i Cryptic Crossword 1862 Punk
January 26, 2017
Quite a tough offering today. For a long time I had about a quarter of the grid filled and could make no further progress. After that everything fell into place steadily enough, if not particularly quickly, so perhaps my brain had just given up the ghost. There’s some discussion over on Fifteensquared about the less than ideal checking, but I’m not sure if that’s what made it tough. In my case, I think it was the number of longer answers split across different entries, that I’m never particularly fond of. If you’re struggling with one or two clues, it leaves you with whole areas of the grid that are blank with no other way of making progress.
Lots to like, with some inventive and witty clues too. COD for me goes to 22/28/26 – ‘Pen DM for book? (5,2,3,9)’.
August 2012 once more over on the other side:
http://www.fifteensquared.net/2012/08/07/independent-8054-punk/
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
Denzo
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
Slow and tough for me too – I was dipping into wordfinders for assistance almost from the start [shame]; in fact, I gave up and came here with the last three (1dn, 3dn, 9ac) unsolved. I think I’m not a fan of large numbers of proper names in grids. The distributed phrases didn’t help either, as you say.
Different experience here with my last two in being in the SW (again) with Scrapie and Amati. They needed a wordfinder (shame indeed) but up until then it had been thoroughly delightful.
If Dac is a fine claret, then Punk is surely champagne – or at least methode champenoise.
Decidedly fizzy wasn’t it? For my money this is about as good as it gets: devious, witty and with a dash of ribaldry. Pretty difficult too. The definition part of 18ac delighted me – a real head-scratcher but once solved what else could it be?
With no recollection from doing this the first time around I found it quite tough but I got there in the end. In contrast to Cornick, though, I got AMATI as my first one in.