Sloggers and Betters Main Event

After the pub-crawl the night before, the main event of the weekend started at 11am. Overnight it had got rather cold... and snowy! Here was the view from the dining room at the Stableside as I had my breakfast.

Fortunately, I didn't have far to go. The Fox & Roman...

...was just across the road from the entrance! Our host, John Henderson,  had a supply of name badges, pens and crosswords. I sat down at a table with the event's main puzzle, An Exercise in Futility, and was soon joined by 4 others, John, Simon, Richard and Jeff - two other solvers and two setters.

The empty grid looked like this...

These were the instructions...

Three stages of an exercise in futility are represented in the grid. In eight clues, wordplay ignores one letter of the solution (Stage 1; the red squares are supportive upon arrival) and the definition is for the entered answer (Stage 2, upon return). The answers to ten other clues are too short for their grid entries, a situation solvers must rectify to represent Stage 3. The figure responsible for the exercise is represented by (i) the unclued answers; (ii) the blue cell; and (iii) the letters in the grey squares.

No, we didn't understand it, but we set off solving what we could. It was a good team effort and we all chipped in with ideas for answers and working out the wordplay. After about an hour we were doing quite well and had filled in enough of the grey squares to work out the anagram and identify what our two missing letters were.With that, and a hint from the setter about what "the red squares are supportive upon arrival", meant, we identified the figure responsible and the 3 "Stages".

But lunch came and we still hadn't cracked the middle squares, so we ended up getting the answers to the last few from another table.

Oh so clever! Follow the link above to access the crossword and this blog from crypticsue to explain the answers. A challenge worthy of the location and the collective cruciverbal expertise there!

After lunch we tried the other crosswords, which you can find here. You can also find blogs explaining each of them on the fifteensquared site.

Part way through the afternoon, I got a rather nice surprise. Somebody came up to the table where I was sat. "John Moody?", he asked. "Yes.", I repled. "Tom Reynolds", he said. Oh my goodness! Tom was my boss at British Gas when I left in 1987... and we hadn't seen each other since! He had seen my name in the list of people signed up to the event and followed the link I had left there to see if I was the John Moody he knew!

Well we didn't have long before he had to go for his train home, but we had a good chat catching up on the last 31 years! And now I know he is a setter, I must look out some of his crosswords and do them.

As the evening came on and people were thinning out, John D and I stayed on and had our evening meal in the pub. The food there is excellent.

By 9pm, I was starting to feel a bit weary so headed back to the Stableside across the road. I'd been in the Fox and Roman for 10 hours! I had gone for a bit of a walk in the morning to photograph the stops along our pub crawl, so I had at least had a bit of exercise, but by no means my usual target. Never mind. I'll be walking about York today with young Sarah and her friends.

So that was a fun event. It was great to meet some other bloggers and a number of setters. Thanks John H. I think I'll be doing more than just The Times crosswords from now on. But first there is the small item of the National Championships next weekend! More training for that next week!