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Greengage, this may seem a little hard-hearted, but it's only Sunday, so I think that you need to consider a different interpretation of the method of conversion into steps, rather than be given too big a hint.

FWIW, I was once where you are now.

Touché rhsl and thanks!

Perhaps some 50 hours after the thing went live it might be permitted to seek a bit of detailed help. It seems that most of us filled the grid without much difficulty, so I don't think I'm giving anything away here. The instruction starting "Using the compass ..." I interpret as drawing a backwards 3 through the cells containing the letters OOLGE. This would seem to be wrong, so how should I interpret the instruction?

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I think this looks too tough an endgame for me but I could do with some help parsing 21down and also 36 down. I think I know both answers but am perplexed by the workings. Maybe if I have time I might look at the endgame through the week, or maybe not

You don’t have to draw any coils, the coils merely indicate the directions depending on the shape of the coil and how that matches against the compass. You then move in the directions of the compass whether than be N, S, E or W or anything inbetween

This went (reasonably) smoothly for me, after a few false starts with the path. The first instruction came through clearly. But now in attempting to follow it, I’ve hit a wall—my second instruction (which I presume is essentially followed the same way as the first) spells gibberish as far as I can tell, and I’ve no idea why! Anyone else ended up in this position?

Hi mullingar,

21d parses 3, 2 where the 3 is in Chambers definition 2.

36d you may have the wrong final letter (I did). Again, check Chambers.

I haven't bothered with the end game.

Thank you Simon I see 21down now. I think I have a definition for 36 down which relates to the last two words. Is that wrong?

That's correct

Ok so what is this short cipher ...? I get the definition what about the wordplay?