David, I remember in a previous video you said that solving this had nearly made you ill. I think I would have been climbing the walls too ! As for the "hawk tuah", I almost spat out my mouthful of tea, which I suppose is a fitting reaction, in a way.
Thanks for sharing. I struggled with this one for at least four days. I don't remember going down the "leviathan" rabbit hole but I definitely saw "bible". I think I, too, stumbled across the answer by googling some plausible letter combinations. They *used* to say that you should be able to solve the Listener with nothing more than Chambers and a couple of other reference books. I wouldn't have stood a chance without a pattern matcher to find those fish and Google to steer me towards Lear. Incredibly tough but equally satisfying to finally get over the line.
Not sure what's more surprising, just quite how insane that puzzle was, or the hawk tuah gag from the most unlikely of sources 🤣. That really was fantastic. Well done chap.
Good grief. As a Telegraph daily cryptic solver this is completely mind boggling. Thank you so much David for this wonderfully crafted and prepared explanation of the solve.
Fantastic vid and congrats on the milestone! You made 4 days of effort seen so easy, I listen get confused just by the preamble to the Listener! More of this please, one day maybe I to will be able to hawk tush on that thing! (Was not expecting that, well played sir, well played).
That was amazing. The instructions were so difficult I couldn't even make sense of them. Thank you for breaking down the whole puzzle and instructions. I like this format where you showed in the dictionary how you got the answers and the breakdown of point of origin.
Seriously, how many people in this world could even begin this, let alone finish it? I knew about 3 words in the solved puzzle. Cant imagine there are many who attempt it.
I managed 50 correct out of 51 entries a few years ago and there were some by Sabre in there (and Shackleton - also very hard, and my favourite). I think I did 3 years of Listeners but then gave up, partly out of protest/sulk at a puzzle I considered unfair and partly because it was leaving too little time in my life for other interests.
@@peterfranklinrouth895 Most impressive ! Didn't Simon Anthony have a huge run of well over 300 puzzles some years ago? I think he stopped because, like you, it was taking up too much of his time. May be misremembering this totally, but I believe in an interview he said that at one stage he was taking the puzzle along with him to football matches to maximise his solving time !
@@Ray_Ridley I don’t know names but the top solver when I stopped was on something like 450 correct and counting (so 9 years!). And there are four a year which are entirely numerical/mathematical. I would do them in the weekend afternoons, but if I were away I might end up having to do two in time for the postal deadline, which was a bit too reminiscent of university essay crises!
I specifically paused at 23:45 and made a graph of which letters follow which in order. I also came up with aunt, bible and job, and was SURE that it's the leviathan. Who knew that a bible reference just wasn't far-fetched enough 😆
Wow, what a puzzle, and what an amazing solve. You completely lost me with the decoding of the description of the runcible cat, however I think you may have given a big clue about the nature your job that you're not allowed to talk about. I always suspected that you had an IQ in the 200 range, and this video seems to confirm that. What is the snitch rating of this puzzle?
