Big Fat Christmas Crossword Answers

 Well, as the Lifers say down the maximum security wing, that's another year Up the Judge's Arse.

Only one more Roast Dinner to endure, then it's back on the steamed white fish and plain white rice. With occasional lettuce leaf.

I think I've told you about the Kirkwall tradition of the Ba' - played on Christmas Day with a return grudge match on New Year's Day; the tradition originated when all the men of the town formed themselves into two teams to play a rugby-scrum type of street football through the residential and retail streets of Kirkwall with a severed head. Such was the fun that it has been repeated annually apart from last year, when Covid put paid to such innocent entertainment. Imagine the viral load in the cloud of steam, spit and piss fumes that hovers above the pack. 

Undeterred by any suggestion of rational thought, the Ba' Committee busily planned the usual games for 2021, until instructed to Cease and Desist by Orkney Islands Council, which has to barricade the buildings and clean the streets post-match, together with NHS Orkney, which has to pick up the bodies, splint the broken bones and treat the concussions and bites. 

And deal with the Covid hospitalisations.

 

However, we know how to have fun here in Craggy Islands, so entertainment of a High Order was provided instead by a Decorated Tractor Parade through the town. Mustering at the Hatston Industrial Estate, on the evening of the 29th December, 150 tractors poured in (well, proceeded at a tractor pace) from the countryside, and processed around the town. It was All For Charidee, of course, and a sum equivalent to £2.00 per head for every Orcadian man, woman, child and babe in arms was raised to the benefit of Clan and MS Orkney. I didn't go, being involved in entertaining friends to a Roast Dinner, but my dinner guests were caught up in the parade of returning tractors, as they attempted to make their way home.

Such fun.

 

Here's the answers to mr mongoose's Big Fat Christmas Crossword. Diabolically difficult, wasn't it? Mr mongoose is working on another one, he tells me, with a strongly ishmaelian theme. 

Thank you, mr mongoose. 

Ishmaelites are now saying - really? Of course! That's it, why didn't I get that? So it was TIG not tag, tug or teg!

  

The publisher informs me that several copies of the two anthologies, Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack were purchased during the run-up to Christmas. I hope that they got to the purchasers in time to pop into Christmas stockings - and I hope you warned the lucky recipients about the outrageous, eccentric, eclectic and hilarious nature of the material. And to have the ambulance on speed dial.