An engaging puzzle but I have to confess I struggled in places, and finally had to cheat on two. As I posted elsewhere-shouldve been the cryptic. Liked it. Thanks for parsing the farmer. Thanks for the blog. I think trio is the three in square meals. I got Old McDonald, but only from the ref to a farmer with first word old. Otherwise it took a long time but got most of the clues through persevering! Rather tough for a Quiptic, but an interesting challenge. I particularly enjoyed all the references to common phrases in clues and answers.
Even then, it took a long time for that penny to drop. Thanks both. Again Anto can be accused of pitching for a cryptic rather than a Quiptic slot. Wonderful puzzle β far too tough for me but thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to Anto and to NMS for helping with the parsing. There should not be a single clue in a Quiptic where I again, as an experienced solver have to think about the parsing.
OK, maybe I can be slow on 1 or 2, but there were several in this including the 12d that everyone is so fond of that were obviously too hard for a beginner. And if the justification is that mostly this is a second, bonus Monday morning crossword for older solvers, then just rebrand it.
And the setters obviously read these blogs and respond to our comments β they are, after all, providing a service to us.
So we have the responsibility to represent them. Thanks for reading this far, if you did! Posters here frequently complain about the difficulty of Quiptics, and in this case all 5 posters before you had made some reference to the level, with 3 out of 5 of us explicitly stating it was too difficult for the slot.
