In the Dark

Long before this Covid-19 lockdown started I had been planning to attend a lunch, due to take place last weekend, on Saturday 2nd May, at Wadham College Oxford, in honour of Jonathan Crowther who, under the pseudonym Azed, has been setting cryptic crosswords in the Observer for the best part of 50 years. The occasion for this planned shindig was the publication of the 2500th Azed Crossword. I went to a similar celebration about a decade ago when the 2000th Azed puzzle came out and enjoyed it a lot.

Sadly, but of course understandably, the Azed 2500 lunch was cancelled (or at least postponed until September) but the crossword appeared today (above). It looks a bit tricky, but it will have to wait until later because I have many other things to do.

I haven’t been doing crosswords as regularly as usual during this period. The main reason for that is lack of time and energy caused by my current workload, but it’s also the case that most newspapers are no longer running their competitions: without the possibility of a prize I don’t feel do enthusiastic about solving the puzzles. The Azed Competition is still running, though, so I’ll definitely give this one a go.

Anyway let me take this opportunity to thank Azed for all the challenging yet enjoyable crosswords he has set over the years!

Update: I managed to solve the puzzle, which was indeed tricky: it took me a good couple of hours! Now to compose a clue for 34 across!

This entry was posted on May 10, 2020 at 11:44 am and is filed under Biographical, Crosswords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.