In my own case, as I said, my original mistake was not a typo but an unwarranted assumption.

I know what you mean about ‘spraying the screen’ and it gets worse as I get older! And re whole words – I once again produced a ‘their’ instead of ‘there’ the other day despite having done it so often before.

I promise to try harder in future!

I worked in IT for most of my career, and have always used the computer to write, in fact I have almost forgotton how to write by hand. The typical IT programmers typing style is to spray the screen with letters and then go back and correct the typos, usually having the computer point out the syntax errors in the resulting program automatically (as opposed to ‘classically’ trained typists where going back over work was just not possible without tippex).

Some typo’s are not always so straightforward. An experienced keyboard user will type whole words rather than individual letters, so sometimes typos are slips of the brain rather than slips of the finger, where an entire word gets substituted for the original.

My own experience of the little mistake in his rendition of 18, 24, 23, 7 relates to several others’ comments on the use of ‘well known’ quotations which one thinks one knows and then may or may not parse correctly. I was comvinced I knew the line as ‘the p. who had no toes’ and then on trying to parse it found myself puzzled by the absence of a ‘d’ in the fodder. My first arrogant reaction was to wonder if the clue might be wrong! I then drew it to my son’s attention, and he came up with the correct quotation. Of course Peedee’s error may well be just a ‘typo’ (as in 12) – it would be nice to know – but in my own case at least it involved rather more.

I suppose it is up to us to try to make sure we have actually got this kind of answer right, but it appears that solvers don’t always do this – in part possibly as a reaction to the type of clue itself. Perhaps it is possible for setters to somehow tempt solvers into more careful solving of such clues – I don’t know. In itself, the clue was of course perfectly correct and the surface was nicely relevant.

Like most other correspondents, I got LEAR quite rapidly, but had to work around the linked clues for some time until I had enough crossing letters to work out what was going on. As with Robi and Coffee, it was spotting ‘luminous’ that gave the game away. Being familiar with Edward L’s main works, I was then able to fill in all the long answers immediately, without recourse to the wordplay. As I usually do in these circumstances, I then looked back at the clues to see how the charades worked – but as these didn’t spring out at me, I abandoned the study, finished off the puzzle, and went off to do something useful. This was the only downside to an otherwise enjoyable exercise.

But I enjoy the great variety of Guardian crosswords and I like to have puzzles of this type now and again.

Some good clues elswhere – I particularly enjoyed 17a, 20a, 25a, 2d and 14d.

Etymological point of interest: COWSLIP is from the Old English ‘cuslyppe’ or ‘cusloppe’, ie cow dung, presumably because the plant (Primula veris) was associated with cow pastures. Hence an inadvertent bit of Paul ribaldry.