Oh, is Garfield one of those? We have a cat who has to be sedated to get jabs, after previous visits involved several bites and a full staff recovery mission when she somehow jumped on top of a high cupboard.

Sorry to hear that. Hope it's as good as can be expected.

One thing that should change is attitudes to modern refs. It's not unusual to see comments in blogs separated by type:

"NHO [obscure plant or unusual word]" - neutral, learning a new thing

"NHO [famous pop star or actor]" - irritable, why should I have to?

#NotAllSolvers but...

Not to mention solvers. If you have a well-established community used to particular old-school words/abbrevs, you're going to ruffle feathers if you suddenly expect them to learn a whole new language.

I think we need incremental change on new words, though a few clunkers can immediately be binned.

Well done!

My major objection to this is the electric car tax. Certainly, there's a hole in the budget caused by different patterns of car use, and I'm not opposed to something of this kind in principle.

But taxing electric while freezing fuel duty yet again is both unfair and incoherent.

Those moments are really valuable. I find progress is usually much more obvious in retrospect, when you realise how you'd improve on past work.

(Also, it helps to take it exactly as you have. I once stupidly diminished a similar comment by suggesting that my past work must have been awful. 🤦‍♂️)

Thanks, I've been training for it fairly seriously (The run, not the puzzle).

The puzzle was born of an exercise to see how I could fit half marathon into a clue, and after a period of wondering about a thematic fill, I settled on a different approach as an exercise. Glad you liked it.

For the record, 1:45. My watch had me 1:44 something, so I missed an extra landmark by the margin of extra running to get around people. 🥳

Oh sure, there are times he makes the ball talk, but this wasn't one of them. He looked, TBH, like the fifth bowler he is, which is really a reflection of the quality of the other four. But he got the results, so 🤷‍♂️

No idea what happens next. A Lyon century before lunch?

Ha! I just saw that and was about to tag you.

To be fair to the lad, that cliché was offered up on a plate, and he's got to be gutted that he hasn't taken advantage.

Yeah, that's pretty close to my view.

No, I don't think so. It was just a matter of identifying all the relevant elements of the wordplay. I don't know if different numbers would make that much clearer, or just make me think "more/less".

I was genuinely just looking at a recipe from a proper, reputable cocktail site that was more or less "Spiced rum and Irn Bru".

I reckon if I had some of this, I'd actually consider making it.

Not just the flags. I hadn't realised that... how to put this while avoiding spoilers... every silhouette had a purpose.

Well, it took a few minutes, but I got it. There were a few details I didn't immediately clock that would have helped.

Thank you. Like a good clue, a potential headscratcher that's obvious once it's been explained.

I expect I'll come back to this as a reminder, because I definitely find my puzzles tend to skew harder than I'd like.

This is excellent, though I feel I should mention for your explanatory text that BBC is British Broadcasting *Corporation*, not Company.