Just a quick post to say I intend to delay my solution to the Times Jumbo Cryptic Crossword 1645 until after the prize deadline. This will probably be the shape of things to come following word on the grapevine that The Times would prefer I didn’t give all the answers away to their prize Jumbo so quickly.
Don’t worry, I’ve not found a dead bloody dictionary in my bed or anything so dramatic. In the past, though, whenever anyone has criticised the timeliness of my solutions, I’ve always said I’d stop posting them if I found I was spoiling everyone’s fun.
I don’t think that’s quite the case here. I don’t believe many of you come here just to copy my completed grid. You’re here to clear up unknowns. You’re here to see what others thought of the Jumbo. You’re here because you glanced over the cryptic clues of a recent Jumbo and finally succumbed to their allure.
I’ve always intended for my solutions to be the kind of thing you’d read having either just completed the puzzle yourself or having given up after a bloody good try. (They’ve also been a great way for me to get help when I get stuck!)
With all that said, delayed solutions obviously present something of a change. I genuinely don’t know whether delaying solutions will kill off my posts, but I do anticipate a noticeable drop-off in engagement. I hope I’m wrong, but I’ll watch what happens over the coming few weeks with interest. I’m keen to at least post solutions up to and including Jumbo Cryptic 1650 (Boxing Day, I believe). This will mark a near-complete run of 300 Jumbo solutions. (I missed Jumbo 1532 as it was an online-only puzzle.) We’ll see what happens after that.
As ever, thank you for the kind words and input. Till next time, wrap up well and stay safe out there, kids.
LP
Lucian Poll's Web Ramblings 
Oh well, that is a great shame. I am sure that no-one visits your site unless they have either completed the puzzle & wish to share their views or are stumped & merely want enlightenment. It would be a shame to call it a day after today’s offering as it was, ahem, rather straightforward. Cheers
I would be very upset if you stopped. Your site has helped me so much to gradually get the hang of cryptic crosswords. I spend most of the week trying to finish it but really value knowing you’ll explain the ones I can’t get. Please don’t give up. X
Lucian. First off many many thanks for the Musings to date. I always enjoy your thoughts on each week’s puzzle.
I do find the Times’ objection rather odd. Solutions to each clue are available in several places elsewhere and well before your article is published. As many have commented, I suspect very few of the visitors to this page even enter the prize draw.
So what the Times is asking won’t meaningfully impact their perceived problem and your delaying the posts will significantly reduce the considerable enjoyment you create for your readership. I’d certainly put it into “their problem, not yours” territory, but the choice is obviously yours.
Thanks again for the excellent and entertaining posts. Long may they last!
Concur totally. I’ve no interest in entering a competition. What Lucian brings is the joy of explanation when my dim mind has battered itself dry. And with that comes providence.. I’m so much better at cryptic than I used to be. Please keep on!
Your postings have been esp helpful for me only 2 years into enjoying this engrossing past time. I do hope you continue to post regardless of when you can do it. Thanks. Tee ________________________________
Like many, I am a novice and your posts have been so helpful on many levels. Hope you continue and thanks for everything
It’s been really handy to check our workings-out just after we finish, but I can quite understand why The Times would be nervous. I was chuffed when I won the prize, I wonder how someone would feel if they’d cheated?
Anyway, please do keep posting your explanations – it will still be handy to check our logic even if it is a bit delayed.
Many thanks as ever.
Understood Lucian. I will continue to check in if you still post your solutions – I often have one or two answers where I’ve not fully grasped the parsing (this week’s easyish puzzle being no exception).
Interesting confirmation that The Times has you on their radar – it would be lovely to learn if any of your observations were taken on board by the setters/editor.
I’d been musing on the different levels of difficulty in these cryptics. We had several ‘stinkers’ a month or two ago, but recently we’ve had a run of fairly undemanding ones. Do they make any effort to assess and moderate levels of difficulty? The other puzzles (eg KenKen, Sudoku) do have a stated level of difficulty but in my experience they’re quite subjective.
Cheers Graham
Lucian, As a person who rarely finishes the crossword I treat your post as an essential part of the enjoyment of the crossword. i love to discover the solutions i didn’t get, and the explanation for those i guessed. Also, we love your humour and themes such as repeat clues or french usage. I don’t think it matters how quickly you produce the post after the paper comes out, but it may be that the Times are watching your posts after all and therefore will take note of your comments re the setters!
Cheers Trevor
Thanks Lucian. We will certainly continue to follow your posts, even if it means having to wait a bit longer for them to appear. And, as others have commented above, we could dare to hope that your posts – and maybe even our comments – might be taken on board by the setters and/or the crossword editor (cough-deletions-cough).
Slightly off-topic, but we’ve often wondered what incentive there is to send in the crossword at all, since the prize is a set of reference books, at least some of which (such as Collins and Bradford’s) are needed in order to complete the puzzle in the first place…
Best,
Sue
Your efforts on this forum are really appreciated, Lucian. I always look at your solution/explanations after I’ve completed the puzzle to check parsings and see how difficult (or not) others found it. It’s certainly not to try to win the rather boring prizes, which I’ve won twice in the past anyway!
Maybe we could continue to discuss the puzzles in a general way?
Completely understand Lucian, but my goodness I’ll miss this if you decide to stop. Finally admitting defeat and then coming here is a treasured ritual in my weekend!
As others have said, I resort to your set of answers and explanations when I admit defeat at the end of the weekend. So it will not be the same without your musings on the topic.
We really enjoy being able to read your thoughts after hopefully completing the crossword and as others have said we like to look for explanations of any answers we have guessed. I do hope you will be able to continue.
Apologies if this ends up posted more than once – am having some issues.
Such a shame. I always enjoy reading your post once I have finished my grid as there is often one I haven’t fully parsed or if I get totally desperate on the last couple.(Now I don’t know why it’s TREPANG (if it is) and won’t remember in two weeks to come and look!) Given that there are several sites out there where you can type in the clue and they give you the answer with no explanation I don’t really see the problem. The Times will still only need to give away the same number of prizes, just that they may have more entries to check. Seems like their problem to me, not yours or ours.
Hi Rachel
For what it’s worth, it is TREPANG (solved entirely from the wordplay, as our beloved leader would say). It’s GNAT (insect) around (“eating”) PER (through), all reversed (“round”).
Cheers
David
Trepang is a sea cucumber
A solution so the crossword is still fresh in our minds when we get to LP’s excellent work is to tear out the relevant page for the next couple of weeks, put it in a drawer and go Christmas shopping! Who cares what the date on the page is?
With thanks for all the chat!
Stick with it, Lucian. What’s the point of a prize for this, and why allow so long to send answers in? Even when I finish the puzzle and more so when I don’t, I enjoy reading your explanations and comments.
Unlike some of the others I’m not a newbie. I’m just not as good at crosswords as you. I find your blog extremely helpful, particularly for parsing and for your general appraisal. If you say it’s a toughie I won’t bother. I understand the Times point but anyone looking at your blog to cheat and win a pop up toaster or whatever would be a pretty sad individual. Please keep up the great work. Yours gratefully – Nigel
What a bummer! I carried over five or six unsolved clues from yesterday evening, took them on to the bus for my hike today (15.5 miles with 1400ft in ascents, since you ask), duly completed them and planned to offer a comment on my return from the pub this evening.
My comment now – to the Times! – is that I can assure you it remains all too easy to find all solutions on the internet should you be sad enough to seek the prize by cheating. I in fact gave up doing xwords 18 years ago for precisely that reason – and only returned when a broken leg in 2017 confined us to barracks for the winter.
The point about Lucian’s post was not so much that it supplied answers than that its enjoyably rigorous parsing let you check your own reasoning. I very much hope this continues.
I will not myself be commenting again until around the vernal equinox – but only because we’ll shortly be in the Pyrenees for the full 90 days permitted by wretched Brexit. I trust that, on return, there will still be a Poll to dance round!
Please keep up the good work, Lucian! I echo many of the earlier posts, in that I only come to you after – hopefully – completing the Jumbo, and get a great deal of pleasure checking the parsing and reading your entertaining comments.
Answers can easily be found elsewhere, but I can see how you might have particularly attracted the attention of The Times’ enforcers by having such a complete solution in a professional-looking format.
The only real issue is that the deadline for competition entries is so distant (Dec 7 this week). Even then, I’d put good money on the vast majority of your followers (Lucianites? Poll-sters?) staying loyal.
Heaven knows what happened to the website software this time but it seemed to be as perverse as the Times is proving. As befits a post about ciphers perhaps, I seem to have been assigned multiple identities! Anyway, I merely repeat my hope that, come spring, there’ll still be your fine site to host our comments. Keep truckin’ Lucian – and all other familiar contributors!
It’s all be said beautifully above. We do hope you keep up the commentary and we can continue to learn from your excellent explanations.
I don’t think many people do the crossword
For the sake of the prize.i think I will have pretty much forgotten the crossword by the
Time you publish the answers.so a bit of a shame.
Well I think it has all been said above – especially the comment about the problem being for The Times – I echo the others who appreciate the timely nature of your solutions and I wouldn’t even think about the prize issue, most of us have the necessary reference books anyway and who needs 2 atlases? Please reconsider the delay – as everyone has said, we can find the answers elsewhere but not presented in your inimitable way. Keep up the good work please.
Lucian, of course the decision is yours alone.
I am in complete agreement with the people who value the “instant gratification” your blog so powerfully provides. After a week has passed, so has the memory of frustration and amusement that the Jumbo gives. The puzzle itself will itself have been long recycled..
If The Times has a problem, perhaps losing the prize element might be a a way forward?
Oh dear, that is sad news. I can only echo all the other comments here – but mainly, thanks so much for all your hard work! Reading your column is a pleasure, even when we have solved the whole grid – we so enjoy your wry humour and the occasional rant; remarks about outrageous accents, deja vus (if that’s the plural) and cries of “Yellow card, setter!” are now commonplace at our breakfast-table.
All the best to you, whatever you decide!
What aa shame. To be honest I’m probably not going to keep the paper foe several werks to check puzzling parsing. And for anyone who just wants the answer to a clue, seversl other sites are available.
I agree with what everybody seems to be saying, that it is a shame that you have been pushed into doing this, especially as people can find answers elsewhere on line and anyone who does cheat in order to win the prize is a pathetic specimen who will probably spend purgatory forced by the devil to work on almost impossible crosswords without any help at all. I shall look forward to reading your comments no matter how long I have to wait for them. Thanks for what you have given us so far and long may you continue!
Agree with all the above.
I never enter for the prize. I come to your site for the solace of a clue explained, otherwise it niggles away at me, and I’m very grateful for your parsing. If this is 2 weeks after doing the crossword I will have forgotten what was niggling me.
The Times should move with the times. It can’t police the internet. They should either have a short deadline, eg. Sunday night, (adding an element of speed into the competition) or do away with the prizes.
I just want to add my voice to the chorus above, and my thanks for your efforts over the years. My sons, my mother and myself started doing the crossword together, very slowly but collaboratively, during COVID. It is still an excellent way of bringing together people living apart, and your site is a definite part of the fun. We’re not interested in prizes, which is just as well because we have only just finished the one from June 17th, but we do like to see the explanations for the ones that the hive mind has failed to grasp. It’s always a comfort when we can say “Lucian thought it was a stinker too”!
Completely agree with you and many of the comments already posted in that I don’t think many of us are in it for the prize. For my part too, the additions to the satisfaction in doing it oneself are your complete and hugely helpful parsing, the humour of your post and the fascination of others’ reactions – particularly their similarities or contradictions to one’s own. I honestly don’t think there’s been a single occasion while I’ve been following it that I haven’t learnt something, and I think it’s good for me to realise I can disagree with a point of view without being grumpy about it1
As I often, indeed generally, start the puzzle a good few days into the following week, I don’t think I’ll mind delaying my attempt until somewhere near the date the solution will be available in the paper itself. I agree with those suggesting it’s better to have your post quite soon after we complete it, and if I just do a few from the published collections for a week or two (until the Times complies with its schedule) that will work for me. Better still, If someone there reads all this, the paper might understand that it could get over its hissy fit in the ways suggested.
Thanks as always for the fun, and enlightenment – please do keep it up.
We always submit the solution for the prize having checked our solution against yours. Sometimes there are errors. It is pretty rare these days that we don’t complete under our own steam but we quite often get words without having fully grasped the logic. We still use missing letter solvers a lot. Anybody who wants to completely cheat can still use Danword (for example).
That’s a crying pity, we leave the jumbo on the kitchen table and gradually attack it over the week, resorting to your excellent blog when stuck, or given up on a Friday evening.
Who on earth in their right mind would go to the trouble of copying all the answers for the faint chance of winning some reference books?!
Please keep up your amusing and enlightening words.
Please do keep supplying us with your finished grids. I’m sure there are so many of us out here that have learned so much. I, like so many others I’m sure really appreciate what are extremely useful lessons in cryptic crossword puzzle solving.
Be well
Tim
I don’t normally leave comment because we don’t finish until
Thursday or Friday of the following week but we enjoy seeing your explanations and I echo what everyone above has said.
Completely agree with all the above posts. We also do the jumbo throughout the week, and then come to your wonderful site to pick up any clues we’ve failed to get, or to find an explanation for any that we can’t fathom.
As others have said, the answers are all out there anyway – surely the Times can change its prize structure to accomodate the internet, which all the evidence shows is here to stay.
Please don’t give in, and don’t give up either!
Your posts are all that keeps me sane …… please don’t give up!
Good Morning Lucian and fellow followers. Thank you for many months of Friday or Saturday morning entertainment over a mug of tea. It usually takes from Sunday to Friday for my wife and me to do the Saturday cryptic, doing a bit each morning for as long as it takes to drink the first tea of the day. This week, here we are, come to find out whatever the insect and the sea cucumber have going on (Chris Tratalos appears to know), to enjoy your parsing and the comments of posters (such as Broad Thoughts From a Home, goodgoalie, Dr John, et al.) only to find we must wait another week or two. We will; and hope to find you have resumed your much appreciated parsings. Please permit a question: are Bradfords and Chambers better than the Shorter OED ?
Publish and be Damned!
I’d urge you to reconsider. I find your site really helpful. I never send in completed grids but enjoy the challenge each week. My standard of solving is below that of most contributors. I tend to complete the easier ones, get to within a few of the moderate ones and sometimes completely abandon it. What I like about your site is the explanations. There are many times when I can see the solution to a clue but cannot fully explain it. I am improving but painfully slowly.
The Times print solutions after two weeks. There are no explanations. Also by week two, I am focused on the current Jumbo. The one they are printing the solution to is history. I cannot imagine I will be interested in the solutions, even with explanations one week late, so if you introduce this delay I will become a very occasional visitor to the site.. Do the Times really believe that their readership are so desperate for reference works and so lacking moral fibre? Is it not possible that they don’t like you calling out lazy clueing? If the absence of a site providing timely explanations provoked me to any action it would be to switch to the Telegraph, whose crosswords I can mostly complete.
What a shame ! …… my wife and I always enjoy your posts (and especially your rants !). It’s hard to believe that there must be some people prepared to cheat to get a chance to win a few reference books.
It’s nice to have the mysteries cleared up on the occasions we cannot parse a few answers, and in our view you are providing a valuable public and intellectual service to thousands of readers. THANK YOU.
We do hope you carry on posting – we will just have to remember to save copies for two weeks !
Russell and Jo
A further thought, having read the interesting and heartfelt comments. If anything, the Times crossword editor should be grateful for the LP post and the comments that follow. Surely it’s great feedback, useful to gauge how well the setters are doing.
If the crossword were a real stinker (official Pollese description) every week, I wonder if I stop buying the paper. I’d miss Matthew Paris and also Rose Wild’s Feedback column, but the rest ???
I’ve never submitted a completed puzzle, to try for a fifth atlas or fourth dictionary. Grow up The Times !!!!
As others I come not just for the answers but the reasoning and to know if you thought it was a toughie. I’m confused this week by those above saying this one was easy!
In the Internet age, a prize competition in a national newspaper is pointless. Numerous sites reveal answers to various clues long before the submission date.
Lucian – you should keep your popular website going, and “The Times” should remove the prize element.
Lucien
I echo all of the above and suggest that you forward the feedback to the Times Editor.
My husband and I usually struggle to the end by Sunday night and then immediately check in with your blog to see where we may have slipped or why the answer is what it is.
What a shame that the newspaper is being such a killjoy. They clearly haven’t understood that there is a Jumbo cryptic community out there who have zero interest in their wretched prizes.
As one of you readers has already said: publish and be damned!
Bit late to the party, but wanted to add my own thanks to all the enjoyment you have given in filling in the gaps, or explaining the full solutions. As someone lucky enough to have won the prize competition twice this year, I can’t think of anything worse than using someone else’s brainpower to do the job for you. If I can’t complete it on my own, it doesn’t go in. I never check before submitting (after all they do that for you) as my near misses will testify….
Please don’t give up Lucian! We need you
abadchap – what have you done with the atlases and books?!
Lucian, tell the Times to sling the hook! Three of us assemble in the pub in Monday, religiously, to compare and collaborate. We even have others chipping in. One of us is good at finding the answer through applying a straightforward ” what letters will fit in there ” technique. One of us is good at getting the answer but not entirely sure why. My contribution is parsing the clue once we have the answer. We always put off ” going to Lucian ” until we are sure we can go no further. At this point, everyone gathers around to see ” what Lucian thinks” ad though we were a family in the 1930s listening to a gramophone. Don’t give in cheers
Like others, we take all week to (almost) complete the Saturday Jumbo cryptic. We’ve hardly ever completed it unaided and never entered the competition but we do rely on your blog to finish it , and to explain some of the more obscure ones. Please do continue. I agree with others that the Times should just drop the competition.
Thanks for all your help which has been really appreciated.
Thanks for having been here! I’ve been visiting for a couple of years to check answers and gained enormous fun from your commentaries. Like everyone else I wouldn’t dream of entering the competition based on your information. I can see where the Times is (are?) coming from but I think it a great shame. I’m unlikely to wait two weeks to see the answers since in general I don’t bother looking at them when they’re published anyway – my attention span isn’t that long and if I haven’t sorted it by Wednesday the whole thing goes into the recycling.
I might, though, hang around for a couple of weeks to hear your thoughts on 1647. Completed but with a bad taste in the mouth. Excessive dependence on the use of female names, and two ludicrously obscure answers, and I think the setter should usefully be subject to 16 Across. But maybe that’s just me.. Thanks again.
Solutions are available on crossword genius, Dan word and wordplay to name but 3 and for the Saturday prize puzzle as well. The Times is out of touch with reality.