Letterbox
All 25 letters from A to Y must be placed in the grid so that no alphabetically consecutive letters appear in horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent squares. The letters in the words alongside the grid all appear in the rows or columns indicated. For example, the letters B, O, T and H all appear somewhere in the two left-hand columns.
With the help of the starter letters given, can you complete the grid?
Solutions at the end
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY
Collector’s Corner was a short series of five 10-minute radio shows broadcast on Sunday mornings in January and February this year. Each weekly show featured an interview with a different member of the public, each of whom, as a hobby, had spent years amassing a collection of items that you might not expect anyone to be interested in collecting. This made for fascinating listening.
A woman named Val Stone was the subject of the show that aired on 10 February; both she and the person who featured in the following week’s broadcast had been building up their respective collections since before 2006. The show featuring Pete Garnet, who does not collect book ends, went out at some point after the one focusing on the candlestick collector.
One of the shows broadcast in February was about someone who started collecting mouse mats in 2011. In her interview, Delia Clay revealed that she had started amassing her collection of items in 2008.
Chris Marl is an eccentric character who spoke with great enthusiasm about his large collection of clothes pegs; the show in which he appeared went out at a later date than the one featuring the person who had started building up an unusual collection in 2002.
The second show in the series aired on 27 January and focused on a person who had started collecting in 2005; this was not Sam Flint.
Can you work out the full details of each show, identifying the date on which it was broadcast, the collector it featured, the items that individual collects and the year in which each person had started accumulating his or her collection?