Just finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Contractions”, lying in bed on Sunday morning. A clean, simple, straightforward theme, yet surprisingly difficult — I saw what the idea was within ten minutes of starting it on Friday, after solving just six clues, but the grid filled in only slowly. I worked on it intermittently on Saturday in between other things, completing a little more each time, and the last part, the upper right corner, didn’t fall till this morning.

Lots of good, elegant, but tricky clues, and quite a few that had me metaphorically slapping my forehead once I’d solved them, wondering how I’d failed to figure them out for long (in a few cases even after I’d figured out what the answer had to be from the crossing letters): 18A, 28A, 38A, 4D, 7D, 25D, 26D, and 34D, for example. No jaw-dropping surprises along the way, just a really well-crafted and well-executed puzzle. Very enjoyable.

I finished this Friday’s Listener crossword, “Not a Black and White Decision”, Sunday afternoon. I’d actually finished solving all the clues the day before, but then it took me a while to see what to do with the answers.

The introduction could have been more helpful. The introduction makes it sound like there’s only one way to arrange the answers in the grid in accordance with the instructions, and then, as a bonus, you can find some appropriate words hidden in the completed grid. In fact, there is more than one way, and finding the hidden words isn’t a bonus, it’s the only thing that makes one grid correct and the others wrong. I spent more time than I liked going over the instructions again and again and backtracking over my work looking for what I was missing.

Finally, you’re supposed to resolve one last ambiguity in the grid in accordance with the words that have appeared in the grid; I thought the connection was a bit less than clear-cut, myself, but then I’m actually very familiar with the words appearing in the grid, as they’ve come up several times in the books I’ve edited, whereas I think the constructor probably knows them just from their definitions in Chambers. There’s no particularly compelling reason in the real world why the correspondence couldn’t be the other way round. And there’s actually a stronger connection with something else in the grid, a connection that can be used to resolve this final ambiguity, but the instructions don’t mention it at all.

Oh well. Not a bad puzzle, but the vague instructions added a level of bewilderment that was more annoying than entertaining.

After three very devious Listener puzzles in a row, this week’s – “Past and Present” by Emkay ; seems relatively straightforward. At least, after fifteen minutes’ work I’ve made a good start on the top portion of the puzzle, including solving two of the theme words, and nothing inexplicable has caught my attention yet.

Later: I started the puzzle during my lunch break on Friday, and finished it during my long commute home, finding the two-word phrase that finishes the puzzle just as the BART train was pulling in to the West Oakland station. No big surprises, just a nice straightforward puzzle.

So now what am I supposed to do with my weekend? I may be forced to actually spend some time writing.