Another puzzle from Ifor, only a couple of months after his previous one in late March.
Preamble: Down clues are in normal order, and their answers are entered normally. Each contains a letter to be cut (leaving a new word) before solving. When read in clue order these form a question which must be answered by highlighting in the grid. Across clues are normal and presented in a logical order; their answers must be entered as solved, but thematically. Bars need not be shown; the grid is not symmetrical.
OK – no bars, no numbers. Down clues and entries normal (more or less), but regarding the Across clues we have the slightly off-putting “presented in a logical order” and for the answers there is the somewhat enigmatic “entered as solved but thematically”. So let’s crack on with the Downs. But first, as I’m in England, I went for a walk in the countryside with one other person who is not a member of the household, and of course we stayed two metres apart.
(In the table explaining the clues, I’ve simply numbered them sequentially for ease of reference.) I solved 2d ODSO and 3d UNSOWN straight away, so the question started _HY, almost certainly WHY especially as the W could so easily be “cut” from 1d. I managed a few more before embarking on the Across clues. 
I managed to solve a few, including the three with 10-letter answers, but after what felt like quite a lot of effort I was nowhere near making a start on placing any entries in the grid.
Next day, back to the down clues, solved a few; back to the across clues, solved a few more; return to the downs, and ended with enough letters to see the question emerging as WHY DID MAN AND DOG GO OUT?, and … an alarmingly empty grid. Another day gone, and things are beginning to look serious.
Having finally resolved 1d HOARD (what took me so long?), I took a deep breath and wrote 1a THIOURACIL across the top row of the grid, followed by the first 6 down answers located by their initial letters (H, O, U, A, C, I), and then for good measure I stuck 7d CARIOLE & 8d LEOPARD on the end. My breakthrough came when I solved 6a PROPINES and saw that I could start it with the PRO towards the right of the third row and then wrap it round at the end and write PINES backwards in the next row. So that’s it, the across answers are entered boustrophedon-style.
As is often the case with this sort of puzzle – lots of cold-solving, the dam is eventually breached, a trickle soon becomes a flood – matters progressed rather quickly after that. What to highlight? Look on the diagonal of course: TO MOW A MEADOW.
Thanks Ifor – that was tough. It was satisfying/gratifying to finish, although I felt that the payoff wasn’t quite commensurate with the effort. And I’m not sure of the connection between Sniping and “mowing” …
| Across | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Clue | Answer | Wordplay | |
| 1 | Sorry tale, so abandoning hapless local authorities inhibiting drug (10) | THIOURACIL | [LOCAL AUTHORITIES]* ¬ [TALE SO]* | |
| 2 | Case with spare for a wash (7) | CLEANSE | CASE with LEAN (spare) replacing A | |
| 3 | Margins kept going down in crosswords (4) | RAND | RAN (kept going) D(own) | |
| 4 | Biblical king is characterized by comprehending marks in old inscriptions (6) | OGHAMS | OG (Biblical king) HAS (is characterized by) around M(arks) | |
| 5 | Shaves – but only one side – and the other? Bristly (5) | SETAL | S(haves) ET AL (and other) | |
| 6 | Outdated offers stay, without one sent back (8) | PROPINES | PROP (stay) SEN (without) I both< | |
| 7 | Iron more crumpled clothing Dad emptied out, kept permanently in the kitchen, maybe (10) | ROOM-RIDDEN | [IRON MORE]* around D(a)D | |
| 8 | Rise above row after trips to country local (7) | OUTSOAR | OAR (row) after OUTS (outings, dialect) | |
| 9 | Granular ice advanced, overwhelming base of rock (7) | GRANITA | GRANITE (rock) with A(dvanced) replacing E (base) | |
| 10 | Journeys that have gone right to the heart of viewers (5) | EYRES | R(ight) inside EYES (viewers) | |
| 11 | Medals dubiously earned, taking both sides in act that’s generous to older folk (8) | ALMS-DEED | [MEDALS]* E(arne)D | |
| 12 | Second-rate engineers keen to be found in old lines (5) | BREME | B (second-rate) REME (engineers) | |
| 13 | Unhappy hearers boo production of Grease that’s over the top (10) | SEBORRHOEA | [HEARERS BOO]* | |
| 14 | Former spinner played with part of speech, leaving nothing out (3) | NUN | NOUN (part of speech) ¬ O (nothing) | |
| 15 | Become inert gas, patently leaving covering layer out (8) | STAGNATE | [GAS PATENTLY ¬ PLY (layer)]* | |
| 16 | Deference that’s stopping Mary Tudor’s return (4) | DUTY | (Mar)Y TUD(or) rev. | |
| 17 | Gloomier god of the underworld’s unholy realm (8) | DISMALER | DIS (god of the underworld) [REALM]* | |
| 18 | Overturned legal issues covering food for cattle (6) | SILAGE | (l)EGAL IS(sues) | |
| 19 | East London woman, very occasionally with her man in front (5) | VROUW | V(e)R(y) W(ith) before OU (man, S Afr) | |
| 20 | Game bird’s brood nearly dead (3) | NYE | double definition | |
| 21 | Aussie spiv’s terror when order’s lost (6) | RORTER | [TERROR]* | |
| Down | No. | Clue | x | Answer | Wordplay |
| 1 | Store opening to [w]omen engaged by firm (5) | W | HOARD | O(men) in HARD (firm) |
| 2 | Fancy that early childhood s[h]ow entertains (4) | H | ODSO | (childho)OD SO(w) |
| 3 | Snowbound ground, leaving bod[y] foolishly without buried seeds (6) | Y | UNSOWN | [SNOWBOUND]* ¬ [BOD]* |
| 4 | Poetic arrangements in rough [d]raft as an alternative to manuscript (8, 2 words) | D | ART FORMS | [RAFT]* OR (alternative) MS (manuscript) |
| 5 | For poet that’s quite enough of case showing l[i]ability (4) | I | CEAS | [CASE]* |
| 6 | Keys site[d] outside of locks, unhappily (6) | D | ISLETS | [SITE L(ock)S]* |
| 7 | Open carriage that’s air-cooled, blowing over dead in cre[m]ation (7) | M | CARIOLE | [AIRCOOLED ¬ O(ver) ¬ D(ead)]* |
| 8 | Spotted animal le[a]d – a rope with its end cut off (7) | A | LEOPARD | [LED A ROP(e)]* |
| 9 | Measuring device came out correct, overshadowed by unfortunate [n]ear miss at first (7) | N | AMMETER | MET (came out correct) in [EAR M(iss)]* |
| 10 | Skin [a]voids squeezing last of Lady Macbeth’s concealed spots (10) | A | HIDEY-HOLES | HIDE (skin) HOLES (voids) around (Lad)Y |
| 11 | Year’s lo[n]g and clear struggles (8) | N | CALENDAR | [AND CLEAR]* |
| 12 | Cut past [d]river leaving contemptuous gesture (4) | D | SNEE | SNEER (contemptuous gesture) ¬ R(iver) |
| 13 | What remains to be done when holding right to guar[d] tower (7) | D | ARREARS | AS (when) around (gua)R REAR (tower) – thanks to kenmac |
| 14 | End of Morse is so[o]n broadcast, bringing luck to Lewis (6) | O | SONSIE | [(Mors)E IS SON]* |
| 15 | Spy ti[g]ers climbing in stages – they’re taking regular steps (6) | G | SETTER | T(i)E(r)S< T(h)E(y)R(e) |
| 16 | Constructed hill evenly, finished without [g]rounding (5) | G | BUILT | BUT (without, obs) around (h)I(l)L |
| 17 | Marks on s[o]ap used regularly, packaging versus colour (5) | O | MAUVE | M(arks) (s)A(p) U(s)E(d) around V(ersus) |
| 18 | Layer that’s felt burning as [o]titis just starts (3) | O | BAT | B(urning) A(s) T(itis) |
| 19 | Gas ca[u]sed by pipeline onshore (4) | U | NEON | (pipeli)NE ON(shore) |
| 20 | Sec[t] subject to prohibition (3) | T | DRY | double definition |
|
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||||
About as tough as they get I thought, and I almost threw in the towel. Spotting the potential diagonal about halfway through saved my bacon, or at least saved me another couple of days worth of solving! Was I the only person who couldn’t get the song out of their head after? The title – yes, that bemused me too…
Blimey! I’m impressed. I’m afraid I abandoned this one after solving a few downs and 1a. It seemed unnecessarily complex and I don’t like having to cold solve a large proportion of the clues before being able to enter them in the grid. I’ll do better next week!
Yes, this was tough; lots of cold solving required before a gridfill could be attempted. However, once the boustrophedon penny dropped, it got a lot easier and the message on the diagonal became apparent and helped me finish the SE corner. I couldn’t understand the significance of the title, either.
Sniping. Possibly ‘snipping’ with a letter cut?
Same solving experience as mine, and many others, I imagine. The PDM came when putting the two next downs after Thiouracil, which I freely admit to using an anagram site to find, and seeing the first four letters of Cleanse miraculously appear. The meadow then showed up and Bob was my mum’s brother.
I’ve been wondering when this one was coming. Solved a fair number of clues, but once my initial stab at entering promised nothing good, I felt no need to go further. On the plus side, I used the time to solve a Listener, usually a quick white flag for me.
Note to self. When the answer is THIOURACIL (10), don’t enter THIORACIL (9).
With assistance, I managed to get a lot of the LHS done but had nowhere to put UNSOWN, LEOPARD and others. Virtually my last solve was ARREARS, so I was fairly pleased to be able to assist the blogger.
Many thanks to S&B
Another Ifor crossword with lots of cold solving required. Another Ifor crossword left unfilled.
While struggling with this, I started to think that perhaps Ifor had for once gone too far on the Guess What I’m Thinking front. For ages I had a partially filled grid with some answers entered in a way that seemed right but other answers that wouldn’t fit at all. Even when I guessed that “One man went to mow” might be the theme, I couldn’t see how that worked at first. Then there was that oh-so-satisfying moment of enlightenment and it all fell into place.
I should have had faith Ifor, of course. You always can.
I read the title the same way as Jon Surdy at post 4.
Super puzzle, which took me quite a while to got going, but eventually the floodgates opened. I knew something unusual was required when the lengths of the across solutions weren’t going to fit normally in the grid. I counted up all the across lengths which told me only 9 cells were not used. Never heard of boustrophedron, but decided that was what was needed, and it is the method I use to cut my grass!
When I was counting down the unused 9 cells I got worried when I used up 3 in a row. Not sure about the title, but I also thought of snipping with a letter removed.
I’ll respond more fully once all the regulars have had a chance to have their say. But in the meantime – all together now – “One man went to mow, went to snip an ing…”
Ifor
Oh dear! I should have cracked this one. I solved most of the down clues, found the question and immediately guessed the answer. However, I found cold solving the across clues daunting and only managed ten of them, with none of the 10-letter words. The significance of “logical order” escaped me. If only I had got 1A, I think, like HG, the penny would have dropped. A brilliant idea which sadly defeated me.
Thanks to Ifor and HG.
By the way, I recall that Serpent’s very first IQ (1380) entitled “Serpent is as Serpent does” also used the boustrophedon style.
I’m afraid I loathed this. I won’t say much else other than to point out that in the clue for MAUVE, I took the S of soap to be the redundant letter. And frankly it makes just as much sense as the O being redundant
It meant the message was making no sense to me and it really irks me when there’s an ambiguity re redundant letters. It certainly didn’t help my mood.
Sorry Ifor. Not a fan of this at all.
I nearly gave up on this several times but kept returning to it over three or four days (nothing else to do in Lockdown?). Enlightement came when. like NNI@10, I realised that the lengths of the across answers were such that they almost filled the grid with only 9 cells unused and that some sort of wrap-around such as boustrophedon-style (a new word for me) would have to be used. No one has commented on the answer DISMALER. For a long time I felt that this couldn’t be the answer because, as far as I can tell, it is a non-word which doesn’t appear in any dictionary. Or am I being too fussy?
Howard #14, Chambers says, in Spelling Rules, ‘Comparative and superlative adjectives (and some adverbs) are formed by the addition of -er and -est to the base form black blacker blackest’. That seems to indicate ‘dismaler’ is fine?
I enjoyed the puzzle, so thanks to the setter – and thanks too for the comprehensive blog.
Thank you Ifor. Ing, meadow. Like it.
Dave W @12: Yes, I blogged Serpent’s first IQ puzzle too – but that had the across answers entered overlapping, the last letter of one being the same as the first letter of the next.
Bingybing @13: If S were redundant in SOAP that would leave OAP, which is not a ‘new word’ (albeit an entry in Chambers as an abbreviation).
Howard L @14: I agree that DISMALER is rather dodgy, despite what Caran says @15: the rule surely applies to monosyllabic words, as in the example given, and to some with two syllables of the form ….Y such as HAPPY. But DISMALER? – maybe; and FORMALER? – I don’t think so.
I liked this crossword – we’ve had a run of (relatively) easy ones and who doesn’t want an occasional challenge? I was uncomfortable with OGHAM crossing the bar at the top of HIDEYHOLES.
Definitely a toughie. “You had good value for money there,” my wife pointed out when (having started as usual over Sunday lunch) I got to the end on Thursday evening. Most of the down clues seemed reasonably gentle and the snipped letters eventually led to the right thought about what one man and his dog got up to; but getting started took a long time because THIOURACIL wasn’t in the dictionary of my home-made anagram software (well, it is now). After that and the boustrophedon PDM it was still a long slow haul through difficult — or so they seemed to me — across clues with no sense of suddenly opened floodgates. I filled the grid before remembering that something had to be highlighted; it would have been useful to look for that earlier!
@18 Me too re OGHAMS, but I persuaded myself that the answer went through a hyperspatial wormhole off the grid and on again, rather than crossing the bar which Ifor told us we needn’t insert.
Decoyman @18 & David Langford @19, regarding OGHAMS and the bar/no bar dilemma: that’s why I used a dashed horizontal line between G & H, to be regarded as solid for the down entry but porous for the wrapped across one. (Same goes for VROUW in the lower right corner, since UW is not a word.)
There have been a few tough Listeners this year, but I found this Inquisitor tougher than any of them. The killer was the lack of symmetry, so even when I eventually (after a very long time) saw how acrosses were to be entered, the bottom half of the grid remained bare for ages because it was virtually impossible to enter down answer in the lower half until most of the acrosses had been cold-solved.
I liked the theme and its implementation, and I admired some of the very clever placements of extra letters. ‘L(i)ability’ for instance was brilliant. However, I felt the cryptic syntax in some clues was inelegant (indeed tortuous), and occasionally the punctuation rendered the clue ungrammatical or even unfair. For instance, the comma after ‘advanced’ in the clue to GRANITA interferes with the cryptic reading of the clue. The clue to VROUW, with no punctuation after ‘with’, reads as a clue to OUVR. And in the clue to BAT there are three words providing the initial letters, ‘starts’ is grammatically wrong; the only way to make it correct is to place a comma after ‘otitis’. I know many solvers aren’t bothered by these things, but I’m afraid they bug me because there are ways of being deceptive without invoking inaccurate or unfair punctuation.
^ BAT is fine. The clue means burning as titis, just the starts.
My solving route was very like HG’s. Solving the down clues was helped so much by knowing that we were looking for a question. It helped in presuming that the first down clue likely started with a W followed by an H. I was fortunate in having solved the first 3 across clues and having OGHAMS in mind but not solved. So into the deep end and entering THOURACIL followed by a string of downs got things started. After lots of staring CLEANS wrapping round and returning fitted and the approach was clear. There was still a long way to go and I did nothing else on Sunday except take a short walk and the IQ. What a sense of acheivement when I eventually finished it. Ifor is a genius.
DISMALER: TEA, crossword helper, sadly fairly recently withdrawn from sale after a long innings, lists this word as Core English.
My usual thanks to blogger and those who commented. A mixed reaction, unsurprisingly. This sort of puzzle is not everyone’s cup of tea. A few points in response:
The usual phrase is “bars MUST not be entered”, but I thought it helpful to leave it optional on the basis that most solvers would pencil them in as they went along and be irritated by then having to remove them. Removal deals with the issue raised and in hindsight might have been preferable.
“Extra letter in clues” is a standard and popular device. If the extra were required to be unambiguously identifiable the technique would be unusable (no use of in, at, if, the, when… in any clue) The solver’s additional task is to spot that specific one that renders the clue solvable in modified form.
Ifor