Given that I’m posting relatively late in the day, I’ll keep the editorial comments to a minimum – in the interests of expediency. There’s not really anything unduly tricky in here anyway, although I suspect 19D could be a literary allusion?
Across
1 WRITER’S CRAMP – I think this is an attempt to pun on “hand”=handwriting but, unfortunately, this seems to read far more obviously as a simple straight definition.
11 PAR(S)LEY
12 TEARS – cryptic definition only.
13 LION,ISED – (side)*
15 OR,NA,MENTAL – (an)<
16 T[-h]E,RN
20 WATER NYMPH – (Why men trap)*
22 HILAR(IT)Y
26 NODS OFF – (Fond of, s[oprano])*, I’m not desperately enamoured with “anyway” as the anagrind.
27 ATISHOO – “a tissue”. This one must be approaching full ripeness as an old chestnut.
28 GOBBLED,I,GO,OK
Down
2 REDRAW,N
4 RHE,A – (her)*
5 CAPT,IVATE,D – (Evita)*
7 PEL(IS)SE – is in (sleep*
8 NEXT TO NOTHING – (tonight X ten on)*. The only genuinely amusing roadside church sign that I’ve ever seen went something along the lines of: “If all you think about is Number One then remember – Number 1 is next to nothing”. Still wasn’t enough for me to have a Damascene conversion though.
9 DYED IN THE WOOL – “died”
17 GNASH,ING – (hangs)*,(gin)*
19 BULLDOG – ???
21 MAN,CHOO[-choo]
23 R[-as]H,O,MB
1A I can’t see anything cryptic about it at all but I presume that I must be missing something.
19D this is a double def “an assistant to the proctor at Oxford and Cambridge universities”.
I suspect that maybe church sign writers have a cryptic bent because the only other church sign that sticks in my mind is “Ch__ch. What’s missing?”
Thanks. Oxbridge slang is one of my perennial stumbling blocks. In fact the 10% of me that’s an inverted snob is quite relieved not to have known this one.
Embarrassingly, it took me a good couple of minutes for the penny to drop about Ch__ch!