Welcome back, HappyUncle, and pleased to see you happy.
Like others I also found the Quinapalus site invaluable. In the past I have quite enjoyed working out the Playfair code for myself, but with no idea of the answer to 10d, uncertainty about 1a, and only four sets of checked letter pairs, I had little to go on. Normally one has a collection of four-letter and six-letter answers with one or two unchecked letters each.
As to whether or not that is cricket, Hagen, I'm happy to resort to the aid because I'm not convinced that the setter 'played fair.' The clues to 1 and 10 do not conform to Listener rules. In the clue to 1 there is an element that normally would require an indication that is obsolete and dialect. The clue to 10d strikes me as, let's say, 'unsound.' If I am wrong then my pronunciation all these years has been faulty.