Phi Crosswords

This week has seen quite a lot of upheaval starting with a middle-of-the-night dash to the emergency vet, leading to a more detailed knowledge of the urethra of the tomcat than I had hitherto possessed. Did you know that the male cat’s urethra…well, maybe not (though you wouldn’t believe what we have to effect with cotton buds). But it is a common enough issue, often fatal, and expensive to treat. However, Toulouse is insured and is now sulking in a crate in our living room, blessedly unaware that he has three more weeks of it, followed by two when he’s only allowed to roam the house. At least the weather will have improved by the end of August.

Then the car had to go in for what threatened to be a major piece of work. But the repairing garage found nothing so bad, and the car came out at merely 4% the cost of the cat. The RF CV boot has been repaired, apparently – the original mechanic explained ‘RF’ as ‘right front’ (which I had worked out for myself) but left CV unexplained. And the websites are a bit reluctant to skip using the abbreviation, but Chambers does indeed have C for constant and V for velocity. You could even justify it using some of the newspapers’ acceptable abbreviations lists…  And there was a reversing light to replace – amazingly the first bulb we’ve replaced in 18 years of driving the same car. I’m now expecting all the others to go out simultaneously.

Nevertheless, there’s a new puzzle this week – an Inquisitor from 2011 – and I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things with regular puzzles. There’s a touch of ‘famous last words’ about that, of course.

I cannot even talk about the usual Friday puzzles this time: the Phi puzzle for next week is on Tuesday 23 July (Tuesday is theme day in the Independent, of course) since some international event or other is approaching on Friday (yes, I missed that date) . Back on Friday 2 August, though – but before that 31 July sees me having puzzles in both The Guardian and The Times, just to polish off the month.

I’m now in a position to make the announcement I’ve been trailing the last few posts.

After close on 35 years, Don Manley has decided to step down as editor of the Church Times crossword, and has asked me to take over. The first puzzle under my editorship will be on 6 September.

Many thanks to Don for the 35 years of custodianship. I find it intriguing that, after so long a period, the baton has passed from the man who set puzzle no. 1 to the man who set puzzle no. 2.  (And the setter of puzzle no. 3 has agreed to resume contributing.)  We are a long-lasting bunch, often coming to crosswords late, but hanging in. Among all the current enthusiasm for up-to-the-minute references in puzzles, it’s a bit of a relief to have one corner where the references are (mostly) long-established.

No puzzle this week. The new Church Times editor has determined that the Christmas puzzle has to be set, and is turning out to be a bit of a tartar. The rest of July is set to be relatively quiet, with only a Telegraph Toughie on 11 July outside the regular Friday Independent slots. (Though there is a rare non-Friday Phi on the horizon – more next time.)

 
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The topic of crosswords and their unfamiliar answers and clues has come up again. The usual suggestions are made that puzzles should have more up-to-the-minute content otherwise they appear out of touch. Many of the setters are older and have different points of reference. It’s hard not to see at least some of it as ‘Everything should be relevant to me’.

Once you’ve been setting for a few decades, however, you realise that this point comes up over and over again. What changes is the contemporary references that are being omitted. Why not have something on the Bay City Rollers, for example? Certainly that was levelled at setters whenever it was that the band was active (actually, it turns out they’re still active now, longer in the tooth, if not in the trouser).  Or about such-and-such a TV show and its stars, or this footballer. 

But in many ways, it’s the up-to-the-minute cultural references that really date a puzzle. Some of us are interested in having puzzles that can be revisited for the pleasure of solving the clues, not ticking off the contemporary references. When you upload old puzzles on to a website you have to check the clues and note that ‘Smith, perhaps’ no longer defines COMPTROLLER-GENERAL, and needs to be ‘Perkins, say’. (And when someone stumbles on the site in ten years’ time, they’ll be baffled again.)

The ideal is to strive for something that transcends a specific person, though obviously a particular set of letters or a specific name will always be tempting. But it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of weird politicians, vain pop stars, mouthy artists and so on about. Write a clue about that sort of behaviour and solvers will populate it with the current example of choice.

The issue abuts the question of general knowledge in puzzles. There’s an abbreviation used – nho – and just occasionally it seems to be wielded with the implication of ‘How dare you expect me to know that’. But my job as a setter is to clue words you may not have heard of in a way that still allows you to solve them. You can go and look things up later (in fact, you should). No-one can expect everyone to know the same things, and one of the pleasures of puzzles is to expand your database.

A few years ago I was faced with a clue the answer to which was clearly the name of a then current footballer. I had M_A_P_ – not actually terribly credible at first blush, but the word play threw up enough to pencil in M_APPE (still not hugely credible, but no indication of origin was given, and transliterations of language do offer oddities to English eyes).

But the first two letters were given by ‘Doctor’ – so was that MB, MD or MO? Yes, I know what it is now (and he’s still current; front page of BBC site as I type, indeed), but what to enter if you didn’t know? That’s the importance of getting the wordplay right.

There’s also the point of the huge variety of current culture. Here’s an excellent book:

https://schrodingersbooks.co.nz/p/inkubator-crosswords-100-audacious-puzzles-by-women-and-nonbinary-creators

You’ll note the blurb includes:

Enjoy hours of satisfying solving as you dive into inclusive puzzles that truly reflect modern life, from dating apps to activism, to the occasional body part–almost nothing is off-limits, except outdated crosswordese.

Having worked through several of them now (and they’re good fun) – I’d say no (and I do worry about that ‘occasional body part’ – has LEG or ARM never been used?). The ‘crosswordese’ is still there – it’s hard to imagine eradicating it in the fully-checked US style, where lots of favourite short entries keep popping up.  But there are a lot of entries that do attempt to include modern, hip terms – but that includes some that, like slang, have gone out of use by the time they’re in book form. And some, like references to a whole panoply of US sitcoms and soap operas and sport, that have never had a wide amount of traction outside the country anyway. So there are corners of them that definitely feel exclusive, rather than expansive. The other thing called to mind is the brand-dropping common in so many modern novels – if the book is to survive then it will be needing footnotes almost immediately. Thomas Hardy managed not to invoke ‘Pink Pills for Pale People’, so unless you have some arcane way of knowing about the imperishability of Jimmy Choo, the tradename might be better avoided.

And you wonder, too, whether the diverse backgrounds of the setters overlap as much as they may think. Would a puzzle focused on Black themes resonate with a Latino audience?

That’s basically the problem with ‘knowledge’ (for which read, at least partly, ‘experience’) – it isn’t inclusive, it’s what you have. And when you set out to solve a puzzle your circle of knowledge comes up against the setter’s, and it’s the setter’s job to make the resulting Venn diagram as near a single circle as possible.

And for those who are still inclined to mutter about the ‘classics’ – they’re classic because they are still done, even if you choose not to go. But on a weekend when the news is of an injury to Ian McKellen falling off the stage in Shakespeare, it’s a bit hard to say Shakespeare is not current.

I am reminded of the furore around Milton Babbitt (Sondheim’s teacher) who wrote an article editorially entitled (much to Babbitt’s annoyance): “Who Cares if You Listen?’. Said article has been held up as arrogance by people who have not actually realised what is being said. Of course a composer wants to be listened to – but as to whether you, as an individual, listen, s/he has to be uncaring. After all, the person next to you in the audience may want to listen to something entirely different – can’t please you both. All the composer can do is write what they want in a way that reaches as many as possible – but they cannot target you specifically. Do not expect to like everything immediately.

[Thinking of listening: if you get the chance listen to ‘To Music’, the final track on Caroline Shaw’s new album ‘Rectangles and Circumstance’. Absolutely gorgeous – as they said on the listening party, if Schubert had had the chance to use steel pans he would have done.]

After a strange and extended session trying to log in to my page only to be told it was a phishing activity, I feel disinclined to spend much more time uploading a puzzle. But it is meant to pour down tomorrow so – well, there’s only so much baking to be done. However it has been a long week, with the water off most days while they laid new pipes, the electricity off one day (and bits of two others) for a new switchboard, and I got COVID again.

There will be a blog on my recent Enigmatic Variations puzzle later in the week. Upcoming puzzles outside the Friday Independent regular slots are a Church Times special on 28 June, a Times 15×15 on 2 July and a Pedro in the Times Quick slot on 5 July.

 

 
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The news last weekend of the death of Richard Rogan, the Times crossword editor, after a heart attack the previous weekend has struck the crossworld like a hammer to a bell. There are many solvers, but the central nexus of setters, editors, bloggers and the keenest solvers is a tight-knit group, and there are few who have not encountered Richard in some way, whether as editor, or as a participant in crossword gatherings. The impact is all the stronger for its suddenness and because Richard was so lively a character. Commiserations and condolences to his family.

My own week has had its moments. There is retrenchment at the Ministry and my job is one that is under threat, and the details of the next steps in the process were released this week. We shall see what we shall see, but there has to be the possibility that I may find myself with more time to spend on this website. (I could finally get around to adding to some of the other parts!) After thirty-odd years in government service it is an interesting position to be in.

There is a puzzle new on the site this time around: an Independent daily from December 2010. Blatantly chosen because there were only 21 clues to type in, I confess…

The next fortnight sees a few puzzles popping up, including the final two of mine edited by Richard Rogan:

12 June: a Times Quick Cryptic from Pedro

14 June: regular Independent puzzle

15 June: a Times Jumbo

16 June: an Enigmatic Variations puzzle

19 June: Pangakupu in the Guardian (amended date; that will teach me to rely on only one calendar – I had it written down properly, honest!)

21 June: regular Independent puzzle

I recall that I suggested I might have an announcement to make this time round – and I don’t yet. Things are still being worked through. What I will have, in the middle of the week, is a short setter’s blog on my recent Inquisitor.

 
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