Stats – We had 40 submissions for this puzzle, which is pretty good, considering the level of difficulty!. Of those who submitted 24 managed to complete the grid with zero errors and went on to get the maximum possible score of 174. Here’s the completed grid.
The following question had to be answered by the solvers..
What is the catchphrase? (3,4,4,3,4) – A: THE LADY WITH THE LAMP
The puzzle commemorates the 200th birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, with 2020 having been designated as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife by WHO . Thematic Entries
1d CASSANDRA – FN’s most famous essay
5d THE WHITE ANGEL – A movie depicting the biography of FN
18d NURSE – FN’s occupation (Harbour is another meaning)
32a ROYAL RED CROSS – Military decoration for Nursing, badge shows the words FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY
39a NIGHTINGALE – Surname (a group of nightingales is called a watch)
The circled letters when rearranged give THE LADY WITH THE LAMP
You can access the Grid with solutions Here – Clicking Reveal ALL will show you the solutions, annotations and the answers to the bonus question.
Here’s the Score Card (sorted by total and then alphabetically). Congrats to the 24 solvers who maxed the score and to every one who participated. Very well tried.
Grid Rating: The puzzle got a fabulous score of 8.83. It got 18 perfect 10s – i.e nearly half of all the persons who submitted thought it was perfect. The minimum score was 4.
Top 3 Clues: The most favorite clues were “IFFY” with 10 votes and “STARTLE” with 9 votes and “CHARD/ALBION and GLOSSAL” with 8 votes each.
Comments from solvers:
- Super! Bhala at his best.
- Still to annotate a couple of clues – wonderful grid with several typical Xchequer clues 🙂
- Sorry, this was a good idea, but it needed a bit more polish, whether it be under/over-unching / double unches / overly tangential definitions or occasionally ungainly clue structures to accommodate a desired surface reading. The result is a crossword made difficult by faults rather than ingenuity – apologies, but not for me.
- Couldn’t solve 27d
- Excellent!
- Extremely challenging puzzle. Tricky clues, as you would expect.
- Good one! I had to really rack my brains on this.
- Expectedly high quality puzzle from this setter. Some devious stuff to unravel adding to the fun.
- such a masterclass in clue construction.
- Very Hard
- tough but fun grid!
- Challenging, very British style grid.. Wonderful,topical theme
- QUITE AN ENGAGING PUZZLE!
- I got my brain fried! Got clogged down for two days during these lockdowns
- Absolute beast of a puzzle. Had me struggling till the last one dropped. Wicked, evil, no gimmes, everything that a good grid should be. Still have to go back and anno a few.
- Very challenging puzzle with very different clue constructs. I have a fair idea who Bingo is!
- Bingo! Excellent as usual. Struggled for two whole days with this. May have made a couple of mistakes though.
- Classy Puzzle! Tough but fair. Extremely enjoyable.
- Very tough, had to struggle to get words like FOEHN, TRAGI, AIOLI etc…
- Tough, good workout
- What a brilliant puzzle. Took time to savour it while reviewing my answers before submission
- Very tricky! I’ll be lucky to get half of my answers right.
- The theme is a tribute to the nurses fighting the Corona. Excellent clues.
- Amazing clues, some of them crazy hard. It was tough to pick just 3 from my top 11. Nice topical theme too.
- Brilliant and technically perfect wordplay! Some brilliant surfaces too (RESIN being my top one). Some other surfaces seemed a bit contrived (eg, 3a, 14a, 47a). 27d was unnecessarily violent. But 38d was really avoidable: normalizing that violence in a crossword clue is uncalled for, imo.
- very good and crisp clues even for 4-letter words has given a good mental exercise. nice effort with theme
- toughie
- Challenging puzzle. Good theme.
- The X chequer’s puzzles are ideal for a lockdown .
- Tough challenge/ each clue crafted with care/ enjoyed solving this!
- Clever puzzle with a nice theme and new words
- More difficult clues and unusual words than usual. Some answers I don’t full understand. four-letter answers with two unches may be questionable.
- Very nice theme and execution
- Tough – some very tricky wordplay. Some new words – VLEI, FOEHN ? Wow ! Quite a struggle but the theme could be guessed and that helped in crossings. Phew!
- What a puzzle, so many new words – superb
- Very very tough and challenging grid
- Super. Kerala is beyond me.
- Challenging, clever and creative clues, really enjoyable and totally worth it. Loads of new words and many “aha” moments as well. It was hard to choose the best clues because every clue was unique in its own way.
- Toughest grid I have attempted