Anax@9 gives my intended explanation about “right/done”, but I too like Stella’s@6. Interesting to hear that the NE corner caused Anax a delay, because this underwent a reconstruction following Eimi’s observation that MISCASTED, replaced with MUDLARKED, although in Tea’s Edited English dictionary (based on Princeton’s WordNet project), is not confirmed in any of the “standard” dictionaries.

Many thanks to all for the positive comments and especially to Simon for a super blog.

My reading of ‘right’/'done’ was along the lines of ‘the done/right thing’ but I like Stella’s interpretation too.

Yes, having re-read the clue I agree with you entirely – just goes to show that one shouldn’t snatch unthinkingly at the first apparent word to do service as an anagrind!

I took the same approach as you did, Simon, trying to get as many of the “standard” solutions in before beginning on the “specials”, but I have to admit that even once I’d got the 3 in the south eastern corner (AD-MEN was a fairly straight forward lead in) I still struggled for longer than I should have done (at least, that’s how it seemed once the penny dropped). I think my error was in thinking at that stage that all of the “specials” were going to be anagrams of the same 5 letters so that initially I discarded words like DREAM and only came back to them later.

Like everyone else it seems I initially fell into the “….tic trap” before flirting briefly with “causalgia” until it dawned that the “u”was misplaced and I tried NEURALGIA.

Lots of excellent clues I agree, though I am also puzzled by “done”=”right” at 1 ac. As for ABALONE, hats off to you Allan_C, your parsing is surely spot on. (A propos of which, you are also probably correct for the parsing of Phi’s UNSTEADY yesterday – unfortunately, though, as an exclusively online solver I can’t now go back to check the wording of the clue!)