The 5000th Sunday Times Cryptic Crossword
*** TODAY’S PUZZLE ***
A fantastic achievement for The Sunday Times which has reached its 5000th Cryptic Crossword. Apparently there were 5 authors – we presume the likes of Dean Mayer and others – who compose the crossword most weekends. There are a lot of wonderful clues in this puzzle and Simon blames his brain for not unscrambling them more quickly!
You can find the Times Online Crossword Club here:
www.crosswordclub.co.uk
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atoll logiciel
It was a shedload of fun watching this today 🙂
Spent most of this video singing "Just One Cornetto…" to myself XD
I have learned so much from these crossword videos that I am finishing them in a fraction of the time now. I actually got many of the clues before you today. Thank you.
The highlight of this video was hearing you say "kinky Jew"
For a moment 1D could have been family guidance but planning made sense thinking of issue as child.
MerPeople…
Nicely done, nearly spat my brew out !
Yes. It's commonly called a chambered nautilus, and the Nautilus was Captain Nemo's submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Reassuring to see in the comments that I'm not the only Sudoku fan to find these cryptics impossible
I know I’m super late to this, but I actually got 11 across! That’s the first cryptic crossword clue I’ve ever understood
Haven't seen anyone mention it, but "family planning" is a "tribe" having a powwow (meeting) "planning" (which is something that may avoid an issue)
every time I watch one of these and the guy that's finding the correct answers is constantly saying along the lines of "that's probably it, don't know why" then has to reverse engineer the clue to fit the answer…
honestly makes me wonder how this is a thing that even exists XD
"and" is the "couple" staying in between the "now" and the "then" found in the first part of the clue. "And" is a coupling word. That's how i figured it works, anyway.
Possible five thousand people have mentioned this, but issue is offspring
Family planning as in contraception. Ie preventing or avoiding an issue ( a child). Good clueing,
Pro Tip: don't start putting in letters (e.g M and I) into the squares until you're sure they're right. O Mio Babbino Caro was never going to fit 1,4,3 🤣🤣🤣 They just sat there preventing any possibility of your brain suggesting "milestone" to you. Good video though; very impressed with "skerry" and "pangolin" 😉
Last month I practiced cryptic crosswords on an app (well, the non-paywalled portion of the app anyway…) while on a flight and apparently it's starting to pay off! With the help of your commentary and spitballing, I managed to piece together "Family Planning" – and consequently "Lead" and "Pangolin" – quite a bit sooner than you! Fantastic job as usual, maybe someday soon I'll be able to complete a cryptic on the level of one of the Times'. 🙂
I wasn't shouting at the screen, but I was singing "just one Cornetto" at you.
This is the first time I've watched someone solve a cryptic puzzle and it was a fascinating experience – highly impressed with some clues, but screaming at you for others (4D in particular!), but mostly I felt as if I was looking in a mirror at a much cleverer version of myself. Thanks! I must have missed the breakdown of 1A (getting the answer was the easy bit), but I'll have to look at it again later.
I've only just discovered this, and I was interested to see how Simon struggled with it. I was likewise baffled for a long time by 1A even though I'd seen an empty grid with a preliminary set of answers. When you've got 5 setters all trying to show how clever/fiendish they can be with about half a dozen clues, I think a hard puzzle is very likely. A solver also has very little chance of tuning into a particular style. One of the expected quintet had to drop out, so I put myself on for their clues, and you can blame me for TEST, MILESTONE and COUPLE among the ones that took a long time.
Peter Biddlecombe, ST crossword editor.
https://youtu.be/uDD0qWCdZ18