You were right about 14 down, and not where you think

Dear Mrs Gorostiza,

Sunday's crossword has brought me eleven letters from readers. Ten explain to me that ALMÓNDIGA is not how you say it. Yours, from a retired schoolteacher who signs with both her surnames, is the only one that came with a photocopy of the finished grid, and the only one that has cost me a whole Monday.

Let me start where you are not attacking me, because that is what the other ten expect.

14 down was ALMÓNDIGA, nine letters, and my clue read: "Meatball said badly and recorded properly." The word exists. It is not said correctly, which is why the clue says so; but the dictionary carries it, with two warnings: in front, the mark for obsolete; behind, the note that it is used as a vulgarism. Just as it carries several hundred others nobody argues about because nobody puts them in a grid. Anyone who reaches that square having read "said badly" is not taking an error home.

And now your part, which is something else and worse for me.

You put ALBÓNDIGA, with a b, and you send me the grid closed. I thought that was impossible, and it has taken me a morning to understand that it is not.

The two spellings differ in a single square: the third. My m against your b. That is where 21 across crosses, three letters, and that square is its first letter. With my m, 21 across is MUS, the card game. With your b, it is BUS.

My clue for that square read: "In the bar, at seven."

I wrote that. I wrote it deliberately and I even thought it rather elegant. In my head it was the seven o'clock game of mus, which is what gets played in the bar on my street as far back as I can remember. In your grid it is the seven o'clock bus, which stops outside a bar in I could not say how many towns in this country. Both things are in the bar and both are at seven. I did not write a clue: I wrote an atmosphere, and an atmosphere does not close a square.

So on Sunday there were two crosswords, mine and yours, and both of them closed. The one who fails there is me.

On Thursday it will be published that both solutions are valid, with the dictionary's label copied exactly as it stands, and my clue for 21 across replaced by one that admits a single answer. That part I can mend myself and there is no merit in it.

The other thing I am asking you for: let me print your letter beside mine, with your name and both your surnames. I have sent this paper more than six hundred grids and nobody had ever proved to me, with a photocopy on the table, that one of them had two ways out. If you say no, I will understand and it will not be printed.

But tell me soon, Mrs Gorostiza, because the page closes on Thursday and this time I would like to be wrong with time to spare.

Ildefonso Berruguete