Thanks malone. One of my pet hates is the inclusion of obscure Americanisms (there was one this week, in fact). I'm also no fan of "subtraction" clues (where a letter is removed from one word to form all or part of another one), or those which simply say "boy" or "girl" to indicate that the answer includes a name. These clues are almost impossible to solve from first principles - I have to guess the answer first, then work backwards to try to figure out how it's constructed.