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Thank you rhsl, I didn't follow up those definitions thoroughly enough.

Struggling to get over the line on this. I have a completed grid apart from the central square; I have (i), (ii) and (iii) and have followed the instruction in the path. My deciphering of the related note starts with a long word, that's also separately visible in the grid, followed (ignoring cells already visited) by two more letters, the first of which is quite unpromising for the start of a word. Where my deciphering finishes does not leave me within 3 steps of the central square (if that is how I am supposed to complete a message). I am not sure I am reading the end of the related note correctly, given the two letters I am left with at the end; I can guess at two entries to highlight, but not certain why; and don't know what to put in the central square that will complete a message.
Any gentle nudges to help me on the right path would be appreciated!

If you have the first word of the related note, you should be able to make an educated guess at the remaining seven letters (noting point (iii) in the preamble), and you can then reverse engineer it. There are no more already visited cells to ignore after the first word.

Brilliant! Thanks quisling. That was all I needed. The reason I was stuck was repeated schoolboy error, which held me up for 24 frustrating hours. I had lost where I had got up to in the related note - I thought I was two places further on than I was! Now I can see that my guess on what to highlight actually now makes sense.

I'm at twit62's stage after far too many hours up a series of gum trees. I can't see how to get from the 8th letter of the word derived from the related note to the 9th (not easy to decipher for the poor of vision!), though I know what it must be. From then on the handwritten instruction beats me: is there a clear version of it on line?

I can understand why Authority has deleted my email address in an earlier post, but how does one get in offline contact with other solvers without an address? It seemed to work without a problem in the past.

Hi Cockie
After the 8th letter, the next symbol takes you to a previously visited cell, so you need to use both that and the symbol after to reach your ninth letter.

Phew! After only 72 hours (sans a bit of sleep). A tour de force constructionwise, but the Preamble could have been a lot less open to erroneous interpretation. A solver who guessed what the "Using ..." sentence meant would have avoided many crans of herrings.

Cockie, you mentioned email addresses - I think quite a few people used to set up temporary email addresses, which they got just for the purpose.

This path decode is horrible. I seem to have something vaguely sensible for my first 8 steps, but then step 9 seems to take me from a 't' to an 'f' and it's all gobbledegook from there.

Presumably the f is wrong?

The T and F are correct. If you know the theme, you should be able to work out the next word from the Wiki entry