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As it's now raining I am revisiting the puzzle. which I quite enjoyed. I'm all done apart from the fact that my playfair grid gives all the expected letters apart from what I assume to be the second pair of 13d. I have M, E and N in the same row, is that correct?

Hi Planks, yes that's correct. The second pair, encoded, gives SN

Aaah, now the penny drops. Thanks Meursault!

All done, except that I cannot parse 4 down, even though the answer seems obvious.

First two are the D's, next three is a word for a being, then two for the last word.

It would be appropriate to use one of the stamps issued last week to send your solution in !

Thanks s_pugh.

It all seemed pretty straightforward to me apart from working out the Playfair code. The information given in the preamble about 17 and 37 didn't seem to be sufficient to construct enough of the playfair grid to deduce the code phrase. Obviously discovering the theme gives one the key, but surely the point of Playfair encoding in a Listener is that the key can be worked out.

Perhaps I didn't persevere for long enough. Did anyone work it out independently of the the theme?

Dryden, I have at least a 50%+ failure rate with playfairs, so I only used the preamble hints to justify my guess. Fortunately, either missing the 3 letter acronym at the front, or using "THE" in error, still gave a couple of matches, so I knew I was on the right track. The final solution is very neat, and if the clues had been towards the upper end of Listener difficulty, I think this would have been a superb puzzle. I know my tunnel vision severely hampered the final switch, but the xword itself was not the most taxing solve this year. Still a vintage year for the listener, and not a bloody hare to be seen or found.

Thank you for spoiling my Bank Holiday weekend by mentioning that bloody hare! ;¬)