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I'm not sure there's an answer to that - it actually is how many cups of coffee I drink while completing a crossword - so if it's a stinker and I have to come back to it anothe day the number of cups is not necessarily accurate! I only think of it in this way for Saturday morning puzzles - when write ins can be one cup of coffee gone cold - which is nowhere near the satisfying tussle of three cups sipped slowly while I deliberate!

Any tips for N?
The only 5 letter answer that seems to fit means "low point"...

environmentalist from some time back

Couldn't think of an environmentalist.
So I found an obscure word for fortification and flipped it...with success.

did you google him?

N was my last one in too. I also thought of the word for low point which wasn’t to be…

I got all the 5-letter words early on, so my first entry in the grid was S. Unfortunately, I inverted the grid positions of U and N due to the shared last letter. That cost quite a bit of time until I noticed the error.

I don't think there was any puzzle in the first letters as they are written in bold. If it was only alphabetical order there would bo no letter there. It's the instructions which are slightly misleading but it never occurred to me that the answers didn't start with the letter indicated.

Araucaria was of course the master of this. But as he did so many and there are limited X and z words he started doing alphabetical order only. Then to be more challenging he also did Italian alphabetical order, Greek alphabetical order. Then aphoristical, diametrical, rhombical, perimetrical! The absolute master.

We are working through his book containing all these. Chambers Book of Araucaria Crosswords Vol I. Each one takes nearly 2 hours hard work!

On another note can anyone explain T please. Have the answer. Not sure of parsing. Thanks.

The outer part of T is a 5-letter American slang word for "bag", as in "not my bag", etc.

Ok thanks. Not one of the best clues.