I don’t know my solving time so I’ll break with the tradition of the last few blogs. I often solve puzzles piecemeal, here and there, and interspersed with bits of Listener solving, daily puzzles, etc, and so I don’t record the times. All I remember of this one is that I solved about 60% of it on a 35 minute bus journey with no dictionary available. I finished off the puzzle at home with Chambers providing confirmation and Bradford’s providing a crutch. There are two answers that I’m not certain about, 13 and 32.

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It’s always difficult starting a puzzle with several different clues types. Here we had extra words in eight clues, misprints in six and no definition in two. That still leaves plenty of normal clues. I usually scan the clues hoping to find the normal ones first. Once there are a few letters in the grid the thematic clues are often easier to work out. This process threw up a couple of the extra words quite quickly. Having found dame, billionaire and slugger I realised that looking for similar descriptions of people might be fruitful. It was and the grid started to fall into place. What took me longer was the theme itself. I had tentatively penciled in EVERAGE for one of the unlued entries realising it fitted with dame. I then got 23a, DANE and saw that it was an anagram of EDNA. A couple of glances at the grid gave MARTIN as a possible answer fitting with DEAN (a crooner) another anagram of DANE.

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Solving time: Lost, but about 11 mins I think. One wrong (2dn).

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