I’ll just say that my cat sat down and started washing herself as I picked up my pen and she was just getting to work on the fourth leg as I wrote in the final answer, so.. Solving time: a fairly peremptory cat bath minus one leg.
Not much to say about most clues. One question mark for me at 1 across.
ACROSS
1 TREA,SURE – I’m still uncertain about this. Is the first part a curtailed ‘treat’? If so, does that equal ‘party’? I can’t find support for that. Thank you to vinyl for confirming that ‘treat’ for ‘party’ is “Edwardian school slang”.
6 F,RAPPE(r) – Is a French rapper a frapper?
9 SPEED MERCHANT – double punning def.
10 CRATE,R
11 TWIT,CHER – to twit.. to goose. To wit, to woo (see 24d)
13 LEPRECHAUN – tee hee, it’s a foine anagram of ‘clean up her’, so it is. I had this picture left over on my LiveJournal account from a St.Patrick’s day blog and it would be a crime not to use it, so it would.
Okay, ’nuff Oirish. Nice clue.
15 MAY,O – the skipper being the late Peter May CBE, captain of Surrey in from ’57 to ’62. ‘O’ is the cricketing abbr. for ‘over’, most often seen in a bowling analysis.
16 EAR,N – reactioN
18 MARBLE ARCH – ‘alley’ for ‘marble’ has been cropping up quite a bit of late
21 C(OVEN)ANT – cant can mean ‘specialised vocabulary’ as well as the now more common hypocritical piety or platitudinous drivel. Oh, no it cant…
22 TIT(i)AN
23 TOOK A BACK SEAT – Speaking as a (now retired) orchestral percussionist, we’d never let a string player anywhere near the back of the pit, bunch of goody-goodies.
25 BER(L,I)N – Swift referred to authors “who scribble in a berlin.”
26 TIN,C(T)URE – tincture here being a “a trace; a smack or smattering;”
DOWN
2 RESERVE – double def.
3 A,GENT O,RANGE – GENTO being an anagram of ‘get no’
4 (pl)UNDER
5 ELECT,RA – The complex named for the daughter, and murderer, of Clytemnestra.
6 FICTIONAL – the ‘a’ of factional replaced by ‘i’
7 ANA – hidden word
8 POTTER,Y
12 COM(PART)MENT
14 COME AGA,I,N – took a bit of untangling. The def. is ‘pardon’, the commander ‘aga’ who is over ‘I’ and all before N(oon).
17 APOSTLE – anagram of ‘plot’ and ‘eas’
19 RE(d),TRACT
20 COASTER – double def.
22 T(OK)EN
24 (b)OWL
Since I live in the US, it doesn’t really matter, I’m not about to fly off to the UK to compete.
Yes, a ‘party’ is a ‘treat’, that’s Edwardian school slang.
I didn’t think the clue for ‘Berlin’ is very good, because while Bern is a capital, so is Berlin, besides being a carriage. Any clue that incidentally makes you think of the right answer is weak. The ideal clue seems to have no relation to the eventual result.
This is almost certainly just a bit of competitor’s paranoia, but I wonder whether the occasional clue like 25 might be included in championship puzzles as a bit of honey-trap temptation towards careless solving – see BERLIN as the “European capital” and “left one” = LI or “in”=IN, and you’ve got a def and a bit of wordplay, which is often enough. It’s the wrong def but this time it doesn’t matter. Somewhere else, similar reasoning could tempt you into a wrong answer.
At 15A, Peter May was also captain of England for the second half of the 1950s, probably his best known role as “cricket captain”. “County cricket captain” is accurate but stricly speaking incidental, as “County” has to be the def.
I liked the use of ‘speed merchant’ at 9 – the slightly disparaging name used by some Listener solvers for quick solvers of daily puzzles.