I hope that our setter doesn’t take that the wrong way!

Both Collins and Chambers list six – bacula; facula; lacuna; macula; macule & vacuum.

Didn’t finish as I was snookered by the VACUUM clue. I had LACUNA, which I parsed as 1) a lacuna is a space, or gap, in text; and 2) a lacuna takes up space because in text it occupies at least an en, or an em, or possibly a larger space. So I thought it answered the question “does it take up space?” in the affirmative! Then I came here for enlightenment, and saw the much more satisfactory answer. I was still pleased with the coincidence that I had (mis)found another 6-letter word which goes _ACU__. Can’t be many of them in English.

Many thanks to Loroso and Gaufrid.

Anax,

With your fix, 20D is interesting and great I have to accept having heard about 16A as well. 4A makes much more meaning now, but during solving it’s way too difficult to unravel. I looked at the cryptic reading – It reads “BUN (that) A DANTE has kept short”, which means we get ABUDANTE first and then shorten it to get the answer.

24D, as you say, is an assumption in any case. In the case of ‘offers’, I ignore the space between the words. In the other case, you assume an extra ‘and’ between that isn’t there.

MA TIN offers answer or MA (-and) TIN offer answer – Ha… Too much technical thingy for something I solved right at the start

Just to answer Joe’s point about the theme; I took a slightly oblique approach to deciding whether or not to announce it. This is one of the easier FT grids to fill, so I hoped some solvers might wonder why it was necessary to have the rather obscure answer at 12a – after all, it isn’t there because I happened to find a really good clue for it (the clue’s rather plain, actually). Sometimes that nagging suspicion leads you to look at the answers to see if any have something in common.

Re 4a, I’m with Gaufrid on the Marmite effect of words doing double duty and I was aware of it – I hoped that adding the QM (unnecessary in terms of the letter deletion indicator) might segue into the definition.

20a is a tad sneaky in that you’re supposed to mentally insert a colon after “This”.

16a. Indeed. You’re often likely to hear general bathroom goodies referred to as smellies when they’re given as e.g. Christmas gifts.

And finally 24d. Yes, it’s one of those things which ventures into the land of technicality and I remember a vociferous clue-writing forum argument on a similar subject. If you replace ‘old woman’ with A and ‘can’ with B, then call the answer C you have the equation A plus B equals C – a plural form. Here ‘offer’ is the ‘leading to the answer’ word, so A and B offer C. Mathematically I see ‘offers’ would be just as good, but this is language and language rules aren’t quite the same. You wouldn’t say ‘Tom and Jane goes to London’.