A good plain crossword from Aardvark.   No themes, ninas or other funny business, just straightforward crossword fun.  My favourite clue was 14 down, least favourite was 17 down.

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Well, this was a surprise for a Wednesday – especially as I was convinced we were due for a Gordius – but I’m certainly not complaining! It was quite a tough work-out but there were some very satisfying moments when various pennies dropped. There might be some eyebrows raised at ‘parochial’ sayings / references but there were, as always, some really excellent clues. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. Many thanks, Enigmatist, for a really satisfying puzzle.

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With Dac as the mastermind behind today’s puzzle, highly sound clues with
smooth-as-silk surface readings were bound to be the order of the day,
and Dac did not disappoint. Overall, I very much enjoyed this puzzle
and made steady progress throughout, grinding to a halt only in the SW corner,
where 19 and 21 were both new words for me. My own feeling is that it was rather
beastly of Dac to slot two less familiar words into the same corner of the puzzle!

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Has Charybdis been on holiday to Cornwall recently? If so he set a corking crossword while there! The rubric was pretty complex and, having read through it and not understood much, I cracked on with the normal clues. These were reasonably straightforward, though, as usual, I had Spenserian problems and found some wordplay difficult.

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