Phi Crosswords

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Spectacular

Once you find the word BEAGLEPUSS and what it means, well, you have to do something with it.  It seems so odd that so specific an item should have such a name, but I checked up a number of sources and found confirmation.  I think I first encountered it in one of the books by Paul Anthony Jones of the Haggard Hawks website.  But it’s also in Wiktionary, and a few other places.

And once you have it, what do you do with it?  Dogs and cats are going to come into it, obviously – and probably in that order.  And somehow you have to guide solvers to discover what this bizarre word represents.  I’m not a great one for drawing things in grids (I can’t draw) but the visualisation of Groucho glasses seemed to be something even I could aspire to, and the lenses begged to be Os.  Hmm…LEGO? OLEG?

But the adjacency of NOSE and however I was going to represent MOUSTACHE was a problem.  Spelling them out cell by cell would consume too much space – I wanted the specs neat in the middle.  So LEG, NOSE and TACHE would occupy single cells, across and down, fully checked, showing where the illustrations should go.

A quick experiment showed that that would screw symmetry.  Also rows and columns would have to be treated as sequences of letters rather than words per se – that would allow me the ___NO/SETA/CHE____ that putting the nose above the tache required.  So no bars, perhaps – although, in the end, a desire to have a checked letter in each of BEAGLE and PUSS led me to introduce a couple to the top and bottom rows.  Likewise the complexities of getting words in rows and columns led me to slip in a few vertical bars in other rows.  But it was going to be an odd-looking grid.

I also suspected it would be hard – a Carte Blanche with no symmetry (although there’s one of those in The Listener as I type) and with a few thematically undefined clues somewhere in the mix.  I suppose (in 20/20 hindsight) that I could have italicised those, which would probably also have given some indication of rows in the grid.  Still, at least the title came easily enough.

So I wasn’t too surprised to see it labelled a D.  Great, I thought, my first Magpie D – and then, this month, as their bonus issue, Magpie re-release an issue from 2004, and there’s a Phi grade D in it.  There are times when you realise quite how much of your past there is to catch up with you.

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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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