Phi Crosswords

For the past week or so it has been possible to get out and about a little more, and I have even driven a few score kilometres one day.  This has rather distracted me from the blog.  It looks as though we will be at this level for a few weeks yet, as it is ascertained that the virus has been eradicated.  Things already look good, which means we have the siren voices already demanding a return to full economic activity.  It remains to be seen whether there will be a flurry of new infections after this holiday weekend (which shows every likelihood of the resumption of widespread travel) and thus whether, like France and South Korea, some further restrictions will need to be reimposed.  Personally I will try to remain at Level 2 economic activity if not Level 3) – it’s just good economics.

Though it has its oddities.  I think I have already mentioned the sudden reactivation of the remote control to my garage door which had not worked properly for some 18 months or so, only to burst into life under lockdown during levels 4 and 3, and stop again the day Level 2 was announced.  Marjorie’s remote has worked perfectly throughout, so the smart suggestion proffered me (that there was a local business resuming activity and hence also resuming emitting a blocking frequency) has to remain moot.

The crisis also prompted my employers to scurry round and find ways for people to work at home (much overdue, but also done at remarkable speed when it did occur).  I now have a second laptop connected to my work computer.  It is most provoking that the keyboard on that machine has the ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Fn’ keys swapped in comparison to my own laptop.  I mean, really?

It looks as though post may be resuming – I gather my last four Listener entries, posted at weekly intervals, arrived all at once on the same day last week.  I resumed posting as we can now buy stamps – remarkably the Post Office is still happily selling the 2019 Christmas stamps, of which clearly far too many were printed.  But I get 10 for the price of 9…

Level 2 also means ‘track and trace’ – every shop you enter requires you to sign in and sanitise your hands.  In that order, in my case, as my hands seem to be getting resistant to the sanitiser and it takes more and more rubbing.  My hands turn pink, and I start counting my fingerprints.  It’s not much better trying to do it electronically (unless you like dropping and then wiping your phone).  There are about six or seven different systems using QR codes you point your smartphone camera at.  But who wants six or seven apps doing the same thing on your phone – I’ve already lost track of one.  It’s very hard to see how this wonder of economic competition supports the delivery of comprehensive tracing.

I also ended up with an album called Covid-19 on my iPad.  One of my guilty pleasures is the group called The Tiger Lillies, who hark back to the sort of savage satirical singing associated with Weimar Berlin, only with a lead singer, Martin Jacques, who has an extraordinary voice, part wheedling, part threatening, generally falsetto.  Their back catalogue includes discs relating to Struwwelpeter, Edward Gorey and Wozzeck, so they’re an eclectic bunch.  They have been unable to tour and sell CDs so have resorted to at-home recording and online marketing (in this case, Bandcamp).  It is worth remembering that many performers will be in the same boat, so you may want to support your favourites via online purchases.

Six hundred words and not a mention of crosswords, so I’d better remedy that.  I recently read the astonishing novel The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, which tells of the struggles of a child prodigy to identify his father.  It ranges over astronomy, aerodynamics, linguistics and maths, and there are pages in Inuit and Japanese.  At one point, the hero goes round the Circle Line to complete the Independent crossword – I assumed that was one of mine…  Not the one I put up today (which postdates the events of the novel) but it is one that has been mentioned in a book.  The puzzle is from late 2012.

Meanwhile my puzzles in early June are simply the regular Independent Friday appearances, though it remains possible that Kcit may appear in the Toughie series before I reappear in a couple of weeks.

New Zealand may be about to move to the next level down, although that will make little difference to my routine, as public transport will still be heavily restricted as to the numbers carried (essentially about 43% of normal), so boarding a train this far out from Wellington will be a fool’s errand.  They haven’t got double the numbers of buses waiting in some vehicular cache, so if I do go in it will be very early and by car.  But a mighty effort has been made and I have remote access, which suffices for most things, and Zoom does a lot of the rest.

It is a bit odd to have a dead bus parked down our street.  It’s been there a week, neatly parked at our nearest bus-stop (which must infuriate the drivers operating the service).  It has an ad on the side that says “Nice to see you here again” – it’s one of those ads from an agency that runs ads for the sides of buses, trying to persuade you to advertise there – which seems appropriate, at least.  (Perhaps it’s not really dead – I mean, it’s not lying on its back with its wheels in the air.)

Not perhaps the oddest thing about lockdown from our observation.  We have an electrically operated garage door, with a remote device – press a button and the door opens or shuts, startling nearby cats and birds.  My device stopped working about a year ago – first it wouldn’t work occasionally, then more frequently, then it only worked once every week or so, then once a month.  I kept pointing it hopefully and getting nowhere.

Until lockdown level 4 when it started to work every time, ditto all through level 3 – but the day details of level 2 were announced it stopped dead again.  I’m thinking of having it tested for coronavirus.

I have found a puzzle from July 2014 for today’s upload.  I don’t have a solution grid to hand but there’s link to the relevant fifteensquared blog.  As for forthcoming puzzles, there’s a Pedro Quick Cryptic in The Times on Monday 11 June, after which it’s the usual Friday Independents only for a bit.

Once the wind and the rain set in, it’s almost a pleasure not to leave the house – and the fact we have a delivery later this afternoon merely brings to mind my late and esteemed colleague, Schadenfreude.

So no real distraction from getting up today’s puzzle (a Beelzebub from 2015) other than a little run of completed puzzles to send off to various editors.  And hence the next in the series now need to have grids generated.  Still, if it stays like this, I might even get a Times Jumbo finished.

Which would replace the one coming up next week on Saturday 9 May.  To which date my weekly Independent puzzle has also been shifted (from its usual Friday – naught to do with me, squire; ask whoever’s appearing on the Friday), thus depriving me of a trio of appearances on consecutive days starting with a Toughie on Thursday 7 May.  There’s also a Times Quick from Pedro on Monday 11 May – all thick and fast that weekend. 

I hope to find time to get another puzzle up next weekend, even as New Zealand edges out of lockdown and work starts to – well, start.

Slightly later this weekend, but yesterday here in the Hutt Valley was so unexpectedly summery that a lot of stuff was put on hold till today – a national holiday to mark Anzac Day (which fell on Saturday).  We were able to take our bubble for a walk, spend some time in the garden and even dine alfresco, which is pretty remarkable for so late in autumn.  Today is fairly overcast (it would be a stretch to say what sun there is forms ‘intervals’) and there’s an intermittent mild gale.

Tomorrow sees a slight lifting of our lockdown, though there won’t be an immediate effect in our case.  I’ll still be working from home, but we can now order takeaways.  And we can resume having the house painted – we’ve had one wall exposed to the elements for a month, which is another reason to be grateful for the stretch of benign weather.

I shall continue to try to put up a weekly puzzle for a while.  The new one this week comes from the Inquisitor series just before Christmas 2014.  It is within the fifteensquared period so there’s a blog there, but, as always, please have a go at the puzzle first!

At the same time, I’m going to pre-empt the reading of the blog to note that Find the Word was considered quite hard.  That’s also been the case with my most recent Inquisitor Transfer of Power and also my current Magpie puzzle Spectacular.  This last is still current but it carries a Magpie D grade so I think I can safely note it has been marked already as hard, whatever further anecdotal comment has reached me.

I don’t try to make puzzles hard, but some of them turn out that way.  The two puzzles of April 2020 were finished at different times and then passed through different editorial processes, which means that they didn’t both originate in a period when I was thinking I should be tougher than usual.

But I rather like the idea that a solver cannot be 100% certain of the ride they’re going to have when they see one of my puzzles.  That seems somehow to be more a part of the game between setter and solver – you can imagine solvers saying “Oh, it’s only X – too easy/hard for me to engage with”.  Whereas the fact that you don’t know what sort of puzzle you’re going to get from a particular setter  might be an inducement to get stuck in.

What makes a puzzle hard?  One clear point is a Carte Blanche element.  The 2014 puzzle presents itself as a Carte Blanche with the clues not in the right order, but with a twist that still allows you to make some progress, amid a lot of cold solving.  Spectacular has some grid bars, but remains effectively a Carte Blanche, and the preamble carefully avoids the S word.  Anything, therefore, that requires solvers to solve a lot of clues without grid feedback is going to be on the tough side.  I don’t always like that sort of content, but sometimes you look at an idea and something like that has to be adopted.  (See the forthcoming blog on Spectacular, probably next weekend.)

Removing word lengths is another indicator of added difficulty – something is going on, and you’re being kept in the dark.  (A similar practice is that of retaining answer lengths showing a discrepancy with the entries in the grid – and not telling the solver!  I’ve fallen foul of that often enough to – mostly- remember to do a spot check of bracketed numbers,)  

A particularly difficult gimmick may see one word clued and a companion word entered: clue HANSEL, enter GRETEL; clue WISE, enter MORECAMBE.  That can rapidly make a puzzle very difficult indeed if the gimmick covers too many entries as there is an extra step between clue and entry.

In the clues, a simple way to increase difficulty is to forgo anagrams – they’re often quite easy to spot, and they offer an easy way in.  It’s generally considered poor form to have an excessive number of anagrams in a puzzle, and many editors set a limit.  My practice of writing many clues in longhand, and in smallish batches of half-a-dozen clues from a given puzzle at a time, means that I frequently do not have an overview of the total numbers, and thus I tend to shy away from them as a way of ensuring I don’t go beyond the limit and have a few spare to use to make any editorial amendments if requested.  I imagine if I was the sort of setter to sit down and work straight through a puzzle I might take a different view – but I tend to advance several puzzles at once.

However difficult it may be the puzzle coming up this week stands in solitary splendour on May Day in the Independent.