Listener 4514 Cordon By Colleague

[Hagen]

Nice theme and some excellent clues but the jumbled entries, combined with a serious amount of guess-and-search for the outer ring, made for far too much cold solving for my liking. If it had been possible to construct this without jumbles it would have been perfect.

[Scorpius]

Completely agree, Hagen. That outer ring was a brute. Once I'd cold-solved all I could I tried to spot some of the perimeter entries and saw one of the two-word ones that I recognised, which unfortunately suggested a different theme.
Thank goodness for Google's intelligent re-interpretation of entry letters, which gave me ring five from my incomplete entry of the first two words.

[starwalker]

I am finding this to be something of a slog - jumbles, cold solving and guess what it is. My enjoyment is beginning to evaporate and I haven't got to the end yet, even though I have ring 5 and a fair idea of what is needed.

[tnap]

Phew. Yet more cold-solving practice. Finding the Ring 1 entities seemed to take as long as filling the rest of the grid, with one of them being ridiculously obscure. It certainly helped that I was very familiar with the theme (literally), and so could fill in Ring 5 after solving about half the clues.

[Scorpius]

When I checked my grid this morning I realized that I was missing one of the entities and had unresolved ambiguities in the the three crossing jumbles. As there were several plausible possibilities it took some searching, and, as tnap says, it is ridiculously obscure.

[AngryUncle]

Well, those who have finished this one are way ahead of me, as I have only half the clues cold-solved and a pathetic six entries in the grid. A familiar pattern has developed: solve three in one section and the fourth is impossible, meaning no chance of putting anything in. Bradford, for once, doesn't seem to be on the setter's wavelength.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is 'Believe me, there are better uses of your life' and 10 is 'No, trust me, the PDM will make it all worth while'), how much more attention should I pay to this?

[Flocker14]

Just crawled over the finishing line with smoke coming out of my head, the asylum beckoning, the weekend lost, the relationship in tatters... the old story. It was very good indeed: hugely tough clues and a very (in one sense) arcane theme to uncover. If we had world enough and time...

[perseverer]

The circular grid plus the first of the seven letter answers I solved sent me off in a totally wrong direction for the theme.
As regards the obscure entity, I have found one that is very obscure, and one that is even more obscure than that, both via the internet which we are not supposed to have to use.

[JustinTime]

I would be amazed if anyone could solve this without Google or some other search engine on the internet.
The clues were mostly difficult and in at least two cases not definitive (in my reading of the build-ups)
But where is the cross as in crossword. Clues are supposed to help the solver solve adjacent clues, but here there were no crossing clues. The entities around ring 1 are mostly known for other reasons than their common attribute and one is really obscure.
Probably the worst puzzle this year.

[Philoctetes]

To be fair, in a circular, the "crosses" are provided by the common elements in the sets of radials. And, though many clues are tough, they do yield. My primary grump is the high proportion of Scottish terms, which, often, you either know or don't. And why such an extremely obscure entity was chosen when a more familiar one was available with the change of one letter, smacks of over-obscurity.

[olichant]

Wow, that was tough.

I agree about that one particularly obscure entry (I assume we're talking about the same one). I was misled by the third entity for a while, and did smile when I saw what it really was.

A bit of an uphill climb to solve (to put it mildly) but I really liked the theme, and of course the inclusion of the dangerous imposter. Some tough, very good clues en route.

[emcee]

Well, this is a tough one. I have cold solved all but 10 clues, have 2/3 of radials (all or partly) filled and still have no idea what the theme is.

Some of the surfaces are pretty daft e.g. 7. Very tough though.

[freiheid]

Finally struggled through this one. I found Ring 5 thanks to a guess on the central cells and googling a word that some of the letters suggested. I soon twigged what would go into the other Rings, whereupon the rest of it was a real slog, especially with 21 jumbles required which is not particularly elegant. The clues were needlessly hard in the circumstances.

[pushmi-pullyu]

Wow, finally made it. Every clue was like pulling a tooth and 39 resisted me right up to the end. But it was a wonderful pdm when I finally understood Ring 5.