I was a wea/ek person who entered ‘inquirer’ instead of ‘enquirer’. Doh! I blame the pronunciation of Rene as Reni.

I also had problems when I altered alerted to related instead of altered.

All in all, all credit to Brummie – not weak at all.

I know that punctuation normally means nothing, but (not having thought of the clever-clever reasoning given by Hugh Stephenson) I couldn’t see any other way of deciding between the two options, so I went for WEAK.

Looking at the scribble on the print I have, I recall that what I particularly liked about this puzzle was the fiddling around with the letters of the unclued answers.
I found the crossing answers to 15A and 19D were some of the slightly easier answers. But spotting, and being sure about, the words to pick out of the Down clues and finding the correct thing to do with them was quite hard.
So I had 15A -L-S-I- and 19D -E-P(?)-I- at the side of the grid foir some time, and struggled trying to make CLASSIC fit – and when I abandoned that started on PLASTIC, before I got to ELASTIC. AS for 19D – I’m sure that was the last thing I wrote in.

I find I am a WEAK solver. I can see the argument for WEEK as the “correct” answer, so I’m glad they allowed WEAK as a valid answer, even though I know I didn’t give it a second thought when I put it in – I thought it was the “obvious” answer and didn’t see the ambiguity.

I am impressed. I think this is the third Genius I have managed to finish, which made me very chuffed [and I had WEEK!] but if I had been unexpectedly asked to blog it, one month on, I’d have been really floundering. So much water [and so many puzzles] under so many bridges in the meantime!

I do remember really enjoying it, though, but it took time – therefore congratulations once again to Ian N14 for being first up. But still, bless him, the £100 eludes him!

My approach was the same as yours – look for the words that don’t appear to belong – but I think your preamble has the task the wrong way round.

I remember enjoying this hugely but being just mildly surprised that the unclued words didn’t have any relevance to each other nor to the puzzle – but that would be asking too much, I think.

Many thanks for the blog. Not for the first time, I think a month between solving and solution / blog is slightly too long for someone my age! – and it’s a bit much when you can’t rely on the annotated solution.

Re24ac: I had no problem with bat = speed: I thought I’d heard ‘go off at a great bat’ and Chambers gives ‘speed, rate’.