Pretty easy with plenty of helpful anagrams and 2 musical numbers. The only thing I didn't know was TOGa (not much cop at physics sadly)but no trouble guessing. Some on the club forum didn't know SNOOD but it was obvious. I have a feeling we're in for a real snorter soon. 20 minutes and I'd have been faster if I hadn't burnt the toast.

Is TOG even a real unit? They use it for duvets, but I've never heard it used in any other context and I don't think it's an SI unit :-)

Yes this was easy though 8 mins is an impressive time George.. some nice clues though

10 minutes - quite a few d'oh moments/things I should have got much earlier.

17:34 with a correct guess at the marriage. My thought process was that it might be named after someone called morgan (chesty?) but it turns out to be nothing of the sort so I was lucky there.

Snood and tog both very familiar. I thought of RMC (college) for 10 on the first pass which I couldn't make a name of so moved on.

Without the helpful wordplay at 3 I'd probably have gone for habeus...

16 minutes (PB?) with quite a few going in on definition alone. I thought there were one or two near obscurities here but I happened to know them and as things have turned out so did everyone else apparently.

I knew MORGANATIC from sitting through innumerable accounts of the abdication crisis on stage, TV, film and radio. Nice puzzle.

Edited at 2013-03-14 01:47 pm (UTC)

...though I have been doing a lot of old ones, so can't remember where. 11:02, but I managed to enter BRANDYSNSP and so I fail today.

Found this one quite tricky and had two missing (Circumstance and Rune). Morganatic and Irma from wordplay and checking letters. Yawned at the Arson clue but thought Maiden Voyage was excellent.

I remembered Avast from Moby Dick: at some point Ahab or Ishmael or Queequeg shout “Avast the main!” (or something like that).

Initially had Royal Fellows for 11dn which caused a lot of bother in the SE corner.

Was that the one George was fuzzy on? I think I first heard it in connection with Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson where the idea was floated that they could marry but she wouldn't become queen. Apparently no one liked it.
So TOG isn't physics but duvets. No wonder I didn't know it - we don't do duvets in NY.

Sheets and quilts (some people call them comforters). We only use blankets if it's super-cold. For some reason duvets never seemed to quite catch on this end and besides I have some rather nice quilts.

15m, slowed down a bit by HABEUS as mentioned above.
Never heard of MORGANATIC, but it seemed more likely than MORNAGATIC.
No problems with SNAPDRAGON at least. These puzzles are so useful for learning the names of plants. I'm grateful for this because the knowledge is terribly useful for solving crossword puzzles.

19:02 … of which a good few minutes were spent trying our various possibilities for the marriage - another word that has somehow passed me by.

I did have HABEUS until the penny dropped on The Titanic.

I liked HIT THE SACK, but it got me thinking again about an episode of Father Brown I saw recently (the TV series sort of 'updated' to the early 50s), in which three times people referred to someone getting "fired". Did anyone get fired in Britain in the 50s? I thought Brits were always 'sacked' until Alan Sugar (channelling Donald Trump, gawd help us) came along.

Point taken. Boom boom!

Whizzed through this until encountering MORGANATIC, which I'd not heard of and which the wordplay and checkers helpfully reduced to just the 6 equally likely/unlikely anagrams. I lucked into the correct one via similarly flawed reasoning as penfold_61, though I was thinking more along the lines of Arthurian legend.

Similar to others, cantered through in 15 minutes without ever getting stuck. No real talking points - all a bit boring really

8 minutes here as well, pleasant enough without any talking points...so, I wonder, does this little run of easyish puzzles mean we're due an absolute stinker tomorrow?

Just over 10 minutes. Slowed a bit by imagining PROSECUTOR had some wordplay in it somewhere, when it was just cutesy. Likewise ARSON, though fewer words meant wordplay was less likely. "Pomp" announced CIRCUMSTANCE with all the large, regal, lager-fueled glare of Elgar. CLEANNESS looked weird. BRANDYSNAP can have CoD, faux de mieux.

I am a happy man again. After numerous crosswords where I just haven't tuned in to the setter's wavelength, I completed this in a very pleasing 13:08. Thankyou setter for restoring my self esteem.

ps. Something peculiar's occurring with this editor. To navigate around in this edit box, the left and right arrow keys seem to function ok but the down arrow goes directly to the end of the text that I'm typing and the up arrow does b****r all!

All ok for me, too, except AVAST. Am I the only one to have not come across this word? I did think of AVAST, but rejected it, as well as await, in favour of asalt.

I too got MORGANATIC by lucky dip of the remaining letters.

Hadn't heard of the President, either, but that was easier to get.

Edited at 2013-03-14 04:21 pm (UTC)

I'm not that DAFT! President TAFT!

A 12 minute romp, having learnt about MORGANATIC marriages recently while mugging up on my French history. AVAST is surely not an obscure word - 'avast me hearties' seems familiar from pantomimes... for the pedants it is explained by wisegeek as follows:
The word "avast" was first documented in 1681, and likely originated from a Dutch sailing term, houd vast, which means to hold fast. The term could refer to military action or the necessity to hold firmly onto ropes and lines aboard a ship. Avast has been widely used in the maritime community ever since as an interjection much like stop or halt.

Like other nautical terms, avast has been integrated into the speech of other communities of individuals. Along with phrases like “me hearties,” “weigh anchor,” and “arr,” the term has been adopted by a portion of the counter-culture movement which values the freedom traditionally associated with piracy.

Ah! Fond memories of Robert Newton and Tony Hancock imitating him at every opportunity.

About 20 minutes, ending with PROSECUTOR and TOGA, the last just based on T?G?. Not much to say, so regards to all me hearties out there.

7:32 here for another enjoyable, straightforward solve. I'm expecting tomorrow's or Saturday's (or both) to be more tricky!

40 minutes for me (which as a slowpoke I am quite pleased with). It was an easy puzzle with some quite unconvincing clues (ARSON, for example), except, of course, for all the words I had never consciously heard of but could get from the wordplay (SNOOD) or from having unconsciously heard of them (MORGANATIC -- no idea what it means though).

I hope this posting will work -- I succumbed to the temptation of installing Internet Explorer 10 and can no longer use it to solve puzzles online. Has anyone else had this problem?

Glad you made it George. We were worried!

Yes, the only peculiar thing here was the clutch of three anagrams at 5,7,8dn. Though the best of the bunch was "tea service" => EVISCERATE at 25ac. And ... no one seemed bothered by the DBE at 12ac. Every ship that ever sailed had a maiden voyage; but few would be quite so memorable I guess.

....which did nothing for my solving time in this rather easy offering. I was mostly on the wavelength, but this little mistake caused me to erase 'circumstance', a perfectly correct answer.

Gosh, was I the only person who messed up 11d agonising over whether it should be "noble society" or "nobel society"?