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Across
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Opening puzzle…
Brisk Kira Menon · Saturday, 24 January 2026 · Ahhhh!
January 2026
Saturday,
24 January 2026
0:00
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Across
1.
Peninsula that taught the world flat-pack furniture and very honest crime novels (11)
9.
Sound you make when the aurora actually shows, or when the bill does (2)
10.
River comedian with a day job in shellfish (5)
11.
What the lights are, what the milk is, and what you tell a clingy chat (3)
13.
Where the sun clocks in; also a London end that still insists it is not Essex (4)
14.
AWS volume you bolt onto a box and then forget to snapshot (3)
16.
Browser's first language, to a job posting (2)
18.
Pink fellow who spends a lifetime climbing waterfalls and still gets smoked (6)
19.
Maps for people who say layers instead of maps, briefly (3)
21.
Sandwich that requires two hands; also the person who splits the bill without being asked (4)
22.
De Niro, or the office guy whose email still ends in hotmail (6)
24.
To inhabit a place, or a slight from 2014 (5)
25.
Bridge landlord of fairy tales; also the commenter who types with the lights off (5)
29.
Geologic forever; also how long the delivery says ten minutes (3)
30.
Dome you build from the only brick the landscape is offering (5)
33.
The size between I am fine with regular and why did I do this (5)
34.
What the firing and the rain are asked to do, on legal letterhead (5)
35.
The architecture PDF that arrives after the code, briefly (3)
36.
Ski-cabin cheese from Norway, photographed more than eaten (7)
Down
1.
The word that turns a sentence into a TED talk (2)
2.
What the photographer wants you to say, and what the pizza was always about (6)
3.
Noida and Gurugram's favourite three letters on a crane (3)
4.
The useful half of a yes-no; also what the toddler is practising (2)
5.
Past tense of lunch; also what the minibar did to your deposit (3)
6.
Bay Area buses, on a Clipper card (3)
7.
The three letters that turn city into cities and irony into a personality (3)
8.
Someone who can say mixed media with a straight face (6)
11.
Capital whose prize gets the headlines and whose winter gets the rest of the year (4)
12.
Geological plot twist: the sea walked inland and never left (5)
15.
Cambridge stretch toward the M11, as an envelope would write it (6, 2)
17.
What the sky sends when it is out of new ideas (4)
19.
What the hair and the DNA both have to set in (3)
20.
Where the Discord handle has to buy groceries, briefly (3)
21.
Buildings that charge extra to already be charging extra (6)
23.
Hansa port whose wooden wharf is on every postcard and whose weather is on every review (6)
26.
What all of them lead to, according to a proverb that has never sat in Bangalore traffic (4)
27.
Classical library with the green and red spines; also a name that sounds like a loaf (4)
28.
Person who needs four lines to say the train was late (4)
30.
Ward you do not want a postcard from (3)
31.
Language of Vientiane; also a people along the Mekong (3)
32.
Wild Bill's wartime shop, before the next acronym put on a necktie (3)