Sloggers & Betters Weekend

From one hobby to another. No sooner home from walking in Marbella and I was off again to York for John Henderson's annual Crossword bloggers and setters get together, known as the Sloggers & Betters do. I went last year and it was lots of fun. As before there was a pub crawl on the Friday night, with a quiz which had a new round in each pub.

This was our route this year.

It had started raining on my way up the A1 on Friday and it didn't stop until yesterday afternoon, so I needed my waterproof and umbrella.

I joined a group of Neil, Richard, Helen and Sid to take part in the quiz. We had great fun identifying the themes and hidden messages in the answers for each linked group of questions, but we came a bit unstuck with the pictures, so we didn't win.

Then yesterday the main event was at the Fox & Roman pub again. Last year we had a fiendish themed crossword to solve. This time John had provided us with a jigsaw style crossword, where the clues were laid out in alphabetical order of the answers. There was also another little twist - each answer had 1 letter missed out by the wordplay. Very tricky. I teamed up with Tim from Ipswich (aka Encota, a setter for the Listener, Enigmatic Variations, Inquisitor and The Magpie) and Nora from the 3D Crosswords team, and we managed to crack it before turning to the other puzzles of the day. But conversation and lunch stopped us doing more than a couple more.

I enjoyed meeting a number of other bloggers, quite a few setters (including Puck, Tramp, Vlad and Hectence) and other solvers, several of whom are regulars at the Times Crossword Championships. I look forward to meeting several of them again at this year's, on the 7th December.

You can get the other crosswords we were provided with yesterday here.