EV 1672 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1672 (Hints)

Loved Ones by Ranunculus

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Growing up as an only child, I often had to adapt pastimes to suit my situation, whether that meant throwing balls at the wall of our house so I could catch them when they bounced back, taking myself on at chess, captaining both the England and Rest of the World cricket teams (brilliantly) in a game of Owzthat, or writing pieces of prose containing deliberate errors so that I could correct them in red pen (I probably shouldn’t have admitted that…)

So the idea of providing hints for my own puzzle didn’t seem all that strange to me. I did, though, check with the editor whether I’d glossed over anything that he felt was worthy of comment.

Preamble: Five clues contain an extra word which must be removed before solving; in clue order, these words and their first letters provide a hint to the theme. In the completed grid, one letter in the entries for each of these clues must be changed to reveal a character who finds himself surrounded by his LOVED ONES running clockwise around the perimeter. All entries are real words, and the unchecked peripheral letters could spell WRY NEWT CLUBS MRS MUD. The Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

No gimmicks apart from five clues which will be impossible to properly solve without their extra word having been removed. These clues could be spread through the puzzle, but the fact that all five will have their entries changed to produce the name of one character suggests that those entries might all share the same orientation.

Across

8a  Shoot bagging brilliant bird (7)
The ‘shoot’ here has nothing to do with guns, while the ‘brilliant’ word might describe a top performer.

14a  Preserved antique lead from coop ducks bent upwards slightly (7)
The verb ‘duck’ is used in its informal sense of ‘avoid’, with a single letter avoiding an eight-letter word.

22a  Stop old American author I occasionally fly into Britain (6)
There aren’t too many famous American authors who can be accommodated in a three-element (2+1+3) charade for a six-letter answer, and this probably won’t be the first time that you’ve come across this particular one in a clue.

27a  Most local research delves into local cattle (7)
The wordplay involves a three-letter abbreviation which may be unfamiliar but is not hard to guess. The ‘local’ indicates that the other word involved is shown by Chambers as ‘dialect’.

29a  Knock HM out, possibly? (8)
You won’t find ‘Gesg?’ in a barred puzzle as a clue for SCRAMBLED EGGS because it contains no definition. This clue is constructed along broadly similar lines, but with the addition of a definition.

Down

1d  Waste hour, left standing in empty alleyway (7)
Two wordplay elements, the first one an abbreviation, are manipulated in tandem before being put inside a third element.

5d  See you – not child – grabbing at round fruit like raspberry (7)
The key to this one is identifying the interjection which corresponds to the informal ‘see you’.

17d  In my poetry, curse naysayers I beat up (7)
Three elements, in a 3+1+3 pattern, are subjected to a single change. The underlining strongly suggests that a stowaway is present.

Definitions in clues are underlined

The extra words, and their first letters, should guide you directly to the character. His name is going to intersect the answers to each of the five clues which contained those extra words, so the search area is narrowed down considerably. Having made the necessary modifications to the five entries (resulting in real words), all that remains is to use one’s knowledge of the character – with help from the web as necessary – to fill in the blanks around the perimeter, checking off the letters in the ‘unch message’ as you go.

There were a few slightly tricky clues, made a little tougher by the reduction in checked letters for the lights which protruded into the perimeter, but finding the character, and then his loved ones, should not have proved too challenging.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾 (Suitable for all)

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