EV1672
Loved Ones by Ranunculus
Setter’s Blog
First letters of extra words give M BOND, creator of PADDINGTON who is surrounded by his LOVED ONES.
EV 1672 Loved Ones by Ranunculus – Setter’s Blog
It seems to me that children’s Christmas presents and children’s fiction have something in common – the best examples are produced by adults for adults, but they also happen to be suitable for children. As Jasper Carrott observed when explaining why Hector’s House couldn’t be compared to The Magic Roundabout, “It’s for kids, innit?” The Paddington books have given me great pleasure over many years with their timeless humour for all ages, and I still dip into them when I’m in need of a good chuckle.
I thought the young bear gentleman from Darkest Peru would make a nice subject for a puzzle, and the success of the recent feature films made it likely that every solver would know at least a little about him. I was delighted to find that the most important things in Paddington’s life added up to 44 letters, exactly the right number for the perimeter of a 12×12 grid; the ten letters of PADDINGTON would fit snugly on a row within. The fact that PADDING and TON (or TON+E/G/K/S/Y) are real words suggested a relatively simple puzzle where a few entries would get changed as part of the endgame.
I try to avoid gimmicked clues where possible, but here I felt that a small number of them could serve a dual purpose – guiding solvers both to the theme and to the approximate location of the letters to be changed. I could have used a mechanism which delivered just one letter per clue, but having extra words meant that I was able to offer two hints from just five clues, both the author’s name, M BOND, and the message ‘My bear often needs diversion’ – when Paddington writes in his diary that he is ‘at a lewse end’, it is a cause for alarm.
Having constructed the grid, populated the perimeter, and put in PADDINGTON along with five crossing words that could be changed appropriately, it proved possible to fill the rest of the grid without drawing too heavily on obscurities. It was important that the five clues with extra words could not possibly be solved while the interlopers were still in place, because, although I used no ‘link words’ between wordplay and definition in this puzzle, there were almost inevitably going to be other clues containing words which in the cryptic reading were redundant. For example, in the definition of RHUMBA (16a) as ‘dance tune’, either word could be considered superfluous, but the clue can be satisfactorily solved while both remain.
Where there are unchecked letters around the perimeter, I believe that an ‘unch message’ is a necessity, but – as Ifor suggested in a comment on the blog – I got a nasty shock when I worked out what material was available here: 18 letters with just three vowels, two of those being U’s, and a Y. I can assure you that (after I had checked and rechecked in the vain hope that an A or an E might somehow appear from the ether) they were subjected to some very hard Paddington-style stares indeed. I like my unch messages to have at least a vague connection to the theme, but in this instance I was happy simply to come up with something that consisted largely of words!
I originally called the puzzle ‘Friends and Family’, which was undoubtedly too much of a stretch when it came to the marmalade sandwiches. I am indebted to the editor both for pointing this out and for extricating me from a sticky situation by suggesting ‘Loved Ones’, which seems to me mildly deceptive but absolutely fair. I hope that solvers found the puzzle accessible, and that one or two might perhaps be moved by it to (re)acquaint themselves with PB in print.
Ranunculus, December 2024
++++++++
A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.