Guardian 26,511 / Paul

46 comments on “Guardian 26,511 / Paul”

1. Just a little quibble (after i finished which is rare) but the NEC is definitely NOT in the centre of Birmingham. Try the airport! (9 ac)

2. Just a little quibble (after all i finished which is rare) but the NEC is definitely NOT in the centre of Birmingham. try the airport! (9 ac).

3. Thanks, Eileen

   Entertaining puzzle from Paul with a lot of rather prolix clues and practically no ribaldry for a change (BRA being the nearest thing).

   Some nicely allusive surfaces here. Favourites were WHATSISNAME, THE NAUGHTY STEP (POI)*, ITERATE, LEYLANDII (for the def and a very unlikely set of letters to rearrange). 9a painted an amusing picture; ‘smart clothes’ in 22d is aptly worded for a former Gallic leader.

   *POI = ‘penultimate one in’

4. Hugh @1&2: The NEC is the National Exhibition Centre, so is the ‘Centre’ of Birmingham

5. Hugh coolican @1 – and 2! – the clue doesn’t say that it is *in* the centre of Birmingham, as I tried to make clear in the blog.

6. Thanks, Gervase – we crossed.

7. Paul always delivers perfect line and length so anyone criticising this would clearly be a troll.
   Very enjoyable

8. Thanks Eileen. Good mix of the dead easy (BELL, the monk) , the witty and tricky, and the never heard ofs, like the naughty one. LEYLA NDII was almost but not quite in that category. All very nice, thanks Paul.

9. [I’m going out now until late afternoon, so will correct any errors / omissions then.]

10. Thanks Paul and Eileen.

    I would never have got the NEC in 9a (tried to turn CENtre!), or THE NAUGHTY STEP, without Eileen’s help. Laughed at LEYLANDII, the hedges are known as ‘green concrete’ (b�ton vert) here in France.

11. Great stuff as usual from Paul. Rather surprised that FORTH BRIDGE cropped up after yesterday but that’s hardly his fault. FINALISTS last in, for ages I could only see FINALISES which I knew could not be right.

    Love the pithy definitions, LEYLANDII of course but SUPERTONIC too, among others.

12. Thanks Paul and Eileen.

    I stared at your T ERA T for too long before the PDM; nice one! I did like FOURTH DIMENSION for the apposite clue. When I saw the ‘giant’ in 16, I thought “Oh, no, another classical reference that I’m never going to get,” but it wasn’t! 🙂

    Interesting that Paul used SUPERTONIC, rather than SUPERSONIC. I guess he just found the former easier to clue.

13. That is ‘second degree in music’ btw Robi.

    This is rather good, albeit with some pretty mad surfaces. The ‘one degree higher’ (not the same as the other degree in the puzzle) I liked.

    1a ‘possibly’ does not seem necessary, and ‘messing about’ implies that part of the anagram is doing the messing with the other bit. Not keen; 27 I don’t know why the particular ‘spanner’ isn’t qualified, after all, the monk in 28 is, so that’s slightly inconsistent; 19d is confused. I don’t like double duty at all.

14. I enjoyed this, thank you Paul. I particularly liked the ‘giant in dispute’. Thanks to Eileen too.

    Before we start another long diatribe on who is right or wrong in their views about crosswords, can I just say that they are just that crosswords, not the cure for some horrible disease, not the answer to world peace, just a form of entertainment, that if you don’t enjoy a particular one, you haven’t got long to wait before another one will come along which may suit you better.

    I’d also like to share the headline of an article in today’s DT – “Our humble hedgehog is disappearing fast” 🙂

15. I parsed 2 down slightly differently: UNCL(e) + A + SP (short for “special” – “killer” in the slang sense). Whatever reading Paul intended, I found that quite a tricky clue.

    I also wondered whether EURASIA was meant to be a reversal of A1’S A RUE (the A1 of course being the main route going north), but looking at it again, that makes the double-duty problem in that clue a lot worse.

    Too many good clues to list – I’ll say FORTH BRIDGE was my favourite, just because it provided a very instructive glimpse into the difference between Paul’s style and Puck’s.

16. A crossword completed on a train journey with no checks and cheat buttons a pleasant change this week

17. A small point for Eileen & HH @13. I’m not sure about double duty in EURASIA. Could it not be read as IS A RUE going North of ‘A’? [in the sense of ‘going North of Watford.’] The ‘a’ is not part of the definition, I assume.

18. I�m of two minds about HH. On the one hand, I�m usually all in favour of a rigorous and prescriptive approach to grammar generally, and I can see the source of HH�s distress when he sees what appears to be looseness. (I think the world would be a better place if schools took a more systematic approach to grammar English and foreign languages, and I�m contstantly frustrated trying to find a good children�s Latin text that says much at all about grammar.)

    On the other hand, I learned the �grammar� of cryptic crosswords by osmosis and without the benefit of grammatical instruction. Whatever rules of construction I�ve picked up, therefore, derive from my experience of solving. I feel that what I have absorbed, though, is systematic and sound. It may well be that Guardian setters employ a different grammar from the Times and that a Times �speaker� might find the Guardian grammar frustrating. (And this would explain why, when I had to choose between the Guardian and the Times years ago, I opted for the Guardian as it seemed more challenging.) After many years of solving, though, I generally find the cryptic grammar of Guardian setters (Rufus aside) consistent and comprehensible, and I might struggle to return to the Times.

    I think that differences in grammar (linguistic and cruciverbal) are an interesting subject � and surely we are all logophiles here � and I welcome HH�s observations in that regard, but I really don�t appreciate the vitriol with which they are sometimes made (though not particularly today, I must admit). If, having chosen to move here from the United States I had gone around angrily declaiming everyone for misspelling certain words, I would quickly (and rightly) be dismissed as a crank and a nuisance. I very much enjoy, though, gentle and often humorous illustrations of cultural and linguistic differences between the British and the Americans. Perhaps if HH tried to sound more like Bill Bryson he wouldn�t ruffle so many of our feathers.

19. Robi @17: I agree with you. ‘Going north’ in this case implies motion, not simply location, so ‘going north of A’ can be read as ‘reading upwards from A’.

20. Geographically, the NEC isn’t in Birmingham at all – it’s part of Solihull Borough, as is Birmingham Airport.

21. I think that ‘going North of’ thing is a stretch to say the least. You have to read it in a very compiler-friendly way for it to work! ‘To’ instead of ‘of’ would have solved it for me. Or ‘by’. These things are so easy to correct, as I said to Qaos yesterday.

22. One or two tricky parsings, but apart from that this was one of Paul’s more straightforward offerings. Last in was SUPERTONIC. I thought I’d seen HIBACHI in another crossword, but the only matches in the site search are ones I wouldn’t have done, so either it was a very long time ago, it has a variant spelling or I saw it somewhere else. Liked LEYLANDII, WHATSISNAME and FRANCIS OF ASSISI.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen

23. Robi @12

    On 13a, to amplify Hedgehoggy’s comment, “second” is part of the definition. The SUPERTONIC is the second note in the scale (re in sol-fa) immediately above the TONIC (do).

24. Re the NEC – I’m sure that Paul knows that the NEC is not in the centre of Birmingham but it is “The Centre” of Birmingham – a nice and almost certainly deliberate misdirection.

25. Re 1a see wikipedia etc. for reasons why the “possibly” is correct (e.g. there is such a theoretical thing as four-dimensional Euclidean space, in which the fourth dimension is not time). HH’s comment about “messing with” @13 is depressing and flatly anti-Ximenean. Doesn’t this man ever do an Azed?

    Re 28a would any Catholics like to start a fight about whether a mendicant friar, or St Francis himself, is or isn’t a monk? I don’t feel qualified. (And Paul does have a question mark…)

    Re Eurasia (19d) I like Robi and Gervase’s suggestion (@17 & 19). I don’t think Paul (a Times setter, for heaven’s sake) would have intended the dreaded “double duty”.

    Re the NEC (9a) – this happens every single time. People say “It’s not in Birmingham!” and other people point out that nobody said it was.

26. Nice puzzle-and something of a relief after yesterday’s struggle. FORTH BRIDGE caused me to hark back to Puck’s puzzle but otherwise this was a joy. Too many good clues to list but WHATSISNAME and THE NAUGHTY STEP raised a smile.
    The discussions of Hedgehoggy are becoming more tedious than anything he ever wrote. Please stop it!
    Thanks Paul.

27. I did manage to solve this after a little struggle, some of the clues were very clever, but the literals were a bit on the obscure side. I had never heard of ‘The Naughty Step’, and if leylandii refers to Mr. Alvand’s imbroglio that is also rather parochial.

    I like Paul’s puzzles, because you can get the answer even if you have no idea what it is when you get it.

28. Thanks Paul and Eileen

    Came to it late and was in a rush to finish, so carelessly entered NUCLEUS instead of NUCLEAR; hence couldn’t get NERVE.

    Liked “puppy feeder” for DOGMA!

29. Very enjoyable. Seeing the double L in the fodder made me think that the giant was going to be one of those oddly named Welsh or Cornish characters – and I’ve had three forty foot specimens of the real solution keeping the sun out of my vegetable patch for years. But I think my favourite was WHATSISNAME.

30. The Fourth Dimension is of course commonly known as ‘time’. Therefore it does not matter about an obscure Euclidean concept. There really is no need for ‘possibly’!

    Elsewhere, ‘to finish’ is ‘messing about’ (the indicator) with ‘our+d’. That I find questionable, as I said above.

    28a and the other one, it’s just inconsistent, as I said. That’s all.

    Re EURASIA I suggested how the clue could be clearer, that’s all.

31. Thanks, Paul, as ever, and Eileen, too.

    Vinyl @27, that’s one reason why I like Paul so much. His puzzles are fun and often tongue-in-cheek and you can solve them before
    working out last layer of meaning.

    [ One evening many years ago I saw a hedgehog carrying its baby off the road and out of danger. It was a lovely sight. ]

    Giovanna xx

32. Thanks Eileen.

    I am not sure about 19d; probably the a should not be underlined, as Robi suggested. I must admit I did not read the clue too carefully at the time: I saw “ASIA” as the huge land mass, spotted the reversal of RUE and saw EURASIA was a huge land mass, and put it in. But on rereading I see that doesn’t quite make sense.

    I don’t know why THE NAUGHTY STEP was so hard to get – it was my LOI.

33. Hi Robi @17, Gervase @19, Herb @25 and Dave Ellison @32.

    You’ll just have to believe me, please, that this was one of those blind spots that happen between solve and blog. The ‘a’ in 19dn should certainly not be underlined – a particularly unfortunate lapsus digiti, which I will amend immediately. I know I parsed it the way you did when I solved it!

34. Thanks Eileen and Paul
    I found this quite hard but satisfying to solve. For some reason I failed to parse 7d. Very many excellent and amusing clues as others have noted.

35. Ian SW3 @ 18

    Yes, I think that HH seems to come at cruciverbalism from the wrong direction. I’ve never read the learned tomes by Ximenes or whomever – just got stuck in and gradually learned how cryptics work. The whole point for me is that setters may bend the rules! Otherwise it’s rather mechanical.

    As a result I enjoy every single Guardian crossword, and never really feel any need to complain. I don’t get upset if I can’t finish a particular puzzle (I often get stuck on one or two of the very short answers, but hey, who cares?!). So from my perspective HH could loosen up and enjoy the puzzles a bit more.

    Today was great as usual from Paul. Favourites were FOURTH DIMENSION, WHATSISNAME and FORTH BRIDGE.

36. HH – there’s nothing particularly obscure about 4-dimensional (or, indeed n-dimensional) space. I suggest a read of Flatland, by Edwin Abbott

37. Flatland is indeed a must read I agree . Great puzzle today. Got stuck on NE corner mainly due to my inability to solve whatsisname

38. I think that M-theory (the current incarnation of string theory) requires 11 dimensions……….though it might be more.

39. Thanks Eileen and Paul

    With “-“, “taken away” and “dashed” in the clue 5d is something like a triple definition &lit.

40. Many thanks Eileen and Paul as ever. Enjoyed this a lot.

41. By the way, I totally agree with drofle.

42. Re 9A … the NEC was owned by Birmingham City Council, and so the Centre was Birmingham’s. But they sold it in January. So, together with Stephen@20, there is now no Birmingham connection. Is there such a word as “iccking”?. That would work. [International Convention Centre, which is in the middle of town, as us Brummies would say.]

43. Thanks Paul and Eileen

    Another entertaining, and in places, challenging puzzle from Paul. Didn’t parse ITERATE correctly or THE NAUGHTY STEP at all. TRIPWIRE and WHATSISNAME were the last two in.

    Dredged up HIBACHI from somewhere, but don’t know where – a crossword, Japanese restaurant, somewhere …

44. Van Winkle @42 – interesting, but your information does nothing to make the clue invalid. Regardless of who owns it the NEC is at least loosely in the Birmingham area, which is all that the clue requires!

45. … and I do have to confess that the NEC itself proudly announces itself to the world as “the NEC, Birmingham” on its website. But technically I would say that it is still as Birmingham as Windsor Castle is London. And not because as a Brummie I only managed to solve the clue with the help of Elvis and the definition. 😐

46. Thanks, Eileen and Paul!

    I got around the Birmingham problem in 9ac by putting in WINKING – W (with) + IN (indisputably in the centre of Birmingham) + KING (Elvis). It was my FOI and rather scuppered the rest of my attempt.

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