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Apologies if my comment at #33 gave away too much. I didn’t think I’d revealed anything that isn’t immediately apparent from the preamble but I’m happy to be overruled! Still curious about the indication for that central cell though. Definitely seems a small mistake to me which is such a rarity in The L that it makes me wonder if I’ve gone wrong.

… still a fine construction though so hats off to Elgin!

I am so close to solving this, but closer to going round the bend. I have the three friends below the grid and the 4th highlighted within the grid along with where they all met. My problem is one of the four lady friends, The sum of the initial letters of the four names that I have is 35. The sum of the letters in the none name that I have is 71. What have I got wrong?

Ditto - I think, from that, you have the right solution. Google the 4 Lady Friend names together, even if one of them is unfamiliar.

Gitto - sorry to mangle your posting name! - wretched auto-correct!

Grunos, apart from the wrong reference to Collins (22 should be 21, as mentioned much earlier), there is no error. But I understand why you might think that there was one.

When you see how it works, you will understand.

JB, as I am a huge fan of punk and metal I am happy to admit my near total ignorance of Opera!! But thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Can't see where the central letter comes from but it is impossible to be other than what it is. IMO it should come from 3d - but it doesn't.

I agree gitto. The only way I can make it work is not to code that letter, which I'm guessing is what you have to do. But that is clearly not consistent with the preamble. So unless I'm missing something, I agree it's somewhat untidy.

I also still don't understand the parsing of 42a, despite the earlier hint, and haven't solved 31d yet. Hopefully inspiration will strike shortly.

Agree SH. For 42a read the very 1st entry in the BRB for the 5th letter in the answer, Word play for 31d is 1+4 and I only found it using google.

Which, the more I think about it, suggests there's more to this than we have thus far discerned Gitto.