Anagrammatic Liberal Blog
By Oyler
Cast your mind back to the summer of 2024 when we had a General Election. The PM announced it whilst getting rather wet. Of course, we were bombarded with election stuff and it was during this period that I discovered that liberal was an anagram of Braille. Now I know that you wordsmiths will have known this for some time but as a crucinumerist I was overjoyed. The reason was that I could resurrect a puzzle from many years ago.
I’d started on a puzzle as a potential Listener offering back in 2009 entitled You Don’t See It. The final grid contained a message in Braille that read ‘Now you do solver’. In fact, all I had was a blank, numbered and barred off grid with a table for the across and down clues and nothing else.
So, I decided to resurrect the idea but using a much smaller grid and message. I opted for a message of 8 characters which would fit nicely into a rectangular grid. There were quite a few I considered; HAVE A NIP, HAVE A KIP but eventually plumped for TAKE A BOW. The original puzzle was going to have used parity so I kept that. Then I remembered a blog that, I think, Chalicea wrote that mentioned something that Chris Lancaster had said about hidden messages; in that looking at the first or last letters of a clue sometimes spelt out an instruction or gave some information. So, I decided to use this in the letter/number assignment clues and have the first letters spell out USE A DOT FOR THE SYMBOL FOR THE EVENS. Quite a lot of my early output used letter/number assignment clues but as I’ve got older, I’m beginning to tire of this type.
I started the setting process at home getting the basics sorted out. Namely the grid and a blank clue list as I was going to Nottingham for 10 days and wanted to use my free time constructively. It was the first time that I’d set a puzzle outside of Scotland let alone St Andrews! So, in between spending my time with my granddaughter and reading Yvonne Vincent’s cosy crime books (far better than Osman’s stuff IMO), the puzzle took shape clue by clue.
When I got back, I did the cold solve and changed a couple of clues to make it better. In particular, it allowed me to use EULER who in his later life was blind and as such had something to do with the theme although he’d died before Braille was born.
Hopefully you all managed to TAKE A BOW.
October 8th, 2025 at 5:39 pm
An impressive puzzle – well done. I am always in awe of your work. Maybe I was having a slow month, but I found that a bit harder than the usual C grade!