Cryptic crossword No 288

Thank you for an interesting puzzle, Benguet, and welcome to this site. There are some nice ideas here. I particularly liked 26a, 29a and 7d. And thank you for going to the trouble of giving the annotated solutions . It makes it easier to give constructive comment. Of which there will be quite a bit in the replies to this comment. I look forward to your next effort. [SPOILERS IN REPLY]

May I recommend that you have a look at one of the guides to cryptic crosswords which are on the Net - a good one is on the Big Dave blog at https://crypticcrosswords.net/. You obviously have a pretty good grasp, because there are some really neat clues in here. But in particular, you have got the weakness (which most of us, I suspect, have at the outset) for the indirect anagram, the one which requires us to find a synonym of what's in the clue, and then do an anagram of it [CONTINUES]

Sometimes these are actually quite straightforward - "Russian spacecraft" to give MIR in 1a for example. But they are almost universally considered unfair to the solver. And you've got them at 1a, 13a, 17a, 23a, 2d (which is so impossible to solve "directly" - how many synonyms for "Bird" are there? - it has a certain brilliance). They're great fun for the setter. But they are almost universally regarded as unfair on the solver. Avoid. [CONTINUED]

11a is a very interesting one, which I haven't encountered before and I think you are close to inventing a legitimate new form of clue. In print, the Spooner reversal works perfectly. Yet it actually isn't a Spoonerism, which was a sort of speech impediment that the Dean had ("you have hissed all my mystery lessons. You must leave Oxford by the town drain"); the answer isn't DOOBLE reed. Maybe if you make it clear that Dr Spooner is putting it in writing? [CONTINUED]

You have, BTW, played absolutely fair by saying "Type of instrument" rather than "instrument. Some of your partial anagrams are a bit dodgy. In 9d, how does the solver know how much SECRET to include? In 15d, what tells me that it's only the first three letters of NEHru that are dropped? This will feel like tearing the puzzle to shreds. It isn't meant to be. On this site everyone is supportive. While this puzzle has a number of technical flaws, it's got 4 upvotes. And I look forward to your next

Hi Benguet and thanks for a fun puzzle. I agree with Gollum’s comments so won’t repeat his points. There’s lots of invention in here and where you have combined smooth surfaces with accurate wordplay the clues are very good. I particularly liked 10A, 14A, 24A, 28A, 29A, 7D and 18D, which all fell into that category. A very minor point: my test solver recently pulled me up on clueing IC as ninety-nine, which apparently should be XCIX - strictly true but we see IC quite often in crossword-land!