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24d. I have the entries, but not seeing why 'continues without changing' = IS

mattrom, the 6th definition of “be” in the BRB is “to remain or continue without changing”.

Thanks, Quisling. I had looked up 'is' and 'continue', but not 'be'

Happy to help, mattrom

All finished but I don't understand the final grid entry for 1d and its definition (I know which it must be) if anyone could enlighten me please? Thanks

Being relatively new to Listener crosswords I thought I'd begun to
get the hang a bit and I've even completed three in the past three months. But I can't understand a flipping word of all this- it might as well have been written in Swahili. So I went to the pictures on Saturday instead.
If next week's as difficult I might just revert back to the ordinary Times crossword which can (usually) manage!
You're all very clever

Stephen - The preamble makes it sound more daunting than it probably was. If I didn't do the crossword every time that I found the preamble daunting, I'd probably never do it! The best thing is to read the preamble a couple of times and then just ignore it and dive in. As you start to solve clues you might come across something that doesn't quite make sense but maybe rings a bell from the preamble. Park that one for now (you can come back to it later) and carry on trying to solve. Things do start to become clearer as you wade through it and you find more that don't quite make sense and a 'pattern' starts to emerge. Then you can go back to the preamble and see if these things you're finding relate to what it says. It's worth persevering..... I thought this was quite a good one, well constructed. Good luck.

Stephen, I’m sure most of the posters on this forum have been through that stage. I certainly have. And even after about 50 years of grappling there are still times when I see a preamble which makes me feel like giving up immediately. But sometimes those puzzles turn out to be the best ones, with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction when everything falls into place. The best advice that I could offer would be to see if the preamble says anything about redundant words or extra letters and that sort of information which you will obviously need to bear in mind, and then to ignore the other complications until you have solved some clues. Often when the preamble is scary there are some very straightforward clues to compensate. Then pennies might begin to drop! Best of luck and don’t give up too soon. Not that there is any shame in giving up after a hard struggle leading to a brick wall!

Simond has said it all, really!

Stephen, I started on these about 6 months ago and plugged away with help from this forum. I worked up to it via (after years of Grauniad cryptics) the Azed in the Observer. The old/Scottish/dialect etc content and necessity for Chambers are similar. Azeds are freely downloaded from the Grauniad site and I did one a day for a while. It really helped and now some of the arcane words keep popping up (eg uts) regularly.

Still a way to go but enjoying getting there (I don't often have to wait for the official solution to be published any more - thanks to the resident wizards here!).