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You are right, murky - I was misreading a for A.

I thought this was very clever and an excellent puzzle, with a slight quibble on the amended second letter of 14a which means it isn’t a real word any more. Or to put it another way, 14 is only a real word if you read the symbol as it’s closest English equivalent and ignore the actual meaning. 15 is only a real word if you take the underlying meaning and ignore the closest English equivalent. So they cant both work as real words consistently, unless I am missing something.

However this is more than made up for by the way the down answers fit together, which is tremendous. Very nearly top marks from me.

I, too, was puzzled by the intersection of 8 Down and 14 Across, so I asked a knowledgeable friend and learned that the troublesome feature of the shared letter is often dropped in upper case. Though in any case I hope any reasonable presentation will be accepted.

The across words intersecting 8 Down don't all change in the same way when the instruction is applied. In some, the sound is permitted to change so that the spelling can remain the same (so to speak), while in others, the spelling is permitted to change so that the sound can remain the same. There's no ambiguity about the intended answer, but the lack of consistency seems like maybe a small flaw in execution.

Nevertheless, I was tickled at how neatly everything came out. Lovely piece of construction!

If anybody is still out there could they help me with the parsing of 21 across? The Internet is offering good deals on flights to Medina but all I can find in terms of half-useful word possibilities is Hejira and variable spellings of the same. So not much help there. Otherwise I thought the clueing particularly fine. So what have I missed?

Look up last two letters of your answer in Chambers

Thank you gem. Now I can sleep easy 8-)