Almost a carte blanche with just those symmetrical bars. ‘A number of answers must be altered in a certain way…’ “A number,” grumbled the other Numpty “we aren’t told how many.” but he was already finding rather a lot that had a letter too many for their cells, as I colour-coded my grid and clues, finding just two 12-letter answers, two 11s, and 2 8s. That was promising! And indeed, VICELESS, REPREHENSIVE, TERMITARIES, OVERLADE, PLEASURABLE and DODECAHEDRAL gave us the skeleton of our grid and before long we had that ‘skeleton’ grid with fifteen words that were too long for their slots and not much idea what to do with BRIDOONS, BITTERNS, BLENNIES or HEAVERS.

Clearly, we needed to lose a letter, but which? It was POU?E?? that made that penny drop (or the triangle ting, or whatever the musical equivalent is) POULENC, and that was clearly an anagram of OPULENCE with one extra E. Composers rapidly filled the rest of the grid and we had most of the corrected misprints: enough to work out the message SORT DISCARDS INTO TWO MORE …

“COMPRESSOR – that gives us ‘composers’ with a thematic extra R!” So we listed our fifteen composers and the extra letters and had a rather obvious SCHUMANN and a puzzling SCHUBET left over. “Doh!” Second penny-drop moment. That R of the title was discarded too – this was almost worthy of the ‘Poat hare trophy’ – the award for the sneakiest setter trick, commemorating that ‘hare’ who sneaked into Poat’s preamble some years ago.

But we have to admire the skill that went into this compilation – the calculation of the number of composers and finding those that would produce the necessary letters to give the last two. Probably that justifies the pretty obscure words we were still hunting for when our grid was practically full. We had EAV?E ‘Wager on each name, nom for a boy (5)’. The misprint message had told us that it was noT for a boy so we had to opt for EAVIE which Wiki tells us is a girl’s name. ?AEDI in the ODE produced MAEDI – some sort of sheep disease – but the clue wanted us to find an ‘Ancient tribe rooted in in northern Galicia’. Again Wiki helped when we inverted ‘plan B’ to get BAEDI.

No, I’m not grumbling – I’m raising a glass or two to KevGar for this accomplished compilation. Indeed he qualified for the oenophile outfit: ‘Shoulder’s rum, heal with treatment (6)’ gave us the HUMERAL that changed to MAHLER, then ‘Old English mead, thrilling liquid that causes blotting (6)’ It gave us OEDEMA (that causes bloAting). With that rum and mead, Cheers, KevGar!

Our first thought is that this is going to be about the Ford Model T. We clearly aren’t going to be discovering one of those machines that used to ring alarms for people when their early morning cup of tea was ready. What other T Maker could there be? Troublemaker? That thought flits through our minds (especially as, this week, an editor has gently removed the word RUSSIAN from a crossword of mine saying that the very word makes people unhappy just now – he replaced it with RATSBANE – a useful way to remove undesirable creatures – if only we could!)

Thematic material added or removed from clues and an equal number of extra words that define the affected entries? We quickly spot that one answer just gives us a T – ‘160, middle of century (4)’ – so three letters must provide the removed thematic material. We see MAA in ‘Bleat coming from heads of many African animals (7)’ so there must be four letters of removed thematic material there.

Another clue spells out RESUMED, ‘Sure to be scuttled on sea, began again (4)’ There must be three extra letters there and SUM seems to be the only possible ‘thematic material’.

It’s Lady GAGA who gives us the p.d.m. WONGA-WONGA fits the letters we have, by this time, in our rather messy grid, and that’s a pigeon, isn’t it. So it’s money that is changing our solutions and MONEY CHANGER slots in at 1ac. Oh dear, it really was ROUBLE (the sinking rouble) that had to complete the title. Now it’s just a question of fitting the seventeen definition words we have found to the words that have gone into our grid:

BEINGS/ people SWEE/swing MALARIA/disease PYAT/magpie MARKHORS/goats UNCE/weight FOREARM/prepare FRET/vex CAIRD/gypsy CORED/deseeded ERA/years HORA/dance WONGA-WONGA/pigeon TIRESOME/boring BESOM/broom LEN/man and REED/pipe.

Ah, but that isn’t quite all. Of course I checked KeGar’s eligibility for the Listener Oenophile elite and spotted the Madeira in ‘Madeira lady blowing horn to stop tide (4)’. We decided she was a SENHORA (SEA around an anagram of HORN) and removed the SEN to give the HORA dance. A little later he was a ‘Dirty drunk in Scottish loch (4)’ which gave us FOU + L. Well, cheers, anyway, KevGar!

Nor did we miss the little Poat hare poking its nose into a clue (rodent indeed!) ‘Single-seeded fruits rodent stashed in unfinished frame (7)’ The little MARA went into SAS(h) giving SAMARAS. Welcome back, little hare.