Excellent puzzle as always. Can’t comment on the difficulty as it was done while watching Bell and Pietersen do so well. But the fact that it was completed fairly quickly for me in these circumstances suggests it may have been quite easy.

Quite liked this puzzle, GAZUMP being last, despite being done myself back in the day and tocsin being a word I’ve only ever met in crossword land.

Need a week at work now to let my back recover!

As Kathryn’s Dad says, TOCSIN is quite popular in Crosswordland – I remembered blogging it quite recently and found that it was in an Orlando puzzle in May, where it was clued as a homophone of ‘toxin’. That reminded me that I first heard it in the madrigal, ‘Brightly dawns our wedding day’, from ‘The Mikado’: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mikado/Brightly_dawns_our_wedding_day
and couldn’t think why / how a toxin should sound! I looked it up and have always remembered it, as it’s a strange looking word, I think. [It's French.]

You’re not alone in thinking 1 down was money. Until I worked it out from the wordplay, I was convinced it was going to be something like lira. By then, I was so fixated on it being a type of money, I went to look up pita in the dictionary, thinking it must be some obscure currency.

Failed on
10a Focussed too much on dupe,rip off , default and didn’t make the connection hovel =dump
18a -never heard of tocsin and could only think of scouser, geordie -not a native of Scotland.
1d Thought bread here was going to be money, dosh, wonga , dough and never thought of types of bread.

So near yet so far…

I found this to be one of Phi’s easier offerings, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and I knew I was in for a good time when kicking off with 7a! Sorry to say that I can’t help with the question of whether or not Sir Ed climbed K2, though he apparently climbed 10 other peaks in the Himalayas after Everest.

Are pangrams like buses I wonder – will it now be some time before we encounter another?