Thanks Uncle Yap for explaining what I did get, and Boatman for a very strange trip.

I did enjoy the theme and the many twisted ways it was used, which sort of justified (?) some of the loose cluing elsewhere…

Message to our dear editor, Hugh: “this should have been a Thursday or Friday, if not a Prize, puzzle”.

By the way, I spent two or three days staring at 3 solved clues, getting nowhere.

One thing that I can’t take credit for: I was stunned to hear that Tuesday was Dickie Bird’s birthday – not the first interesting co-incidence that’s happened since I started compiling. Clueing, it seems, moves in mysterious ways.

Thanks also to everyone who could not finish it. It is always good to know you are not alone.

Frankly I’ve been feeling like I’ve had some kind of brain injury in the last few weeks. The puzzles seem to have been getting harder and I’m solving fewer and giving up up on some, like today’s, hardly half way through. Some of the weekday puzzles are harder than the prize crossword or the Genius, I have found.

Found this a clever and ultimately enjoyable puzzle despite sailing through some pretty choppy waters. Especially liked isthmus, ostrich and bulletin.

Learning last time of your interest in old buildings, Boatman, I thought we may have had a ‘transom’ or perhaps a ‘transept’ … but ‘ness’ made a return as promised so thanks for that and for a great puzzle.

Boatman’s offering was the last thing I went to to. I expected a challenge – I DIDN’T expect to meet my Waterloo ! I knew it wasn’t brain failure, as I’d already done The Times puzzle in about 8 minutes.

I must have spent a good two and a half hours over this beast (in sessions of between 5 and 20 minutes per visit) and finished less than half the puzzle. It didn’t help that I failed to crack 6/22, and that I didn’t translate “Ostrich” despite seeing the anagrind (no wonder I couldn’t justify “chorist” !)

8 was totally unknown to me, I saw “chapel” but didn’t enter it because I couldn’t see the wordplay, failed lamentably to identify what should have been a simple one in “ludo”, and couldn’t prefix “sample” (“trial” was rather apposite !)

I didn’t get (and wouldn’t have got) “thwart” either.

I was prepared to be very critical of this puzzle, but thanks to the excellent blog I’ll hold my hands up and say “Well done Boatman – you totally outsmarted me this time !”

Maybe it was the quasi-religious theme, maybe it was the liberties taken in the clue-ing, or maybe it was just a case of a setter more focussed on confounding solvers rather than bewitching or seducing them…..whatever it was, this puzzle now enjoys pride of place on my dart-board.

So, if you wake up in the night Boatman, with pangs of pain from well targeted arrows, `tis only I, returning the compliment.

I thought Boatman traded off some tighness in the clueing to get good surfaces in this puzzle. The surfaces were very good, I was immediately hooked by some of the clues, especially the leading clue 7 across which I just had to try and solve immediately. I can forgive bending of the rules when it results in an interesting and intriguing puzzle. I think that a talented setter taking liberties for effect is not the same thing as a weakly constructed puzzle from a poor setter.