This is a special crossword in memory of my dear friend Lucy Kilbride, who died in June. Lucy and I met in 2013 after I compiled my first crossword for this website. She completed it with ease, I duly met her in Cardiff to buy her a drink as promised and we clicked. A keen cruciverbalist who appreciated and enjoyed my anagrams, jokes, puns and subversive naughtiness, she kept winning the drinks ‘prize’ – usually in the Old Arcade – and before long I was regularly visiting her at her lovely home in Llanharan. Over the years we spent many a summer afternoon in her magical garden chattering, debating, smoking joints and laughing alongside the tumbling Ewenni Fach stream that ran through the beautiful garden. I am badly missing her plant cuttings and delicious home-made jam, but most of all her intelligence, charm and talent.

ACROSS
1 Flawed old act is funny (peculiar) (13)
7 For starters, can you cook leeks and eat in tandem? (5)
8 Unfortunately, I bit a bone (5)
9 Somewhere at the bottom of Lloyd George Avenue (5)
10,24 Unwanted hanger-on taken for a fool (10)
11 Cor! Incredible bird! (3)
13 A stocking worn by any Londoner (5)
16 Like a field in Caernarfon or Kennington (4)
17 Obscure band is rubbish (4)
18 Tool’s a bit of a card (5)
21 What is beheaded – stale after 15 (3)
22 Retarded nobody at Number 10 does gas! (5)
23 Where to find fashionable berks (5)
25 It’s a sign, all the same (5)
27 Big tides from SE turn sea very wild (6,7)

DOWN
1 I back the police (3)
2 Bad egg? So poach it, stupid! (9)
3 Irregular for a French event to be cut short (6)
4 Every other scrag rentable – how lewd! (6)
5 One after another, sounds like cheap labour (6)
6 Stop in difficult land, hard land without deltas (9)
10 Nice atmosphere in bog videos? Surely not! (4,5)
12 Daisy’s a nude: call perverted (9)
14 Talk about earnings (3)
15,19 It’s licensed to cure a cold, dear (3.6)
18 Remainer has stamina (6)
20 Wide scope of former boyfriend (camp) (6)
26 Bet on an amateur (3)