Centenary: Chile Pine

 So today, it was 100 years since the birth of Araucaria, John Graham.  The doyen of cryptic crossword setters in the second half of the 20th Century.

And, I thought, a suitable homage to him in today's Guardian, although it proved to be rather Marmite for the solvers - at least from the comments on Fifteensquared and the Graun's own comments section.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.

Dining Room

A long, long time ago, as a callow sixth-former in Tottenham, I joined some of the upper sixth who were trying to finish The Guardian's Cryptic Crossword. It was the final clue of a puzzle set by the great Arucaria:
“Begin description of dining room (8)”
I somehow saw it immediately: INITIATE.
And I was hooked.
So when in today's challenge we had 22 across: "They say solver had dinner late, to lose strength (9) - which gave ATTENUATE, although it was a weaker clue, I was joyfully reminded of that moment.
So thanks 'Philistine'!

Zoo 5 - Various Primates! and Butterflies!

Araucaria last Saturday

A lovely warm article in last Saturday's Guardian.  Prompted, of course, by the news that he has terminal cancer - and how he shared that news. Well worth a read.

Poem of the Week

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
Rupert Brooke
(Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow. . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe. . .Du lieber Gott!

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and there the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten’s not verboten.
eithe genoimen . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Oh Araucaria

Arucaria has 18 down of the 19, which is being treated with 13,15.  This puzzle was first published in the December edition of the magazine 1 Across (c) and is repeated here by kind permission.

Oh.

That was the preamble to yesterday's Araucaria Cryptic in the Guardian.

18 down was a write in:- 'Cancer'.

Here is how much I managed over all (not quite all of it, as you can see).

This was so hard to do - not because the clues were extra hard - although I failed to get two solutions.  But because of the theme.

I've posted about the estimable John Graham before, of course, a number of times.  But even for this extraordinary setter, this was an extraordinary crossword (as Tramp said on the Fifteensquared discussions of this puzzle).  To use his own terminal disease as the theme was typical of him, I guess - but even so substantially disconcerting (to say the very last).  It made the National News (the 'Today' program this morning, Guardian front page) and there are, unsurprisingly, letters in today's Guardian (and lots of comments on the Web site).  According to one of the other posts on Fifteensquared he is likely to be around (and puzzling) for a while yet, which does seem good news.

I can remember (I think) the first Araucarian clue I ever solved - "Begin Description of a Dining Room", (8) (*) - in the library at school when I was new sixth-former.  I've been attempting to match the man ever since (and usually struggling).

More than most setters, there always seems to be a playful, emotional heart to many of his puzzles - they are sheer fun, pleasurable, frustrating and satisfying by turns but  rarely merely mechanical tests.

This was no exception and there are many fine clues scattered around it (see 7D and 27A).  But I have never felt so sad when doing a crossword as I did with this one yesterday.

(*) - Initiate.

Hubris: Five in a Row

On Radio 4's Brain of Britain, if you answer your five questions in a row you gain an extra point. 

My achievement last week was far more modest - but I did at least achieve it.  I solved all five of the weekday cryptic crosswords (in the Guardian). (Wow!)

Quite astonishing, for me. 

I guess in part it just shows the extent to which solving crosswords is a learned skill, and is much less to do with inherent wonderfulness.  I started regularly attempting the hard crosswords at the back of the paper about 2-3 years ago.  And at that point, I didn't solve them - or only very, very rarely on my own. Perhaps one every 2-3 months.  Instead if they did get finished it was because I collaborated with others, sharing and pinching answers.

But you improve - or I did, anyway.  And I also started to become more entertained: I began to enjoy the wordgames more as I became more able to solve them.  Eventually, and in a sad way, I even gave clues little exclamation marks if I thought they were particularly witty or graceful. (I'm not proud of this).

And then a few months back I realised I was solving one a week on average, and then two.  Usually the easiest ones of course - which I think often occur at the start of the week.  The tough ones can be really tough, for me (and I'm not discussing the Saturday prize grids here - they seem to be more variable, somehow).

Actually cryptic crosswords go back much further with me.  I remember sitting in the school library in the mid-seventies, with mates who shared the same free periods, finishing an Arucaria.  You remember stuff quite randomly sometimes: I remember that the last clue we solved of that puzzle was 'Begin description of dining room. (8)'   (*).

So I've kind of known how the cryptic clues worked and occasionally solved them, or attempted them with friends for many years.  Doug Gray, Neil Frowe.

But it is harder on your own.

A year or so ago, I also discovered the Fifteen Squared Web site (see links).  I never look there beforehand, but sometimes it helped me after I'd given up to see how a particularly knotty clue worked.  So, thanks to them also.

Anyway, here are the five.

Monday, 22nd November

I think it is fairly easy to see that I found this one quite straightforward.  You can see I even wrote down that it only took me 40 minutes.  Since I tend to try my hand at them on the train journey coming home from work, there is usually an upper limit of around an hour and a half or two hours.  After which there is no time left in the day.  Still, 40 minutes is not bad, even for the first grid of the week. Redcoats seemed difficult, and Audience took me a while.

Tuesday, 23rd November

I found this a little harder, and it shows - not just because it took longer (50 minutes plus), but because of the big question mark I'd left by 15 down.  I did enter the solution correctly in the grid (without help, honest), but I didn't know that 'foramina' was a word meaning little openings.  It just had to be the answer from the rest of the clue.

Wednesday, November 24th

This was easily the prize of the week.  Amazing.  A clue in French (with an answer also in French), with some Italian, German, and Latin used elsewhere.

I vaguely remembered Amoretti was a little cupid/cherub/putto (ie fat boy).   Gourde was the last solution - I had no idea it was Haitian currency (settler is a stretch I think), and had to construct it from the rest of the clue. Quatre Bras was also hard, as I only had the faintest of memories of some kind of battle and had, again, to construct it.  And Crucible took a while because of the brilliant misdirection.

Altogether it took me well over three hours - but I had the time as I was in town seeing someone. 

I was pleased to finish it, but it had been hard.  So when I looked at the comment in FifteenSquared I was pleased that many other people also said they found it tricky.  It wasn't just me. 

Then someone pointed out that not only was it a pangram (all of the letters), but it also, if you looked carefully, contained the French integers from Un to Neuf scattered around the grid.  Amazing, indeed.  (If I'd spotted that it would have made Gourde easier to solve!)

Thursday, November 25th

Again, you can see I found it really tough.  Clues full of unforgiving surfaces, I thought.  I went down to Southampton Uni with eldest that day, so I had the three hours+ it needed for me to complete the solution, whilst sitting on the train. 

But in all honesty more than half of it came in about an hour of the journey back.  I needed to make the odd correction along the way, as you can see - but more because of simple spelling errors than major mistakes.  8 down was a joy when I spotted it, but 15 across I disliked (Father Christmas as a Ho-Ho-er?)

Friday, November 26th

You have to imagine how tense I was by Friday.  I was on a full house, or a hat trick, or whatever, having finished two tough crosswords during the week that would normally have defeated me.  Whether that was only because I had the time for them, by chance, was neither here nor there.  They were both realistically challenging.  It hadn't been an easy ride.

So anyway there was this new goal, which made me try extra hard. 

I think you can see that I was quite stressed by this one.  With several solutions, although I worked out the answer, I couldn't get the clue to make sense (9 across was a case in point - only when I later read FifteenSquared and saw 'Bess' in 'Pub, Essex' did it seem logical to me).  And I struggled for far longer than was necessary with Eclair.  On the plus side, I quite liked the 'shops' theme, which I spotted early and it helped a lot.

To be honest, however, I nearly gave up right at the end with one clue left.  For some reason I drew a blank on 9 down (which at other times might have proven to be pretty easy).  Indeed, it only got solved when I saw, belatedly, that it formed 'John Lewis' with 16 down.  Altogether, just under two hours. 

But what next?  Last week felt like a real achievement, but also like something completed.  Something over. Time to move on?  But where to?  Harder crosswords? Shorter solving times?  But those options partly miss the point - the pleasure and enjoyment of the wordplay.  (Of course, it is also unquestionably true that I'll probably fail horribly at the next puzzle I try. Too much hubris just at the moment).

Or stop.  Draw a line, and use the time released to do something different - more 'meaningful' or 'creative'?

I don't know.  But I do know that this week I've gone cold turkey- no crosswords.  And I'm having a think.

(* - Ans: "Initiate")

Spectacular

My favourite crossword compiler, Araucaria, recently composed a puzzle around Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar.  To be completed on Trafalgar Day (October 21st), the answers included lots of words linked to the theme (Nelson, Hardy and so forth).

In fact, he went further, and one clue only works on Trafalgar Day, 2010 - as the answer refers to the fact that the previous day was 20/10/2010 (see also earlier), and thus could only work on this particular Trafalgar Day, ever, in the whole history of mankind.  While another clue builds on that to give the previous day as 'Tuesday' - hence a further clue that only works on that specific day.

All of this was signalled by the title of the crossword 'A puzzle for today'.

And so of course on Thursday, October 21st, 2010, Trafalgar Day, the Guardian botched the whole thing and printed the wrong crossword. 

We were served up one by Bonxie which I recognised from a couple of weeks earlier - 8th October according to Fifteensquared.  I hadn't done that well with it, but it was instantly recognisable because of the unusually-interlinked Across clues. 

A quite spectacular mistake (if admittedly not that important in the greater scheme of things).

It's a pity, because the crossword that should have been printed is really quite wonderful - spectacular even, and well worth a go.  You can find it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/crosswords/cryptic/25147 (not, I think, the link given in a short apology the paper published the next day), and the full solution with comments is as usual available on Fifteensquared.

Warning

A nice Araucaria on Thursday, including the first line of Jenny Joseph's Warning.  A classic.

Paths of Glory

A very entertaining Aurcaria puzzle in yesterday's Guardian (for me at least, the experts at Fifteensquared were less impressed).  Reflections on the election and the horse trading we've just had in the UK, and politics in general, and including just the right quotation from Gray's Elegy.

Spain Tour 21: Oviedo

We stayed in the Hotel Castro Real, on the Calle de Bermudez De Castro. Not a great neighbourhood and the hotel seriously oversold its proximity to the centre (and, indeed its closeness to the attractive “San Julián de los Prados pre-Romanesque church”).

Google maps suggests that the church is 800-900 metres away at least - if not further - and the city centre is about the same again. Although the capital of Asturias, and a World Heritage site, Oviedo is not that large – it has a population around 220,000. So I would have expected that ‘near to the centre’ would have been a bit, well, nearer. Unimpressed. OK, the distances still aren’t that far – but we felt it was a clear case of misrepresentation and said so (but only as we left!)

This was the view from outside the hotel. Ok, yes you can see the cathedral in the distance...
The hotel was pretty modern, with lights going on and off automatically as we walked through hallways, and windows that didn’t open. Quite annoying, really.

Parking in the underground car park was difficult in our little people mover. On one occasion I got the thing jammed on the tight curve of one of the steeper ramps. It took some effort to extricate it.
Anyway. All of those irritations aside, the centre of Oviedo was pretty pleasant. This is the cathedral closer up:

But the real charm - and tourist trap - of the city are the pedestrianised medieval streets.
Aswarm with cafes and bars - competition to get an outside table is severe.
We met one or two inhabitants...
... and strolled around


The orange, we found was really orange...
... and building sites were really blue.
So were some buildings.
After some looking around, I finally had a huge Asturian fish soup. Delicious, full of multi-legged, complex-shelled creatures, plus octopi and fishy bits. I suspect I was given soup for 4. Anyway, not understanding I ate the lot as a main course. Yum. Waddled a bit after, tho'.
We spotted these in the main park. I don't think they were being prepared for soup...

And, of course, where would we be without a tree?

Saturday morning

Eldest arrived home from a conference in Berlin at 1:30 last night. I waited up, so was pretty groggy this morning.

Hazily, I heard:-
- Val Doonican's inheritance tracks. What?
- A program about what's it like in Germany and why don't English people go there like they did in the nineteenth century. Again: What?

A Guardian then happened at me and I was pleased to see an annoyed letter about 'Lets Move To...' - quite right too. The crossword was OK though - a nice collection of Romantic poetry references to complement the cheap chapbook guides they've been handing out with the paper.

I almost missed the last of the frost - it had been a cold night.

After that I decided to go out, even though it was still a little chilly. Thinking about historical things Nunhead, I took this:
But do you know where this is?

The trees around Nunhead

It was John Major who infamously spoke about going 'Back to Basics' and the last person I would like to emulate is that Tory prime minister, the very rotter who oversaw the privatisation of the railways.

Nevertheless, for this post only, Basics is exactly where The trees around Nunhead is going back to.

Nunhead has lots of roads whose names derive from trees. But I don't think there are many lindens (limes) on Linden Grove, Limesford Road nor Limes Walk. I haven't spotted any. Hollydale Road may have some holly, however, and I'm sure somewhere on its long length Ivydale Road boasts some ivy.

This small specimen, which is none of the above, can be found on the corner of East Dulwich Road and Peckham Rye (W):-
Turning the other way, there is this huge horse chestnut: Some of you may recall my posting of 11th March (Just what it says on the Tin) where I wrote about a huge tree on Nunhead Green that 'after some heavy-handed topiary... dominates the Green today. Huge, menacing, with blunt fingers grasping at the sky'.
Well here is what it looks like now. The blunt fingers are covered with greenery and a lot of the sense of menace has gone. Perhaps the topiarist knew what she or he was doing after all:-

Just around the corner, this strange growth stands guard over Nunhead Library:
There are quite a lot of these strange spiky trees (bushes?) in the area. Maybe they were fashionable once?
This poor shot of the roundabout at the junction of Clayton and Consort Roads at first seems pointless in the current context.
But closer up, you can see a mature Aruacaria or Monkey Puzzle Tree.
Elsewhere in Nunhead, these trees stand outside Ivydale school (unsurprisingly, on Ivydale Road):-
And this is the entrance to Nunhead Cemetery from Limesford Road:

Finally a photograph of the unusual house that stands near the south-east end of Peckham Rye, opposite the old tram stop:
So. I've beaten the bounds of Nunhead (sort of), photographed some trees - some for the first time - and gone Back to Basics.
And I feel all the better for it.
After all, people might otherwise wonder about the title of the blog and what it was all about, and I wouldn't want that.
Oh, and I felt it would be appropriate.
This has been my hundredth posting.