This week’s puzzle is again from 1996, and it’s an Independent Inquisitor, which back then was just called Crossword. And, no, it’s not really number 39 in the series – there’d been a redesign of the page about nine or ten months earlier, and the counter had been reset to 1.

In contrast to the Enigmatic Variations puzzle last time, the preamble is a single sentence – but the puzzle has close to 50 clues, which I think may be the most I’ve put up (outside Jumbos).

Anyway, this week saw the appearance of this article. There was a gratifying surge in hits on the site, and a few complimentary emails, so thank you. It did not seem to be protocol for the setter to respond to queries in the comments (I checked a few of the earlier ‘Meet the Setter’ pages), but I will try to address some of them here, in the hope that people are still hanging around.

So, yes, I do set for The Times – there’s one coming up on October 1, just before my next update to the site. I was sort of glad not to be asked for my favourite clue, since I find it quite difficult to remember them (I was reminded that I got an Azed VHC for CHALET, which I cannot remember writing…) but here’s a couple from what you might call different levels:

From The Independent: “I herald a toss, possibly (5,2,5)”

From the Azed competition: “This word’s not right for ‘shy’ (5)”

Answers at the end, as per Guardian style.

And, hi, Meic – I reckon I’m unlikely to get over to Sussex any time soon either. But there’s a pretty good brewing culture here – our monthly subscription package should be here in a week or so.

We can’t determine whether many people followed the link to Marjorie’s site from the photograph. It was chosen partly because my eyes don’t appear – they have developed an alarming ability to slam shut as soon as a camera is aimed.  I see Derek Harrison has kindly referenced the piece in his monthly newsletter, with a link to a photograph from 20 years ago. Hmmm – hair.

I would still maintain that I am not so prolific as claimed –  I have estimated my output, and I think I will write my millionth word in a clue some time in 2023. Roger Squires has passed the two million clue mark. If I’m prolific then please advise of the word for that (simple use of prefixes not allowed). 

In other news this week, I found myself pondering the number of variants of the Covid virus, and anxiously counting along the Greek alphabet. Mu, which is where we seem to be currently resting, is the twelfth letter, while Phi is down the line at no. 21. Given the number of letters we have skipped (‘variants of interest’ not ‘of concern’), there is both time, and every likelihood that I will not be faced with the same sort of problem that companies called Isis faced a few years ago.

And I would also like to point you at a book I finished this week (and, by implication, its predecessor): Seven Demons by Aidan Truhen, the sequel to The Price You Pay. The narrative voice strikes me as P G Wodehouse reimagined by Quentin Tarantino, with a helping of Zaphod Beeblebrox thrown in. The storyline is frequently violent, and the amount of swearing phenomenal (and, to be fair, these are characters you’d expect to swear a lot), but it is truly very funny. There’s even a bonus for lovers of pseudonyms: Aidan Truhen is a pair of anagrams of Diana Hunter, a key character in Nick Harkaway’s latest book Gnomon (if you look around the Web, you may find Mr Harkaway interviewing Mr Truhen…). Harkaway’s real surname is Cornwell, which he hasn’t used so to avert comment that he is making his way on the coat-tails of his famous father, David. You haven’t heard of David Cornwell, you say? That’s because he wrote under a pseudonym too: John le Carré. 

This is getting unusually long for me, and the presence of a cat on my lap doesn’t help the spelling, so I shall cast off here. We have a foster cat with us at the moment, still rather timid, and I should spend a little time with him, too.

But not before the promised answers:

HEADS OR TAILS (anag. & lit.)

BRASH (brash – r = bash = attempt, shy & lit.)

The crossword this time round is an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 1996 – sufficiently long ago that I decided I should mark the passing of time by updating the descriptive text on the main EV page. The puzzle itself is called Lifts, and it’s one where I looked back at it and thought “Did I really just decide to do that?”. It also has what I think is the longest preamble of any I have put up on the site so far.

Some people grumble about long preambles. There is a lot to take in – but that’s balanced by the fact that you are being given lots of information. You are generally less likely to have to hang around waiting for a penny drop, and you instead have a process to which you have to adapt your solving skills. In the case of ‘Lifts’, it’s a mode of entry twist – there’s a fair bit of boustrephedon work in this one, and I can tell you that here because the preamble also does so. Hence you can plunge in and start solving – though not all answers can be entered straight away. But you have the outlined process to help you spot where an answer might go. I don’t think the puzzle would be solvable without this degree of up-front information.

Some people grumble about short preambles too. Certainly things like ‘A number of clues contain modifications that indicate how the remaining answers, whose clues are normal, are to be entered’ or even the very basic ‘The unclued answers have something in common’ are not letting on a great deal, and you have to dive in and start fossicking around.

There is room for both approaches, surely. Well, actually there often isn’t room for long preambles, while we remain dependent on paper versions. Newspapers have limited space for crosswords, however expansive their websites may be. The original version of ‘Lifts’ did strike me as being in rather small print, though I don’t have any contemporaneous examples for comparison. So the chances are that solvers will see a majority of puzzles of the less informative, wait-for-the-penny-to-drop type.

Last time I was musing on the value of having up-to-the-minute and topical references in crosswords. Almost immediately there was an example in the Independent where the clue referred to a successful pop song from the mid-90s, and a large number of solvers (me included) were left scratching their heads.  I also read an interview this week with Chris Riddell, the illustrator and former Children’s Laureate, who has recently brought out a modern version of the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. He noted that John Tenniel had included a caricature of Benjamin Disraeli in the illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass – this was not an option in the present-day when political reputations rose and fell almost on a weekly basis. 

So I remain somewhat against topicality: that’s not to say a clue cannot have it, but it’s going to have to have a surface that persists beyond the immediate relevance, and delivers two clear components – definition and wordplay – that do not depend on the topical context for solving. That strikes me as a hard thing to do.

My own piece of topicality: aside from the usual Friday Independent appearances, there’s a Times Quick Cryptic on Thursday 9 September.

I’ve had a nice little run of barred thematics which is now bearing fruit in the writing of setter’s blogs. The first one of these is up (for Means to an End in the July Magpie). I have drafted one for Enigmatic Variations No. 1501: Alternative Names, which will appear on the site after the closing date (that’ll be September 1st). But I haven’t even started writing the one for today’s Inquisitor 1714: Clouds. That’s due to go up on September 7th.

Links on the Setter’s blogs page will be activated as we go. I’ll also try to remember to come back here and activate links too.

Here we are back at level 4 lockdown, with talk of bubbles, and quick scurries to the shops to wander round the aisles masked. Much was made a few days ago of New Zealand going back into lockdown for one case – except that by the time the BBC was reporting that factoid it was up to five cases, and the count is now in the fifties – no, seventies, just checked today’s announcement. Cases are beginning to pop up across the country, as a result of reasonably active cross-country travel, and a virus that gets infectious before it doles out the symptoms.

No, still not had my first jab yet – that’s next Sunday.

Today’s puzzle goes back to the last century, and is a Beelzebub from about a year after I started contributing. I have not modified it greatly, other than to remove the word ‘hyphenated’ from the clue enumerations, and to update an entry that had consisted of two words in the Chambers of the day, but which the latest edition has conflated to one. Oh, and in deference to the last post I took out an exclamation mark.

I had planned to use a puzzle from the BBC Music Magazine, but my 1996 box predates my association with them. I believe the current issue of the magazine is on sale in the UK – Beatrice Rana on the front cover, I think – and that contains my 300th puzzle for them. It hasn’t arrived here yet.

The other reason I was going to use a BBC puzzle was to preface some musings on the use of popular culture, bu this paragraph will have to do instead.

Many would say that a crossword on classical music is an obvious throwback, and not up to date. I was recently reading an article based around an interview with Will Shortz, and the interviewer noted that he was criticised for not including more up-to-the-minute items around current pop music, politicians and sporting figures. The use of these trending items would be more attractive and would bring in more solvers.

And yet I wonder whether that is the case. The pandemic has done far more for puzzle solving than a change in content, though it’s clearly less useful as a tool in an editor’s armoury. It’s already quite tricky working through some US puzzles – ‘OK, I’m looking for the forename of an actor playing a role in a TV show I’ve never heard of’ – and I often find myself wondering what would happen if you produced a crossword that included clues about (say) the nurses on Dr Kildare. A while back I stuffed an Independent puzzle with the names of bands with No. 1 singles from…well, quite a long time ago, and no-one spotted the theme. Some of them even I’d heard of.

The issue is severalfold. Popular culture is increasingly diverse and the chances for people to be across all of it are limited. Too heavy a reliance on it might lower people’s willingness to try a puzzle. And if you need to check a reference, well, there are fewer agreed sources, though Googlepedia is pretty darn good.

At best, unless you are extremely prescient or lucky, topical references attach a ‘Solve by’ date to your puzzle. Which some may be fine with, but you aren’t going to win an argument about the ephemerality of crossword puzzles with someone who has just dug out a crossword from 1996 and found it usable. Go on and try it.

If I remember to press the ‘Publish’ button this time round, then you will still have time in the UK to nip out for the Sunday Telegraph of 22 August (and you can nip out and I can’t). It looks like the Inquisitor of 28 August will be mine (though it may slip back to the following week) and there’s a Times puzzle on 31 August.