I was really flagging at the end of this one

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword Only a few hours late today, but bonus points for not having the grid scanned. Buckle in, it is going to be a bumpy ride.

MynoT time! I generally like MynoT puzzles, so let’s get started. Now I could have made this much easier if I had checked back through my list of MynoT puzzles earlier to see that he had one that was a Swiss flag. Anyhoo, what have we here? Jumblies… lots of them, but some sort of order, and extra/missing letters to show something.

Even though I knew they were jumbled, 1 across did leap out at me because I had done another puzzle somewhere where BREAMED came into play, so I knew it was BEAMED. Can’t put it anywhere. I ran through the acrosses and got quite a few of them, jotting the words beside the grid, though that didn’t help me much with BELLINI. Shouldn’t there be a law against having more than two jumbles per row or column? I’ll start a list of George’s completely unofficial laws of crossword conduct.

OK, back to the puzzle… after slotting in some down answers I was noticing a lot of double letters… are we in for bell-ringing? Particularly on the right hand side, there’s a lot of STURY… hmmm. But it is not quite alphabetical.

I also had FALO in the circles, so I was starting to suspect that the grid is going to end up a FLAG OF something…

Ohhh… is the alphabet divided up to make regions to colour in a flag? I had COLOU in the extra letters.  A check on flags, and the flag of GUINEA is the reverse of the flag of MALI (that would explain the title). The alphabet is split into the coloured regions, and GREEN is on the right which would explain VERT near the end of the down extra letters.

This was all completed with a pretty empty chunk on the left hand side, though knowing only the first third or so of the alphabet could complete 18 gave me FACE-ACHE, and the possible left over letters from acrosses gave me AHAB though I cannot see the wordplay.

I’ll put the grid in here when I get home.

I liked the flag and it was a fun grid with all the letters shuffled to sides, but I must say I never worked out all of the message, nor got a few of the wordplays, so although I can call it a Victory to George, I cannot get 100% completion.

Game over:  89% completion.

Feel free to tell me that the solution was waving in my face the whole time, and see you next week when tnap somehow separates a feline.