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I do indeed get your drift S.Pugh and am much relieved by it! Thanks!

The complete riddle can be found in ODQ. Just check the index under any of the extra words that are nouns. One of them will refer you to the relevant page. You don't all the extra words, just the keywords for the ODQ index.

BOBBLY is a better answer than BLOBBY because of the Chambers definition for BOBBLE.

This is my query about the maths of the riddle. The square root of the number plus 8/9ths comes to more than the number unless the number is 72, which it clearly isn't.

s_pugh, it's interesting that you have identified some real words in your final grid. I don't have any!

Oh heck! Now I'm worried - I have what are effectively 'new' real words but only at 12dn and 18ac ...

And why wouldn't it be 72 anyway?

Hold on - "square root of the number"? But that misses a word out surely ....

I may be completely on the wrong track, so don't take my concerns too seriously. If you have real words at 12d and 18a but nowhere else you have found a way of resolving the clashes that I haven't seen. The grid contains a number of instances of a certain letter. Discounting the cells with clashes there are 21 or 22, depending on the choice for the ambiguous entry. There are another 6 instances in clashing cells. If they are involved surely all must be or none, because how would one choose between them.To me that means the answer must be 21, 22, 27 or 28.
Surely only the first can be arrived at by the equation of square root of a number + 8/9ths of the number plus two for the other two.

Perhaps I'm missing something. This is, after all, Sabre, who is the subtlest of them all.

I make it 21 instances, plus the 51 clashes, totalling 72. I reconciled that as the square root of HALF the number giving 6 plus 8/9ths of the number giving 64 plus the 2 extra critters. Were you missing the 'half' from 9dn?

Does that mean that you have changed all of the clashes to the relevant letter, whether they have that letter in them or not? Maybe that is what is required, but I don't see a rationale for it. Originally I thought the answer 72, but the I couldn't see how to get that number without doing something that struck me as arbitrary.

Hi Dryden

I've changed all of the clashes to the relevant letter.

Not an elegant grid but I think it fits the preamble.

Indeed I have - as per the preamble "the completed grid contains a (literal) solution to the riddle" - with emphasis being on the word 'literal'. If you take the full quotation of the riddle and not just the first 9 words of it the calculation comes out at 72 of the critters, nothing arbitrary about it. 21 instances plus 51 clashes makes 72.

I could be wrong but I find it a lot more convincing than some of the Listener solutions I've seen, and I'm not going to mention 'big ears'!