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.

I normally put this up at the start of May or thereabouts, but I have brought it a little forward as something extra for the current unusual circumstances.

The annual APEX puzzle, circulated to a group of about 50 solvers, forms the backbone of this site, and you can access them all on the relevant page.  The 2019 edition is the last on the list, or you can go direct to it here.  There is always a clue-writing competition with the puzzle, and the solution page includes the winning clues.

New Zealand may be coming out of the most severe lockdown somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday next week, but it is not anticipated that a great deal will change.  A few extra shops may open, and that might include post offices, so perhaps I can get stamps for those puzzles still requiring postal entries (though I doubt I can do much about transit times across locked down borders).  I gather UK post offices – at least ones that are open – are few and far between if this photograph of London is anything to go by:

You will need your knowledge of perspective to determine the likely position of the Post Office (assuming it isn’t around a corner).  The snap was provided by a Toccata Classics email.  The site is well worth a visit and while you could still order physical CDs (and consign someone to that queue for an hour – at least the weather was fine that day), you might want to try the downloads instead.  (Not that the Royal Mail would send them to NZ, of course.)

Puzzles this week – well, you have the reappearance of PINK today (I’m sorry, P  I  N  K), and there’s a Times daily on Wednesday 22nd, as well as The Independent online on Friday 24th.  A blog on my recent Inquisitor is set for publication around 6.30 am NZ time on the 22nd, or the evening of the 21st UK time.