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bobbycollins

28th December 2019, 18:50
Foinaven - aster gains 3 letters
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foinaven

28th December 2019, 19:32
Sorry, being ambiguous. Yes, aster gains three, but the word which is pruned to give the solution loses one.
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foinaven

28th December 2019, 19:37
Well, I am clearly making some mistakes here. In 13a, 37a and 22d my clue gains only one letter, and in 32d it gains four. I will clearly have to look for alternative additions, although I have to say that the ones I had made were perfectly adequate in leading to the required answers. If they are all 2s or 3s that might make it possible to obtains sets of ten.
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granama1

28th December 2019, 19:46
Filled the grid, got the creature (not sure what the relevance is). Have a couple of ?? Eg parsing/wordplay of 28d. First part looks clear and provides an answer but 'Go back. Take off'? I assume one of these has been trimmed.
However, main question is the puzzle title 'Of Course'. Anyone got any ideas?
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kilgore trout

28th December 2019, 19:55
Every altered word has a letter count either "two under" or "three under" what you'd expect (par for the course, so to speak)
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foinaven

28th December 2019, 20:00
Have sorted out 12a (NB not 13a as I claimed, since I cannot read numbers) ,37a and 22d but cannot see any sensible alternative to a four letter depletion in 33d (NB not 32d as in my previous post). However, if it is three letters than I have four sets of ten which is what the doctor ordered. Presumably the highlighting instruction will allow 10000 different options? Or is there some peculiar significance to the word 'strand'? I still think that it is very odd to achieve the gridfill, without knowing precisely what is going on, and understand all the clues, but still to be stuck on how to finish!
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kilgore trout

28th December 2019, 20:13
There is a two letter addition at 33a which gives a word that has the required definition.

I had to add 3 letters to 10d (making a possessive) to get the 4 sets of 10 needed.
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kilgore trout

28th December 2019, 20:14
By which I mean 33d, of course!
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planks

28th December 2019, 20:15
Thanks to kilgore trout the penny has dropped and I have the highlighting done. What the 'creature' has to do with anything remains a mystery, a red herring perhaps? some of the parsing is a bit hazy too, 7d for instance, but i'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
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foinaven

28th December 2019, 20:24
Well, I had thought of that and thought it meant something slightly different in the same location, but I now see the Chambers allows it as an alternative. So, somewhere, I have to increase 2 letters to 3. Then I am still not sure about the degree of freedom permissible in the highlighting. Not very impressed, I am afraid, and I am not sure that this was very hard to set, unless I am missing some subtlety.
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