No dissent from me on how hard this is! Nearly gave up several times - despite Drxx comment to 'read from bottom up', I could not make sense of anything as I didn't have enough answers to reveal highlighted letters in the first and last columns. A few obscure words and/or variant spellings, several answers were just pencilled in as there was so little 'meat' in the definitions that I wonder how anyone could parse and be sure which letters were to be highlighted. So I was left with very few letters highlighted around the grid that I was sure of, and it wasn't until I had nearly finished that I could see that there was a 'nina' theme running around the edge and then extra theme words. I am still left with no idea what 12a is! I'm sure of the last letter (obviously now!) and pretty confident of the first but I can't find any word that fits the parsing and I am hampered by now being unsure of 8d as it seems that none of the letters of this are part of a theme word but if what I have put in is correct, the third letter is S. Please can anyone help? I would hate to fail at the last fence after taking so long to get this far! thanks in advance