Having had a post up a few days early, I now have one a week late.  Holidays do get in the way.

I hope everyone has had a good time solving all the extra puzzles that come around at the festive season.  I think I’m now through most of them, so its safe to put up another one for you.  It’s an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 2014, which means it’s covered by fifteensquared, as well as the subject of a setter’s blog here.  Links to those blogs are given with the solution.

I spent part of the holiday reading through Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition.  Benjamin Dreyer is a leading copy-editor at Random House and an entertaining guide to style and grammatical issues.  And he likes the semicolon, always a reassuring trait in an editor.  He has even revised his book to acknowledge that, just occasionally, UK and US usages differ.  Giving the reader laugh-out-loud moments in a treatise on something as potentially dry as grammar is a recommendation at any time.  

It is definitely building to summer here, and we have had a few days of high 20s temperatures.  As yet New Zealand is secure against the latest mutations, but there’s a renewed pressure to log visits to offices, shops and so on, to ensure that movements are traced and contacts are confirmed.  While I’m not yet planning to revert to more frequent updates on the site (for one thing I’m regularly out at work), I am certainly going to get back on schedule with an update next week (it will be an old Beelzebub puzzle).  

There’s nothing unexpected in the published puzzle line before then – indeed, most of my January puzzles have now occurred, and you’ll have only the regular Friday Independent puzzles to tackle.

This is the blog due next Saturday, and I felt the title was premature for Christmas 2021.  And I can also give you a last-minute alert for the Christmas Eve Toughie, which is by Kcit, giving me two that day, as Pedro turns up in the Times Quick slot.  Phi is absent this week as the Friday slot in The Independent falls on Christmas Day.  And, since I won’t be blogging again for over a fortnight: I have the New Year’s day Jumbo in the Times, and Pedro reappears on 8 January.  Both days should see me restored to The Independent as well.

There’s a new blog on the site, for Commonality, in the November edition of One Across magazine (that link is so you can go off and subscribe).  The powers-that-be at the magazine have kindly agreed to let me put the whole puzzle up on the site very quickly after the solution has been published.  So you could have a go at it before reading the blog – after would be a bit underhand…

I’ve also put up What’s in a Name?  This is a puzzle I completed a few years ago, but I don’t recall it ever making it into the intended publication.  So here it is as a sort of Christmas present.  If you’re missing Phiday on Christmas Day, you can turn to these two puzzles.

My phone regularly sends me alerts about ‘things I might have missed’ which seems a bit of an understatement given the amount of stuff out there on the internet.  But occasionally there’s an item of interest.  One appeared this week that linked back to a post put up by Auckland Libraries at the height of the first wave of the pandemic.  There have been a number of attempts to describe the craze for crosswords that swept various countries in the 1920s, but I think this is the first to round up the New Zealand contribution to it.

Keep safe and well.  See you in the New Year.

Outside the one from the Crossword Centre at the start of the month, I haven’t seen any seasonal puzzles yet, but they’re waiting to descend en masse.  Annoyingly I’ve just been apprised of a fascinating idea for a seasonal puzzle, but it’s somewhat too late for this year.  Given the length of some of the pipelines, it might even be too late for next year.

This year’s seasonal puzzles from me aren’t so many in number – Christmas Day being a Friday sees me having a week off from the Independent, and the puzzle this coming week isn’t Christmassy at all (and isn’t on Friday – it pops up a day early; there’s a reason for that).  Friday 18th does see a seasonal puzzle from me, though, in the Church Times – a rather bigger one than their usual fare (and I think it will be printed in red).  The run-up to the big day has me appearing in The Times on 23rd, and then the Times Quick Cryptic on Christmas Eve.

Some time that week I’ll put up an unpublished barred puzzle that I unearthed in my records – it dates from 2014, and as far as I can see it hasn’t been published (and if it has, I haven’t been paid for it!).  That will replace the next scheduled update over Christmas weekend and we’ll be back to normal service from the second weekend of the new year.

If you’re keen to practice on my 2014 style, the new puzzle this time round is also from 2014.  It’s a BBC Music Magazine puzzle which happens to commemorate the nearby anniversaries of two very different composers (though nonetheless linked, as the first clue hints).

APEX puzzle: still hasn’t been typed up.  Aiming to get it circulated by next weekend – or during next weekend at the latest!

It is useful to get this up promptly so that I can alert you to a Phi puzzle in the Inquisitor series on Saturday 28 November and a Kcit puzzle in the Enigmatic Variations series on Sunday 29 November. 

An interesting shock to see a book of puzzles called ‘Enigmatic Variations’ on a shelf in a local bookshop.  A copy had to be bought, and thus there’s a rare update to the book review corner here.  

I have also put up a setter’s blog for my November Crossword Club puzzle Anniversary.

No puzzle this week – but I’ll get one up next time around.  That, I see with a bit of a gulp, is the last before Christmas, and is around the time I’ll be sending out this year’s APEX puzzle.  It may have been a rum old year, but it has nonetheless gone by at a canter.  Rather than put something up over Christmas weekend, I shall add a little something (which I think has not been published) the weekend before (i.e. 19/20 December).

Other things not yet published include a Pedro puzzle in The Times on Friday 4 December with its anonymous big brother featuring me on 8 December.  There may be a Kcit Toughie before my next update as well.  If I hear of it when I’m putting up the blogs for this weekend’s IQ and EV puzzles (some time around 9 December), I’ll let you know.