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Solved almost all the clues and then thought I’d hit a brick wall. It took a good while for the clue in the title to click. I expected that this would give me a toehold but it turned out to be the key to unrolling the whole thing. A tour de force of construction!

just because a few good Samaritans have been kind enough to offer advice to me, I feel duty bound to assure all readers of comments on this thread that I am still alive and the balance of my mind is in a relative state of equilibrium, despite some slight queasiness over the fantastic disparity between the solutions v eventual encoded counterparts. The disconnect in meaning between solutions and entries is strange, but not as strange as the idea that I would put myself through the utter misery of discovering and implementing the encoding. I have now completed the encoding and have a final encoded alphabet and a final grid..
I have very little qualitative analysis of this week's puzzle, other than to say AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!

Well I thought this was a fabulous puzzle, requiring clue-solution, conceptual insight and code-breaking. Just one clue remains for me. No one else has posted about it, so I'm sure I'm just being dim, but it someone could put me out of my misery I'd be grateful...27D...

Hi Neophyte,

The definition is "cat" as 'o' nine tails' and it's a 7 letter breed of dog minus its last 3 letters which mean "favourite".

Aargh - thank you!

I'm glad to read that Neophyte agrees with my Beano-style exclamation verdict on this puzzle, albeit partially. Thanks to all those who offered help to me in my hour(s) of need. I did eventually manage all of the original solutions, getting my last two (17 & 10) through back-solving.

One of those when I manged to crack the code reasonably quickly - with an educated guess on a couple of letters, crossword solver and the title - If any of those elements were wrong would have taken somewhat longer - so think not a 'pat on the back' but perhaps 'lucked in' - I still had to work out 2 of the answers by back-tracking...

Neophyte, if it is any consolation, that was my last one too. I only got it through reverse engineering.

Hi, please could someone offer a hint to 34A? It's the only clue I've not got. I assume I'm looking for the name of a red mineral, but struggling with the wordplay.

In my encoded grid I have es_i_it, but can't seem to backtrack from that to get an acceptable answer to the clue.

Do you mean 35a? Isn’t it 6 letters rather than 7?