I keep this notebook to take cryptic clues apart slowly, one device at a time, so that the next grid on the morning train makes a little more sense than the last one did.

Penfold Crosswords is a notebook I started in the spring of 2021, after a winter in which I finally got past the stage of reading the answers the next morning and feeling cheated. I live in Islington, I solve mostly on paper, and most of that paper is folded into quarters on a train between Highbury and the City. The notes here are what I wish somebody had handed me earlier: how the clue types actually work, which indicator words keep turning up, and where I still go wrong.

There is no setting here and no puzzles of my own worth printing. I quote clues I have written myself to illustrate a device, never clues from a published grid, because the setters deserve their puzzles left alone and because a made-up example can be built to show one trick cleanly. When I mention a paper I say a broadsheet or a weekday cryptic and leave it there, since the conventions are shared across most of them anyway.

Once a week, usually on a Thursday, I sit at a corner table in a pub off Upper Street with one other solver and a single printed grid between us. Several of the pieces here started as arguments at that table. Neither of us is quick. We finish most weeks but not all, and the grids we abandon have taught me more than the ones we filled in before the second drink.