When Voodoo grew too-too so-so By David Astle Normal text size Advertisement Required reading when there’s disorder. That was a clue from mid-year, and the message felt on point. Fires, plague, The Very Excellent Mr Dundee – 2020 has been a lavish shemozzle, and this clue knew it. Cryptic crosswords, my own required reading, can occasionally deliver that eerie topicality. Because RIOT ACT, the answer, pales to the clue’s prescience. The surface narrative leaves a deeper impression than the answer itself. Same for a second pun I met in August: Stay-at-home worker? Baseball is the allusion, the gag alluding to UMPIRE, yet the clue’s scenario packed the stronger swat. Four short words had evoked a city of employees banished to their kitchen tables, the junk rooms, the virtual synods of videochat, as if the mystery setter had glimpsed our future.