L4681: ‘1 41 6:10’ by Colleague
Posted by Encota on 5 Nov 2021
My thanks to Colleague for an enjoyable solve. My final grid looked like this:
Before I had solved 28d’s $BIRD, the Title took me longer to decipher than perhaps it should. I had replaced 41, 6 & 10 with their clue answers at first, leading to “ONE TIMOTHY UNFORTUNATE: STERN”. I then tried to make sense of that perhaps reading ONE+TIM+(unfortunate)E. Was there a ONE-TIME PAD involved, somehow? ‘DELTA’ in Row 13 looked possibly interesting (relevant), too.
I then spotted CENT.SIMO and decided it was a coin. I did then briefly check to see if these had all been square coins – or coins with square holes in them – but couldn’t convince myself that either of these were true. Nonetheless my highlighting gives square results.
I liked how ‘MONEY’ being the root of all coins resolved the ambiguity with DANDIPRAT / DANDYPRAT – that was a nice touch. And 5a’s use of ‘toffy’ = U was something I hadn’t seen before and worked well in that clue.
My thanks again to Colleague!
Cheers & stay safe,
Tim(othy) / Encota
Listen With Others 
Brock said
I found it all very straightforward apart from some of the clues I had mental blocks on. I struggled especially with 5A as the “toffy = U” is a very indirect indication to include in an anagram and an unusually (in my view) unsound construction for the Listener. My guess was that it was that way to gain an extra line for space as it would be pretty simple to add a “container” indicator. I’d have tried something like “Early sweets are from sillabub, nuts, toffy included” and then tried to save the extra line elsewhere, e.g. by rewording 52A as “Some honesty needed for regulatory body”.