Long-term solvers may recall Turnip and Beans (Listener Crossword No. 3,578, on 12 August, 2000) which had a gooseberry theme. I remember it as the only Listener puzzle I’ve clued in a single session. The idea of one item in a group of three being unwanted obviously has quite a bit of mileage and is open to reinterpretation.
This time I went for an omitted letter leaving another real word, and gave myself the added challenge of the letters either side of the unwanted one spelling out a definition of GOOSEBERRY. It rapidly became clear that any credible definition twenty letters in length was not going to chime with GOOSEBERRY appearing in order. So we ended up with the structure you saw: Intruder clues in an order that spelled the definition, to be fitted in where they would go, with the omitted letters then needing to be rearranged to spell the thematic word.
Even there I ended up with LIS(B)ON, which was a little careless, but with these sort of things you expect to end up with at least one item that is a bit of a stretch. As it happens I have a colleague called Lison, and she is very careful in telling people that it is an original Jewish name, and not an aphetic for Alison. I was confident, given some of the names in Chambers’ list, that it would be there, but no.
I wonder whether this will revive my attempt to grow gooseberries. They are not easy to find in New Zealand and the plants we located a few years ago put out a few leaves and then turned into things from the wood of the suicides in Dante’s Inferno. Maybe in our new climate where things are appearing up to two months early?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Comments