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ears to brendan! enjoyed this a lot and thought there was some clever cluing, including 4d and 6ac....can't fully parse 5d though

Off to great start with FOI 13,8 but like Brendan ran out of steam in NE corner. Finally got that quadrant sorted but LOI was actually 5d. Answer obvious from crossers but took far too long for PDM re parsing. Enjoyable challenge for me, thanks to Brendans.

Re 5d insert the theme word in the middle of the answer and you’ll see it

Culmer

5d - think of popular phrase referring to the benefit of being prepared in advance and as instructed remove hearing organ from final word.

thanks jono and jk....got there!

I’m not sure whether I enjoyed this or not which is an odd feeling. I had the same FOI and LOI as geeker - 4 taking me perhaps longer than it should. As for the treatment of ‘not’ in 6, I don’t know why it couldn’t just end with ‘not contracted’ which would have made it work more smoothly as jono intimated.

Tips needed for 22a.
I suppose it could start in PRE-, if the definition is "note echoed later".

Now have 22. A place where English people are put to the test.

haha

It's really interesting reading comments from other solvers, some of whom had very different experiences from mine. Very easy on the whole. Some clues took a bit of head scratching, but none of them were as tough as the most difficult ones usually are. FOI 11a, which I found almost ridiculously easy. LOI? Well, the last one for which I figured out the answer was 5d, but the last one I fully parsed was 21a, for which I guessed the answer almost at the beginning, but couldn't think why. I reckon 21 out of the 26 clues were thematic, which is a remarkably high proportion. I quite liked the way the theme was incorporated into so many clues in different ways. Unless I've missed something, the definition part of 1d is remarkably generic, so much so that I'm not at all happy with it as a clue, although I didn't find it very difficult to solve. Although I quite enjoyed the puzzle, like some others who have commented I really didn't find any clue clever enough to be a serious contender for COD, but if I have to choose one then maybe it's 13,8.