Listener crossword 4000: Quadrivium by Dimitry, Viking, Arcturus & Trev

I first came across the Listener Crossword when I was 17. I couldn't understand the point of it at first. There appeared to be no consistency to the thing. Each week there was a different setter and a different theme, and hardly any of the diagrams had blacked-out squares, which until then I had always considered the hallmark of crosswords.

Sometimes, when the theme was mathematical, it wasn't even words but numbers that one had to fill in. But with each passing week and each issue of The Listener, my doubts dissolved. I was drawn farther away from what I should have been doing (studying for my A levels) and deeper into the weird and varied minds of the setters. The inconsistency itself (which now I interpreted as a weekly surprise) became a part of the pleasure. Soon I was an addict - a sporadic addict.

I even compiled some crosswords of my own, one of which was accepted and published by The Listener a couple of years later. (I was absurdly pleased at the time, but when I came across it recently, I didn't much care for it; the theme seemed a bit obvious and the diagram was not even symmetrical.)

What are the pleasures of a typical Listener crossword? First of all, the shape of the diagram, the mysterious title and the curious and specific (but not at first fully comprehensible) instructions. Then, the click of satisfaction as the solution to each clue comes through. Not only are these clues cryptic but quite often letters in the clues or solutions are intended to be left out or substituted; or words extraneous to the clue proper lurk in wait, stones carefully placed to trip one up, but also to act as links in a ford to take one to farther shores. (The first letters of these extra words might, for instance, contain an instruction on how to treat the diagram as a whole.) Finally, the theme becomes clear and the satisfying clicks come thick and fast. Well, not quite finally; often there is a further twist - a second denouement or decryption or decoy to baffle the brain-weary.

In one case, the fiendish “Symphony in Four Movements”, there were four separate hoops to jump through. In another, where solvers were blandly advised to use a pencil, the final action required everything in the diagram to be erased except the word “Grin”. (A Cheshire Cat in the style of Tenniel had appeared in it.)

Crosswords cater perfectly to my weak character. Since I am not disciplined, the only thing that keeps me glued to any task is obsession. And there is a quality of obsession about worrying, terrier-like, at a crossword. I must have struggled, over the years, with hundreds of Listener crosswords. Even when I solve them, I rarely send them in; and sometimes a year passes without my tackling one.

But it is good to know that it is there to be turned to every Saturday, an unvarying (but various) source of pleasure.

The Listener itself disappeared in 1991. The Times, to its great credit, provided a new home for that venerable waif the Listener Crossword, and the many happy obsessives who clustered around it. It is now, amazingly, celebrating its 4,000th appearance.

It cannot be said of many institutions that they give great joy. But for all the hair-tearing and sleeplessness that it induces, the Listener Crossword is certainly one of them.

Puzzle Facts and Figures

The first Listener Crossword appeared in April 1930, about a month after the first Times Crossword. There was one correct entry.

Themes featured from the start: No1 was about music and No4, on St George's Day, used a map of England as the grid.

Until the Second World War, every correct entry won a prize and occasionally there was none. The lowest number of correct entries in The Times is eight, for No3,240 in 1994.

In the 1930s, one puzzle a month was in Latin or Greek.

In 1997, when a shortage of space threatened the puzzle, Peter Robinson MP proposed an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons to demand its retention.

Stephen Sondheim once told a gathering of Listener setters that he and Leonard Bernstein would break off from work on West Side Story whenever The Listener arrived, so that they could both tackle the crossword.

An anthology of 60 puzzles from 1996-2000 will be published next Friday by Chambers, on behalf of The Times.

Find out more at listenercrossword.com

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