What I really want to know is......

Duh! Watching!!!! (no idea how that got to be war hung)

suziewoozie

We do the Guardian cryptic ( or try to) nearly every day . If we haven’t much time, we do the quick crossword but there have been rumblings on the letters page that the latter is getting harder.
One question for Times cryptic crossworders, do you have the name of the setter above the crossword? I know it’s a shared pool and we know who the setter is. This gives us a general pointer as to their style and also the odd one who completely baffles us.

No. I sometimes do the Guardian as well and I remember the days if Araucaria!

Cryptic crosswords are a rarety in Germany, but there is a fairly easy one in our paper on Saturdays but we usually manage that, finishing it over lunch. There are definitely different compilers. Some weeks the questions are on our wavelength, on others it involves more intellectual acrobatics.

We pass on the magazine in Die Zeit which has a very hard cryptic crossword. That's over our heads and we leave it to DS1 and his wife who both have doctorates.

Ha ha JackyB I can assure you it's not the doctorate thing that makes these do-able!

I have a French friend ( who teaches English) who picked up doing the Guardian cryptic crossword in a flash - she just ‘got it’ yet my Swedish friend( has lived here 30 years, absolutely fluent, broadcasts and writes articles in English) is completely baffled by the whole concept. I put it down to how your mind works and practice too of course.

I think that's how it is Suziewoozie - some people just think that way.

Do you have a favourite cryptic clue? My introduction to cryptic crosswords was, ‘Saw little Richard making a pudding’. That was in the easy days.

Spotted dick

Exactly Lucca, but I remember being excited because I ‘got it’!

Mollygo

Exactly Lucca, but I remember being excited because I ‘got it’!

I’m constantly surprised at the increasingly myriad ways the setters signal an anagram or a ‘sounds like’ So clever