Crossword roundup: do you leave or let well alone?

In my life, and maybe in yours, seasonal crosswords form piles.

The Jumbo from a relative’s Saturday Times, a bank-holiday special found on a train, printouts of the increasingly sighted 25 December online-only puzzles. “That’ll be a good ’un,” I mutter: and the pile grows.

Then, usually around 6 January: an epiphany. Just as you find yourself itching to tear the now-limp streamers from a cafe ceiling, the idea of a seasonal puzzle is suddenly horrendous. It’s over, people. Let’s get on with our lives.

This year, though, there was an exception: Phi’s New Year’s Day puzzle in the Independent. Once you’ve been away to solve it, you’ll agree that while it may kick off with now-obsolete topicality ...

... the idea of converting FIRST-FOOTING to an instruction which can be applied, to take the first three examples ...

... and to make them into FOOTLIGHT, FOOTSOLDIER and the luminance unit FOOTLAMBERT – it’s great fun long after the tall dark stranger has left his coal behind.

Latter patter

I have a couple of questions for you. Here’s Chifonie in a recent Guardian puzzle:

First, what’s your go-to paraphrase of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? In this, as in so many ways, I’m very much like TS Eliot (“Leave well alone / Or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone”). Others, and who can blame them, prefer LET WELL ALONE. Is there a regional or class divide here? Certainly LEAVE seems to be winning the evolutionary race:

LET really ruled for a while there; then during the second world war no one seemed to want to express such thoughts; now I’m sticking with the majority’s LEAVE.

Second, it was only on solving Chifonie’s clue that I twigged: “well” means “not broke”. The well is something you leave (or let) alone. I’d always read it as an adverb: that I knew and knew full well. Anyone else care to admit to same, or is this a source of shame I should have kept well private?

And since WELL is a word with so many senses (Oxford goes into the triple figures), it offers our next challenge. Reader, how would you clue WELL WELL WELL?

Clueing competition

Many thanks for your clues for REPARTEE. I was partly drawn to the word because it begins with a REP and my favourite corresponding outcome was JollySwagman’s “A salesman with skill nearly always generates a quick response”.

It also held anagram promise, fulfilled by GeoScanner’s “Dynamic exchange rate: peer-reviewed”, machiajelly’s curious “When father’s not around, prepare tea, stewed in retort” and ComedyPseudonym’s inspired “In revolutionary street rap, Erik B & Rakim displayed this”.

I also enjoyed the unexpected surfaces of harlobarlo’s “About to break up? Improve romance ultimately with witty wordplay” and Peshwari’s B-moviesque “Grim Reaper captures alien for banter”. That poor alien.

The runners-up are alberyalbery’s depressingly plausible “Awkward repeater of badinage” and schroduck’s “Riposte shows right skill in swordplay”; the winner could only be Middlebro’s “Agile épée art fencing in Connor’s ‘Latter Patter’”.

Kudos to Middlebro; please leave this fortnight’s entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.

Clue of the fortnight

When setters include other setters’ noms de guerre, it’s best if a) the solver needs no knowledge of crosswording culture to interpret the clue and b) the apparent meaning is utterly scurrilous. Both boxes ticked in a quiptic – the Guardian’s stepping-stone from quick to cryptic – from Pan:

And so COPULATE it is. I never even knew Enigmatist had a merchant vessel. Aye aye!