Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty */** – Enjoyment **
A particularly poorly cat, and the resulting visit to a local vet, renders Libellule indisposed to review today’s challenge from my observant colleague Rufus. He certainly brightens up a particularly miserable Monday morning in West Sussex with his usual mixture of clean clueing and dry wit.
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As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the more difficult clues and provide hints for them.
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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 **
Tilsit is off to chat up the nurses at the hospital again! The online Telegraph Puzzles site originally announced that this was an Elgar puzzle, but it didn’t take long to realise that Vlad is taking a prolonged sabbatical and this one is from the hand of Osmosis.
The subheading is an additional hint for 12 across!
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
What with clues about Noah’s Ark and floods engulfing a city you’d almost think that Giovanni had a premonition of the horrible weather that we’re suffering from at the moment. I expect we’ll get a few complaints about ‘general knowledge’ questions but there’s nothing very obscure. Let us know how you got on.
If you want to see an answer highlight the gap between the brackets under the clue.
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BD Rating – Difficulty */** Enjoyment ***
A very enjoyable puzzle from Cephas with a good mix of clues, including his trademark anagrams.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
The first thing to do was to discover whether MynoT was still on his alphabet mission and, if so, which letter was the featured one. The first two clues I solved both had an M and an H; the third one had an H but not an M. So was it to be H? The answer was soon found to be ‘No’. It turned out that MynoT was killing five birds with one stone and that all the answers contained one (or more) of V, W, X, Y or Z. Does this mean that this tedious series is now at an end? Let’s hope so.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Hola from the very noisy Vega Baja where a guy started up a pneumatic drill about 50m away at 0830 this morning. Didn’t help the concentration on what turned out to be an enjoyable RayT. I’m fairly confident that it’s him this week as we have the Queen, Beam (his Toughie pseudonym) and a bit of innuendo. I’ve gone for 2* overall but for me it was a puzzle of two halves. The top half was only 1* as I more-or-less just wrote in the answers but the bottom half was a 3* head-scratcher so, on average, 2* it is! Maybe it was the pneumatic drill which caused the problem – it’s now gone quiet but been replaced by what sounds like a rather large angle grinder!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***– Enjoyment ****
This one took me slightly longer to solve than recent Virgilius puzzles and I did have to spend extra time sorting out the wordplay for a couple of my solutions . The usual great all-round entertainment we have come to expect on a Sunday morning, and for once solved in brilliant sunshine.