A Matter of Taste

I'm having one of those days today – you know the ones, when you can't face doing what you're meant to be doing and look for any excuse to do something else. So I'm finding it quite hard to get my head in gear to produce some puzzles. Having said that, I suppose a mental rest is important now and again (that's exclusively for the benefit of my boss). Mind you, picking your nose is important too, or at least that's what I'm telling myself this morning.

For a lot of people, a mental rest means doing a puzzle or two as a brief escape, but as Jackie said in her Confessions… blog post, it's not necessarily the same for those of us who 'get paid to solve crosswords'. I expect it's similar for people who work in a chocolate factory. 'Help yourself to anything' means eating so much chocolate in the first week of the job that the very idea of eating chocolates after that first week is worse than a bushtucker trial for Kim 'projectile vomiter' Woodburn.

I am an avid fan of one crossword, however – the Cyclops crossword in Private Eye. It only dawned on me that I'm obsessed with this crossword a few weeks ago when there was a technical problem: the puzzle from two issues previous was reprinted. Angry doesn't come close, even though I know how common print production problems are.

So what is it that I like about this crossword? On the face of it, it's a completely normal puzzle – a standard cryptic crossword, with a standard grid, following the standard rules of cryptic clues. However, it breaks all the rules in one important respect – it's full of cross words: rude clues, swear words, in-jokes and innuendo, along with irreverence and up-to-the-minute political and cultural references. Would we be able to produce similar crosswords? We could have a good stab at it, but I don't know that we'd get away with including them in our titles. We always aim to provide entertainment as well as good mental exercise – the odd (bad) gag and so on within the clues or the grid, but that's as far as we go. We don't think you, our readers and puzzlers, would like us to go further.

I suppose I'm trying to say that a crossword is a crossword is a crossword, but also that a crossword is a unique experience, and the solver is the most important part of the puzzle when we put one together. Are we right not to include cross words in crosswords? … Have you been put off by nose-picking and projectile vomiting? There's your answer. What is it? Tell us!