And it wasn’t the obvious queries mentioned above that slowed me down. SEESAW was an easy guess and having guessed, something in my mind said “it’s a bit obsolete, but I’m sure I’ve heard SEE=mark somewhere or other”. Just don’t ask me where. And the brain did one of it’s usual optical illusions with ANGINA. Because NAN is all Ns and As, and the letters which aren’t GIN were also thus, hence the brain was happy with that because it neglected to count them!

SEE is not the first word that springs to my mind for ‘mark’, but Chambers does include “to regard”, or, intransitively, “to take particular notice”. Commonly, this notice is not necessarily visual (“Mark my words”), but some dictionaries, the OED for example, suggest a more visual interpretation as archaic or poetic.

Robi @3

I might have better expressed the wordplay of 13D; as a phrase, LACE RATION is quite OK for “ration of lace”.

Thanks, PeterO; I guess you might want to include COLE as a potential wearer of knickers in 23. I agree that 10 must be a mistake. Not sure about 13; it seems to be back-to-front. Is the ‘of’ meant to denote second?

Glad to see that I am in good company for a change re ANGINA.

Not familiar with SEE as a synonym/meaning of MARK in 24a – can’t see it in Chamber’s at a first glance.

This all fell out nicely, with LACERATION my favourite clue, followed by ASTONISHED for its clever surface.

I can’t make ANGINA work either, so my hypothesis is another Grauniad foul-up.