categorised instead of categorises

Zebec instead of xebec

Thanks for explaining the word-play ( or should that be letter-play) for
‘for your eyes only.

I thought this was a really great puzzle, a big challenge to solve. For some reason I missed this at Christmas and found out about it only though seeing Gaufrid blog on the 15^2 home page a couple of days ago.

I was a bit disappointed with Araucaria’s Christmas offering this year, nice but over too quickly and just not enough of a challenge, so this is exactly what I needed.

I thought the grid was excellently designed, there were no easy starters and every entry required careful logical deduction to choose its correct location.

I think SESS in Ulysses is probably just a mistake, I didn’t spot it until you pointed it out, so I could image the editor/proof reader missing it too.

So, a big thank you to Gozo for rescuing my crossword Christmas!

Not my sort of puzzle at all, but stumbling on this blog I could not resist the challenge of trying to explain ULYSSES. The best I can think of is that “are cancelled” is meant to be a reversal indicator, possibly through the meaning “cancel” = “revoke”. After all, “half the meetings” is a sufficient indicator for SESS[ions].

This puzzle took a while to get going, but as you say once you do get going it resolved fairly straight-forwardly and led to a satisfying conclusion.
I liked the clue/solution ‘favell’. In the Guardian genius 102 they’d had currier as a solution (though not one to be entered in the grid of course) and in checking currier in Chambers for that puzzle had encountered ‘currying favell’, which modern parlance has garbled into currying favour. Funny how these connections seem to arise in crosswords.
I don’t use the expression ‘to curry favour’ that often, but from now on I’m going to make a Pedanticus point of mentioning the grand horse’s moniker.
(On a totally off-topic line, did anyone catch Peston on the Today Programme this morning using agrimony instead of (I presume) acrimony? Could be a heavy cold, but this one’s straight off to Maslanka)