Unusual things are happening this weekend. For one, I am appearing at the weekend rather than waiting until Monday, though if you are reading this on Monday as usual, the effect will I concede be considerably less eerie.
Perhaps, though, you have come here because of one of the other unusual things. Today’s prize, for example, is set by a new name – Hugo – even though a recent announcement advised solvers not to expect a rash of new names.
And its tone? Hardly even. As crossword editor, Hugh Stephenson wrote in these pages in 2013 about the Guardian’s decision to eschew the consistency embraced by other papers’ puzzles:
I inherited the policy that the Guardian puzzles, unlike those in other places, should deliberately have a wide range of ‘difficulty’. The justification was (and is) that some of the puzzles should offer challenges to seasoned solvers and some should be an invitation to people who think that the whole cryptic world is impossibly arcane.
All part of the fun. But today’s puzzle varies so widely – and not just in difficulty – that the solver might wonder: how is one mind capable of so many leaps in spirit, so broad a frame of reference?
The answer of course is that the puzzle is not the work of one mind. Like Biggles (four setters named John) and Bogus (marking World Toilet Day), Hugo is a collaboration – on a large scale. The clues make up a series of coded goodbyes and tributes to Prof Stephenson AKA Hugh, who has stepped down as crossword editor after a quarter of a century.
An intrepid setter was dispatched to assemble a dossier on Hugh’s remarkable life thus far with the kind of details that would be useful for fellow solvers. A brawl was avoided in the allocation of the 28 entries; suffice it to say that there was no shortage of enthusiasm to make a puzzle that reflected this paper’s setters’ respect and affection for the puzzle’s subject, who took delivery of his copy yesterday.
Happily, everyone was kind enough to supply a rewording if their clue required knowledge that was known only to Hugh, or if it was wholly unfit for publication, which is how we have today’s puzzle: a one-off.
