Inquisitor 1840 All My Own Work by Nudd

It had been a long week. Your correspondent had promised himself that it would end with a few quiet drinks and an early night, leaving him feeling refreshed and ready to enjoy the weekend. And a fine weekend it would be too, something that felt a little like spring in the air. Unseasonably so, some would argue, but these are the times we live in. Spain didn’t get a proper winter at all this year, so we shouldn’t complain.

The reasons then 1AM would come and go without any sign of bed being reached we will not go into, and just note the empties that went out with the recycling the following (late) morning.

A new coffee grinder has arrived, so there was plenty of coffee. And chips. We always need coffee and chips on a Saturday. And cake. And the Inquisitor, of course.

Ah yes, the Inquisitor. Regular readers will know that I’m not averse to taking a short cut when it comes to solving a puzzle, and thus it would be this week, because…

Jumbled entries are pretty tricky to deal with, aren’t they? Even if they are only every other row. So I started with the downs, so that I could get some checking letters in place and work out which rows would be the jumbled ones. Still got some of the faculties in place, you see. One gunslinger and an unexpected PENGUIN later that was achieved, and then would begin the rather slow process of entering what I could, and filing the rest.

In the back of my mind was the thought of the lines that were to emerge. Surely they’d fill all those jumbled rows, given all of this palaver. Well, yes. Because first I spotted a BASS GUITAR, and then glanced up to see that the letters I had might make a handy GLOCKENSPIEL. Now, TUBULAR BELLS (PART I) might not really be my thing, but it’s a jolly famous thing that most of us will have heard, so in went the rest of the first line, the name of the narrator, and of course MIKE OLDFIELD.

And then, really, job done, copious checking letters being in place to polish off the rest. The fact that I didn’t need to solve a large chunk of the clues is neither here or there, and a pity probably given all the work that will have gone into them. But there you go, I suspect I won’t have been alone.

Does that mean that it wasn’t all our own work?

I wonder, though, how many were bemused by ELGAR, and how soon they kicked themselves, the answer being literally on the same page?