening of ‘old favourites’ (I always felt) to give the solver some gentle entry points.  Habitues of the heavily checked plain puzzles (in, say, The Puzzler magazine) will recall that such favourites were how you learned of ELEMI, and hobnobbed with EMUs on a regular basis.

US puzzles, being fully checked, offer a range of similar old friends.  I’m beginning to get some of the baseball ones (Mel Ott, anyone), and even Bobby Orr of ice-hockey fame is known to me, and that’s only the ones beginning with O.

Back to a cryptic next time.