Cryptic crossword No 379

Superb effort Madryn. Loved this. Beautiful surfaces that sounded so natural with minimal filler. Very professional (apart from tiny typo in 14a). I could tick every clue, honestly. But to highlight a few to make the Comment more colourful, 11a, 18a (one of my faves), 22a, 3d (superb), 4d (ditto), 5d (ditto), 17d, 19d, 20d. A couple of very small quiblets in Reply. SPOILERS IN REPLY.

Thanks Madryn, enjoyed this a lot. Fine surfaces and a nice degree of difficulty (for me at least!). Favourite clues were 11a, 12a, 22a, 1d, 3d and 20d.

Hi Madryn, great stuff. As others have said, some really good surfaces. I especially liked 11a, very funny, 14a, 3d and 5d. See reply.

Thanks for the encouraging comments everyone. It's gratifying that the clues you've mentioned are the ones I was most pleased with and plenty of food for thought with the other comments. I MUST NOT leave it so long before the next one!

Nice one, Madryn, this was a fun solve. Top picks for me were 11a, 18a, 4d, 7d, 13d (outright favourite), 17d, 19d, 24d

Quite late to this one Madryn but I really enjoyed it and would echo the positive comments of others. I do agree with PostMark on the point about matching the parts of speech of definition and solution, which I spotted in a few places. Particularly liked 11A, 25A (albeit maybe a QM helpful), 3D, 4D, 13D (I’m ok with “they” as a singular pronoun as I have a very close non-binary relative), and 20D.

Thanks for this impressive puzzle, Madryn. I just solved this on twitch. The stream is available to watch/listen to at twitch.tv/contocrosswords - if you do so, I hope it provides some useful feedback.