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I hope Brendan is well, haven't seen him for over a week. Even on the barred puzzle threads...

Thanks to Soup, who's a relatively infrequent Guardian setter, for an original challenge. ISTR he's set a Prize, but am not certain. He has been profiled in "Meet the Setter": https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2021/aug/02/crossword-blog-meet-the-setter-soup


Witty puzzle, above the norm in difficulty IMO but not extreme. Doesn't take too long to notice it's thematic and the special instruction is relevant. Quite a few uncommon solutions (though they can be deduced from parsing) and tricky wordplay.

FOI 11.
LOI 7, which I despaired of getting but drew a surprised smile when the penny dropped (had misjudged the definition).

COD 12, difficult choice because I enjoyed many. Other contenders receiving consideration: 22, 8, 7, 11, 5, 16, 3, 2 and 10. So I had fun.

Approached with some trepidation, but found that brute-forcing the theme in certain places was fruitful.
I'm left staring at 7 and 8, which, with all the crossers in place shouldn't be too hard! I'll come back to them later. Also puzzling at some of the parsings, but again I feel those will clear up on the second glance over a beer later.

Similar to my experience, plutocrat. 8 was my next-to-LOI and source of much confusion. Fortunately I was able to dredge up the memory of once encountering it in a crossword.

I thought this was quite fun. Enjoyed it greatly once I spotted the theme, and chuckled over the instruction. I found it about average difficulty. COD among the non-thematic was 3. I liked too many of the thematics to choose.

Plutocrat and Geeker, I agree that there were a few thematics made much easier by assuming they were, and then reverse engineering to see the parsing.

Indeed. I briefly hoped for an added boost of the thematics being symmetrically located in the grid, but that was soon dashed. 😉

A good challenge I thought. Soup is better known for setting Guardian Genius puzzles, in fact I’m sure he’s dropped into this forum from time to time on those threads. He also collaborated with Enigmatist a while back on an Araucaria tribute puzzle of note (actually I see it was two years ago now!).
I did wonder if the instruction was necessary, it might have been fun to discover the theme oneself, especially with a hint in 4, but either way good fun.

Can't believe I've solved this! LOI 8. Once I'd got all my As in a row, had to resort to web. Never heard of this (and certainly not heard it) before. Very clever clue. Enjoyed the cleverness of all the clues following the special instructions. Oh, Brendan, where art thou?

Enjoyed this, not sure I’d have got there without the special instruction. Started slowly, FOI 21, so off to a good start in a way. Like others, I guessed that some solutions were thematic which helped. LOI 14. COD 8.

Enjoyable puzzle
FOI 2
LOI 6 (doh)
COD 12 or 22
Don't understand what Starsailor has to do with it and can't parse 27 - help appreciated :-)