Christmas Conundrums 2016 : Day 12, Thirteenth Question

Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

Christmas Quizzes 2016–2017

Thirteenth Question, and how to become the fortunate winner !

Congratulations on solving the twelve WordSearch puzzles, which we hope you enjoyed :-)

You may well have spotted one or two curiosities along the way which, we trust, gave rise to some speculation! But now, please look back over your results with the following simple thought in mind.

Some letters aren’t used at all in the song-words we asked you to look for. Look particularly now for the unused letters in the very corners of the puzzles (there’s always at least one, and never more than four).

Or to put it differently ... the puzzle squares are all 9 x 9; each square contains therefore 81 'positions'. Many of these 'positions' contain letters that aren't involved in the song-words you sought out. From each square you're going to collect 1, 2, 3 or 4 of these uninvolved letters, just the ones that occur in the 'positions' in the very corners of each square.

Example:

Do they spell a little message? They do! HI to you too.

So please look back at 25 December's WordSearch puzzle and collect any uninvolved letters from its corners (you did keep a note of your results!)

Then perform a similar procedure for the remaining eleven puzzles, in date order.

Do these uninvolved corner-letters, strung together in order, spell a little message of any kind? If they do, you are probably getting everything correct.

Incidentally before we go on, sorry we forgot to thank our ever-vigilant checker, Jane Clare.

Jane comes from Perth and very kindly oversaw various final puzzle checks.

Ah yes. Back to that little string of uninvolved corner-letters from the twelve Procol WordSearches.

They add up to (you guessed already, of course) an anagram of a Procol Harum song-title. That’s to say, by rearranging the letters, you’ll be able to make the name of a track on one of the regular Procol albums … not a rarity, not a download-only album, nothing obscure.

So we’d like you to listen to that track again. The title is sung several times.

To win your chance of a prize, please send us the five words sung by Gary Brooker (lead vocal) after the last iteration of the title.

Use this special link – webmaster@procolharum.com – to send the five-word answer to 'Beyond the Pale'.
Don't forget to include your choice-order for the Fab Prizes: your message will be something like :"The five-word answer is [x x x x x] and my prize preferences are GAEBFCDH".

If you're in the quickest three correct entrants (on a beat-the-clock basis, following the midnight GMT posting of the final question) you stand a very good chance of getting your prime choice of the prizes.

After that, all correct entries received in the next 48 hours will be placed in an Homburg hat, and the remaining winners will be drawn from that, possibly by a suitably Glamorous Assistant (subject to availability).

Over the past years we've had one or two non-winners who complained, 'You guys tricked me …' so here's fair warning … just read the final instruction – indeed, all the wording of all the questions, and all the instructions – carefully.

In the unlikely event of there being fewer winners than prizes this year, early claimants will get more than their fair share! Prizes will of course be awarded at the absolute discretion of Roland and Jens, who run 'Beyond the Pale', and whose decision will be final; their families are not eligible to enter.

	You've seen this before, here COMPANION [1,1,E] CORPSES [8,9,W] DARKNESS [9,4,W] DIRTY [5,5,E] GRAVEYARD [1,3,E] NEWSPAPER [9,2,W] PAVEMENTS [4,1,N] SLITHERED [9,6,W] STRANGER [8,7,W] TOMBSTONE [9,8,W]
(above) The crosses represent letters that are not involved in the find-the-song-words challenge Look in the full puzzle (below) for the letters that correspond to the crosses in the corner positions ... the uninvolved letters (below) that are in the same corner-positions as the crosses (see above).