Clues Across
(3) Archduke in a bow-wave frenzy? (1,2)
(8) Speculum speculations expected with the expectorating Inspectorate! (1,1,3)
(9) Dearest child of the "barren steppe" (7)
(10) Cork-oak tallboy throng (it's a stoater!) (2,5)
(11) Scheme for dividing nascent tubers (5)
(12) Chrome Yellow as spoken by lisping Chinee (3,3)
(14) Dale Winton mounts the hoarse manservant in Thracian tragedian's collapsed gazebo (1,1,1,2,1)
(15) Jack O' Lanterns galore: turnip-heap captured by Niépce (4,2)
(17) Drove road for latticed moleskin mashers? (5,1)
(20) Alhambra Alan's at it again! (2,3)
(21) The Duke of Eskin discovered in a meal-sack (3,3,1)
(24) "Anoint my thews fine-fingered wretch!" quoth the limber equestrian (2,5)
(25) Bandicoot and whelkstand and whelkstand and whelkstand and bandicoot (5)
(26) Naked Marchioness surrounded by pot-bellied mini-devils in the "Chambre Rouge" (3)
Clues Down
(1) Pugas' Hierarchy of Non-Arising Boundlessnesses (4)
(2) Escher in blue jeans diamonded by horizontal rhombus (6)
(3) Prongs burnished by a blackamoor (2,2)
(4) "I'd prefer yonder Delicatessen in Essen", lisps delicate Tess, in essence, to the SS men (5)
(5) "Quarky", "strange" and "charming" (no breeze for the kestrel, you knave!) (3,5)
(6) Mole straddles Sammy. Yoiks! (2,4)
(7) Jutting Gargantua; yielding Pantagruel (2,3,3)
(12) Lobster bisque scrambled by unicycling hirsute dominatrix (4,4)
(13) Dangling cat has human feet; no, Vanda, not the nude oboe interlude! (6,2)
(16) Pope dipping his toes in the Wide Sargasso Sea (6)
(19) Me and my cosined sepulchral badinage! (3,3)
(22) Park and Ride for Pipe and Lyde? (3,1)
(23) Crabtree soilings overwhelm the six handstanding Twelvetree sisters near a crouching ibis (4)
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Cryptic Quiz by Lars Runcible
(1) Elm-meat in a tandoor?
(2) What is the Neapolitan difference between an in-hand lapse and a lapsarian otter-hound?
(3) How Ochre were Jersein's kumquats?
(4) Make the formulaic stand for the epigrammatical (hint: as whispered by Kuville-Mallé)
(5) Who was the "Whalebone Marionette of Muker"?
(6) Vince Hill brushed by the lips of the Csar's oldest carp would smell as fragrant as which "Pirate Pugilist"?
(7) Carrot or Mandolin? Barnaby or Woolsack? How's the Goonhavern Beauty Pageant?
(8) "Second-sand Vose" they called him; what did he call his nubian lover?
(9) Australian interior expands the subconscious of the elderly Swiss bugler. How are his horn buttons discovered in a gooseherd's daughter's underwear by a trio of itinerant Chilean dwarfs?
(10) "Tesselation Boulevard" was his unpublished meisterwork; his brother was the "splayed Bishop of Ware"; what did his Welsh music tutor keep in the carpet-bag under the mangle-stand?
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CONUNDRUM by Factotum
DDRESTORKWRENCHADDERRDUDDADDAD
(clue: howl away ruddy-chinned dropsy-veteran, I'll not bleach another smock for 'ee!)
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Questions of the Season
Miss Eunice Q Halberd, The Hunchings, Emneth Hungate, is moved to ask:
"Oh me! when, when, oh when, will my joy-boy come? And the wintry winds solace no pilgrim, I'll nary a jot repine, nay, no, not I. For, when, when, oh when, shall my brightly-boy show his shone and lunar profile betwixt my bonny brindled gate-stoups again, ah?"
Bantley Bannock, of Hapmouche Villa, Tranterwesterbury, Milts., enquires:
"Dearest Sirs,
my sister, Elspeth, and myself often amuse ourselves of an evening in the traditional family fashion for our kin. That is, happy in the knowledge of labours complete, and gladly fatigued by the won battles of our noontide striving, we sit before the glowing logs with a jug of Perseus Equine Milk, a full blue pot of Luxana and our old favourite Crannocks Oaten barrel of biscuits, there to indulge in a yard or two of Baldace Quoits. Now, nothing to stir the questing brains of our discerning readership there, says the editor, but soft! For our Baldace set is a beauty of unique antiquity, passed through the beginningless Bannock generations. What we should like to enquire is, do any of your readerships have any handling experience of the Baldace Quoits sets made by the Whelker & Sypey manufactory of Thratterbridge, which manufactory thrived between the years of 1798 and 1857 and was ruined by first an August flood of the Yare river, next the terrible "October" fire of 21 November 1857 (dubbed an "October" conflagration for sound though complex reasons which I Have expounded in an article published in the March 1986 edition of Drandery's Journal of Extinct Early Manufactories), and finally by the burgeoning Broome Brothers Games Mill of Ickerdyketonbridgeleyfordhamptonbridgeleyford, which was of course the early driving force behind Sir Robert Trestle's revolutionary Model Village. For we should value the companionship and gaming fun to be enjoyed by communion with any such experienced readerships. Also we are interested in so far and in as much and only as such as to find where these knowledgeable readers get repairs and replacements and repairs and replacements and repairs and replacements done, as our old set has several badly 'winged' quoits, a perforated 'allaying pouch', two split 'heel pieces' of Drumknock Inlay, a missing 'flank pole' and our scoreboard is an original 'tenterhook' mapping whose figuring (being of 'encre japponaise' laid into a 'pamphlet-bordered' eucalypt fundament) is badly discomfitted. We await any replies, having rested similar notices in Cacks' Drawing-Room Monthly, The Winking Barbary Ape and The Quarterly Sharp and laid a detailed card in many local shops and business premises. Yours, etc, "The Gay Gamers".
And we also have an enquiry from a Mr Colin Pinney, "saloon bar attendant", c/o The Soiled Gusset, 17 Stinking Alley, Penzance:
"Dear Sirs,
my Uncle Wallis was jailed in 1965 for pointing a cardboard pistol at a Bishop. This was at Cheriton Bishop of all places in the Autumn. The Bishop of Torbay was on holiday visiting family they said. The Bishop's elderly companion, a Mr Vites (who was wearing a startling pea-green velvet suit for some reason, and had just taken off his boater), fainted away with the shock. It was in an enclosed part of a garden, my Uncle gaining entry through a broken hedge. Strange to say, my friend Mrs Elwiss once knew a neighbour near Polyphant who was put in prison for threatening an off-duty Beefeater with a mock gun he had made by pasting a picture of an arquebus onto a cereal packet and cutting to shape. This occurred in London on a coach trip after I understand some quantity of cider, it happened in the Marylebone area, the neighbour lay awaiting in an alley near the 'Dandy and Polecat' Inn and emerged in a menacing way out at the Beefeater. Sirs, what I wonder is, do you or yours know of any such similar problems with false weaponry. I am particularly interested in tales of cardboard guns as I used to play with them as a child. Yours faithfully, Colin 'the florin' Pinney."
Ten Local Thimbles Baked In An "I"?
"Flat of Angles" or Mound of the Saxons
Prairie deaths in Icelandic slang
Racine's favourite hymn-joke
Kimble keeps running - how many times does he stop?
"Blithering Arbroath!" Whose catchphrase?
What did it look like inside the lemon-tree?
Braddock's Second Principle (the Polish version)
Did they ask the Panjandrum or not?
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Words of the Sages
"Yankee Caviar's eggs is like drabs. They stinks o' fish an' costs the h'erth."
(Arthur Pestle, an 1840s London Wit.)
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Illustrious Figures Discovered!
It was in 1837, whilst on a walking tour of the Brecons, that the Bishop of Stander and Pounding was discovered upon the roof of "The Blue Dragoon" inn in Pantyffynnon at 6am clinging to the chimney pots and shouting out some of the few naval phrases he was familiar with, such as "steady as she goes!", "westerly, I say, bosun!" or "by God, sir, ye'd make a Frenchman lower his yards and steal the lum-light!" The Bishop's companion, Mr T H Orotund, editor of The Clun Argus, having emerged from the interior of the hostelry with 2 bottles of aged Malmsey, famously burst his braces in an heroic attempt to scale the bulging nether wall of what was even then an absurdly tall house. It was only at noon, in a thunderstorm, that a half-drowned and demented scarecrow of a "skyward Bishop" was finally enticed to jump, or, in the event, to slither, flop and hurtle, from the roof into the stinking collection of horse-blankets and old hay prepared by Effyon Twyst, the landlord, and a gang of navvies who were rained off from their work at the Pontyfwelly viaduct.
