i Cryptic Crossword 3810 by Peter
April 24, 2023
Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳
A reasonably straightforward and enjoyable start to the week that I suspect I made harder work of than necessary, possibly because I was trying to multi-task when solving. A smattering of odd entries in the grid, though nothing that wasn’t gettable from the cryptic, and with much of the rest readily solved via the definition / checking letters alone it all balanced out I suppose.
CoD? I’ll go with one of those obscurities, at 24ac – “False alibi’s bad when editor’s leaving special field of interest (9)”.
All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from April 2019:
https://www.fifteensquared.net/2019/04/07/independent-on-sunday-1519-peter/
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
Denzo
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
A ⏳⏳⏳ experience here too, although being short of time I did resort to a word list for my LOI, 16d. Solving on the app today, there is a difference in the wording of the CoD; mine reads “False alibi’s bad when editor’s leaving Channel Island”. Perhaps that makes it a bit less obscure?
Starting at the top, the answers fair flew in until the last 3 or 4, but BAILIWICK, ACETATE and BREEDERS pushed it into two egg-timers sort of time. Slightly discombobulating to experience the gear shift!
24a was less obscure for having also appeared in yesterday’s Indy by Filbert.
22a and 16d were my hold-ups after everything else went in fairly smoothly.
Enjoyable and fairly swift solve today. Loved 1a being M not P for head of family! Excellent work by Peter. We too had 22a and 16d as LOI. We flirted with “prophets” as answer to 16d but couldn’t do anything with the “p”. Eventually got 22a first. We were also multitasking, As we had made mincemeat this weekend and today we had to jar it all up before coffee and crosswords. Probably nearer a 2 than 3 timer for us.
No more than ⏳⏳ here, but BAILIWICK was a write-in as it cropped up in the IoS only this Sunday with an anagram of ‘alibi’ as part of it. All done in one session apart from ACETATE, but that was obvious when I came back to it.