The ideal training-ground for honing the craft of cryptic crossword clue creation – be careful how you say that – is the behemoth that is the Friday Cryptic Crossword Game, within the extraordinary multiverse of the One Touch Football (OTF) online forum c/o When Saturday Comes, the self-styled “Half-Decent Football Magazine”.
If the interweb hosts anything that compares with OTF I’ve yet to come across it. Contributors with improbable monikers such as Kevchenko, Jah Womble and Toby Gymshorts debate passionately and articulately – most of the time – on anything from football to film, technology to tattoos, Corbyn to couscous. Despite the global reach and the noms de plume, OTF has a palpable sense of community, allowing you to feel well acquainted with people you’re never likely to meet in the flesh.
So, the crossword thread, then…what presumably started as a gentle diversion at the end of a working week has grown like topsy to surpass 19,000 posts and 825,000 views since the relaunch of the message board in 2008.
The thread works as a chain of cryptic crossword clues, where each clue contains the solution to the previous one. At times this can take us far beyond the confines of a conventional crossword grid; as I write, the current challenge is to incorporate The Secret Policeman’s Ball into a new clue. One that sticks in the memory is when I used the previous solution (in bold) as follows:
For ice-cream sellers originally in Italy, “Yes, we have no bananas for this split” (7)
The answer is at the foot of this post.
There’s a small but hardy band of regulars in the game (I post there as irony towers): the de facto thread kingpin Guy Profumo (né Potger); the affable Duncan Gardner, who frequently has us Googling Northern Irish sporting references; the meticulous ad hoc; the eclectic MsD. Cast members have come and gone over the years (whither Hofzinser, Andy C, Nefertiti2?), but the game will surely see a good few more Fridays yet.
Answer: FISSION
For ice-cream sellers originally -> FIS
in Italy, “Yes” -> SI
(we have) NO ‘bananas’ [i.e. crazy, confused] -> ON
PickaPuzzle 