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Thanks, Murky. Tend to agree with all you’ve said, as well as with the person who points out the aids setters have recourse to. I try to avoid, but when you get stuck you either give up or give yourself a nudge. And once you’ve sought help with one clue...

I don’t go in for the various prizes that come with these crosswords, so it doesn’t matter, but I wonder if there are any ‘rules’ if you do enter. Obviously, with listener and azed and the like some leeway is implicit in the permitted use of chambers, which you can use as a proactive aid for more than just checking words after you’ve arrived at them

This has been fun! (thanks all.)

I've completed the puzzle but don't understand the parsing of the entry in 33 with the extra letter removed. Can anyone enlighten me?

Numbskull, the first four letters of the answer, reversed (sent back) mean 'broadside', then a usual two-letter 'about' The definition is 'African country', the last letter being the extra one and not given in wordplay.

Thank you Malone . I didn't know that synonym for 'broadside' but I had the definition and extra letter.

Thanks, Numbskull. The 'broadside' was new to me too!

My pennyworth regarding aids: I think all’s fair in love, war and the Listener. Clues often involve words we don’t know as solutions and/or part of wordplay. Often wordplay is no help and has to be parsed retrospectively. And in puzzles like this, the crossing letters are no help either.

No doubt many will disagree, but I'd say doing these puzzles without modern resources is like doing complicated calculations without a calculator. Intellectually noble perhaps, but life’s too short.

I don't think there's anything noble about trying to avoid solving aids, loge - it's more to do with practice ('exercise' might be a better word).
If you have a word-matcher/anagram-solver regularly on tap, why struggle to learn the words? Why bother trying to piece together the typical patterns that occur in our language that help us construct anagrams?
I'd avoid word lists as well (getting a list of likely candidates and seeing which one fits will be far quicker than solving a clue - so why not dispense with the cryptic element altogether?).
Setters are only just ahead of us solvers - we'll have caught up in a few weeks when a novel word or synonym has done the rounds... as long as we take the trouble to register the novelty (and we've got a better chance of doing that if we've cracked the clue the hard way and checked out the wordplay/definition afterwards).
It would really help the process if setters could avoid those doubly obscure clues - using obscure wordplay to 'clue' an obscure entry seems altogether pointless (to me, at least). It gets interesting when a fairly common word is clued with doubly obscure synonyms, but that's about it.

I've got little to add regarding nobility/purity, or even what constitutes cheating - this is a crossword help site after all. I'm always happy to get a leg-up when I'm stuck and even happier when someone is prepared to point out to me something I've missed. I like the fact that solvers help each other to finish puzzles so they can enjoy 'the moment' (the PDM, or whatever) but I've got quite fixed ideas on how best to achieve that - for me it's really about 'Flow' (Csikszentmihalyi) and pleasure, not pain.

Csikszentmihalyi seems like an admirable fellow, but if I were him I'd change my name to Czikssentmihalyi to avoid the problems people might have spelling my name :)

Quite right, Drxx, this is a help site after all and there are quite a few solvers who regard fora like this as a far worse abomination than using a wordfinder or anagram solver to help with a difficult clue. I don't take that view; I think that the sharing of hints here can only encourage new solvers of Listener and similar puzzles.

I don't think there's any such thing as cheating (apart from in crossword competitions) as long as one is honest about how one completes the puzzle.

I prefer to use no aids at all for daily puzzles, and to keep them to a minimum even with Listeners and the like. That way one learns. But sometimes there's a stark choice between using electronic dictionary to make progress and leaving a puzzle unfinished. This one was a good example.

I suspect we're actually in heated agreement on this!

We are, loge - let's go with the flow.