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Thanks Quisling for the brilliant deduction of the clue. Why apologise? You are doing a great help and one should not expect you to be present all the time in this forum. When you respond with such a brilliance, it is worth the wait.

Thanks for that, quisling. It explains a word that, having studied genetics, I'm very familiar with - TELOMERE (the end of a chromosome, very important in replication and cell division).

Thank you Bharat. I wish everyone on this forum had your manners and class. Their absence on other threads is one reason I seldom comment on them anymore, and that accounts for my less frequent visits to the site

Thanks, ChrisE. Most people know the tele- prefix means far, distant, as in television, telekinesis, but this is something of an obscurity. You’re spot on with telomere using the different root

Please help me in parsing / solving this cryptic clue -
" Lovely red clothes split at the bottom leaving nearly every one standing (7)"

Bump

It's another convoluted one. The definition is lovely, charming. Red is the drink, surrounding (clothing) nearly every one (four letters, dropping the final t (split at the bottom leaving)) and going upwards (standing)

Thanks quisling for the neat parsing. I could get the word. It looks so simple once you parse it. Thanks

I don’t think it was a simple clue. They always look easier in hindsight. But there were a lot of words, and working out how to group them was far from obvious.

The definition is at the start or end of most clues. Lovely red doesn’t mean anything, and standing has few synonyms. One standing a possibility, e.g. candidate. But lovely was the most likely. Clothes should immediately signal a possible containment indicator, putting red round the outside of the rest, and after that it was not too hard to see the removal of the t (split at the bottom leaving). Also both at the bottom and standing were vertical direction indicators, suggesting a likely down clue.

But you are already improving fast in my experience.

Well done on solving the clue, Quisling - but it's another one I'd probably class as pretty dire! Technically, it all works ok, but the surface reading is just... pretty much like a stream of consciousness. I know these are all helping Bharat, I'd just like a bit more elegance or humour sometimes.