Guardian 26,541 / Philistine

73 comments on “Guardian 26,541 / Philistine”

1. Thanks Gaufrid. Really sorry to hear about Eileen: please pass on our best wishes. This was a pleasant swing through cities which began pretty early for me in Damascus and ended pretty late in Cairo. I liked 1D and was (eventually) happy with leaves=ROCKET ie lettuce. Thanks Philistine.

2. I parsed 26 as NEEDS FIXING [lase]R. Can “tip” be considered, though, as the end of a word?

3. Hi Steve B
   You are right of course. I don’t know what made me type L[aser] (well I do, I was suffering from an optical migraine whilst writing the blog and so had difficulty in reading what was on the screen).

   I have seen ‘tip’ to indicate the last letter of a word before and I think it is fair. After all, the tip of a snooker cue, for example, is the end of it.

4. Thanks Philistine and Gaufrid
   Best wishes to Eileen.
   I found this easier than most Philistines, so rather more enjoyable. I didn’t know CAIRENE, so had to solve it from the word play.
   Curiously, Gaufrid, I too had (NEEDSFIXINGL)* written down for 26, and wrote in INDEX FINGERS without noticing that it doesn’t contain an L.
   Out of many good ones, I think BEMUSES was my favourite.

5. Thanks Philistine and Gaufrid.

   Enjoyed this. MANCUNIAN led to CITIZEN, which helped with all but 10d and 1,9d which had to be fed into Crossword Solver.

   Surfaces fine by me today.

   Best wishes to Eileen – which clue riled you so much?

6. Thanks Philistine and Gaufrid. (Do hope you are managing all right, Eileen, and not in too much pain.)

   Several of these clues were a refreshing ‘change’, SYDNEYSIDERS, IN ERROR, LENSMAN…

   I was led astray in 19d thinking ‘CHESS might also qualify since it is sometimes used in France by servants, e.g. ” ‘chesse est servie”, but probably not in England.

7. many thaks, gaufrid, especially since you’re under the weather – so glad you got such a nice puzzle, though.

   most enjoyable, as ever, from one of my top favourites.

   26ac made me smile, in view of my present limitations – please excuse lower case! i agree about r = tip.

   thanks for good wishes. it doesn’t hurt much now – just a blessed nuisance, being the ‘wrong’ hand – and i’m off to copenhagen for the weekend this afternoon!

8. Couldn’t get CAIRENE (and didn’t know the word) but all very enjoyable. Favourites were LIVERPUDLIAN and ASSUAGE. Nice theme. Thanks to Philistine and Gaufrid.

9. My apologies. I neglected to mention best wishes to Eileen! Hope you have fun in Copenhagen 🙂 And here’s hoping your migraine passes sooner rather than later Gaufrid!

   I suppose, technically, that a “tip” can refer to either one of two ends of anything. I didn’t really have any problem with its usage in the, well, in the end…..

10. Pedant point but surely 14a is a homophone of Damn A Scene – which was my clue to make me smile today.

    Best wishes to Eileen.

11. A very enjoyable puzzle. Thanks, Philistine and Gaufrid, and best wishes, Eileen!

    My favourite is 25, with 9 and 26 as runners-up. I couldn’t parse the first part of 10d, but it seems so obvious now – definitely a TTM. 14 took me a while as I got side-tracked by “film’s 17”, which left me trying to fit “Kane” into the answer … oops!

12. Thanks Gaufrid and Philistine
    Very best wishes to Eileen and hope G’s migraine passes quickly.
    Very enjoyable. Most answers on theme were easy enough once theme itself became clear but 19d nearly got me and Sydneysiders was a new one to me. 1a could not be anything else even if the parsing was predictably a bit clunky.

13. AndyK @10, although the whole solution is a homophone of “damn a scene”, I think that as the spelling of the last part is the same, it is at least as valid to split the parts and parse the clue as Gaufrid did (which is what I did too). Perhaps it depends on the order in which the parts are found. I got “a scene” before I got “damn/damn”, so breaking the clue seemed more natural.

14. jennyk @13 … make that “damn/dam”.

15. A good mixture of easy/difficult clues making it a very enjoyable solve; thanks Philistine.

    Thank you too to Gaufrid for stepping in, despite the migraine – hope you’re feeling better. Best wishes to Eileen, get well soon & enjoy the trip.

16. Sorry to hear about your broken wrist Eileen, and I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment of Copenhagen too much. I thought this was another excellent Philistine puzzle. Like others CAIRENE was my LOI after I finally saw the wordplay, and like Gaufrid I had been thinking that “Chinese” “had to be” the answer, but I hadn’t entered it because I couldn’t parse it. Of the non-thematic clues my favourite was the one for BEMUSES.

17. What a pleasing challenge this was! I think I was fortunate to solve the straightforward anagram for 24 across, and with a Z in the key clue, Citizen soon popped up. Felt somehow that 1 across simply had to be Liverpudlian, but took me ages to work out why…

18. Defeated at the end by SYDNEYSIDERS and CAIRENE, but what lovely words they both are. Nice puzzle, Philistine!

19. Finished, with thanks to OneLook Dictionary for the rather obscure 10d and 19d, and to Gaufrid for explaining who the John was for 16a (I was thinking it must be either Lennon or Dowland…).

    Get well soon Eileen.

20. … and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.

    Best wishes to Eileen (and Gaufrid, and John – any more for the prayer list?).

    Obvious, perhaps, but I think worth pointing out that all the 17s in the puzzle use different constructions (14A and 19D are close; and 1A and 15D share a little more than proximity).

    My favourite is 9A BEMUSES – an excellent novelty.

    Bravo, Philistine, a fine puzzle.

21. JennyK @11 was also looking for Kane, and with an X and Z early on was wondering if I should be looking for a Q and a J somewhere on the grid.

22. Thanks Philistine, good puzzle.

    Thanks Gaufrid, hope you are feeling better and Eileen’s wrist is improving.

    Although LENSMAN is in all the dictionaries, I can’t think of when it would be used these days.

23. @22
    You get 123 results if you search “lensman” on the Guardian’s site. E.g. 9th Aug 2013: “Week two of the Guardian’s photography project sees the great documentary lensman Martin Parr setting a tough task”.

24. Thanks, Gaufrid – and commiserations to Eileen (or should I say eileen, in solidarity?)

    Enjoyable puzzle, with an unusual variety of toponyms as the theme. As others have said, there were some simpler than usual clues for a Philistine puzzle, which gave a way in. Like Dave E @5, I solved MANCUNIAN, CITIZEN (surely ‘exciting central’ should really be ‘exciting centre’, though that would obviously throw out the surface) and then it all became clear.

    I particularly liked BEMUSES, CHESS and ENNOBLE – all succinct clues with disguised caesurae.

25. Best wishes Eileen, sorry to hear you cracked your wrist.

    This was going okay ish in the across clues, but took a dive in the downs, for me. 9a I thought was very good, though it may need a QM.

    1a ‘desktop’ does not mean D, especially in an across clue, though in The Guardian these niceties do seem to get disregarded; 11a ‘age regression’ does not mean ‘regressing age’ or ‘regression of age’; 16a def does not define in the right part of speech; 21a seems to stereotype a bit for me; 5d again definition is in the wrong part of speech; 6d the indicator is nounal, I don’t like this because technically it can’t work; 7d should really have ‘sausages for 17s’ to make proper sense; 17d ‘central’ does not mean ‘some central part of’ and does not really work, even if it were in the right place i.e. positioned before ‘exciting’; 18d ‘turn’ can only really work as ‘turns’; 19d ‘with’ for some would be inelegant; 20d ‘when’ is hard to justify.

    HH

26. Thanks Gaufrid, good blog.

    GWS, Eileen, I’m guessing left wrist, right?

    Enjoyed this on the whole, but SYDNEYSIDERS went in unparsed.

    These nouns denoting one’s domicile (anyone know the proper word?) are odd aren’t they? I have a pal in Newcastle who tells me he’s a Nova Castrian.

    Nice week, all.

27. Excellent puzzle – very enjoyable.

    Doesn’t deserve the sort of rubbish at #25, which every Guardian puzzle seems to earn in inverse proportion to it’s virtue.

    The author of #25 seems to do G puzzles almost exclusively and solely with a view to making negative comments about them based on his view that there is a single unique rulebook for crossword setting and (despite his troubles with understanding simple English grammar) that he has mastered it.

    He seems to like the occasional Indy puzzle – especially those by Tees of *whom* he once wrote:

    The �crossword who�s who� says that Tees is not a Guardian compiler, which is unfortunate. It would ramp up the quality in that journal. They should kick out the dead wood.

    Fancy that.

28. First of all, I’m very sorry to hear about Eileen’s injury – I hope you are back in action soon.

    I liked this one a lot – a pleasing mixture of devices, though once the theme gave way (from MANCUNIAN which confirmed FRANKFURTER) some of them were guessable from the crossers. Last in was CAIRENE, not a word I was familiar with but it dropped out from the wordplay and had to be right. Liked DAMASCENE and LENSMAN

    Thanks to Philistine and Gaufrid

29. I liked this; it was fun trying to get all those citizens in there. Like others have said, I began in Damascus and ended in Cairo. With Damascene and Mancunian in place, the theme was obvious.

    Our tour didn’t visit the Americas, though the only interesting demonym that I know of for a North American city is “Angeleno”–all the rest involve taking the city name and tacking on -er or -(i)an. (And really, “Angeleno” is just that, but in Spanish–which is possibly unique among English-speaking cities.) In South America, you’ve got “Porte�o,” which is what you call a citizen of Buenos Aires, but maybe that one’s a little TOO interesting…

    And I’ll add that I hope Eileen heals soon.

30. @25 – I’m really struggling to maintain my vow of silence 🙁

31. And William @26: the word is “demonym.”

32. @Eileen

    I wish you a speedy recovery to the rudest of rude health.

    @Gaufrid and co.

    I’m very sorry your helpful and excellent blog has been infected by the overwhelmingly destructive input of “hedgehoggy”. I’m all for fair comment and openness, and many of this poster’s offerings are no doubt worth reading. But the overall impact on fifteensquared.net is approaching the “intolerable” warning indicator; approaching the Japanese knotweed level.
    Just my opinion of course.

33. LOI was SYDNEYSIDERS of which I’ve never heard and,annoyingly, couldn’t parse. I also had some trouble with LIVERPUDLIAN which, given I am one,was also annoying. The balance was fine I thought. I particularly liked DAMASCENE and CAIRENE.
    Thanks Philistine

34. Am I the only one to cavil at 12 across? “Niggard” surely is a mean, miderly person, not a selfish one. There is a difference, and although I could see “niggard” I didn’t insert it because I assumed it was wrong.

35. Thanks Philistine and Gaufrid. This was right on my wavelength today, with a great variety of top quality clues.

    Best wishes to Eileen – enjoy your weekend.

    (Is there a word for a native of Copenhagen?)

36. At 27 the ‘Grammar King’ Jolly Swagman uses the dreaded IT’S when he means ITS.

    All I’m saying is, being extremely ready to be the first one to cast a stone is a dangerous mindset 😀

37. Are my posts really ‘intolerable’ ‘baerchen’? Your post is confusing because you say my posts are ‘no doubt worth reading’, so what do you mean? You seem to have a dual personality problem.

    😀 only joking.

38. PS ‘Grammar King Jolly’

    🙂

    I don’t get this thing you say about Tees.

    Yes he’s one that usually produces fair clues, but nearly all of them do on the Indy, so it can’t be much of a surprise. To be honest, I don’t think he is the only one I’ve singled out as a writer I would like to see working for The Guardian.

    PPS I have never said or knowingly implied that I have ‘mastered grammar’, that is a very snide remark on your part. You are SO angry it is appalling.

39. Sorry that was a bit rude, apologies.

40. baerchen @32 – well said! I liked your knotweed, though Hydra might be just as appropriate…

41. alexandra @34, I also had doubts about NIGGARD, but reasoned that if a person was miserly s/he was most probably also selfish.

42. @hedgehoggy

    I said that many of your posts are worth reading, but my overall impression is that your input, when taken as a whole, is overwhelmingly negative. This pursuit is a joyous one for solvers, and a diversion for setters. I feel that you frankly suck the joy out of this activity, and it saddens me.
    By all means ignore my view and carry on; but how much better it would be if you would join the majority here who have as their default setting a positive mindset to crosswords

43. Found this quite tricky and technically failed as I had CHINESE at 19d, assuming I wasn’t clever enough to parse it. Then I was going to complain at the mixture of city and national citizens. Mind you I nearly ended up with TRANSFORMERS at 7d, which would have been embarrassing.

    Still tons easier than yesterday.

44. You seem to be trying to limit how people may express themselves here baerchen, I’m not sure it is your job, though I do not mean to insult you there. I very often praise puzzles, but that usually goes unheralded. Except by Cookie! I do not seek to be negative, and these are only an opinion, my hope is that crosswords will not ‘forget’ the art of setting. It worries me, to be honest, that compiling could let it all slip.

45. If a fairly new but now regular visitor to this site may give her view of “the hh issue”, it seems to me that the usual pattern is:

    A) one post from hh with a lot of detailed criticisms (and now occasional praise),
    B) a few serious attempts to counter some or all of those criticisms,
    C) a lot of posts which just complain about A, and
    D) hh’s responses to B and C.

    Without B, C and D (particularly C), the knotweed would seem a lot less pervasive. To put it another way, “don’t feed the troll”. I don’t think hh is actually trolling, but the annoyance factor is much the same for some people, and so is the advice to minimise it.

46. I don’t know whether to thank you or not, Jenny. 😀

47. Thanks to Philistine and Gaufrid – and w(r)istful condolences to Eileen. Thanks also to mrpenney for yesterday’s list of stadia-stadiums. I knew Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge (and Wembley) but not the rest (especially Craven Cottage). Today I had no trouble with Liverpudlian and Mancunian but struggled with Sydneysider, Damascene, and particularly Cairene. As to 12ac, a production of Macbeth in race-conscious D.C. created a firestorm because Macduff told Ross: “Be not a niggard of your speech.” US directors often change the word to “miser.”

48. jenny @45 – this is exactly why I made my “vow of silence” a few weeks ago, but we all have our breaking points. I suspect there will always be disagreement between those whose crossword education started with the Guardian and those who started with, say, the Times. For those of us in the former camp, the Guardian’s long-established idiosyncracies are precisely what makes its best setters so special, so we resist attempts to drag the Guardian into line with standards it has never adhered to. I suspect that by now, there are probably a lot of us in the “let’s keep quiet and hope it goes away” camp.

49. HH @25
    Concerning 7d, remember that there is a difference between “Frankfurter” (someone from Frankfurt) and “ein Frankfurter” (a sausage) – hence JFK’s famous faux pas “Ich bin ein Berliner”, which translates as “I am a doughnut” (warning: this may be apocryphal!)

50. Thanks Gaufrid and Philistine, and get well soon, Eileen.

    An excellent puzzle with a challenging theme. Certainly, SYDNEYSIDERS and CAIRENE were new to me. It occurred while reading this blog that “California Girls” would be an excellent clue for CAIRENES.

    mrpenney @31: I originally thought that CITIZEN may have been DEMONYM, having already got MANCUNIAN. Of course there’s no way it would parse.

    William @26: Novocastrian is the spelling, and a fine word it is – in fact, I can actually see Novocastrians RUFC’s ground from where I’m sitting.

51. Thanks Philistine and Gaufrid, and commiserations to Eileen. I hope you have a swift recovery: if you can start to exercise the wrist/hand (with a sponge rubber ball) while it’s still in plaster then the loss of fore-&-aft movement should be minimal – I speak from experience.

    beery hiker @ 30: I’m with you

    baerchen @ 32: well phrased

52. Could I just say, even though I should absolutely extra-totes keep my great big rot shut, that I completely luvvit when ole Swaggers makes a twit of himself. He did it before on compound anagrams which, let us not forget, was a real tour de farce. And quite honestly I would have kept schtum, were it not for his one or two recent forays into naming names, or dancing round with hand on arse of same, when he has no grounds for it.

    Shaddap Swagman.

53. mrpenney @31 Many thanks for demonym, brilliant.

    jennyk @45 Well summarised. I’ve been a B, and it has served neither me nor the blog a jot. I now resolve to ditch my B habits and reform into a non-feeder. Thank you.

54. hh @46, 🙂

    I don’t have any problem with your initial posts. I agree with some of your points; mostly I find them nit picking. It would be easy to skip that one post if I wanted to do so, though. I do find the back-and-forth bickering tiresome, and that is more effort to skip.

    bh @48, I’m sure you credit hh with more influence than he has if you think his complaints on this blog have any power to “drag the Guardian into line with standards it has never adhered to” – but I’m also sure you don’t actually believe that.

55. My name is Herb and it is 27 days since I last responded to a “hedgehoggy” post.

56. HH – why do you want ‘calm’ to be a noun in 16d just because it is in the clue? This is just a standard compiler bluff, surely?

57. I’ve had a couple of run-ins with HH but it must be clear by now that no amount of criticism is going to make him change his ways. I think a good strategy would just be to allow him to be his somewhat prickly self. He adds to the rich tapestry of comments, and he has a sense of humour, thank goodness.

    Herb @ 55: are you getting withdrawal symptoms?!

58. Welcome, Herb, that’s a nice name. You have shown great courage and you are among friends.

59. (Muffin @49

    No, it’s not.)

60. What a coincidence – Paul B jumps in.

    You never scored a single point (which is obviously your intention – ie as opposed to polite discussion) over me regarding compound anagrams – a simple enough subject which no doubt appears enormously complex to you.

    @HH – so I did its for it’s (or vice versa). Just a typo. Actually very uncool to dine out on typos done at speed. OTOH your ludicrous clangers on DBEs (or DBE’s for greengrocer’s) and who/whom may well have started out as that but you went back and (no doubt after some consideration) defended them.

    @jennyk If you’d been around a bit longer you’d know what’s going on with HH – as with Rowland before him. The word around the traps was that Rowland was just a sockpuppet – but that can’t have been true can it – I mean there’s no one in the cruciverbal world who would sink so low as to pretend to be a cripple in order to disguise their feeble attempt at sockpuppetry – is there now?

61. Not sure whether anyone wants this but I am going to make an effort to explain what HH means @25.
    Trying to understand what HH means is really what it should be all about.
    The fact that the overall tone is once more negative (‘compensated’ by these awful smileys) leaves me actually cold, as does JS’s reaction to this.

    1ac: ‘desktop = T’
    Whether this (also) works in an Across clue depends on whether you see ‘desktop’ as an indicator for the grid entry or as a part of the clue (which is written from left to right, so T might the top of the word). Some time ago we had a discussion on that in a Monk blog in which he made his point. ‘East of Eden’, N, but not in a Down clue?
    I have no problems with it.

    11a: ‘age regression’
    It’s in the same category as ‘Tory leader’ for T. Some setters don’t like it (including Tees, the setter @52) but many cannot be bothered (including Paul). Some say it should be ‘age’s regression’ which doesn’t make much sense in the surface. Therefore HH comes up with some alternatives that do make sense. That is, if you in the No Tory Leader camp. But let’s not talk about politics ….

    16a and 5d: ‘… scored by John’ and ‘… in France’
    Once more a case of “some setters do it, others don’t”. Here I am with HH, I prefer ‘for something scored by John’ [doesn’t make sense in the clue (of which the surface doesn’t make sense anyway)] and ‘somewhere in France’ [which Philistine could have written].

    21ac: ‘extends’
    Nothing wrong from a cryptic point of view. But now the surface seems to be the problem. A matter of taste, I think.

    7d: ‘Frankfurters’
    Yes, agree, ’17s sausages’ or ‘citizens sausages’ doesn’t mean anything. To improve the surface HH suggests ‘Sausages for 17s’ which is fair enough. That said, he is skating on thin ice as often he wants ‘for’ in ‘A for B’ to be used as ‘A leads to the solution (B)’.

    18d: ‘citizen’
    Here I had my question marks too. Unlike HH, I can accept ‘central exciting’ for CITI but ‘exciting central’ is at least questionable. I’m fine with ‘exciting centre’ even if we’re in ‘Tory leader’ territory here.

    18d: ‘ennoble’
    Let’s call the definition (‘Make a lady’) A and the fodder (‘a travel bonnet’) B. Then the clue reads as ‘A turn up in B’. Ideally it should be ‘A turns up in B’: that’s what HH means and I’m afraid he’s right.

    19d: ‘Cairene’
    That little word ‘with’ is just a link word, often used. Here HH is just nitpicking to no avail.

    20d: ’emigres’
    Perhaps HH misses something between ‘When regime’s corrupt’ and ‘they seek a better life elsewhere’. Perhaps, it’s just a comma? In my opinion, one more case of nitpicking.

    Well, that’s it folks!
    Is it?
    Not really.
    I would like to say that this was a very fine crossword by a very thoughtful setter and fellow 17d.
    Chris DeBurgh once wrote a song about ‘the classical dilemma between the head and the heart’.
    Perhaps, that’s HH’s problem.
    He seems to focus on the ‘head’ while his adversaries like to follow their ‘heart’.
    I’m somewhere in the middle as I think an inspirational crossword should look both ways.
    I know, it’s a bit LibDem – and you know what happened to them …. But let’s not talk about politics.

    ps, never heard of SYDNEYSIDERS (10ac).
    We did enter it but couldn’t parse it.
    So thanks Gaufrid, for helping us out.
    One more example of Philistine’s love for using multiple fodders (like in 25ac).

62. But many of HH’s comments on clues I just don’t understand, so I thought I would ask him about this very simple issue. The same English word can so often be a noun, verb, adjective whatever and it is part of a setter’s skill to confuse the issue whenever possible. So why is this wrong?

63. Thank-you very much for this, Sil van den Hoek, you anticipated my query (which crossed) and your answer explains a lot. Actually, the clue I meant to refer to was 6d rather than 16d, and you’ve not mentioned that. Is there any problem here? Why does HH object?

64. Oops, I mentioned 18d twice (of which ‘citizen’ should be 17d, of course).
    And yes, I forgot 6d.

    HH doesn’t like here ‘with second promotion’ or ‘with ‘second promotion” (see the subtle difference?).
    What’s happening here is: S (‘second’) goes up (‘is promoted’).
    HH doesn’t like nounal indicators and indeed one should be careful using them in the right way.
    For HH ‘(with) second promotion’ means ‘(with) promotion of second’ or ‘(with) second’s promotion’.
    The apostrophe-s is crucial in the cryptic reading of the clue.
    It is similar to ‘Tory leader’ which in HH’s eyes should be ‘Tory’s leader’.
    To be fair to HH, (s)he’s not the only one with this view.

    And what’s my opinion?
    For some reason I feel less comfortable with ‘second promotion’ than with ‘Tory leader’.
    But my discomfort was easily cancelled out by the joy of this puzzle in general.

65. Just ignore him – as you would a spoilt child. Giving him so much attention will just encourage him.

66. Herb @55, drofle @57 – after yesterday’s relapses, I am now back on the wagon (for now…)

    Sil @61 – thanks for your efforts – that analysis must have taken some time…

67. Late to this post as I only finished the last two clues this morning. (cruising all day and then enjoying the last of the sun with a beer or to on the bow deck 🙂 )

    I really enjoyed this and although I hadn’t heard of CAIRENE or SIDNEYSIDERS both were gettable from the wordplay.

    Only posting now to mention my favourite bugbear, “The Pangram”

    Funny how hardly anybody mentions when a puzzle isn’t a pangram. (Surprisingly we did have one confession here 🙂 )

    How many of you wasted a lot of time trying to fit a Q and a J in the troublesome clues? I still believe that, due to the rarity of the “phenomenom” this “technique” wastes more time than it saves. However if you enjoy it please continue.

    Thanks to Gaufrid and Philistine

68. Brendan @ 67

    While not specifically disagreeing with your views on pangrams, I’m not sure how infrequent they actually are: we’ve had three* in the graun and at least one in the Indy or FT (I forget which) in the last fortnight, so that’s more than one in six. Granted that may have been an unusual cluster, but they do seem do be a fairly frequent event.

    * because, of course, alphabeticals are by definition a pangram

69. Simon @68 – I am extending my vow of silence to include any further discussion of Brendan’s views on pangrams

70. Beery Hiker @66, ‘that analysis must have taken some time�’.
    Maybe, but I prefer people to disagree (or, perhaps, agree) with HH after trying to understand what he actually means, rather than putting him away just because of his negativism.
    And I am not sure whether many solvers here make that effort (anymore).
    I have the impression that most posters dismiss HH just because ‘it’s him again’.
    Which, in a way, is HH’s own ‘fault’ due to his style of writing.

    When I solve a puzzle I also, regularly, see things of which I think ‘is that right?’, ‘that’s a bit iffy’ or the like.
    But I don’t put them in a List of Bad Things in order to show the world that the setter should have done better.
    What I actually do, is asking myself ‘Would I have done this?’, then think about it and go on to the next line.
    There’s no point in over-analysing crosswords, and certainly not in summing up all the things that might perhaps not be fully right or according to ‘the rules’ (JS: quotation marks!).

    I am well aware of the fact that I wrote some pretty long comments on crosswords too.
    That mainly happens when I get really excited by a puzzle, or when I think a puzzle has some underlying cleverness or hidden gems that the world doesn’t see but should.
    Of course, there should be room for criticism too but in a balanced way.
    Few people are perfect, few crosswords are perfect.
    Yes, many Times puzzles may come close but, personally, I prefer the generally less dull surfaces of Guardian crosswords.
    They add to the fun.

    And this Philistine puzzle was fun!

71. No Sil – people dismiss HH for another reason – which you manifestly haven’t latched onto.

72. Is it your reason?

73. Sorry for the extremely late post, All my daylight hours are taken up with a renovation and I am a week behind in crosswords. Even further behind in recorded TV shows.

    Best wishes for a speedy recovery to Eileen.

    PS I hope you get to read this Eileen.

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