Category: Weekend Cryptic

12:23. I made a complete mess of this.

There are some delightful definitions today! 1, 16, 18, 20 and 27 across, and 5 and 12 down all made me smile. The wordplay in 13ac also stood out.

Is this as hard as it seemed? Or should I have simply replaced the videos with some (instrumental) music and focused exclusively on this excellent puzzle?

I had to think hard about some of this wordplay. Perhaps it qualifies for a master class, not a regular workshop!

8:56. I took a while to get going with this one, but once I had a few in the rest flowed pretty steadily.

Some tricky wordplay today. You needed to read the instructions carefully. (Or, biff the answers!)

I found this rather discombobulating. Did finish in one go, but it took a while. Several answers seemed quite obvious, but the parsing was not.

It was hard to isolate some of the definitions; perhaps they were visions in a dream? (Thinking here of the Coleridge poem suggested by 1ac).

12:31. I thought this was quite tricky in places, and I found myself stuck with a couple left unsolved.

A pleasant Saturday number, done in regulation time. I blinked a bit at the “sounds like” clues at 1ac and 19dn, but probably that’s just me.