Phi Crosswords

Being able to sit out and enjoy a meal is always one of the pleasures of summer. Being able to do so in July is something of a rarity, whatever the Northern Hemisphere may think. Doing so a week after a torrential winter storm is sort of perplexing, but we have made the most of it. There’s even a glancing reference to this sort of weather in the puzzle this week – one from the Church Times in 2011 – uncannily prescient of me, don’t you think?

Apparently, Australia is sending us another storm tomorrow, so the sudden sunshine has seen us out in the garden: mowing, despite the lawn still being too damp; and setting up a new raised bed, and equipping it with lettuces. So only a quick update today, at the start of a week with a trio of puzzles: a Times Quick cryptic on Monday 26th, a Telegraph Toughie on Thursday 29th, and the usual Friday Independent appearance (yes, there’s a Nina this week).  There’s a 15×15 Times cryptic on 5th August as well.

All being well, I shall be back in a fortnight, and I’m pondering opening the delights of my twentieth century puzzles again.

Not for the seventeenth time, I find myself sitting before WordPress with other pressing things to get on with, and no idea what I’m going to write here. Still, the fact that the puzzle I’ve just put up is an Inquisitor from 2012 that was presented without a pseudonym gives an outline of a topic. (2012 means that there is a fifteensquared blog for the puzzle; just the usual note to solve first and consult blogs after.)

I have done a number of ‘anonymous’ puzzles over the years (and there’s another currently in a pipeline somewhere).  When ideas are coming (and wouldn’t it be nice if they did that more often…) they come from all directions, and one’s own pseudonym isn’t immune. The letter Phi itself can be represented by bars in the grid (yes, there’s one like that), and it has relationships with other Greek letters and their symbolism. I’d also suggest my wn background in astronomy, though to be honest I doubt whether Phi Canis Majoris (to choose at random) would be visible without the assistance of a telescope.

Even the preceding Inquisitor I put up was anonymous, so I’m clearly on a roll with these at present. One potential difficulty is that using one’s own pseudonym as a theme requires the expectation that a solver will recognise it. That’s not really the case – ideally, one should always assume the puzzle appearing today is the first one a solver is tackling, requiring no previous knowledge. It’s not quite the same with books – you pick up Volume 6 of The Twilit Hunger Games at Hogwarts and there’s a strong chance that there is going to be some backstory you will need to assimilate. But each crossword should be a standalone experience.

I do have a concept of a sequence of puzzles, each of which is standalone. Collectively, over a period of weeks, the puzzles combine to form a meta-puzzle, for the people who come along for a ride. Like many such concepts, whenever it gets near the drawing-board it flutters gently back to the floor. But I shall keep at it – an idea I’ve been trying to grid for a couple of years now finally gelled this week, so one day, perhaps…

Only the Independent Friday puzzles coming up just at present, but there’ll be something extra to report when I reappear in a fortnight.

I have been tinkering off and on with a new puzzle in the Beelzebub series, for this website only. I have already put up a number of completed puzzles that I had ready for publication when the series ceased in 2016. I also had quite a few grids ready for clueing – I do work rather a long time ahead.

I have now completed a set of clues for the first of those and that is today’s puzzle.  There are perhaps seven more grids for me to work at – I don’t think that further new puzzles will appear in close succession, but there should be a few new ones popping up over the next few years (let’s see if I can get one done in time for Christmas). Even after that – well, it’s not that onerous to put a Beelzebub grid together!  Enjoy!

The start of July sees a little flurry of puzzles for me (though the rest of the month is fairly quiet). There’s a Pedro puzzle in the July edition of the Magpie; if you take that as appearing on July 1st, then it will be accompanied by one of my Times puzzles. The next day (which happens to be my birthday) sees the usual Friday puzzle in The Independent, but also a special puzzle in the Church Times, marking the 1611th in its series.  

This time the puzzle is from October 2011, and it’s a rather special one – my one thousandth daily cryptic for The Independent. The puzzle had to be solved in the dead-tree edition to get full value – the software for the online version simply could not cope (and, ten years of weekly puzzles on, still cannot, as far as I can tell – happy to be disabused of that opinion, though).

Milestone puzzles like this can be fun, though this one had a particular set of constraints which made clue-writing entertaining. Very recently we had PINK regathering to set Inquisitor 1,700 – I dare say there’s a good chance in two years or so that we will be back for the next century-marker. And I have my three-hundredth BBC Music Magazine puzzle coming up later in the year, and more of that at the time. 

The issue for many of these types of puzzle is much the same as for any themed puzzle – it’s important to make the thematic element sufficiently subservient that the puzzle can be solved without ever appreciating that that element is there. Funnily enough (see the fifteensquared discussion – after solving, please), the mismatch between the paper and online versions demonstrated this rather well.  Online solvers saw simply an ordinary Across/Down puzzle, and not the paper version (which is presented here).  It was a tough puzzle, though I don’t know that the differing presentations had much effect on the level of difficulty.

I suppose the Inquisitor series, being thematic throughout, suffers this rather less – certainly 1700 was part of the theme in that puzzle, and solvers had to work out how it applied.  

We are creatures of anniversary and milestone, of course, and these puzzles will continue to occur. As a dedictaed cataloguer of appearances I can also identify things like my 1,000th published puzzle overall (Independent 4,359, since you ask) though these tend to creep up on me, and do not get special treatment.

Bearing all that in mind, I can let you know that for the rest of the month my appearances are solely in The Independent Friday slot, and you may want to give them a whirl. If you nip off promptly and subscribe to One Across magazine, you may well get the June issue (just out) which has a puzzle of mine within.