Happy Christmas to you all. Thank you for your patience in 2016 when things went awry, for which I apologise. And thanks to those who took time to send notes of appreciation for what has been on offer. I have taken some comfort from the fact that the number of those complaining that the puzzles have been getting too easy is almost exactly the same as the number complaining that they have been getting too hard, hoping that this is some evidence at least that we continue to face in roughly the right direction. I particularly liked a comment last month from ‘slezska’ – ‘The first rule of the Guardian crossword: Paul is usually easier than the average Paul and Rufus is usually harder than the average Rufus.’

As advance warning, you may like to know that Maskarade’s Christmas offering (a jumbo alphabetical with a theme) will be published on Christmas Eve. Deadline for entries is extended to 4 January and the solution and winners will be announced on 6 January.

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A footnote to the discussion of cryptic clues: it concerns what constitutes a fair lead to an initial letter or letters being part of the required solution. Michael B, who lives in France, has raised the issue with me more than once. Take, for example, the letter B. For some time I have accepted that the word ‘British’ in a clue could indicate that there is a B in the solution (or in the required anagram). Obviously, B = British in contexts like the BBC but why, he argues, should British = B in a clue when no such specific context is indicated? On this principle, he questioned a clue in a recent Picaroon puzzle (No 27,016, 3 down), where ‘Fully exhaust and dismiss old fellow (3,3,2)’ was intended to produce the solution RUN OUT OF. ‘Run-out’ is obviously one way of getting dismissed at cricket, but how, he objected, are you expected to know that in this clue O = old and F = fellow. He clearly has a point.

My answer, however, is that crosswords, like most human activity, have conventions shared by those involved; and that clearly these conventions change over time. When I started editing the Guardian crosswords, national identity letters linked to car number plates were not generally accepted as crossword conventions. Today, I think, A = Austria, E = Spain, PL = Poland and the rest have become conventionally accepted, though I might still draw the line, for example, at BF = Burkina Faso, or SF = Finland, as being a bit recherché. And, back in those olden days, internet country top-level domain codes were not the stuff of daily intercourse. Today, though, most setters and solvers would accept that .de = Germany and .za = South Africa, though is not perhaps all of them, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .tj (Tajikistan) or .ba (Bosnia and Herzegovina).

In the other direction, even accepted crossword conventions eventually die a natural death. Early in my time as crossword editor (though I could see its great helpfulness to a setter in trouble over a difficult clue, I insisted on killing off the convention that ‘charge’ in a clue was a fair way to reach ION in a solution. (I did so on the grounds that the convention was simply too wrong to be acceptable, since an ion is an atom or molecule, not an electric charge.) West = MAE hangs on as a convention, mainly, I suspect, because it can be so useful to setters. But the popular memory of the great (in every sense) film star must be have faded amongst the under-50s and her association with RAF inflatable life jackets in WWII is decidedly dated. I worry, too, about the accepted convention that ‘ship’ = SS, as the last launch of one to be powered by steam must predate the birth of the majority of our solvers. ‘Army’ or ‘volunteers’ = TA is another anachronism, since the then Conservative defence secretary Liam Fox abolished the Territorial Army over five years ago.

So how should a crossword editor negotiate these shifting sands? The traditional shelter in a storm is one of the respectable 1-volume English dictionaries, where each alphabetical section starts with a list of words for which that letter is an accepted abbreviation. This, however, is of no comfort to Michael B in France, because Chambers, for example, sanctions B, O and F as legitimate abbreviations for ‘British’, ‘old’ and ‘fellow’. Looking for consistency in editing clues, I have come increasingly to depend on another Chambers publication, ‘Chambers XWD: a dictionary of crossword abbreviations’, produced in 2005 by Michael Kindred and Derrick Knight, both cryptic crossword setters of distinction and jointly also authors of ‘Cryptic Crosswords and How to Solve Them’ (Chambers, 1993). Their XWD book has become a great comfort to me and I comment it to Michael B and any others in doubt!

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November’s Genius No 161 by Soup got slightly more correct entries than usual (302) by the deadline. First in again was ‘PSC’ in Australia at 01:38, followed by ‘m1f’ with Yahoo at 02:12, ‘mjs’ in New Zealand at 03:47 and ‘pc’ with AOL at 04:12. There were 41 entries by the end of the first day.

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