Toughie No 222 by Excalibur
You Pays Your Money……
+ – + – + – + – + – + – +
BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment **
I subscribe on a monthly basis to Telegraph Crosswords which means I pay £60 a year for my puzzles.
However, It’s days like today that I wonder why I bothered. When I was a lot younger my mum and dad used to get the Weekend Magazine, which was I suppose the Hello or OK!! of its day. A heady mix of salubrious celebrity tittle tattle and some rather curious adverts that baffled a prepubescent teenager and one of its features was The Stinker Crossword set by our setter today, described as being the toughest of its kind. As someone who had become spellbound by cryptic crosswords I could only look at it and wait for the solution to see what was going on. Even when I saw the solution, a lot of what I saw bemused me, and I waited until my dear old Latin Master spent lunchtimes explaining the magic of cryptics to me using the Guardian, Times and Telegraph. In all honesty, this puzzle might as well have been from that era given the language of the cluewriting and the words used. For the first 60 minutes today, I couldn’t work out a single clue. It’s rather strange as I tackle the Listener, Azed and Enigmatic Variations on a regular basis and can usually make a decent start, even if I don’t always finish it without resorting to dictionaries.
It is very noticeable that this setter seems to like using grids that contain answers with the minimum of checking letters and here we have another grid like that with ten of the answers having less than 50% of their letters intersecting. This means you can end up trying to guess and answer from a pattern such as * I *E * I * C*. Grossly unfair. The surface readings and accepted devices seem to be happily sacrificed at the altar of fairness. The Monday Maestro consistently manages to provide good surface readings and accurate cluemanship. Here it is not a case of hitting the bullseye, but just about scraping the outside of the target in quite a number of instances.
There are some decent clues in this puzzle, but they are outweighed by the puzzle’s inadequacies, of which there are many. There are a couple of answers where I have used my solving aid called TEA, and would not have finished without it, as I cannot make out the way the clue works. I am sure my esteemed colleagues will make more sense of those clues.
I don’t mind a tough challenge, but this is not tough, just inadequate.