This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2014/nov/25/unexpected-treat-fans-of-araucaria-guardian-crossword-setter

The article has changed 4 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
Removed: article Araucaria’s final crossword: one last treat from the master
(about 20 hours later)
This article was published early in error. It will be reinstated at the correct time. If you are a regular solver of the Guardian’s cryptic crossword, you are advised to click away now. If you have already solved it, then a) congratulations and b) pour yourself a cup of something soothing, if you didn’t do so as soon as you saw the name of the setter.
It is, to put it mildly, a surprise to see Araucaria’s name underneath a puzzle on Wednesday. This is a pseudonym known even to those Guardian readers who are not addicted to the paper’s puzzles.
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. He crossed over from the puzzle to the news pages last January when he announced that he had oesophageal cancer.
With characteristic chutzpah, this announcement took the form of Guardian cryptic crossword No 25,842, which came with the special message “Araucaria has 18 down of the 19”. 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.
He went on to set a further 25 puzzles and died on 26 November 2013. 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”.
That friend is fellow Guardian setter Philistine. 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”. He had completed a grid full of answers, but didn’t feel he had the concentration to complete it with the clues. So the two men did what setters do; they discussed the words (solvers look away now). 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). Philistine queried a couple of entries: SHIRRALEE and IN SE. 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.
(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. Araucaria described them as “martyrs” in the puzzle and explained that they “were people I thought Guardian readers should know”.)
I wondered whether Philistine attempted to write the clues in the style of his late friend. 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”.
The most touching clue is surely the one which also gives the theme: 25 across. BUTTERFLY is clued as “It’s what it does to another Rev (9)”. Our Rev is the Rev John Graham; the other is William Archibald Spooner, in whose fabled phrasing the insect in question might “flutter by”. Here a lover of wordplay expresses our love for another – in wordplay.
The emotional part of the process didn’t hit Philistine until he saw the proof copy of the completed puzzle. “It put into sharp relief the magnitude of the loss to the crossword community of his departure,” he says.