Crossword 808 solution

Composing cryptic clues is most often a journey of discovery. I didn’t know that COAL MINER (10 across) is an anagram of NO MIRACLE until I began to play around with it but obviously it has been discovered before and many a crossword has undoubtedly featured something very close to my clue. The “possible” anagram indicator seems almost obligatory after “no miracle”; the clue thus almost wrote itself. Thus I found it rather than created it. It simply can’t be original.

An almost impossible quest for true originality stymied my nascent creative ambitions quite early on. Proud of my prowess with pencil and pen, I was entering a children’s drawing competition and asked my mother to explain one of the rules: the picture had to be original. She explained the meaning of original and I realised that, up until then, all my drawings had been copies, or at least attempts at imitations of comic art. My work was not original. It was a terrible discovery.

I continued to draw and paint my imitations and copies, but only as practice or for fun. Originality and true creativity would have to wait. It never came. Many years later I discovered the artistic concepts of “influence” and “homage”. If those had been given to me early on, perhaps a brilliant career in the graphic arts would have followed. Ah well …

At least nobody expects a great stream of total originality in crosswords (though I must say some setters such as Araucaria nonetheless come close to achieving it), at least not in anagrams. Thus I am rarely stymied these days by the originality bugbear. Obviously I don’t copy but if a clue looks slightly familiar I don’t agonise. I probably have seen it before. As long as it works and I haven’t copied it, or used it previously myself within the last dozen or so years, it has to do.