Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

I've now spent 30 minutes on 9d which is 5 minutes more than I spent on the rest of the clues combined! Oh, and I still haven't got it!

Other than that, pretty standard Everyman fare with some nice clues.

If you get stuck there is the usual initial letters in the acrosses and a long anagram in the downs.

COD - A toss-up between 5a for it's unusual word for "laugh" and the Spoonerism at 15d which made me smile.

Thanks to Everyman:-)

Stay safe:-)

....and got it! 😎

I've got 9D :p You're probably that if you finished after me :p

25A was my last one in which was a much better clue than I was expecting ;)

I can't parse 18A though.

Lot's of immediate write-ins which I haven't taken time to parse fully yet.

No rhyming couplet but 4 and 9 down are antonyms (did I say I have 9D already) :p

And all my gloating privileges are cancelled because of the spurious apostrophe I added to lots :)

Hi PS,

18a - 7 letter "spread out" goes around 4 letter anagram/'up'.

I knew the type of clue 9d is so had all the letters but it took an age to put them in an order that chimed with a definition:-)

Cheers for the parsing, it's beer o' clock here that's my excuse!

This was super easy until the SE corner which took me much longer than the whole of the rest of the puzzle!

I'm having trouble parsing 1A also tbh. Maybe more beer will help.

I know the feeling:_)

1a - 4 letter "international" as in a 'sporting event' then 4 letter "transport system" - definition is last 3 words.

Thanks to Everyman. This is one of his highest quality puzzles I can recall. I'd rate it even higher, but 2 clues were oddly familiar from the Indy: 8 in today's (US) #11,001 and 14 in Friday's #11,000! Of course that could be mere chance.
FOI 1a, about a third of the puzzle was write-in and then the challenge picked up.
LOI 23, which I'm not sure about the parsing (American, struggle with rhyming slang).
Too many clues to pick one COD. Really liked 20, 15 (brilliant Spoonerism which was next-to-LOI), 13, 26, 17, 9 and 14. Clues 16, 21, 11 and 22 were also pretty good. Clearly I enjoyed the puzzle, more fun than yesterday's Prize, which was a bit of a slog.
5 was an unfamiliar term to me, perhaps UK slang.

Oh of course yeah, maybe more beer does not equal more intelligence :)

13A was a nice change from just being an anagram I thought.

8D was a nice clue as well.