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Thanks to Prize star Picaroon for an entertaining and elegantly clued challenge this week.
About median level difficulty IMO, but with a plethora of clever and deceptively worded clues.
FOI 6 (took a while to get started), LOI 21. Stalled on 20, which took a high percentage of solving time. Needed to summon Google to fill in the final word of the long compound solution. I inferred one fairly difficult solution from a medallist in Peer Review 644. :-)

Enjoyed too many clues to call one COD. The short list included 29, 23, 14, 18 and 3, which slights several other contenders.

A classic Picaroon workout, which I greatly enjoyed, but for which post-funeral beers were perhaps not the best preparation. 23 was both LOI and COD for me - took me ages after getting the crossers to realise that I was looking in the wrong place for the definition. Very clever.

Yes, 23 was excellent. Saw the definition and guessed solution almost immediately (it's fairly regularly used), but only managed the (extremely witty) parsing much later.

I’m now beginning to wonder whether I’ve got the right solution to 23, geeker. I thought the ‘fairly regularly used’ definition was the solution at first, but I couldn’t parse it. My PDM involved altering that word by replacing ‘current’ with ‘energy’ and then realising the very witty bit, which I then took to be the definition. If you see what I mean. I still can’t see how it works the other way round.

You're correct, rogissimo. My error. I saw the connexion but didn't think it through properly and let the "obvious" initial guess stand. If I'd only understood, that might have been my COD: discounted it because I dislike the "fairly regularly used" figure. 🤣

Chalk a deserved point up to Picaroon. His FT puzzle tonight (doubling as Buccaneer) is pretty good, too.

Very entertaining and almost there. 8D made me laugh! Reading through your comments about 22A, I am wondering about my answer and how it impacts 21D and ultimately 28A where the 3rd letters appears to oddly placed. Is there more than one spelling for the racer in 14D?

Oops! Just realized that you were discussing the “shoemaker” clue. Very clever, if I have it right.

No, the racer has only one spelling. 14 parses as 4, 4, 1, 1: the "around" is a little confusing but I think the first 2 words of the clue both apply to the first "4". 21 parses cleanly as 3, 3, but I only saw that after figuring out the non-obvious definition. Similarly 28, whose definition was hard to see but then parsed simply as 1 inside 5.

geeker @5 - thanks and phew!

Got it! Thanks. I saw the non-obvious definition but looked at the wrong halves! And the drinking led me astray.