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I totally agree, Dryden. Your earlier comment also made perfect sense. The standard I grew up with was that a cryptic clue should be tight enough (by the interplay of definition and wordplay) to identify a unique, correct answer; and this has been largely upheld for 50 years in various cryptics...

...possibly the setter will claim, "What else could it have been than GRANS ?"

Please can someone put me out of my misery with 3dn and 15ac? I have the theme, know the spare letters from those clues etc. Just a hint on the wp for those clues would be great. E.g. 3dn I have tr for transactions, with an anagram of air? I have the first 3 letters of the entry, I feel like the answer should end IK but I can't get that to work at all, and I can't get it to work with 15ac either.

And of course as soon as I post I get the answers by myself :-)

Forgive me, but I don't see the objection to this clue. Surely the wordplay Is "Nova Scotia" (NS) splits apart "its" (ie Nova Scotia's) "dreary" (GRAY), giving GRANSY from which Y is then removed to give a word corresponding to the definition? There is no requirement for GRANSY to be a word, any more than (say) PLATENCY. Or am I missing something?

Midgers, the problem with the clue, for me, is that it represents a quantum test : at some point, not discernible to the solver, the 'cradling' (split apart) GRAY becomes no longer a cradle, but instead a prefix...