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And I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank my wife, who has a knack for sudoku solving (although she never does them).
Without her help I couldn't have got to the end of it.

drxx - I started to get some help from the grid after I'd solved a little over half the clues. That's on the high side for the Listener's guidelines on how much cold solving is required, but still within reasonable limits. I wonder if some people spent more time than necessary cold solving before moving to the grid fill, because they thought they would have to cold solve loads of clues - self fulfilling prophecy.

That's quite amazing, acornz - have you got a special electronic device for that? Even with every clue cold-solved there's very little you can enter into the grid with certainty. Erasing the 'potentials' and trying further guesses... erasing them and trying further guesses... is very time consuming using a pencil. Is there a push-button device available to rattle through the options? If so, I can imagine reverse engineering the odd 'maybe' answer, but with only a little over half of the clues solved? Really?

It's possible that this is hindsight speaking but I think there was room in this puzzle for at least a decent amount of steady progress just by keeping careful track of everything and paying attention to what was forced. Probably you need at a minimum about half of the starred/unstarred pairs matched against each other, but I think it's accessible with patience.

To the extent that I had any electronic aids, it was mainly just for bookkeeping (and a slightly speedier sorting of "alphabetical order of entries").

That doesn't appear to be the approach other solvers took - most mention having just a few clues outstanding before starting the grid-fill. Your earlier posts, here and on the AB, don't appear to support a methodical, logical path - the process sounded pretty exhausting to me (and that's with some helpful aids to hand).

When I was setting out to the solve, I kept thinking I'd need to cold-solve everything before even starting to to the encoding, so if everybody had a similar mindset then you can see why they'd get up to 20+ clues cold-solved before anything else. But once I'd started, and perhaps once I'd also figured out *how* to apply the logic, it seemed to be steady progress from then on.

I mean, sure, it took me a while, and I was working on it until quite late. But that's because there was always just enough progress to tempt me into pressing on.

It's one of those puzzles where I can see how automation would be helpful, but it isn't necessary imo.

'...the grid-fill seemed impossible without an additional piece of information from the extra letters (ie, the message has to make sense, resolving one last ambiguity).

I mean, that's tight setting. Squeezing everything out of the puzzle.'

(From your AB post - hindsight is a funny thing.)

Oh, I see. Well, firstly, that refers to a single ambiguity in one cell (and even then I might have missed something), secondly it was meant as praise for the setting, and thirdly if I recall my reaction when I was at that point in the solving process was something like: "Oh my god how am I going to sort this out -- oh, wait, it's fixed by the alphabetical order of entries at the end, that's amazing!"

So it was entirely meant as praise for the cleverness of the logic, rather than a complaint at how arbitrary it was.

I had a similar experience to claretgold. I managed to fill my first several letters into the grid with only a handful of clues solved. From there I entered a loop of clue solving and grid cross referencing that allowed me to make slow but continuous progress to the end. Admittedly I do come from a background of logic puzzle solving (sudoku etc), but no automation or electronics necessary on my end.

Hi drxx,

I've also not used any mechanical aid for the grid-fill and only used one grid and a lot of pencilmarking in the form of 'C/G' etc. I started filling the grid with about a third of the clues solved. Didn't get that much help from the grid, but then again -- with 4-letter answers arranged in the alphabetical order you usually get one letter checked. Occasionally one of the other three did come from the grid.

I use aids for the clue-solving for the weekend thematics, but I'm a non-native speaker, so I think I can be excused :) For this puzzle they were less help than usual. I agree it has a logic puzzle flavour, but I don't think it stops being a crossword -- and it certainly has a theme (if a bit postmodern one) that is brilliantly executed.

Given you disliked it so much.. What are your favourite puzzles of the year so far?