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Magpie, March 2022: 17 downs

Flanders and Swann were at their peak popularity when I was about five, so my interest in them doesn’t stem from seeing them live. My father loved them, and I also suspect that some of their songs turned up on children’s radio (Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, anyone?)

Later they were somehow just there as part of the cultural background, and I picked up on some of the more adult songs. Have Some Madeira, M’dear had a last couplet that might have been relished by kids for its surprise value but was far too risqué. And there was the strange melancholy of Slow Train (I’ve already done a puzzle on that, and a blog), or the odd anti-litter message of Bedstead Men (though it’s the stunningly appropriate rhyme in that one that always gets me). I have a fondness for The Armadillo which sets off as a comic song and then, rather suddenly, isn’t.

It felt like they should be about one hundred years old, and when I checked a couple of years ago, sure enough: Michael Flanders born 1 March, 1922. (Swann’s centenary is next year.)

That 1 March instantly suggested a monthly publication, and I didn’t have anything on the workbench for The Magpie (and The Magpie has a bit of a track record in Flanders and Swann). The great thing about celebrating songwriters is that their titles immediately offer you a store of words. And FLANDERS, with eight letters, sprawls nicely across a 12×12 without threatening too much restriction. (MICHAEL FLANDERS fits across – or down – a daily 15×15 if anyone wants to start planning for the bicentenary.)

So I lined up FLANDERS alongside the song titles, with a view to having pile-ups of letters in individual cells, with the missing letter contributing to the surname. That provided some surprising limitations – I wanted to use the more familiar titular words, and that cut down the options. It struck me that expecting solvers to spot links between ‘anagrams – 1’, even with the additional definitions, might be a bit much, so I dropped SWANSONGS into the mix.

No, I don’t have a puzzle ready for Swann’s centenary.

Well, not yet.

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About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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