14A: Ah yes, IBM. I didn’t like that film at the time – I didn’t understand it – I saw it again on SBS a few months ago – I thought that a few decades of accumulation of life’s wisdom might help me to appreciate it more – but I was wrong!

25A: Yes it does! Bit that was the easy bit. The worst part is writing out the clues (but at least I only had to write out those clues I hadn’t already solved in my head).

14D: You make a good point about back, retreat, front etc. Like you, I’ll be paying special attention in future to these indicators to see how/whether they are applied to down clues. A quick survey (a couple of crosswords) suggests that words like up and on are used for down clues. I suppose if you think about Arabic being from right to left then it’s inappropriate for a down clue, but if you think of it as being in the reverse order, then it’s OK. I suppose we really need to know how an Arabic word would be written vertically. I suspect it would be top to bottom, in which case my objection would still stand………..I think……………my brain is starting to hurt!

6A: cont is a standard abbreviation for continued, so discontinued I thought was a good way of removing those letters.

I also deliberately used contempt so as to confuse. Sure, it’s a little ugly, but I figured that the natural tendency, when seeing the letters of cont lined up all in a row like that, is to extract those first four letters from contempt even though that is not the only option.

14A: I was inspired by the reasoning behind the computer name HAL in 2001, although no one is entirely sure if the story is entirely true.

25A: Does that mean you wrote out the crossword grid on paper as well?

14D: I never consider the direction of the clue in the grid to matter. If you do think it matters, doesn’t that also make instructions like back, retreat, front etc. problematic? Or are those kinds of instructions only ever used on across clues and I haven’t noticed the whole time?

And with the vin, I just wanted to be clever by using a cryptic instruction not before used. What should happen is that after years of practice the master begins to experiment. On this occasion, the neophyte jumped the gun, although I thought it was alright, and I like Basil Fawlty.

6A: I don’t like the use of discontinued to indicate the removal of “cont”. Surely that should be “dis-cont-ed” (pity it’s not a real word), not “discontinued”. And it’s especially ugly when the “cont” being removed is not the first 4 letters, but the first 3 letters and the last one.

14A: Pshaw! This is certainly a novel way of using “retreat”. I hope DA’s not reading this!

25A: My mistake. I wrote down the clues manually (I don’t have a printer) and omitted the word “front”. Silly me!

14D: I knew Arabic was right to left. Didn’t know about Hebrew though. I thought it might be “eel”, “ram”, and “vin”. I’d accept this clue better if it were an across clue. For it to work as a down clue, wouldn’t Arabic and Hebrew have to read from bottom to top? And “German win” = “vin” sounds a bit Basil Fawltyish. How about French wine? Too easy, maybe.

6A: discontinued contempt is contempt without cont, although that refers to the first three letters and the last letter of the word, which gives temp.

14A: Male odd retreat means take the odd letters from the word male and make them go backwards in alphabetical order, which gives lake.

25A: Yep, seventh from the front = g row.

14D: Written Arabic and Hebrew reads from right to left, so sea snake = eel and butter = ram (a DA special), then from right to left that’s lee mar.

German win is win with a German accent, which is vin.

I think you might be the only person to have given it a go. Thanks for giving it a crack, and don’t worry, I’m under no illusions about my abilities.

I made another one quite a few months ago now. I think that one had a couple of funny clues, although it had quite a few more tortured ones as well. Anyway, if you want to have a crack at that one, it’s at http://anagrammatically.com/cryptic/2008/11/02/a-delayed-report-and-a-substitute/

On the earlier crossword, there was a slight mistake on 28 across. On this crossword, though, I don’t see a mistake: ensconced is spelt ensconced. Well, it is now — thanks for the tip off!

Only one I couldn’t get was 11A: it’s not THE CRUEL SEA, is it? Why?

I couldn’t fully explain 6A (discontinued contempt = TEMP?), 14A (male odd retreat = LAKE?), 25A (seventh = G ROW?), and 14D (Huh?).