I missed an update last weekend, and, as chance would have it, next weekend is also looking fairly full.  (I won’t rub it in about having a pet expo, a concert series launch and an arts trail to accommodate.)

But this weekend sees another southerly storm keeping us indoors (though the garden seems not to mind so much, with the flax now coming up in abundance, and a month early).  So here’s a Church Times puzzle from 2014.  The Church Times has recently cut back its puzzles to only fortnightly.  However, they are kind enough to let me put up older ones on this site, so I hope they won’t mind my occasionally filling the gap.  Advance warning: the Christmas Church Times puzzle on 18 December is a new one, and from my pen.

Other than that, I have the chance to alert you to a Toughie by Kcit landing next Thursday 12 November.  And I will have time to put up the next update over the weekend of 28 and 29 November, because both the Inquisitor and Enigmatic Variations are by me that weekend.  Back then, I hope, with news of when the 2020 APEX puzzle can be expected.

Alas, as I simply don’t seem to have the time, with an unexpectedly tight deadline requiring accommodation, and proofs to check, and a little run of puzzles to be typed up and accounted for.

I would draw your attention to the latest book by Martin Amis (Inside Story), which is a sort of fictionalised memoir presented as a novel.  As with much Amis, it isn’t quite as good as he thinks it is, which doesn’t in any way prevent it being very good.  There is a glancing footnoted reference to crosswords (not the chapter entitled ‘Beelzebub’, unfortunately) in which he quotes a couple of favourite clues, which I suspect are from The Times, and even explains why they are good. 

One is ‘Something wrong with Finnegan’s Wake?  Perhaps too complicated (10)’ and to get to it he trots out the old chestnut about Joyce’s novel being a cryptic crossword clue that goes on for 600 pages.  Given his aversion to and avoidance of cliché elsewhere in the book (and his books in general), it’s odd that this old warhorse of a criticism gets the stamp of approval.

[As Flann O’Brien noted, that apostrophe probably hounded Joyce to an early grave.]

November is a quiet month, mostly.  The Crossword Club has just circulated a puzzle of mine, but mostly you’ll be subsisting on the Friday Independent puzzles.  There’s an additional appearance in The Times next Friday (6 November), though. and there’s a little flurry of activity at the end of the month which I’ll come to in the next post.

It’s always baffled me that left-wing is red in the UK and right-wing blue and quite the reverse in the US.  I suppose it goes to show the irrelevance of colours, or possibly that politicians are basically politicians everywhere and it doesn’t really matter what colours they drape themselves in.  I come from a part of the UK where Labour used green (and occasionally green-and-yellow) because the Tories had bagged red.  I never did work out who had blue (Whigs?), but it felt a bit like Roderick Spode having to form a political group called the Blackshorts because the shop had sold out of the shirts.

This is all to avoid talking about any party or person having post-election blues.  Here we are in a brave new world where it can now be demonstrated that proportional representation processes can deliver majority governments, at least post-pandemics.  Curiously the world seems not terribly braver than before, and looks about as used as it always has.  There was still cat food to be bought and tree boughs to be cut down, though making lemon curd was a novel experience (we’ll use up those lemons yet).  While it cools I can get on with the website.

The puzzle this week is an Independent daily from 2014.  My schedule says I was due to put up a Church Times puzzle, but there’s an actual live Church Times puzzle in the actual Church Times that you can go out and purchase.  I’ll put one from there up next time, so you can compare how my style has changed.  The daily has a hidden theme, which may be timely (though pandemic considerations may yet prevail).

A quiet fortnight – beyond the Friday Independent puzzles, there a Times cryptic on 27 October, and (just in case I’m late blogging next time round) a puzzle for the Crossword Club at the start of November.

You can’t let a date like today’s go by without some acknowledgement.

It also means that the closing date for my September Crossword Centre puzzle Minor Variations is well and truly past, so I can now share the setter’s blog for it.

I went to vote today, even though the New Zealand general election is technically next Saturday.  This year early voting has been extended to rather more venues than previous elections – some opened last Saturday, in fact, though the school hall a couple of hundred metres down our road only got going this weekend.  It was noticeably busier than previous times, and it remains to be seen (another week or so, that would be) whether turnout is affected by the change.  It certainly felt more relaxed, and more likely to encourage people to turn up.  Whether many will turn up with a cat, as we did, is more moot.

Also this week I finished the latest Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood.  There has been a lot in the press and elsewhere about the sexual politics of the book, but it’s a little hard to see what’s going on.  The character in question (who may as well be wearing a red herring suit as fancy dress given the conventions of the genre) is a nasty piece of work for sure (and based on a real American case), but sadly definitely a male heterosexual.  There’s a lot reminiscent of The Satanic Verses in the to and fro of “The book says this” and “Actually, no it doesn’t”.

However, JK has reached into the Lazy Box compartment marked ‘evil genius’ and made him – guess what?  That’s right, a crossword solver.  What has she got against cruciverbalists? 

And I can follow up my hypothesis of a forthcoming Toughie with a date: 15 October.