EV 941

[devadolly]

Good Afternoon All. Have looked but cannot find any evidence of N & Cing so presume you have all finished and gone out for the day!

[kayakamina]

Good Afternoon devadolly.

A reasonably straightforward puzzle with a connection to last weeks 'Accomplished
Solvers' but not as much sleuthing .
I think the picture of the gift cropped up in another crossword from a few months ago.

[turnerjmw]

Pretty entertaining, I thought, even if the premable was rather overladen with hints for my taste. Thanks, Salamanca.

PS I assume 11dn should be (6) and not as printed

[dr b]

I thought it would have been more challenging had the 4 thematic answers not been identified as such in their clues. Enjoyable nonetheless.

[DocHH]

Hello everyone,
It was the length of the entry indicated by the clue compared to the number of available squares at 27a that gave it away. The others agreed with each other.

Devadolly, the weather is so awful here, there is no way I'd be going out today!

[devadolly]

Hello DocHH, no the weather here has been fine, cold and sunny, not my sort of weather for trotting round outside but a great improvement on last weekl.
Do you think these compilers get together and swap fiendish ideas? They have probably got their own N & Cing thread going somewhere, heavily disguised!

[DocHH]

Devadooly, today has been sooooooooooo rainy and windy, and as last week at times the wind was howling down the chimney! My neighbours who returned on tuesday from their house on Madeira, after a 6 week holiday, are dressed like Nanouk of the North!
I suspect you are right about the compilers colluding! I doubt if they N&C, if they do I'd also suspect it would be on an ethereal plane that would be a several stratospheres above our EV thread!.
Our Talking Newspaper finally took the last step last week, and are now sending out memory sticks rather than casstte tapes, on tuesday i am doing my first recording where I have to insert track markers between articles and then save the final recording as a series of MP3 files! The logistics of uniting our 300 Listeners with their players and training them has taken longer than expected, but we are there now!
I hear a Tempranillo beckoning me! Perhaps a Talisker first!

[Christiana]

Hello everyone. Tempted to say elementary, as I have very quickly achieved a completed grid, except that not entirely sure about the reasoning behind the cryptic part of 12a, plus I seem to have six 'signed' answers.

[kayakamina]

Hi Christiana

There were 6 in the original story.

[Christiana]

Oh yes, I knew that, but hadn't put two and two together, so to speak, certainly didn't make them add up to six. Thanks K.

[AndrewG-S]

Away yesterday so a late start for me. I agree a bit too much given away in the preamble. Also not yet sorted out 5d or the gift.

[novalis]

Evening All! ( But none you can surely remember Dixon of Dock Green!! )

Have managed to find time for EV this afternoon and have a completed grid but the line from the rubric "...and items of the gift may be imaginatively pictured together in the grid." is giving me pause for thought. Does this mean that the gift has to be indicated/highlighted? If so, and the gift is what I remember it to be from the dim and distant past then I flummoxed unless it has to do with a certain letter which appears far more often than normal.

[kayakamina]

Hi novalis

I also wondered if the 'gift' needed highlighting but decided that as it only in the mind's eye not to.
It is possible to picture the gift in 6 contiguous cells.

[AndrewG-S]

Ah I see, all finished now - an enjoyable puzzle.

[Malcolmd]

I have a completed grid but find the 'imaginatively pictured' a little tenuous. Does anyone think that something needs to be 'done' to indicate the gift. I am also struggling to make sense of the last sentence '.....to squares used, additional information..etc'

[AndrewG-S]

Malcolmd, it makes no sense at all to me, looks like "additional information" should read "rather than". Of course 27a went awry anyway in implementing this. Poor editing?

[zita-green]

27a is what I'm having a problem with and I also think the final sentence is unclear.

[AndrewG-S]

zita green, do you have the other thematic entries of this type? the 7 letter word length indication is actually a little bit helpful

[turnerjmw]

I didn't care for the last sentence either, but I think 27ac has to be seen as an abbreviation of the first word in an anagram of the last word, making it some sort of &lit, if that's the right terminology

[zita-green]

AndrewG-S, not yet. The story I think it refers to is not in my edition so I am struggling.

[kayakamina]

Hi Zita

Email me if you need a broader hint.

K