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Well, that was absolutely marvellous from start to finish. Excellent work Mr Snaky.

My only slight quibble is the relevance of the left hand perimeter entry, which seems to have a very tenuous connection to the whole thing unless I'm missing something?

Smellyharry and others - Agree with your assessment of the puzzle. Loved working my way slowly but surely through this. Not too worried about the left-hand column as I can sort of justify it mentally but totally bewildered by the Fisher reference. It hardly seems likely that Statistics correlation comes into this and using the codes, either way, I can't make any sense of what results. Would love to know the relevance. or at least to get a hint of where to look.

Is Fisher a play on the thematic name?

Fisher seems a clear play on 1a and may also refer to a parable involving 19d. The final 13d seemed complementary, although I hoped for a second it was part of a whisper campaign to return Surrey's Matthew Fisher to the England XI.

I found a cypher insofar as there seemed only one possible substitution for each letter in the perimeter answers, but others may have seen more to it.

I agree that Fisher is connected to 1a.

Surely, the left and right columns point to how we know that the shape is a 1a 7a?

Rhsl, I agree. I was puzzled by an earlier post which suggested that the shape contained no right angle. I have a solution which is one of only five, apparently, that satisfies the whole perimeter and corresponds nicely to the proportions of the grid.

That's why I don't like 13d. I dont think there is a right angle in the desired shape, so it's somewhat misleading.

The bottom row suggests a size that can't satisfy the top row and have a right angle. The shape I have is completely unconnected to 13d.

Still a great puzzle though.

I still think I have a solution which satisfies all four sides of the perimeter and has a right angle so I don't understand why others think that is not possible.

I read 13d together with 19d as a hint for how to calculate the lengths of two sloping legs in the desired shape.

My understanding is that the bottom row refers to a 7a in which two measures of its size are equal. I believe there is one of those which has a right angle, satisfies the preamble and occupies an exact proportion of the grid.