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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this Everyman will divide opinion.

Maybe I was just off the setter's wavelength, but I thought it was quite difficult. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right frame of mind, but I found this something of a slog, lacking the punchiness and humour of recent weeks.

I'll be interested to hear what others think.

Brendan, I don't often do Everyman, but your post prompted me to tackle it this morning. I didn't find it difficult, but I agree about the lack of punchiness and humour. It seemed a very pedestrian offering to me, with some poor clues.

Hi Malone, I just couldn't get in to this, maybe if I look at it again with fresh eyes in a day or so I might think differently, but I doubt it.

Regards the difficulty, I was comparing it with the Everyman crosswords of the last few weeks which, as well as being easier, were a lot more fun - but maybe others will disagree.

Well, I'm afraid I do disagree. I've finished the puzzle, so it must be reasonably easy and I enjoyed it. 1ac for example built up nicely from the word play and in a number of clues the setter used some less obvious devices in a fairly transparent way, good for beginners to see how it can be done, I thought.

Hi Arib, thanks for your feedback, which pretty much chimes with what Malone said, as far as difficulty goes. I'll still be surprised if there aren't a few people who find this a bit trickier than usual, but time will tell :-)

I've stopped doing the Everyman for the last few months after a run of, what I thought, were very poor ones. Thought I'd try today's and found it OK, better than the last ones I tried. Not too taxing but a few nice clues (21d?). I also like the way the long perimeter solutions 'matched' each other. Not a great one but probably brought me back into the fold.

Thanks Simon, another vote for the easy end of the scale. Now I really know what it means to not to be on the setter's wavelength!

I occasionally tackle the Everyman . I found today's fairly straight forward. I liked the humour of 2d and 9d .
and 21d was clever.
I am unsure of the correct parsing of 23d. (I have a currency)

Add 5 letters to your currency for a monk...

Thanks Scorpiojo. As soon as I submitted my post, I realised my error.
Correct currency, but had omitted the 'can' in my attempted parsing !