I took this as ARM, as in a branch of the fighting forces (Chambers), rather than A + RM. I wonder which was intended.

M’colleague Anax disagrees I know, and ‘speck to him for it, but I am against anagrams for hard words in daily puzzles because, even though solvers may be in possession of all the required letters, and even all the crossing letters, unless the word is actually within their vocab they will have absolutely no idea where these go in sequence, and will have to guess (unacceptable) or leave the light unfilled. This to me seems most unprofessional, and I am deeply, deeply shocked.

If Deano could email me – after malfunction in ‘puter I have lost your details, mate.

As for ITE shall I go there? How many Romans?

I think this is from Oliver and I learned a new word – “ditty”

8dn: ‘completely’ is justified, I think, because we have to leave only the first and last letters. ‘Heartless’ in clues often means take out only the middle letter.

24ac: ‘light’ [third meaning in Chambers]. I’ve seen this several times before in crosswords but it’s more usually ‘alight’, ‘in common parlance’ [which is how that word is usually used, I think, but not too often, I grant you].

15dn: I have in my garden a beautiful chunk of serpentine which, thirty-odd years ago, we [possibly illegally] hauled all the way up the steps from Kynance Cove in Cornwall. I’d call it a stone!

22dn: ‘ditty’ isn’t used that often but it’s a rather charming word for a simple poem, sometimes used self-effacingly, of one’s own work.

23dn: again, I think MIT is fairly usual in crosswords.

I’m really sorry you found this ‘too serious’ and were like Queen Victoria in Benington’s comment on 16dn – I thought it was great fun!

I ended #17 with ‘I still have a lot to learn’.
So far I thought I could do well at Guardian crosswords, but this one was, at least for me, two or three steps too far.
It made me aware of the fact that there is much more to the English language than I have experienced thusfar.

I don’t blame the setter for that at all (nothing really unfair about the crossword).
Although I still think that he sometimes made rather unusual choices that made the crossword hard to solve for the average.
For instance, ‘stars’ for ‘ram’, ‘land’ for ‘light’, or in 10ac, ‘for’ into ‘dance’ for ‘pp’ into ‘hay’, all of which is not the first thing one thinks of. Of course, when G would have been clear to us, the situation would have been very different.
But that’s part of the game, isn’t it?

BTW, I do understand the setter’s two-letter GS dilemma and his choice – the breakdown is rather nice, as I already said in #17.

This crossword was just too British for me.
Can happen.
Over and out (as said in #28).

20a: The constellation of Aries is called the Ram so the use of singular is fine;

22a: OVERARM is a type of delivery (as is underarm) so ABOVE is the definition of OVER.

For the rest, they seem to bee complaints about words you have never heard of – a great difficulty in solving a crossword as I should know but not the fault of the setter! Different people have different knowledge of words, that’s all.

p.s. 16d : There is a clue in “Nothing to amuse us” to Gladstone as the “We are not amused” remark by Queen Victoria was allegedly made to Gladstone.