Days 3425 – 3431

 Aka Monday 8th April to Sunday 14th April 2024

…a(nother) very chilled week this week. Still resting up my gouty foot, so no going out partying or for exercise, so mostly the week was spent working, watching Youtube/Netflix/old DVDs, listening to music and reading. It also gave me the chance to catch up with my Lego building, firstly the Lambo a got for my birthday:

…and the classic Bond Aston Martin:

…the post man also delivered ‘Torpedo 1972’ #2:

…which is tad…rapey…and I think I will drop it…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords, kicking off with Monday’s crossword:

…which get’s the crossword week off to a grand start, as we were able to solve 95.24% of the 21 clues, only missing one clue. We got stumped by ‘kind of research’ and didn’t get ‘postdoctoral’, we were thinking along the lines of the actually type of research, e.g. practical or theoretical, and not what level of research. But all in all, a grand start to the week…

…Tuesday’s crossword goes equally as well, we solved 95.83% of the 24 clues, missing just one. The clue proving troublesome today was’2023 Wimbledon champion’, mostly because we don’t follow much sport, and defo don’t follow tennis, so we didn’t know that ‘Alcaraz’ won Wimbledon in 2023…

…Wednesday’s crossword takes a massive tumble down, as we only solved 83.33% of the 18 clues! On the bad side, we missed three clues, but on the good side, we didn’t know the answer for two of them, and the third one, ‘Morocco’ from ‘kind of leather’, we have a vague memory of having been a previous clue. So, we relearnt that ‘Morocco’ is a ‘kind of leather’ and learnt that ‘Oleander’ is an ‘ornamental shrub’ and that ‘ab initio’ means ‘from the start’. Hopefully, this is just a mid-week slump and we’ll be back to normal crossword solving tomorrow…

…and Thursday’s crossword finds us still in slump town, only solving 89.47% of the 19 clues ☹ yeah, am improvement compared to yesterday, but not by much. A chewy grid and we missed two clues, one we should have gotten, ‘Q in the Nato alphabet’, for ‘Quebec’, and one that taught us that ‘pulchritudinous’ means ‘beautiful’. Roll on some less chewy grids please…

…Friday’s crossword finds us back on track, solving 95.65% of the 23 clues. A nice straight forward grid today, a few chewy ones, but not unsolvable. And we learnt that ‘fallacious’ means ‘unsound’, which is nice to know…

…and Saturday’s crossword brings this crossword week to a grand finish as the little grey cells aced all 24 clues!!! Woot, woot! Nice to get a clean sweep under the belt and to end the week on…and I did the second of Guardian’s Quick Cryptic:

…which, along with the Metro Cryptic’s is defo upping my cryptic solving game and in a few months/years I might be able to do the full fat Guardian cryptic and then The Times cryptic!!!

Days 3418 - 3424

Aka Monday 1st April to Sunday 7th April 2024

A pretty quiet week, mostly as I was under gout enforced rest…it did ease off over the week, but it did hurt like buggery for the first few days!!! On the plus side I did pick up some Lotto winnings:

…and some beautiful comics:

…and I got some great music:

…the Starsailor CD for the excellent Soulsavers remix of 'Poor Misguided Fool', the ‘The Time Has Come’ EP from U.N.K.L.E., for some glorious early UNKLE sounds/remixes, the 'Athletico, A Compilation' CD, for some top-notch early Big Beat (before it got narrowed down into the big breakbeat and rock guitar and hip-hop vocal path) and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart ‘Visions Of You’, which has some great Andrew Weatherall remixes from just as The Sabres of Paradise were forming…and the latest issue of ‘Disco Pogo’ arrived:

…and I can’t wait to dig into it! And I also did this week’s G2 Crossword:

…and this new crossword week gets off to a bumpy start, a very bumpy start! It was a chewy grid and a half, and we only solved 80.95% of the 21 clues. The only upside is that we just didn’t know the answers to the four clues that we didn’t get. A bumper learning experience you could say! We learnt that the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ is a ‘Venetian landmark’, and not a Parisian one as we thought, that ‘Delft’ is a ‘Dutch city famous for pottery’ that ‘Erasmus’ was a ‘leading Renaissance scholar’ and that a ’parvenu’ is a ‘social climber’. Hopefully the rest of this crossword week will go better…

…and we’re back to the smooth lands with Tuesday’s crossword, as we solved 95.65% of the 23 clues, missing only one clue. Which means that we learnt that an ‘aphoristic’ is ‘like a maxim’, which is nice to know…

…and there’s not much to say about Wednesday’s crossword, as the little grey cells smashed the clues into smithereens! Solving all 21! Getting a clean sweep!!! Woot, woot!!!

…Thursday’s crossword doesn’t go quite as well, but almost as well. The little grey cells solved 95.65% of the 23 clues. The only one we got stuck on was ‘1936 du Maurier novel’, which is ‘Jamaica Inn’, which we’ve heard off, but have no idea what it is about or who wrote it, but we know now…

…and it’s a similar story with Friday’s crossword, another 23 clues, another almost clean sweep, with the little grey cells solving 95.65% of the clues, leaving one that stumped us! This time we didn’t know that a ‘Knot’ is a type of sandpiper (from the clue ‘fastening – sandpiper’), but it’s nice to be back in the upper echelons of 90%...

…and we end this crossword week on a damn fine note, as the little grey cells solved 96.00% of the 25 clues. Again, we were stumped by one clue, so we learnt that ‘Tripoli’ is a ‘city in Lebanon or in Libya’, we knew it as a city, but didn’t know that there two cities called ‘Tripoli’…and I first of the Guardian's Quick Cryptic:

...which went pretty well, as a practice for the main cryptic crossword, allow us to build-up to the proper one and I did the Metro Cryptic Crossword: