Christmas Conundrums 2014–2015

How to proceed after the last daily question

The final, thirteenth instruction is a great deal less taxing than usual. You just need to send a letter to BtP ... by e-mail.

You also need to read the whole of this bulletin with suitable attention.

The letter you need to find – the single letter – occurs in the name of a musician who’s made a notable contribution to Procol Harum’s performing history. You have twelve letters-of-the-day, and they need to be reordered for anagrammatical purposes. All you need to do is reorganise the letters-of-the-day until that name emerges.

Oh yes, we should mention: the name you’re looking for doesn't actually have twelve letters … sorry, we’re adrift by +1 or -1. It has eleven, or thirteen: so you will find you’re rearranging one letter too many, or one letter too few: either way, the rogue letter (the one you don't need to keep, or the one you do need to supply) is the one to send to BtP.

For example
If your letters are R E T R O R A I N B O W, you’ll notice that they rearrange to form the name ‘Robin Trower’ but with an ‘A’ left over, which will be the Holy Grail in this particular Quest.

Or if you’ve got I K I C K M R Z E B R A, pretty clearly that’s 'Mark Brzezicki', but with a ‘Z’ missing. So … send us the ‘Z’ and your name could go into the lucky BtP Homburg, for the draw.

Cue the pedant: ‘And you will doubtless also find that you need to move the whole set of letters-of-the-day forward by one position in the alphabet (your ‘F’ becomes ‘G’, your ‘Z’ becomes ‘A’ and so on). Or if this doesn’t work too well, try moving the whole set of letters-of-the-day back by one position in the alphabet (your ‘A’ becomes ‘Z’, your ‘F’ becomes ‘E’ and so on). In other words, you’ll be using a Caesar Cipher with value +1 or -1.’

(Thanks, pedant! IBM transforms to ‘HAL’, the name of the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey, by this sort of process: just use the table below, which doesn't require superhuman IQ).
 

For the avoidance of doubt, when we refer to 'the alphabet' in these puzzles, this is the sequence of letters we mean, in this order:
a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26

So ... if you've identified the rogue letter, send a quick e-mail to webmaster@procolharum.com . It should specify all the prizes in the order in which you favour them (don't leave any out).

Clue: in case of doubt, think back to where you heard – or thought you heard – one of the prescient Procols utter the correct answer among the SatNav promo text you listened to so carefully on 30 December.
 

Back to the main page about the 2014 'Beyond the Pale' Christmas puzzles

The final day's puzzle