HALFEN, GUIRO, TWEEL and SHOYU were sympathetically clued - thank goodness! A little word here for the lovely clue for RETAILERS, which seemed to dip into Roy Clarke’s other famous creation with Arkwright, Granville and Gladys Emmanuel. It was CUISH which caused me the most difficulty, and, despite having set Judd-based clues myself, I sadly didn’t manage to get Donald out of my mind, so that the parsing of that clue caused me serious trouble until disgracefully recently: that is code for ‘just now’! I am still in doubt as to the exact workings of CLEGG and RETRO, but maybe they will come to me before the Newsletter makes all clear.ĭid Calluna have a stroke of luck with LILANGENI, or was the grid plan Eswatini-ready from the start? I was too stuck trying to think of Italian mathematicians who weren’t Leonardo of Pisa to be helped by Frank Paul’s delightful visual clue, and feel about integrals rather as the uninitiated tend to feel about 3D Cryptics. Without those, I think I would have struggled with the harder ones, as there are a few relatively obscure words here. ![]() There are a handful of easy clues to help us along: EDITING, NAIVE, SISAL and UNTIE come into that bracket. Vlad shows his great skill in composing such an economical and appropriate clue for the wonderful Bill Owen’s character COMPO SIMMONITE, while the other characters’ clues have a satisfying consistency about them. From that point, the six thematics should have become much easier. Roy Clarke’s affectionate, astonishingly inventive and consistent evocations of character are well described. He had saved up a beauty for the central thematic Day 18, which gives no inkling of what is about to be revealed. ![]() That shock to the system over, Vlad’s tougher challenges awaited. My first clue solved was CREPUSCLE, though I had to check in Chambers that such a spelling was acceptable - of course it was, though I’d never seen it before. Compo, Clegg and Foggy (no room for the others, but you can’t have everything, and it’s with that trio that I remember the series, comforting Sunday-night watching in the 1980s, staving off the return to work the next day) fitted in beautifully. ![]() HOLMFIRTH, the fascinating SIMMONITE and NORA BATTY (in administrative or perhaps Magyar form) satisfyingly framed the subject-matter. Nine-letter words are plentiful and varied, as the devisers of Countdown anticipated all those years ago, and with this theme the grid worked perfectly. 9x5x5 gives a satisfying proportion to the page: no straining to see the cells, and an elegant layout which will make this page most welcome on my kitchen wall in the least attractive of months. Solvers can be delighted that there’s more to come, while this grid was for me a most welcome innovation. When I sat next to half of Calluna at the 2021 Calendar’s Prizes Lunch, I had no idea of the full extent of this composing team’s expertise and originality. Graham Fox’s highly thematic photograph sets the pattern for a year of sumptuous colouring: here I detect an appropriate touch of nostalgia in this painterly image.
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