Enigmatic Variations No.1035 – Last One To Join by Kruger

First of all, let’s have a rant. The editing was shoddy. Again. There was a missing bar in the grid (making 47ac appear to have 7 letters), ‘for’ was written as ‘fo’ in 7dn, while ‘or’ replaced ‘of’ in 30ac. Only the 7ac mistake was innocuous. I’m sure that the puzzles could be proof read by some enthusiastic amateur if there’s no one willing to do the job properly at the newspaper. At the very least, they could be fixed in the online version. But I digress…

Right. Now that I’ve filled the ‘no spoiler’ bit, wasn’t this an unusual theme?

It took me a while to twig how the clashes were formed, although I’ve seen the technique recently. The thematic words were each simple combinations of ‘extra’ letters from the across and down clues that overlapped in certain squares. Having deciphered GLAS + GOW, EDIN + BURGH came as no surprise, but I was no closer to working out the theme.

For that, the extra letters were essential. Luckily (or perhaps by design) these were quite clearly signposted, and I only once went astray (although I was looking for UNIVERSITY for a while). The letters spell out…

UK VET SCHOOLS

Namely, GLASGOW, EDINBURGH, LIVERPOOL, CAMBRIDGE, BRISTOL and LONDON. The LAST ONE TO JOIN is NOTTINGHAM, which is written diagonally TL-BR through the centre of the grid. In fact, you could have found that even if you hadn’t found the extra letters or figured out the theme.

There were some nice touches in the lights, like the appearance of a vehicle in 18ac. I particularly enjoyed the definition in 34ac. Unfortunately, 11dn appears to be incorrect – the subsidiary indication gives an extra T and only one O. The empty square was unfortunate, but hardly a deal breaker.

Notation
(xxx) = definition
[xxx] = (anagram/homophone/container/etc.) indicator
XXX* = anagram
< = reversal
XXX = unused letter(s)
HOURGLASS/BUY=extra thematic letter(s)

Please post a comment if the explanations are not clear.