Runner-up!

I can't quite remember when I started doing it, but for at least the last year I've tried to enter all of The Times and Sunday Times cryptic crossword competitions on Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays. The trickiest is the advanced "barred" crossword, the Mephisto... which you can find described here, and I only started doing it relatively recently.

Now look what I found on checking the latest Times Crossword Club prize-winners list...

Yey. I'm a runner-up for the Mephisto! And I will be £20 richer as a result. Not enough to give up the day job without 4 or 5 0's added, though. What shall I spend my winnings on? A book or two of crosswords, perhaps?

You can find the crossword and its solution here, and see it all explained here. The clues can be a bit opaque. The one I had most difficulty with (and its explanation) was this...

29	Enthusiasm’s shown up with no little energy in scraps (4)
	ORTS - ESTRO(enthusiam) reversed, missing E(energy)

I commented...

"29d was a complete mystery to me as an unknown clued by an unknown (NHO estro) and the answer isn't in my edition of Chambers."

[ NHO = Never Heard Of]

...to which the Crossword Editor replied...

"The absence of "ort" identifies your version as the initial printing of the current edition. In the previous edition, some words had grey highlighting to show that they were interesting, and somehow these disappeared in the production process. There is a document with all these words and their defs at: https://chambers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Chambers-Missing-Words-1.pdf"

My dictionary has the interesting words omitted? Bizarre!