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Finished the grid, the description and the instruction late last night. As meursault said earlier, the setter has cleverly divided up the grid to accommodate groups of letters and that enabled me to resolve the ambiguities in the unchecked cells.
The instruction initially made no sense to me until I realised in a Eureka moment that not all of the 29 letters go to make whole words.
I don't know if setters read comments on the forum but I'd like to congratulate MynoT on a wonderful achievement. Bravo!

I am hoping that someone will be able to help me to finish the last two unsolved clues. 10d (Athletic exercise area coordinates awareness) and 31a (Spin an overriding interest to European). I have all of the letter options for 10d but cannot find a word to fit them. Perhaps I have made a mistake.

catkin - overriding interest is fad + European (spin as in golf) - xy are the coordinates + sus (awareness) with T as an extra letter inserted

If anyone’s still out there , have been trying to solve this one, on and off since Monday. Finding it really difficult and would appreciate assistance on two clues please, 11D and 26D. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, goshawk,

11dn “Impatient exclamations” is the definition, though the answer is more a quiet noise you might make when annoyed with something. The wordplay leads to an extra O. There,s a four-letter word that means “aggressively solicit” ( as in “xxxx for trade”), from which you need to remove the O. This is followed by a three-letter word that is a dialect word meaning “piecework”, and then the standard abbreviation for “second”. If you’ve deduced the pattern that the letters take in the grid, you should realise that only certain letters may be used for this down clue.

For 26dn, there’s an extra S that must be removed. The definition is “aromatic medicine”. You need to find a three-letter word for a game (usually played with matches), and then a four-letter word meaning “ground” in the sense of “earth” (Americans usually say “dirt”) - the S must be removed from this word.

Hi wintonian
Thanks for the assistance. I did indeed have a pattern of possible letters for 11D but had misspelt the entry for 12D which had misdirected me in my arrangement of the crossing letters for 26A (if you get my meaning). Anyway I have both answers now so thanks again for your help.

Sorry for such late comments; Tuesday and Thursday evenings are the only time I get to concentrate. And this one took up all of tuesday.

Re. 4496, think I was lucky to realise that the artificial constraint was going to be important. 10d and 12d are such unusual words that it couldn’t just be coincidence. (There is a very interesting website of linguistic curiosities at jeff560.tripod.com for anyone of a similar bent.)

A magnificent rendition of this self-imposed restriction and, to my mind, all are “proper” words. However, I do feel I am missing the point as to why ——-A was chosen for the endgame.
Am I being dim?

Also spent an absurd amount of time trying to reconcile HOIST, PALE and FLY in the extra letters before realising it was a bit easier.
As they say: a little learning is a dangerous thing. Exceptional construction by MynoT and thanks for a title that gave us a good clue.

Hi, n00b,

Because not everybody does the Listener Crossword on Saturday (or even on Friday evening), it’s a challenge not to give too much away too soon, but as it’s now Friday, I think we can be a little less indirect.

The setter didn’t want anything too complicated, so a tricolour was pretty much forced. The only two instances where one is the mirror image of the other are XXXI and XXXXXA, and the reversed title works better with the former. Also, I wonder whether MynoT was thinking of the old Boy George/Culture Club song “Karma Chameleon”: “Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams, . . .”.