iMagus

For the first and prolly last time, my name has appeared among the answers – in fact at 1 across – in a cryptic crossword puzzle. You should have no trouble working this out: Soldier left fat politician (7). [Source: the so-called 'Sunday Times' puzzle, no. 697, in The Australian, 14  August 2010]

In worse news, having just solved the puzzles in the fifth of the six published Araucaria collections, I’ve just opened the last one: Volume 4 of the Chambers series. I glanced at the first puzzle and was horrified to recognise it. It didn’t take long to find it again, at no. 95 in Volume 2. (The first two were published by The Guardian.) I hope it’s an isolated error.

Here’s a cryptic (crossword puzzle type) clue for my ‘cousin’.

PM: nameless apostate (5)

(Thanks to Araucaria.)

Araucaria is still setting!  John Graham, born 1921, set the puzzle in the most recent Guardian Weekly.  I’m still solving puzzles he set in the 1980s – but he’s been doing it since 1958.  A living legend.

The guy who invented the crossword puzzle just died.
They buried him 6 down.

As I mentioned a slow time for the Times cryptic crossword puzzle the other day, I should say that I’ve posted a PB: 13:50!  This was a genuine, clocked, unassisted time.  And when I say ‘posted’, I mean that I mentioned it in Times for the Times blog.
I feel a wonderful sense of relief.  Having broken the 15′ barrier, and being quite sure I could never crack ten minutes, I can now solve the thing as slowly as I like for the rest of my life.  As the Yorkshiremen said: ‘Luxury!’
For the record, my PB was on Times 24288 of 27 July 2009.

I solved today’s Times cryptic crossword puzzle in 43 minutes.  It was depressing, as I wrote my second answer in at the ten-minute mark, to think that Peter Biddlecombe would have solved the whole thing by then.  Later today, he’ll tell us here how long he took.  I’ll look later and let you know. … Peter solved it in 11′29″: see!

Our Leader

I attempt to solve the Times cryptic crossword every day.  Today I completed it in 34 min. – not a PB, but as good as I will ever get, because today’s (24207) could not be called easy.  There’s a website for people like me: Times for the Times, where a team of solvers, led by Pete Biddlecombe, post their times and discuss the setting.  But I’m just not good enough.  The best times are usually in the 10-20 min. range, so my 34 min. just doesn’t cut it.  And there’s one answer I don’t understand.

Belay all that: slow as I am, I’m now into it.

Fellow setter Ragaman and I discuss cryptic crossword puzzles and both admire Araucaria, tho I think my colleague’s esteem for the great man is lately reduced – as he puts it: the dog should be able to see the rabbit – and Araucaria’s puzzles take a very long time to solve. Ragaman found one which had a single answer with something like 40-odd characters, so in response he set a puzzle with one 50-odd character answer. Of course this was a challenge to which I had to respond, and the result is Magus 19, which has one answer of 65 characters. It may not be a very good puzzle and at least one answer (28) is rubbish, but it does set a high mark for this one aspect. Puzzles like those set by Araucaria are as much about the setter’s virtuosity as anything else.
Footnote: Ragaman is uncharacteristically shy about publishing any of his puzzles.

One answer has 65 characters.

Magus 16

I solve crossword puzzles, and sometimes set them. Here’s one such. I set it a few years ago, and would try to be fairer and more Ximenean now, but this is mainly just to see what format it has to be in to be inserted. I know it’s never been solved, not even by my mate, Sledge, the crossword critic, because I just checked it and found one of the anagrams was wrong. And – like life – it isn’t meant to be easy.