Phi Crosswords

I promised another favourite puzzle from a single weekend, and here it is.  Calling it a second favourite is a temporal ranking only!  As I said last time, setters can be conflicted about identifying puzzles as favourites.  But it has to be said that coming up with this idea, and steering it through creation to publication was immensely satisfying.  It is, be warned, a very tough puzzle, which may be why there were few comments at the fifteensquared blog.  But they are very satisfying comments – and the blogger has done a damn sight better solution grid than I have!  My own setter’s blog (with photos) is here.

Recommendations of the week: do not contract a bad cold and simultaneously reactivate an old back injury.  It makes for a very depressing week.  On the brighter side, you realise that ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ may have other interpretations.  

Also on the bright side: the receipt of a letter that clearly contained a cheque.  A sterling cheque, sent in a letter which cost £1.25 (that’s a pound sign, in case it doesn’t make it through to the published page) – to the value of one penny.  It’s not even as if anyone asked me for my thoughts on this.  The letter came with an “Our Ref” that was also quite remarkable (on the assumption that the original characters represent people’s names, I am anonymising things somewhat; heck, even the reference numbers are anonymised):

ABC/DEF/GHI/JKL/MNO/PQRST/UVW / 022255-4 /  / 6291.

More than a pennyworth of ink just printing that I shouldn’t wonder.

Someone has noted what I hope is only the occasional typo, and has asked if I want to be told about them. And the answer is yes.  I type a lot of these in from paper copies and while my spelling hasn’t deteriorated over the years, the ability to hit the right keys at the speed I type is not as good as it was.  I hope I spot the red-underlined stuff (ignoring the depredations of an American spellchecker, natch – cheque, ha!), but other things slip through (one that was spotted was ‘talking’ for ‘taking’, for example).  So please let me know and I’ll get round to updating things, probably in tandem with one of these blogs.  The same goes for any dodgy links – I had a page link to itself the other week, which someone kindly pointed out.

Upcoming puzzle: a quiet start to the month, though there’s a Times puzzle on Monday 4 November.  Proofs came in this week for an Inquisitor later in November and an Enigmatic Variations not too long before Christmas – more on those as they draw nearer.

There’s something to be said for blocking the question “Which is the favourite of your puzzles?” with the same sort of response that parents have to “Which is your favourite child?”.  There isn’t a pecking order, you want to say.  And yet there is, of course – just as there often is in the parent-child relationship.

More pleasant is the way you stumble on a puzzle and recall it fondly – it briefly is a favourite, but it never supplants others.  The new puzzle today is one such – glancing through a list of titles, this one sprang out at me, and I thought it was worth sharing.  And when I opened the boxfile to get it ready for use, there, below it, published the very next day, was a further favourite, which I will set up next time.  That was a good weekend!

The puzzle today is This House Believes… from the Inquisitor series (I’ve reinstated here the ellipsis I feel the title needs!).  It exploits an oddity in the English language which only became more pronounced the more I collected examples.  And, yes, it does have two squares already filled in, in an already smaller-then-usual grid – what more could you want?  A bigger puzzle?  That’ll be next time…

As always with more recent puzzles, there is supplementary material available: the fifteensquared blog and even a setter’s blog elsewhere on this site.

Speaking of setter’s blogs, there’s one up for the recent Enigmatic Variations puzzle Arrival.

Between now and next time Pedro produces a Times Quick Cryptic and Kcit a Toughie, both on Thursday 24 October.

This is the time of year I find myself setting seasonal puzzle, so that editors have them in stock for December.  It feels a bit odd to be considering such themes just now (though the decorations are in the shops), but that’s the way it is.  There’s a special puzzle, done by a trio of regulars (and my first collaboration with Nutmeg), in the Church Times, and I’ve just completed the puzzle for the BBC Music Magazine (which hadn’t, for various reasons, to be too Christmassy this year).  Coming up is the puzzle for pre-Christmas week in the Independent.  The weather, obligingly, has turned into wind and rain, with snow showers on the Southern Alps, though, to be fair, that’s fairly typical for October.  (Spring is the most depressing NZ season, I fear, promising much and delivering little.)

Off to the opera tonight (The Turn of the Screw), so it seems a good moment to offer up a musical crossword from the BBC Music Magazine.  I commented last time that having more recent crosswords allowed me to point you at solving blogs, so for the next few updates I’m pottering around in late 2014 and early to mid 2015.  That period was chosen because I stumbled on an old Inquisitor (well, not so old…) and thought I would share it with you next time.

Before that there will be a Times puzzle on 16 October, and possibly a Church Times puzzle on 18 October (the proof I received said 15 October, and that seems the likeliest typo!).  And don’t forget tomorrow’s Enigmatic Variations.

The puzzle this week is another daily puzzle from The Independent.  I see I have chosen a few recently from the same boxfile, so it is time for me to choose a new one and move to a different year.  I shall look on it as a form of spring-cleaning, which is a nice thought on the weekend we had our first barbecue of the new season.  The clouds have rolled in since, but we’ve salvaged the strawberry bed.

The good thing about recent puzzles is that I can refer you to a fifteensquared blog.  Do make use of this – you might not only be the one stuck on a clue.   There are blogs for other puzzles as well: see Big Dave in the blogroll for Telegraph puzzles, for example.  I seem to have failed to include Times for the Times, so here’s the link, and I’ll do something under the hood before next time.

I am very pleased to report that the Prawn Underbelly burger (see here) won the Supreme Burger award for 2019, so we went back and had it again.  It’s still not set to appear in a crossword, though.

Looking ahead, there’s a Kcit Toughie coming up next Thursday 26 September and a Pedro Times Quick Cryptic on Wednesday 2 October.  The next update in a fortnight will coincide with a Kcit Enigmatic Variations puzzle (the one that clashed with The Year Continues, as mentioned last time).

Now I rwally must get a grid done while the mem-sahib is out…