A complicated week, given that I retired on Friday, in the midst of distributing this year’s APEX crossword, and aware that this post needed to go up this weekend. And all the burgeoning number of Christmas crossword specials to be collected and solved too.
A week of capricious weather too: warm to start, then a five degree drop accompanied by gales and rain, and now back to an intensely hot and muggy day. The garden has been lapping it up, with everything coming up or out early (plums already lined up for jam; beans pre-Christmas rather than post-New Year). More widely, the New Zealand ‘Christmas tree’, the pohutukawa, which tends to peak in the space between Christmas and New Year, is already winding down its display in several places. Lots of red former petals in the gutters, making it look like there’s been mild carnage further up the hill.
As usual at Christmas, the puzzle this weekend is an unpublished one – another Beelzebub-style puzzle, which I keep working at to keep my clue-writing hand in. I’m thinking that, with the additional flexibility that the season (let alone retirement) brings, I may unearth an old Independent Jumbo for a fortnight’s time.
Meanwhile, I have a Times Quick on 23 December, Pangakupu pops up in The Guardian and the Independent Friday puzzles continue as normal.
But for now it’s Christmas. All the best for the holidays, and keep your head down as the rest of the seasonal puzzles come flying in!
Here in the UK, a Christmas Rhododendron that has for the last ten years failed to live up to its name has started flowering. Whether it packs up flowering on the 24th, has yet to be seen. A sign of the times and global warming, I fear.
So much more free time and expanding crossword setting commitments has to be a nice situation. Will you be able to(or in deed want to) find time to do consultancy work should your old place realise what a talent they have lost?
Seasonal best wishes to you all, and may the good weather persist till the new year.