Inspired by John Finnemore’s recent Listener puzzle, a question about the value of symmetry
This contains spoilers for Listener 4,549; which you might well enjoy solving first.
Solvers, setters: what does symmetry add to your enjoyment of crosswords?
So, I worked on that for a while … but I knew I wanted another message from another vantage point, and struggled to find one. And then I got cold feet that he wasn’t just obscure, but someone basically no one has heard of, including me, before I went Wikipedia trawling. So I threw him and his needle overboard, started again, and looked for properly famous people with that pattern.
Ever drifting, drifting away
Into the endless realms of day;
Finally ceasing
Of course, that meant a lot of letters in preordained places, which made the grid-fill hard, and for a while I thought impossible … but then I chucked out symmetry. I don’t understand why symmetry is such a big deal anyway, except in carte blanche and jigsaw puzzles, where it’s useful to the solver.
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