Listen With Others

There’s not lot to say about this one. For some of my puzzles the idea sits in my mind for months or years until I think of a good way to execute it; but for this one, almost as soon as I thought of using the line [If all is not lost, then where is it?], the way forward was clear.

As for filling the grid, my first thought was that I would need to resort to some jumbled across entries; but I decided to see if I could get a good fill without jumbling and was pleasantly surprised that it turned out not to be all that difficult.

I did not want to clue ALL in the wordplay nine times so the decision to let the wordplay refer to the entered form for the clues with omissions was easy.

And that’s about it, except to say that I was unaware that COVID appeared in row 9 of the grid. It was mentioned by a number of solvers in their feedback but was completely unintentional.