No geek
is an island

So, my weekend of General Election action.

The flight south was very bumpy. Turbulence is my number one reason for not flying. If the trains were quicker and cheaper, I’d happily stick to land-based transport. As well as being uncomfortable, the flight was late.

As I was working on the Guardian crossword, waiting for the shuttle bus from Luton airport to the station to leave, someone sat next to me. “Hello, Will,” she said casually. One of those “small world” moments: it was Kat Fletcher, recently re-elected President of the National Union of Students, returning from a conference in Belfast. I told her that my blog was getting a significant proportion of hits from people in ac.uk domains searching on her name. It does seem to disturb people when I say things like that.

We had a good chat, catching up on events since we last bumped into each other (at LibDem autumn party conference), including the various controversies within NUS and which General Election candidates we were out campaigning for.

At Kings Cross, we went our separate ways and I returned to the crossword. Araucaria doesn’t usually appear on a Friday and his crossword had a note at the top: “A 70th birthday tribute.” A quick flick through to the Guardian birthdays identified the subject of the crossword as Alan Plater, or 16 6 10: “Birth/dayboy/Alan”. I’ll dig out my favourite clue from the puzzle at some point. I had to Google an Alan Plater bibliography to help me (I’d never heard of The Coalhouse Door) and managed about half the puzzle in the end.

Up bright and early on Saturday to go Blackfriars to meet The Boat. With banners on the sides (including "Labour sells students down the river"), campaign material loaded and big LibDem diamonds up on deck, we headed off up to the Thames to Westminster. There we were met by a big crowd of LibDems plus TV cameras and journalists, including BBC News.

We then travelled down to Greenwich and dropped off Chris, the candidate for Greenwich & Woolwich, and Lord Dholakia. Then back to Westminster to disembark and distribute postcards and newspapers. We stopped at Downing Street and then headed on to Bloomsbury to deliver our student newspaper to halls of residence.

A late lunch and a quick committee meeting at ULU before heading off to Lewisham to Dan’s for pizza, Doctor Who (more on that later) and a club.

After breakfast and a first stab at the Observer prize crossword, I headed to Orpington. By the end of the very long bus journey, I’d seen a swathe of orange Chris Maines diamonds and completed the crossword. (Note to self: Post prize crossword asap.) I did some delivery before being assigned to printing duties. A few hours and several thousands leaflets later, I had a particularly large and tasty dinner.

Monday morning, breakfast from McDonald’s and a visit from the leader’s battlebus. I spotted myself on the news (on several channels) holding a big diamond behind Charles Kennedy’s head while he and Chris walked to and from the police station they were visiting. Some of the students from Orpington College were really keen to see Charles and had their photos taken with our big LibDem diamonds. Once the battlebuses (one for Charles and staff, one for the press) had headed off, I delivered some more leaflets. Then lunch with a group of helpers - including Eric Lubbock, aka Lord Avebury, who was Orpington’s MP in the 1960s - and off to Luton for another bumpy flight. Monday’s Guardian crossword - by Rufus, I think - filled my time on the aeroplane, bus and train home and I polished off that one too. By then, my back was starting to play up and I was stuck at home Tuesday, knocking back Panadol I’d bought at the airport.

Chuffed this morning as, after several weeks of trying (of which my previous best clue, and the vilest, was “She enjoys lurid finger without you (10)”*), I’ve merited a mention on Sandy Balfour’s competition page.

Each Friday, in the Guardian G2 supplement, Sandy sets readers a word to be clued. Last week, he asked for crossword clues for the word MAESTRO. I toyed with Mae West and Vanessa Mae (as it were), but settled on an anagram, which made the top ten:

Great artist, possibly Old Master (7)

This week’s challenge is SECOND CHILDHOOD.

(*Click on for the answer) (more…)

I’ve recently finished reading Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) by Sandy Balfour. It’s a mix of autobiography, travelogue and crossword guide, and I highly recommend it. It’s a life-affirming story of the author’s global travels and in particular his quest to find a national identity after leaving South Africa.

If you’re interested in crosswords (and in particular the Guardian crossword), it also provides a simple introduction to the subject, covering both Balfour’s belief in the stories contained in crossword puzzles and the basics of solving them. It also lifts the veil on some of the setters with the enigmatic names.

A work colleague gave me a printout of today’s Edinburgh Evening News crossword. Having failed to make much progress when I tried the same paper’s puzzle for the first time ealier in the week, I set to work on the cryptic clues (it’s a double crossword - two puzzles, one quick and one cryptic, with different answers for each but on the same grid).

I was very chuffed as I completed it in one sitting, and I only had to check one word in a dictionary: sisal.

One of yesterday’s Guardian crossword clues had me stumped (well, most of them did, but there is a point this…). The clue was, roughly, “Fifth-rate celebrities around (for instance) John Donne (7).” I resorted eventually to Googling “John Donne” since I had no idea who he was. The first result revealed him to be a poet. Another result contained one of his works which, given the title of this blog, I really should have known:

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.

Thanks to this info about him, I did manage to work out the answer. “Fifth-rate celebrities” is “E-list” and “for instance” is “e.g.” which together give John Donne himself: elegist.

Further to my previous post, one of last week’s Corrections & Clarifications columns in The Guardian had to clarify, following some concern from readers, that the duplication of clues was, indeed, intentional. The readers in question must be kicking themselves.

I did complete today’s crossword by Quantum, although I resorted to an online dictionary for help. This taught me that an acer is a type of tree and a racer is a type of snake. Favourite clue was “The fault’s in the office, not the Church (8,5)” while the most elegant was “Mixed, as in molecules (13).”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the paper Alexis Petridis’r review of the new Band Aid single includes a biting summing up of Dido: her “vocal style … recalls a woman distractedly singing to herself as she tries to remember where she parked her car.”

Oh, and Jonathan Calder highlights why Polly Toynbee’s nanny state is undesirable.