Twister

A violent tornado picks something up and puts it down a very long way away.

One continuous track runs through the storm, entering at the mouth beside wedge 1 and coiling clockwise, five turns, to the eye. Bars separate consecutive answers along it. The track clues are given in alphabetical order of their answers, so where each belongs is for you to find. The crossing answers are entered in the wedges, reading inward.

Three track clues carry a whole word their wordplay cannot use. Strike it out and set it aside. In every other track clue the wordplay assembles one letter more than the answer holds; that extra letter is not entered in the grid.

Seven track answers arrive one letter longer than their clues promise, and the crossings confirm them. Those seven extra letters, in walking order, give what the storm swept up.

The letters the track's wordplay could not place, in walking order, give the lesson of it all (6,2,5,4,4). The three struck words will by then have explained themselves.

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1 across the wedge

Absorb lessons covering what can make holy (5)

Alphabetical by answer — you work out where each belongs. Jot a temporary answer in the first box and any spare wordplay letter in the second.

  • —There are donkey's years in human gestures (4)
  • —Going downhill in retail lingerie (6)
  • —Bachelor on hard beer by a block of hay (4)
  • —A blast damaged what was underlying (5)
  • —Bishop in a nasty heart scare steels himself (6)
  • —Lay on a spread with the cold afterwards (5)
  • —Badly nailed and low in the water (5)
  • —Droves turn over the throne (4)
  • —Insolence when hot rum is mixed (5)
  • —Mesh holding the south-east gun emplacement (4)
  • —Veneer is cracked when hell freezes over (5)
  • —Ranges almost finished with a thousand poles (5)
  • —A ring from the east is short on colour (4)
  • —Leave the tarts to the signatories (7)
  • —The drink turned in the gym so speak up (4)
  • —Work the rock with the opening on the face (4)
  • —Model in the south-east with her entourage (5)
  • —There is a yelp in each nerve and muscle (5)
  • —Set store by a grass on ecstasy (4)
  • —Mesas shattered on the moon's dark plains (4)
  • —A small cadre has to shift (4)
  • —The brain has a dance in the steamship and gives a mate away (5)
  • —Ordeal when the clique turned on an alien (4)
  • —Article holding that woman over yonder (5)