i Cryptic Crossword 1872 Tees
February 7, 2017
My favourite comment from the original August 2012 blog on this crossword over at Fifteensquared, is no. 7: ” Puzzle about average Indy difficulty”. Oh really, nmsindy? That’s me told then … I thought it was just a touch on the tricky side. 😉
A slow start today, with progress accelerating in a clockwise direction from SW to SE and finishing with 20, which is an exceedingly cheeky clue. My knowledge 8d is fair to middling, but Newnes Crossword Dictionary was required to check the thematic entries – and 20 isn’t in the list, for good reasons. The answer was clear enough, but it took some research to find out why. Ho hum. 24 was new to me, but eminently solvable from the wordplay. Anyone else remember 21?
Lots to enjoy: the matched pair of 1ac and 11; the mild ribaldry of 1d and 23, and some clever individual clues like 5, both 14s and 15. My COD is 12ac, on account of the bathos:
“Solo physician, in good health, left support on stair (8)”
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
Just a tad on the tricky side. 😉 This took a while, and felt like hard work, so it was no surprise to see that this was an Indy Thursday reprint. It must be said that the puzzle felt quite intimidating at first, with all those cross-referenced clues, the key ones quite slow to fall too. I had lots of ticks at the end, so I’m guessing I enjoyed it too. 🙂 Favourite amongst them 24ac.
Gave up and came here to defrustraterise myself! Certainly a clever puzzle though.
For what it’s worth, I suspect nmsmindy’s comment was a slip/auto-correct error, and was supposed to say “Puzzle *above* average Indy difficulty”.
nmsindy – sorry, typo!
Just finished this, but had to do a lot of looking up and trawling through lists: definitely above average on the difficulty scale for me. Remember 21? I’d never even heard of “Stars on Sunday”.
Made very slow progress and for once spotted the theme, decided I wasn’t enjoying it so went to the Gruaniad for my daily fix☺
I’m something of a Bardolator myself – and a great admirer of Tees – but I didn’t enjoy this offering very much, alas. I’ve been in As You Like It but regarded Ganymede as unfair; I’m also a Geographer but knowing Masherbrum/K1 is surely a bridge too far. And as for Stars on Sunday… Eeesh!
Yeah, Masherbrum was one of the things I looked up! Thought it might be part of a Warwickshire whisky still 😛
Ha! Now there’s a clue!