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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *********
Greetings from the Calder Valley! It is nice to be making one of my occasional ventures into Blogland and even more so when the puzzle you get to blog is so stunningly breath-taking.
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James Leonard (right) at a Listener Dinner
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Greetings from the Calder Valley! I’m helping BD out today as his Toughie blogger is not around. We have a pleasant offering from Ray T (I thought it was Petitjean because of the pop references!). Nothing too taxing, although I hadn’t heard of the alternative spellings of 4 down and 5 across, which I had only seen in the Bible in that form. I wonder how many of you have an answer at 7 down which is actually correct. I had an answer in there which when I came to parse it, I couldn’t and realised with a prod from BD, that I was wrong. A good example of answering without thinking fully.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
Greetings from Nether Wasdale! I am away on a week’s holiday, but couldn’t resist bringing you the annual offering from Micawber reviewing the year’s news. As usual, it’s a lovely offering that makes you smile and brings back some of the characters that hit the headlines in 2012 (though I suspect a certain Elgar will be disappointed his hero Silvio hasn’t made an appearance).
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of you a belated Merry Christmas and a really Happy New Year. Thanks to everyone involved in bringing this lovely site to life and especially Big Dave for all his work in keeping it running. A special word of appreciation though to Mrs BD (aka the lovely Pam) for putting up with His Nibs! I shall be back regularly after my break once I have got on top of my Open University course and one or two other things. Speaking of our glorious leader, I must thank him for nudging me on a few of these explanations that baffled me!
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
Greetings from the Calder Valley! One of my favourite setters is here today and as usual we have a high quality and stiff test for the Friday slot. Lots of great quality clues that demonstrate a setter right at the top of his game and caused plenty of head scratching. I spent quite some time staring at a blank grid before things started to materialise and fall into place.
I would happily nominate 24 down as one of the best clues I have seen this year.
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It’s not too late to enter this month’s prize puzzle.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, an assortment of clues, including some of the more difficult ones, have been selected and hints provided for them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment *****
Greetings from the Calder Valley!
Well, we have a Toughie by a mystery setter, or perhaps not? I’m not going to spoil it for you here and will try to keep things as much under wraps as possible. It’s a ferocious beast and you’ll need to know your music. Fortunately the key to this is one of my favourite tunes. I suspect some of you will not like this one bit, but I would encourage you to persevere and use a few hints, it is worthwhile. If all else fails, I’ll link to the music at the end of the blog.
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There’s still time to enter this month’s Prize crossword – entries close at midnight.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, an assortment of clues, including some of the more difficult ones, have been selected and hints provided for them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Greetings from the Calder Valley. Thanks to our lovely double acts for covering while I was incapacitated.
It’s Friday and this week Osmosis is here to taunt and tease us. A pleasant solve with not too much to tax the brain, although there are the usual hallmarks of our setter – unusual indicators of one and two letters, along with elegant and unusual, and occasionally stretchy, definitions.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment *****
Greetings from the Calder Valley! It’s that time of the month again and Elgar (aka Vlad the Impaler) has been let out of his padded cell to torment us with another ferociously fiendish Toughie. I think he might have been particularly grumpy when he set this one, as I found this a good deal tougher than some of his recent ones (and they were pretty tough!). Some unusual words in today’s grid which caused me to have to reach for the search engine, together with a couple of very cryptic definitions made this hard going at times, and will no doubt induce apoplexy in the homes of fans of other setters.
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