I wasted a good deal of time taking 'country' to be the definition in 1ac. Biffed 1d and 19d, never bothered to parse the latter. A sluggish 7:18.

I found some of this quite tough with a number of clues (1ac and 20ac in particular) requiring several revisits before the answer came to me. 15 minutes, and amber solve only a few seconds short of tipping into the red.

19 mins but with over sea for 17a!
Think I biffed it and forgot to go back and parse.
Too much leffe last night watching the footy.


Struggled with pertinence honest, leaden and perusal.

Cod perusal.

For me this was a mixture of write-ins and half a dozen head scratchers. FOI was MEAN,followed by a very quick run through several clues until the hold-ups. For me these were PHRASE BOOK,PERUSAL,RHONE and OPEN SEA. COD to 1a for the misdirection.
Time was 15:28.
David

12.51 with all bar the SW done inside about 8 of those but took ages to see TEESSIDE which then unlocked the rest finishing with BOUNCE. I don’t think it was as hard as I made it though...

NeilC

Masterdon's normal intro is normally Yeatsian and 4dn.

Today's is equally uninspiring but brief. Sadly no jubilation hereabouts. I can't wait for Wednesday!

FOI 5dn MAD

LOI 4dn LEADEN

COD 14dn USELESS

WOD 9dn PERTINENCE

Do not attempt today's 15x15 without a grown up present.

The same experience as David - write-ins + head scratchers - except my head was scratched over different clues! The ones which chewed up the minutes for me were LEADEN, EBB TIDE (tried to make “books” either OT or NT) and LOI USELESS, which was how I was feeling by the time it fell. Total 2.2K for a Reasonable Enough Day.

FOI MEAN and COD to HONEST for the lovely surface.

Thanks Don and Hurley.

Templar

Edited at 2019-10-21 07:45 am (UTC)

A nice crossword from Hurley, with a good mix of difficulties and some very good surfaces. It would have been inside my target of 15m but for the 1a and 4d crossers which took me an extra 2m to see and were my last ones in. Thanks to both setter and blogger.

A steady solve today with 27:29. The only two which really held me up were 'leaden' and LOI 'perusal'. COD to 14d which raised a smile. Today I learnt that Teesside has a double S. Makes sense I suppose.

Nothing too chewy for me today as I made steady progress around the grid with a short pause at the end for PERUSAL, LEADEN, EBB TIDE and HONEST. I felt that USELESS might be a chestnut but I don't recall seeing it before so it gets my COD for putting a smile on my face. Happy to start the week with a sub ten minute solve, finishing in 9.39.
Thanks for the blog

No problems for me as I sit here in 20a giving TftT a 1a. I found this quite straightforward and finished in 7:52. Thanks Hurley and Don.

I had a similar experience to horryd. I wasn't over-impressed by ASHY or DEMON. 3K. Thanks to both. John M.

About average for me. ASHY = 'colour'. Really? Seems a bit of a stretch to me.
PlayUpPompey

Not a bad day. No time as I did it in bits but probably around 4k. Nothing I had to resort to aids for, so it must be comparatively easy. Took ages to see the hidden in 15a and really struggled with 4d and 14d.
A mer to 18a as that definition of demon never occurred to me.
FOI 5a

I was hoping for a slightly easier return after a few days away, or perhaps I was just a bit rusty (it did rain a lot where I was 🙂). Either way, 25 mins for a pleasant mix of straightforward and tricky clues. For me, a good example of the latter was 4d, Leaden, which I am now happy to give my CoD vote to, having been well and truly bamboozled for several minutes before seeing what was going on. I agree with others that 'Ashy' as a colour is 'iffy'. Invariant

Today's was a good example of why I often fail to finish. EG: useless = stupid? I'm useless at snooker but that doesn't make me stupid. Why not clue it 'unable to economize?'I've heard of ashen but not ashy.

....at DEMON, my eyebrows vanished into my hairline on finding ASHY. I thought DARLING was, to say the least, weak. Not Hurley's finest hour I'm afraid, but completed within target.

FOI MEAN
LOI SPY
COD BOUNCE

Anyone else have “over sea” for 17a? Sounds like oversee which could with not much more of a stretch than some other clues fit start to notice. Never heard of ashy as a colour, and had a MER at useless for stupid - you can be stupid and useful (wasn’t this staple of USSR overseas policy?) and useless without being stupid.
Paan

I note that horryd felt the need to have an adult present for the 15 x 15 today.

For my part I felt a child's perspective would have been more useful. Some of the apparently more 'difficult' clues could be resolved by following one's nose with basic Crossworld building blocks. 11D was a good example.

I really enjoyed the puzzle and thought it was very elegant largely for that reason: that it managed to build difficulty from elementary blocks. Every clue was thoughtfully built up from first principles with any vocabulary deficits adequately compensated by unambiguous cryptic signposts. But ultimately it was a Monday puzzle, albeit at the more difficult end of that spectrum.

Which brings me back to horryd.

If he found difficulty in the puzzle necessitating the reassuring guidance of an adult, then perhaps he needs to grow up. And if I may give some advice which I sincerely hope will be taken (although almost certainly not acknowledged), part of that process will involve identifying the things that he cannot change (the length and content of other people's blogs for example) and those that he can (deficiency in vocabulary, particularly in the realm of classically derived terminology).

I am guessing with that last bit. I may be wrong. But wherever the difficulty lay, I would suggest that that is where his efforts should be directed in the future.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

late i'm afraid - always up to a week late - and remaining as one of the many unconfident unidentifed amateurs who benefit so much from the free and generous input of the more experienced - may I add a late support for don and gratitude for the time he gives to accurate blogs - and I enjoy the digressions - and ask other users of this site who clearly benefit from it to refrain from indulging in the urge to self-aggrandise at the expense of what makes the site so worthwhile - or go elsewhere?thanks all bloggers - nick

I note that nick is not in favour of free speech.
He appears to be elsewhere most of the time, and I do not wish to join him.

All bloggers do an equally good job. But some are more equal than others. They are consistently praised with the most common phrase hereabouts, 'Thanks to setter and blogger.'

Setters get hammered most days on small points of order such as homophones etc. Bloggers rarely come under scrutiny.

If one dislikes or disagrees with a Blogger's intro then one is perfectly entitled to state 'Thanks to setter' or even 'Thanks to setter and Yah Boo Sucks to the Blogger!