I must confess that my heart sank when I saw the special instructions for this puzzle, but in the end it turned out to be only a little more difficult than usual. For those that didn’t see it, the difference was that in the across clues the definition led to the answer to be entered in the grid, and the cryptic part led to an anagram or reversal of the answer. The down clues were the other way round. This obviously made the puzzle more difficult. However, one obvious defect of this format of puzzle is that it doesn’t matter whether in fact you correctly obtain the anagrams of the answers, although I have shown them in the blog (in brackets) for completeness’s sake. In the circumstances, I haven’t said much about the wordplay in the across clues, where it leads only to an anagram of the answer.

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