It gets worse. It’s very likely no fault of Azed’s, more The Observer being incompetent, but there are lots of mistakes here. There is a general cock-up (which is of no real concern to the solver) which is a repeat in reverse of last week: last week they printed the ‘three prizes’ version of the preamble and said nothing about any asterisked clue or where to send it; this week they printed what they should have printed last week when it isn’t a competition clue-setting week.
But more serious is the large number of little mistakes, so many that in some places one can’t be quite sure what is going on. 26ac is given as 24ac. Is 32ac of five letters or six? 18dn doesn’t have the number 18 in the right place in the grid (it is, meaninglessly, in the square above where it should be). 28dn seems to be of five letters although it is given as (4). There should be a line between the D of PARDAL and the N of AVANTI.
I downloaded the crossword from the website on Sunday morning and one would have hoped that by now things would have been corrected. I looked again just now (late on Sunday) but nothing has been done. I didn’t see the paper copy and wonder if that one contained the same mistakes. My bet is that it does and I base this on the obvious disdain of the staff at The Observer for a crossword that continues a tradition of many years. Time they started to treat its crossword with a bit of respect.
Still, I got there, more or less, and it was the usual enjoyable experience. Is it me or are the words becoming more and more obscure? At least the clues are structurally pretty straightforward.