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foi 1d, i disliked 18a and 24d, cod 4d.

I’ve just been reminded of the theme of the prize puzzle this time last year. Set by “Bogus” (a collaboration of setters who I don’t think have made an appearance since) in celebration of something practised on the first Saturday in May! 🥶

Challenging today, took me ages to get started, finished now though. Was a good puzzle. Never heard of 11, 27 or 19 before.

Clue of the day was 21, 22 for, me very good.
Nice maths word for 14.
4 was funny as well :)

Last one in was 27 luckily it was listed as a synonym in thesaurus.com.

I was not a fan of 3D despite it being a clever double definition, cos of the "glasses" part of the clue, which I do remember seeing somewhere before but it's a bit cheeky that one.

The "glasses" device in 3 is not extremely unusual, I've seen it quite a few times over the years. 3 wound up my COD, not so much due to "glasses" (spotted right away) but a tricky "Washington" misdirect (which rendered it also LOI).

Did the proper (in my opinion, although the OED uses -IZE a lot too) spellings of 25 and 15 throw you (you're from the US I believe)?

I work in computer games so there's always 2 different spellings of 25 knocking around in the code somewhere (I always spell it the 25 way but all the libraries have it the -IZE way) ;) We've admitted defeat with COLOR though :(

No, I managed to navigate the spelling issue. I've been doing British cryptics for a long time and (by now) hardly ever slip up on that account.

I have to adjust the other way around because thesaurus.com (which I use as a thesaurus, obviously) has US spellings for everything, so I had to change ENAMOR into the correct spelling recently (Everyman last week I think that was, may have been the Prize though).

I'm occasionally surprised by Americanised spellings creeping into UK cryptics, which I'd have thought would be anathema to editors.

They usually indicate that though, with something like "as Americans would say". I'd not be happy if they didn't!

I play Scrabble as well though which allows US spellings (in the UK rules anyway).