I Say Nothing (3)

My Family and Other Puzzles

Sandy Balfour

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782393726
• Print ISBN:
  9781843545170

This delightful book explores the world of the cryptic crossword clue, a place where nothing is quite as it seems. From reflections on his children's musical tastes (might ABBA be an Old Testament citation?) to veiled digs at Labour's foreign policy ('What could be subtler during search for weapon!' 7, 4), each of Sandy Balfour's perfectly proportioned essays is a joyful investigation of these devilishly difficult puzzles and the life they punctuate.

Contents

O Tempora, O Mores

The Italian for Love

Relative Values

Travels with my Crossword

Setters and Solvers

The Omnibus Puzzle

Epilogue

O TEMPORA, O MORES

Anyone for Crosswords

Bill Clinton used to do crosswords. I wonder whether Tony Blair does? The idea has a quixotic appeal, a bit like the notion of President Bush, say, reading a novel. But I can’t quite see it and Downing Street wouldn’t say. Crosswords require patience and humour and a willingness to submit to the random and surreal orthography of the setter’s mind. They do not, by and large, provide a home for control freaks. A crossword setter, Fawley once told me, is entering a game in which the point is to lose gracefully. By the same token the point for the solver is to win – appreciatively.

Like I say, Tony and Araucaria? I don’t think so.

But if he did, he might feel that the Guardian setters were having a go at him. A couple of weeks back Paul was on the case with a very sarcastic ‘What could be subtler during search for weapon! (7,4)’ⁱ It was a theme he started on some months ago. ‘Say it aloud, sending ships to the Gulf was such a mistake – a build-up demanding contemplation (5,5),’ⁱⁱ for example.

It was no coincidence that this appeared in a puzzle in the Guardian on 15 February 2003, which alert readers will recall was the day news chiefs had been warned by the Pentagon to expect the second Gulf War to begin. In the same puzzle we found a number of other clues critical of Our Leader’s enthusiasm for all things military.

Paul is not the only one. Three weeks ago Bunthorne weighed in with ‘Spites Blix over possible arms sales, say? (7,7)’ⁱⁱⁱ which could hardly be taken as a neutral comment on our ongoing imperial adventures. And last Saturday, Araucaria anticipated the government’s discomfort over its statements on Iraq with his usual subtlety: ‘Abjure blue berets? (5)’.^iv Alistair Campbell must wish he could, literally and cryptically.

If things continue to slip in Iraq the Prime Minister would do well to heed Bunthorne’s warning: ‘Living with past record? Fail and “You will —!” (2,7)’.^v I suspect that, despite the Iraqi failure to lose gracefully and the American inability to win appreciatively, the Prime Minister’s place in history is secure.

But is it the one he wants?

18 AUGUST 2003

i CLUSTER BOMB; ii NAVEL FLUFF; iii VISIBLE EXPORTS; iv UNSET;
v BE HISTORY

Tony Blair’s Place in History

Following intelligence failures in Iraq, there has been much talk of ‘blame’ recently, which is what happens when real life intrudes on our carefully constructed semantic fantasies.

‘Russian nouns decline,’ I said before the storm broke last Wednesday.

‘How many letters?’ asked my girlfriend.

For some years she has been campaigning to get me to call out crossword clues properly. The ‘proper’ method is to say the number of letters first, then the clue, then any checked letters and then the number of letters again. It’s a question of manners.

‘It’s not a clue,’ I replied.

‘What is it then?’

‘Well, I don’t know. I suppose you’d call it a “remark”.’

‘Oh.’

We were in bed at the time (sensitive readers may want to turn away at this point) and the sun was rising over London.

‘What made you say that?’

I supposed I had said it because my Russian teacher had drummed it into us the previous evening. ‘Today we will do the accusative,’ he said. He has a habit of stressing two or three words in every sentence, like a camp version of Graham Norton. ‘The accusative is the object of the sentence. The object of the exercise, on the other hand, is that you will learn about nouns.’

The effect was to make me slightly seasick, bobbing about as I was on the choppy seas of his scansion. But you take my point. Never again in our house will a word be used as though it has only one meaning.

By breakfast therefore, storm clouds were gathering in the west.

‘You don’t understand how I feel,’ said my girlfriend. I hesitate to say petulantly.

She wrested the newspaper from me and went to drink her coffee.

‘You’re imagining things,’ I replied, not necessarily helpfully.

There was a silence, mostly in the accusative.

‘I’m sure all I feel includes more than what I imagine,’ⁱ she said eventually.

But since she failed to call out the number of letters (which was ‘four and four’), I had no way of knowing that this was not ‘a remark’, but a clue – taken from that morning’s Cinephile puzzle in the Financial Times.

For which I blame her. Or him. Or anyone other than me.

25 JULY 2003

i REAL LIFE

The Hutton Inquiry

There has been much made – in the Guardian particularly – of the different approaches taken by various media owners to the deliberations of Lord Hutton in the matter of the death of Dr Kelly. Commentators have suggested that some newspapers are motivated more by the political calculations of their proprietors than by any respect for what one might term ‘the truth’.

Happily the crosswords setters (many of whom are, ah, promiscuous in their setting allegiance) have no truck with this sort of thing and it was possible to discern their maverick commentary on the Hutton inquiry in most of the papers. In the FT on Tuesday for example (atoning for a couple of repeated clues and solutions the previous day) Quark described ‘How some went for attack lacking sense of proportion (4-3-3)’.ⁱ

But it was Rufus, normally the most amenable of setters, who seemed to be almost prescient on Monday. ‘Something said about Anthony (6)’ⁱⁱ (or TB, as they seem to call him in the e-mails that fly around what the papers refer to as the ‘upper echelons of Downing Street’), was clearly not something Alistair Campbell was about to ‘Let pass (6)’,ⁱⁱⁱ especially not given the ‘Global degree of freedom (8)’^iv enjoyed by the press and in particular by that ‘Intriguing, if cruel, devil (7)’,^v the BBC.

Actually that last clue was from Wednesday’s Times, a paper that has consistently supported the government (and anyone else) in its battles with the BBC. The setter, though, wanted to know whether there were ‘Any left who’ll get worried by inconspicuous observer? (3,2,3,4)’.^vi

Not by the time they have finished with them. I have in my time been such an observer and know as well as any government apparatchik that it is not your presence that counts as much as what you say afterwards. Still, I did enjoy the extracts widely quoted. I wondered only that when Campbell described the government’s evidence on 10 September as a ‘detailed draft dossier’, the papers forgot to mention that ‘detailed’ is an anagram of (amongst other things) ‘dated lie’.

22 AUGUST 2003

i OVER-THE-TOP; ii REMARK;
iii PERMIT; iv LATITUDE; v LUCIFER;
vi FLY ON THE WALL

The Death of Stephen King?

Is Stephen King OK? Has anyone heard? I only ask because Paul had a puzzle themed on the great man and his work on Tuesday and Paul’s record in these matters is, ah, mixed. Screaming Lord Sutch, for example, passed away the moment Paul put him in a puzzle.

I feared the worst when I saw that this puzzle appeared the day after the National Book Club awarded King a lifetime achievement medal. The award is given to ‘an American author who has enriched the literary landscape through a lifetime of service or body of work’. Previous recipients include Arthur Miller and Oprah Winfrey – and you may make of that what you will.

The difficulty – or the challenge – of a puzzle like this one is that one’s ability to solve it depends in part on one’s familiarity with the theme. I have not – as far as I know – read a Stephen King novel although I did once see the movie Misery on an aeroplane and so I found this one harder than usual. But not impossible. And in fact Stephen King was the last answer I filled in – and that was only because it fitted. It took a while longer (and some superior smiles from my girlfriend) before I worked out how you get his name from ‘“It” was one of his favourites, written up for a sort of party piece (7,4)’.

And that’s the test. Good – which is to say fair – clueing should still allow the solver to get the answers, whether or not he knows the theme.

But back to Stephen King. There is something sinister about the phrase ‘a lifetime of service’. It suggests that the life in question may be over...or almost over. And King is only fifty-six years old. He is reported to have said that he will donate the $10,000 that comes with the medal to the National Book Foundation. But the medal, he said, ‘I will keep and treasure for the rest of my life.’

Which will be long and happy, I trust.

19 SEPTEMBER 2003

Duffers

You see them hanging around the centres of our cities on a Saturday night: shifty-looking young men with the word ‘duffer’ emblazoned across their chests. I had hitherto thought this to be a surprisingly honest admission on the part of the wearers, rather than a fashion statement. I was raised, you see, with Arthur Ransome’s maxim ringing in my ears: ‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers won’t drown,’ was Commander Walker’s encouraging response to the suggestion that his children should go sailing on their own in Swallows and Amazons. But – having solved last week’s prize puzzle by Taupi – I now realize that these hooded youths are part of a crack unit of crossword setters, specializing in anagrams.

‘Sailor’s shanty: “MacDuff” (9)’ⁱ was the clue. My son was, at the time, prancing about the living room with a plastic sword telling his sisters to ‘Lay on, MacDuff,’ and it took me a while to get past Macbeth and realise that wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents