I managed to hurl myself to the ground at a local bus-stop the other day. I put my hands out to cushion the landing and so I have some splendid abrasions. All squeaky antiseptic and healing nicely, but a bit onerous for much typing, though pen and paper is fine. I can also report that having a laptop in your knapsack as you land leads to your chin being driven into the paving as said laptop flies up and hits you in the back of the head. That must be a bruise as the skin seems unbroken. Time for a goatee, perhaps.

It was such a nice day for a walk too, unlike today when the first of the spring gales have kept us awake overnight. Not a day for going out, but since the car’s on the blink too…

The onsite puzzle today was going to have been an Enigmatic Variations puzzle, but you have a new one from Kcit in the series in the Sunday Telegraph today. So deferral not a bad thing perhaps.

Next weekend sees an interesting set-up. You have an Inquisitor from Phi (I am led to believe that it may be at the harder end of my personal spectrum), and if you want to escape to the online Independent puzzle – alas, it’s one of those weeks when I am shifted from my Friday slot (so presumably Friday’s puzzle will have a theme with some sort of anniversary element). And if you choose to abandon The Independent entirely for the safe haven of the Times competition puzzle…well, hard luck again… You’ll just have to do whatever else you can do at the equinox (the Great British Cheese Festival is on, says my calendar). Back on Friday for September 29, when I can confirm there will be a theme with some sort of anniversary element.

 
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And welcome to spring. Here it is a matter of some tradition to say (generally in the first news bulletin of the month) that it’s spring now, because 1 September means spring, and 1 December means summer, and so on. The actual seasonality of the seasons may have shifted somewhat, and the vernal gales that are yet to come would put anyone off welcoming spring, but today is a pretty good spring day. The plum blossom is creeping out and the clothes are drying.

The puzzle this time is a BBC Music Magazine puzzle from 2019. It struck me as having rather a lot of anagrams, so if that’s what takes your mood…

A busy fortnight coming up, so I have to resort to bullet points listing the expected puzzles again:

• Monday September 4: Guardian Genius
• Wednesday September 6: Guardian daily by Pangakupu
• Thursday September 7: Telegraph Toughie by Kcit
• Friday September 8: Phi in the Independent
• Friday September 15: Phi in the Independent
• Friday September 15: Pedro in the Times
• Sunday September 17: Enigmatic Variations by Kcit

And that does mean a bit of concerted effort to replenish the stocks…

 
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Yes, missed last week. Rather a lot of puzzles being published and others being sent off to editors over the last two weekends, in fact. Still, the added effort in getting a Times Jumbo out into the world is unlikely to recur soon, so things may be quiet enough to get me back on schedule next weekend. In other Times Jumbo news, it’s worth remembering that the August Bank Holiday issue of the paper will have a Jumbo crossword in addition to the usual Saturday one. Guess who set this coming Monday’s?

Sticking with The Times. one of my puzzles has been the subject of a rare publication error. I keep a note of all dates of publication (insofar as I know them) and it’s now clear that there are, in fact, often two publication dates to consider for an individual puzzle. Normally they are the same, because they are the online publication date and the dead-tree publication date. But there are two processes at work, and they can get out of synch.

In this case, I had a puzzle due in the Times on 22 August, where it duly appeared for those who popped into their newsagent for a copy. Those online, on the other hand, had seen it back on 11 August, when the paper carried something different. The website Times for the Times has various warnings in place for those trying to navigate their way between the two calendars. The paper itself published the 11 August dead-tree puzzle as the online one for 22 August, and there the two exist, like unmatched socks (“Yes, I have another pair like that…”).

The blog there (in fact, see here and here), when it is not explaining the time-slip element, spends a fair degree of time discussing ‘la’ = ‘see’ (starting with the title), with a number of contributors apparently in ignorance of it. Chambers is the only one of the three dictionaries to give the exact definition, doubling down in the Chambers Thesaurus by saying that ‘lo’ is the old form of ‘la’. Collins notes it as a general exclamation with the etymology that ‘la’ = ‘lo’. The OED ignores it. There were some grumbles about crossword setters relying on dictionary definitions. But the thing is, I’ve been solving now for over 40 years, and ‘la’ = ‘lo’ = ‘see’ has been an ever-present bit of crossword jargon. So it’s something I simply turn to, and I wouldn’t say it was particularly unusual. One of Mervyn Peake’s characters (Professor Cutflower, is it?) tends to end every speech with ‘la’.  Still, I don’t think it helped that it was the LA in the slightly unusual word TONSILLAR. I do think rarely used adjectives from familiar words are fair game, though, and I was surprised to see so many going for the far less convincing TONSILLOR – that doesn’t really look like an adjective at all to me.

And it all rather obscured the fact that it was my 200^th Times puzzle, with a pair of TONs, one in each corner of the grid (TONSILLAR contributed to one of them). I suspect that the hidden pattern might have caught a few eyes had there been no other issues to discuss.

In other news(papers):

Pangakupu made a first appearance in the Guardian prize slot in August as well (Saturday 19th). Fascinated as always to see the bloggers’ mix of ‘bit too easy for the Prize’ and ‘up to the usual level of the Prize’. Magnus Magnusson always used to say that, whatever you might think about Mastermind, an easy question is one you can answer and hard one is one you can’t. When I was on the programme, I was complimented on knowing the word for the phase of the moon between half and full (‘gibbous’) with the person going on to say she thought that was a type of top hat. And, of course, she’s right – but the hat is ‘Gibus’ (it’s a sort of opera hat, one that collapses – I went and looked it up), a fact I would consider far less common than something like a phase of the moon.

What almost (but not quite) went by unacknowledged in the Guardian puzzle was the M?ori word. This was ‘taitai?’, which means ‘unlucky’ – this was my thirteenth submission for the daily slot.

Since I hope to be back next weekend, there’s really only the usual Friday puzzle in the Independent to mention beyond the Times Jumbo on Monday.

 

We have had a winter storm recently, with the first serious winds we’ve seen in a while. (It’s not Wellington without the winds.) But the weather has stayed generally mild, with high temperature records being set for several days in July (and some low temperature records as well, it has to be said – getting the sun for the former means some frosty nights too). It’s nothing like what has been seen in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, of course – but we’re getting spring flowers up a month or so early, with lots of lemons turning yellow, both things you’d expect in September. Meanwhile we have gathered a couple of very small feijoas today, so they still haven’t quite given up. One or two deciduous trees are discovering it isn’t so ingrained an attribute.

I have recently finished reading Derek Harrison’s collection of letters from Eric Chalkley (which you should order here). Derek did tell me I was mentioned a few times in it, and that makes for an interesting read. It’s a bit like discovering people have been talking about you (though I dare say there’s some witticism about that being better than their not talking about you). There’s even a picture – to be fair, I only spotted myself in a shadow because I knew was there. But apart from the sort of thing that is only really interesting to me, the book does have a lot to illustrate how epistolary friendships are made, with Derek and Eric’s growing links mirroring those forged by Apex and Ximenes (or Eric and Derrick, I suppose). There are some puzzles in an appendix at the end, though the binding of the book makes it a trial to solve them in situ, or to get them photocopied/scanned.

The puzzle this time is an Inquisitor from 2021 (which means there’s a setter’s blog to be found elsewhere on the site).There are a couple of puzzles in addition to the Friday regulars before the next update: a Telegraph Toughie on August 10, and a Times Quick Cryptic a week later.

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