TREAT WITH A CUPPA CROSSWORD FULL

“It put into sharp relief the magnitude of the loss to the crossword community of his departure,” he says. The emotional part of the process didn’t hit Philistine until he saw the proof copy of the completed puzzle. Here a lover of wordplay expresses our love for another – in wordplay. Our Rev is the Rev John Graham the other is William Archibald Spooner, in whose fabled phrasing the insect in question might “flutter by”. BUTTERFLY is clued as “It’s what it does to another Rev (9)”. The most touching clue is surely the one which also gives the theme: 25 across. Grocery item known as The San Francisco Treat. He told me that he did, but that the same “probably applies in most of my puzzles and possibly in those of many other crossword compilers”. Winner (and host) of the 1966 FIFA World Cup crossword clue. I wondered whether Philistine attempted to write the clues in the style of his late friend. Araucaria described them as “martyrs” in the puzzle and explained that they “were people I thought Guardian readers should know”.) (This is reminiscent of his puzzle No 20,014, a tribute to South African anti-apartheid campaigners including Ruth First, Steve Biko and Chris Hani. Not expressions we use everyday, to be sure, but Araucaria insisted that Guardian solvers would know them both already, or would benefit from discovering them in the course of solving. Philistine queried a couple of entries: SHIRRALEE and IN SE. Araucaria was delighted to have constructed a grid with a top row containing ADMIRAL and SKIPPER – both nautical terms, of course, and also both butterflies (the theme of the puzzle). So the two men did what setters do they discussed the words (solvers look away now).

TREAT WITH A CUPPA CROSSWORD FULL

He had completed a grid full of answers, but didn’t feel he had the concentration to complete it with the clues. Araucaria had completed a grid which, Philistine remembers, he “tore out carefully from a sheet of A4 while I was at his bedside in hospital”. Once she was seated, she put a quarter teaspoon of sugar into the cup and then filled three-quarters of the cup with tea before topping it up with milk. That friend is fellow Guardian setter Philistine. So there’s nothing the least cryptic about the appearance today of a final Araucaria puzzle: No 26,427 is a memorial and was, as the rubric explains, “finished by a friend”. He went on to set a further 25 puzzles and died on 26 November 2013. I found solving it an experience which was at first sombre, but finally cheering, not least because of the thought of Araucaria responding to the prognosis by looking for anagrams. With characteristic chutzpah, this announcement took the form of Guardian cryptic crossword No 25,842, which first appeared in 1 Across magazine, and came with the special message “Araucaria has 18 down of the 19”. He crossed over from the puzzle to the news pages last January when he announced that he had oesophageal cancer.

Araucaria – also known as the Rev John Galbraith Graham – is the only Guardian crossword setter to have received the MBE and chosen a set of Desert Island discs.

Treat with a cuppa crossword