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Back down to earth then! I have one Grid entry, one other definite-maybe and one hmmm-could-be. Nothing from the answerbank people either suggest this is going to be trouble (or it is so easy it does not warrant comment and I am having a really bad day). Still, plenty of time as the rain comes.....

There are comments on AB, saying how tough (and how wonderful!) this crossword - you maybe missed them?

After a slow start, I found the top left corner came together and helped with the rest of the initial grid-fill. Despite the comment in the first sentence of the preamble, it's helpful to prepare a 12x12 grid and use this as a standard carte blanche puzzle with bars and clue numbers. Of the fifteen letters forming the message, 13 are checked, so this will help with identifying most of the crossing clues with affected wordplay if you have already identified some missing letters. Some clues have more than one omitted letter in the wordplay - indeed, there's one clue with five omitted letters!

The endplay was a bit tricky, and I had a false start before getting a grid with exactly 40 blacked-out cells and all the entries as real words. The final step is very clever.

Funnily enough, the 30 mins after posting saw some success top left. Then I noticed some replies and was reassured to be already emulating Winstonian. I will plough on and ignore the comments about it being hard:-)

Have a completed grid but having trouble with the majority of the omitted letters - only have about 5 I'm sure of and they don't seem to contribute to a phrase (h then f??). Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hi Mandy

The letters in order appear to make no sense.

It's their position in the grid left to right that spell the words.

6-9 for the phrase.

I'm nearing the end of the gridfill, which has been quite fun. The two-word phrase seems to be very like an old Byrds title, though with the leading ordinal one less. FD (6,9). But many more questions than answers at the moment. Can the second letter of 10 be anything other than H ? How does H,O,H become 'hands over' in 16 ? How does 'Handle' work in 5 ? Where does the N,O,S come from in 7 ?

5 I'm happy with now. DISCUSS; U and S omitted from draughts.

Hello Meursault,

10. Def is Fashion. 5 letter word for unpleasant person with one letter missing
16 O is one of the omitted letters
7 SON backwards. Chambers has a definition as an inhabitant

Hi, Meursault.

In 10a, the definition is "fashion" as a verb, so the second letter is not an H.

In 16a, the second letter and the sixth are both in the thematic phrase and omitted from the wordplay, so "hands over" simply means that the two letters implied by the rest of the wordplay are surrounded by H and H for "hands".

In 7d, "from the south" applies to all the wordplay, so you have a four-letter sea surrounded by a three-letter word that can mean "resident" in the sense of "a native or inhabitant", all reversed.