Resonance FM: Hooting Yard Podcasts

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Hooting Yard: Obsequies For Lars Talc, Struck By Lightning Pt. I Obsequies For Lars Talc, Struck By Lightning was published in an edition of twenty-five copies in 1994, under the Hooting Yard Press imprint and – save for a brief, rewritten, extract posted  here some years ago – has never again seen the light of day. It was the last piece of prose I completed before [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Little Stint jespák malý, Zwergstrandläufer, Dværgryle, Correlimos Menudo, pikkusirri, Bécasseau minute, Veimiltíta, Gambecchio comune, nishitounen, Kleine Strandloper, Dvergsnipe, biegus malutki, Pilrito-pequeno, Combatente, pobrežník malý, Småsnäppa, Mazaricu Nanu, S?rç?vari qumluq cüllütü, Ar sourouc’han bihan, Corriol menut, Redonell, Territ menut, Pibydd bach, Pibydd lleiaf, Premavera, malgranda kalidro, Playerito menudo, Väikerisla, väikerüdi, Txirri txikia, Dvørggrælingur, G ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Marzipan Wolf Next, acquire a large glob of marzipan. It should be at least the size, if not the shape, of an average adult wolf. If you are not sure what that is, make study of wolves, for example by combing through reference books, preferably illustrated, by watching informative documentary films at the local fleapit, or by [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Urgh. The newspaper cuttings are convincing forgeries, but forgeries nevertheless. By dint of the pincer-like precision of my research, if I mean pincer-like, and I think I do, I can reveal exclusively that the deliberate counterfeiting of details of Urgh the howler monkey’s biography served a malign purpose, but fortunately not one with cataclysmic world-juddering implications. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Depressed Horse Never Knew Saucepans. When faced with such quandaries I have stalked off into the deep dense dark woods of Woohoohoodiwoo and sought the counsel of the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman. That freakish crone is a dab hand in the arts of recovered memory syndrome, and more than once she has brought bubbling to the surface of my cranium material which [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: 10,000 Nails In The Coffin Of Imperialism. I would sing to you of Tarleton, of the gleets, of the balcony, if I could. If I could sing I would. But how can I sing, mouth crammed with pebbles, penned in a pound, atop the tor? And what an irony that it was Tarleton who bustled me hence, arms flapping, half blinding me [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Lobster’s Tune (Conclusion). When first this desire consumed me, I did not bother myself with such niceties. I might be at an elegant and sophisticated cocktail party, and I would take someone aside, steer them to a corner where we would not be overheard, and say: “Can I have your head? I want to take it across the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bashed On The Bonce With A Sap By A Copper Like Spandau Ballet, I bought a ticket to the world. I wish I had paid more attention at the counter, however, because there was a misprint – I hesitate to say whether it was accidental or deliberate – and what I had actually bought was a ticket to the wold. Now, I am as much [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: My Inner Glove Compartment. I thought I was getting on quite well, and was certainly showing no signs of delirium or derangement or discontent. Then I happened to mention the business to a colleague, who suggested that it was perhaps the contents of the inner glove compartment, the stuff I had crammed into it, with which I needed to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: (Two Broken) There was no sign of the twinkly-eyed ancient, but I saw the quantity surveyor, heading home from work. I accosted him, and told him I had got my lost rag back. I thought he would be pleased, but his eyes filled with tears, and he said: “What does it profit a man, that he regains [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Hop With Tongs No longer at a loose end, I tracked down, within my quarters, a pot and some soil. The soil was dry, so I added, from a spigot, a spot of water to endamp it, and I placed the pot of soil on a shelf. Then I pressed the bud into it, to reverse iceberg depth. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Sensible Quiz Time I am fairly sure that Dobson was at one time a member of his local Moorhen Appreciation Society. The out of print pamphleteer joined it for reasons we can only guess at, for as we know the space in the human brain devoted to ornithological matters was in Dobson’s case either utterly vacant or so [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Anniversary I was almost blind with tears, but that did not stop me thrusting the point of my poniard through the giant’s gigantic heart. Its foul impure giant’s blood gushed, splattering me from head to toe. It crashed to earth, writhed, and perished. I was in no fit state to sort out my business at the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Notes and Queries. News just in that weedy versifier Dennis Beerpint has been appointed Poet In Residence at Beppo Lamont’s Travelling Big Top Circus. Chief among his duties is to write a life in verse of the circus strongman, Lars Tax, also known as The Mighty Lars. So strong is Mr Tax that he has been known to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Rock n’ Pop News. It is not known how much money Dobson received for his poptart puffery. The records show that, although the swans-and-pebbles-related fine was paid in full, his gas supply was cut off on St Creak’s Day of that year, and not reinstated until the first day of Vice President Nixon’s visit to Venezuela, as recounted in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: An Evening of Lugubrious Music and LopSided Prose. Extended version of “An Evening of Lugubrious Music and Lopsided Prose” Recorded at Woolfson & Tay Bookshop 18/11/11. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Deckhand With Mop But what of Chamfer Ticktape himself? How did he paint, in swathes of brightly-coloured emulsion, the hideous countenance of the deckhand, without himself succumbing to gibbering, and to insanity? For years, the noted Royal Academician has refused to speak of his painting, referring all enquiries to his PR toady, a master of obfuscatory fol-de-rol. At [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Dislike of Inappropriate Buttons On Easter Sundays and other Christian festivals the pointyhead detectives experimented with divan-arrangements somewhere between orderly and chaotic. They had never been able to settle upon an optimum disposition, for they were only too aware that some crimes were best solved with the divans lined up in a row, or in a stellar pattern, while [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Tiny-Headed Boy. As dawn breaks, up the slope of the hill toils the village wolfman, with his bucket of slaughtered squirrels and hamsters and mice, food for the wolf. He empties the bucket at the foot of the old rugged cross and while the wolf gobbles down its breakfast, he strides in his wolfman’s boots to the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Maintenance of Reservoirs. The field in which the howler monkeys were recorded is, of course, a very different field from the squelchy, squelchy mud-strewn one in which the jamboree takes place when the Community Pole-Vaulting Collective and the Avant-Colliery Marching Band have crossed the bridge and successfully negotiated their way past the heavily-armed sentries. Drawn exclusively from the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Galvanic Batteries, Heads of Swans If the bandage is white, as is common, and the swan is white, as is common, the casual observer may not even notice that the embedding has taken place. That may or may not be important, depending upon the legal regulations obtaining in the jurisdiction. Some authorities take a dim view of the embedding of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Goblin Colour Codes We learn, for example, about the lives of the threesome before their retirement. There is Bim, at the random grim forge, fettling for a great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! And there is Bam, also at a random grim forge, also fettling. And Nat, too, at the next forge along the lane, and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Monkey-Annoyance Expert I banged my head on the baptismal font, but that was only the beginning of my troubles. The font was hewn from adamantine rock, and the water it contained, though of necessity holy water, was icy. When the priest slopped it on to my bashed head, I screamed at such a pitch that a stained [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Headline News. The Non-fictional St. Poppo (lance not pictured) “After the death of Mrs Hawker, he fell into a condition of piteous depression, and began to eat opium. He moped about the cliffs, or in his study, and lost interest in every thing… “He took it into his head that he could eat nothing but clotted cream. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Alphabet Soup They called him Blomqvist, and he was the village wrestler. He lived in a room above the post office. No other living being ever set foot in the room until the day Blomqvist died. They found him lying on his bed, as if he were asleep, but there was no doubt that he was dead, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Note On Gnomes. Because of his drooling, the slack-jawed dribbler was a man of few words. It was said that he expressed himself more fully in the waltz than he could ever manage with words. When he spoke, he slurred and slurped and his eyes grew wild. The fey ladies shuddered or swooned, and who can blame them? [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Hoof Print Advice i. Remain lying in bed, quite still, staring at the ceiling. Try to recall any dreams you may have had while you were asleep. Did any hooved beasts, such as goats or horses, feature in these dreams? If so, they were probably not dreams at all, and thus you have a preliminary explanation for the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Book Reviews. And hardly were the words out of his mouth than the impatient young hothead strode out of his chalet and down the mountainside to town, to buy a ream of sheet music paper and a biro. Crepusco settled back on the divan, by the oil heater, and devised a two-pronged strategy. The first prong was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Take One Weasel…. I squelched across the marsh, in driving rain, and linnets sang within my brain. There were no linnets to be seen, just crows, drenched crows, drenched crows. I lit my pipe and sucked, and heard the caw of a drenched crow. The rain was pelting down as I made my slopping way from marsh to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Further Spookiness At South Mimms. “I’m afraid I have never seen any of your plays,” said the glintist, “My work keeps me fantastically busy, and on the rare occasions I might be free to make a trip to the theatre, I often have to go to a kiosk on a seaside pier where a charlatan healer makes enigmatic passing movements [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: W to Z to South Mimms. Twas midnight as I crept through the graveyard. The sky was pitch black, the stars obscured by clouds. My Toc H lamp shed only meagre light, and I stumbled many times over the rough and ravaged ground. Somewhere an owl hooted. I hooted in reply, mischievously, for even in so macabre a circumstance I retained [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: P. to V. If it was shortly after dawn that you sank into your quagmire, bleary-eyed on a morning hike, you at least know that you have many hours of light ahead, and this knowledge should help you to keep your pecker up. After all, statistically, the longer the daylight, the more chance there is of a peasant [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: H to O   Over the years I have watched various crew members of ships, from Rear Admirals to barnacle scrapers, perform all sorts of baffling physical manoeuvres, and not once have I thought any of it fitted the definition of jiggery-pokery, except on one occasion when I was aboard a very sinister ship which sailed into a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A-H You shall knit tea-cosies and scarves and miscellaneous woolies, and at the very instant they are completed, they shall unravel and you will knit them again from scratch. From dawn until dusk and through the cold dark horrors of the night, you shall knit much like Sisyphus hopelessly pushing his boulder uphill. As he gaped [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Sword Of Wisdom The image intended to illustrate this pod-cast, a picture of two jars, failed to upload to the server. (This episode features  a weird crackling sound) Ahoy there, Frank! I thought you might be interested to hear about the little routine I have devised for myself to help me winkle out the deep and deeper meanings [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Your Ogsby Packaging. The very next day, a few miles inland in the awful little village of Gack, he killed a monkey-trainer named Perkins, and made such a racket while doing so that dozens of police cars screeched up to the hovel wherein the fell deed was done. The coppers formed a ring of steel around the hovel [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Lecture Delivered In The Big Tent At Hoon. Curpin tracked down reports of locust swarms. He honked twice, slipped beneath the sea, went to work on a huge pile of food, and tore up lettuce, his pouch unfolding. His rattling became a sizzling. Even the nearby gravel-crushers were keenly aware of Curpin’s bone finger ring, embedded in mud. Gently, in order not to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Looking For Love. In 1821, for unfathomable reasons, Jarvis Greasecollar’s star waned, and not a theatre in the land would stage, nor cobble, one of his productions. He fell out with Swausage, endured a mysterious calamity in yet another seaside town, and his wife ran off with a dapper gentleman of foreign extraction. Years later, she was to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: On Sawdust Bridge, Harangued. I tore up the few puny pages of prose I had written about hay in nosebags, and instead submitted to the magazine a piece about swill for pigs. Alas, later that day, listening to the news on the wireless in the clinic’s rumpus room, I learned that the skyscraper housing the offices of Beasts Of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Soutane-Attired Nemesis of Sea Monsters I might be forced to take refuge in the dingly dell hotel. In the normal run of things, of course, I avoid it. Sometimes, while gathering my nuts and fruits, I come close to the hotel car park, and hide behind a shrub. I have seen the major domo of the hotel striding purposefully across [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Abortive Pliny Now, imagine the scene. It was shortly after breakfast time on a cold and storm-tossed morning in the 1950s at the home of the twentieth century’s most magnificent pamphleteer. Dobson had eaten his bloaters. Marigold Chew had something eggy. They were still sitting at their breakfast table. Outside, hailstones were pinging. “Marigold, o my darling [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Vapours and Slime. Now, I was reluctant to march off to my nearest egg shop to buy the extra eggs I would need. For one thing, I had no idea how many eggs that might be. Also, what was I going to do with them all when my experiment was done? One can only eat so many eggs [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Yava Hoosita! Blötzmann’s interest in the alignment of tree clumps in the East Kent area was prompted not, surprisingly, by Tony Wedd’s important study of the alignment of tree clumps in the West Kent area, but by a stray reference in a yellowing old copy of the St Bibblybibdib’s Parish Magazine And Religious Tirade, where a writer [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Organised Fern Hunt Hunting animals is the sport of fools. Nearly all animals run away when pursued. Ferns, on the other hand, stay right where they are, so you can go crashing through thickets with much gusto, a determined jut to the jaw, every so often emitting cries of panic or revelation, or both, all the while safe [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Thieving Beerpint (Poetry Special). I shall sit down  / And eat sausages Thieving Beerpint Poultry Menace, Day One Poultry Yards Of The Grand Archdukes Poetry Masterclass Glad Tidings From Pointy Town Idiots Of The Marshes This episode was recorded on the 8th June 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: O! To Be In Pepinstow! Later, back in Pepinstow, I saw the Tundist fires burning. The Adepts were silent now, and ominous. I crept in shadows past my chalet, all the way past it until I reached the kiosk of the night soil man. It was empty, save for a coathanger on which hung a bright new uniform. I tried [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Bats Of Remorse To attract monkeys to create divertisements among the cakes and tea-strainers at your tea party, you will have to create the right conditions for them, and this is where a qualified monkey feng shui consultant proves a boon. They tend to charge quite high fees, and rarely accept payment in nuts, so be warned that [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bobnit Tivol: The Lost Interview. The peasant tramped about looking for his shears. He found them leaning against the side of the barn, rusty, rusty. “These will never do for clipping,” he muttered, and spat, but his goblin goaded him on. It whispered rustic lore into his ear. “The sun is boiling in the sky, clip your hedge while it is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Tiny, Lethal. But what was he doing in that remote estancia on the edge of the jungle for two weeks? He had neither pencil nor notepad with him, so he was certainly not working on a pamphlet. He shunned the few families who scrabbled a living in the village of Santa Eulalia, and when any of them [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Werewolf Tax. I found my star. On the third or fourth night aboard the tugboat, far from land, I noticed a flock of wereguillemots, disposed across the sky such that they formed an arrow, or directional pointing device, clearly leading me to a bright tiny speck. I howled and I set the engine a-chug on its last [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: What Is Wrong With Grooving? I had my pippy bag and my hiking apparel, and I had a handful of feed for any goats that might cross my path as I wended my way. The sky was blue, and I thought of Ruskin. Well, in truth I thought of both Ruskin and Letta Mbulu. I wondered, as I often have, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Oubliette Of Fops. Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with all 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Six Long Years Of Wittering ‘N’ Babble. Those of you familiar with the important Hooting Yard Book o’ Days will know that precisely six years ago today, the very first episode of Hooting Yard On The Air was broadcast on ResonanceFM. I will be celebrating by drinking a flask of aerated lettucewater and sacrificing a (vegan, marzipan) goat. Once upon a time, of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Terrible Fate Of Mrs. Sludge, The Medium. Thus the irascible chain-smoking coach took up lodgings at the edge of an ant farm, and spent hours upon hours every day drilling the ants in all sorts of sporty disciplines. So fantastic was his rapport with the tiny insects that they came to worship him as a god, one who wore a Homburg hat [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Zoist Spasms. I strode manfully over to the town gymnasium to throw medicine balls around to no apparent purpose and to spend a while on the simulated bobsleigh machine. At the corner, as luck would have it, I bumped into young Dagobert Stalin, but he was in a frantic hurry, rushing to some newsworthy incident, of which [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: About Ivan Clank. A hammer thumped thrice upon a panel indicated the good burghers had made a decision, and the townsfolk gathered in the square to hear it pronounced. The grubby man was to be coaxed into a tub of hot water, and scrubbed with soapy brushes, scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed and rinsed until all trace of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Duck In A Pond. I am minded to conduct enquiries into Dr Henry Hall Sherwood of New York, a man with “controversial electromagnetic theories” who “would become known for his ’savage rotary magnetic machine’ which he claimed could cure all manner of diseases from rheumatism to herpes and tuberculosis”. Gosh! A Duck In A Pond Two Snippets Chambers [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Hark! Back at the house, Dennis sat looking at his mother in her winding-sheet. He was perplexed that she had called him Ivan, for he had not put two and two together. He was soft in the head, and a worrier. If he was Ivan, he wondered, where was Dennis? He decided to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Shade Of Smart. Bonkers Maisie in her cart, trundling past the madhouse wall. Has she read The Intellectual Part by author Rayner Heppenstall? Yes she has, a hundred times, it is the only book she owns. She can act it out in mimes while juggling several traffic cones. She trundles ‘long the rutted lane, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: 77 Today. It is not, I think, generally known that the notorious killer Babinsky was also a man of letters. So the imminent publication of The Complete And Staggeringly Voluminous Correspondence Of The Notorious Killer Babinsky, in no fewer than forty volumes, is to be welcomed. Babinsky, it seems, when he could tear [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: One Thousand. It is at times like these a person’s thoughts turn to cake. It will have to be an enormous cake, to fit a thousand candles on to it. Think of all that burning wax! One Thousand The Behemoth Question The Blind Man As Poultry Inspector This episode was recorded on the 12th February 2010. A complete [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: When Mr. Key And Pansy Went Feral. (re-loaded) Mr. Key and Pansy Cradledew join Mr. Phil Minton’s Feral Choir for some knock-a-bout sonic japes involving exciting mouth noises. Mr Key Goes Feral When Mr. Key Went Feral Mr. Key writes: ‘Incidentally, and quite coincidentally, both Phil Minton and I have contributions due to appear in a forthcoming recipe book, to be sold for charity. I [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard (Supplemental): Mr. Key & Pansy Go Feral. Babbling prose into a microphone for half an hour every week is all very well, but occasionally one feels impelled to vent in a less… shall we say, prosaic manner. To this end, I was pleased (I think) to take part in a performance by Phil Minton’s Feral Choir . Incidentally, and quite [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: 104 Pamphlets (Out Of Print) To Vange! We set out, the champ, the widow, and me, at break of dawn, hoping to make Vange before nightfall. I knew little about my travelling companions. I had no idea, for example, of what the champ was a champion, nor did I know whose relict the widow was, nor for [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Philogiston Variations (Bouffant Redux Edition) Anniversary Directors Cut. To celebrate the publishmentation of Mr. Key’s new collection of  epic old prose We Were Puny, They Were Vapid we revisit The Philogiston Variations. Pickle your ‘O’ and away we go! This episode was recorded on the 14th January 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Tear-Stained Letters. Mainly dry, with sunny or clear periods and very cold. A few light snow showers are possible, especially across eastern parts, but any accumulations of snow will be small. On the whole tonight will be dry and frosty. Aminadab! Aminadab! Burn the pastille, Aminadab! Tear-Stained Letters Tolls And Jingles New Year A Bee Fact Rosh Sal Ber Yon Animal Magnetism Poets Of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: That Awful Mess At Sludge Hall Farm. In a cardboard box on a wooden shelf in a broom cupboard behind a door in a corridor on the ground floor of a shabby house on an ill-lit lane winding towards the sea in a land whipped by blizzards and gales, there is an old picture postcard, stuffed in among a jumble of papers [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Tull, Cloth, Eel. Cadmium! So soft, so ductile, so bluish-white, so bivalent, so high in fatigue resistance! And yet so toxic! Is there a better metal with which to electroplate your bird table? Tull, Cloth, Eel. Cadmium-Electoplated Bird Table Woolworth’s Is No More In The Slimy Feculence Battles Against Foes Thrills & Spills With Zig Et Puce This episode was recorded on the 10th December [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Five Years Ago. “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. Remember, too, the case of the distressed pig, solved by Special Agent Blot. The distressed pig was found in a rowing boat crossing Tantarabim Lake. Agent Blot swam out to it and fed it with nutritious cake. As the pig grew becalmed Agent Blot took [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: I Had A Hammer. I had a hammer. I hammered in the morning. I hammered in the evening all over this land. I hammered out danger. I hammered out a warning. I hammered out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land. They should have seen that coming. I Had A Hammer Municipal Monkey Vampires Soup [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: From The Diary Of Heliogabalus Monday. I celebrated the rite of the taurobolium, tossing my head to and fro among the castrated devotees of the Great Mother Goddess. I infibulated myself, and did all that the eunuch-priests are wont to do. Also decided to celebrate the rite of Salambo, with all the wailing and frenzy of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Ballad Of Sopwith Tim. He came in a Sopwith, his goggles were tight. He landed among us in dawn’s early light. O say can you see him in the airfield canteen, telling us of all the places he’s been? Widnes and Wivenhoe, a village called Splat – the latter’s in Cornwall but I’m sure you know that – Totnes [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Trip From Throm To Bosis The town of Throm is perhaps best known for its gorgeous sewers, with their chandeliers, Rococo ironwork railings, and jewel-encrusted access ladders. In spite of the magnificence of their sewers, the Thrompersons fought hard to win that official designation as a town. It is, after all, the size of a village, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Disfigured Nuncio I cast an eye over my visitor. He was horribly disfigured. Indeed, for a moment I thought he must have come into my chamber straight from one of Mr Lovecraft’s purpler passages. But then I recalled that Lovecraft’s works are fictions, and that his characters have no reality independent of the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Groovy Boffins in a groovelab high in the Swiss mountains have spent years – or is it mere days? – trying to isolate the Hooting Yard Groove, for the betterment of humanity, while Mrs Gubbins has been indefatigable in her attempts to express the essence of the groove in the form of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Googie ‘N’ Bee. The two most consistently popular search terms leading interweb hikers to swing open the gates of Hooting Yard, far ahead of all rivals, are bees and ectoplasm. Occasionally, some befuddled soul gets here after searching for bee ectoplasm. Another favourite, much to my delight, is Googie Withers, though the 92-year-old screen siren gets misspelled as [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Erk Gah. It is hard to think of an esoteric sect more hidden, more obscure, than the Erk Gah. We know virtually nothing of its membership, its ceremonies and rituals, its raiment and vestments, its perfumes, its symbols, its armaments cache, its hierarchy, its headgear, its idiosyncratic buttoning methods, its potions, its nostrums, its pomposity, its colour [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Black Perusing the shelves of my local branch of Periodicals & Other Ephemera R Us the other day, I noted the existence of a glossy magazine called Black Hair. On the cover was a photograph of a woman with black hair. Leafing through it, I saw it was stuffed full of other similar photographs, and although [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Memoir Of Stick Insect Island I had several reasons to sail across the Sound to Stick Insect Island. There were rumours of murder and mayhem and pagan sacrifice. My brother had made the crossing a fortnight before, and no word had come from him. My own homecoming was long overdue. And I wondered if the tiny post office still sold [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Goat God Catechism Is there anything more frightening than the goat god? No, there is not. Must one tremble when the goat god appears, looming from a cloud of foul inexplicable gas? Yes, one must tremble. How must one tremble? In awe and dread. Those Wednesday Potato Nights Goat God Catechism Gilliblat Recipe Time Brand New Goo In Search of Plunkett This episode was recorded on the 16th July [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress The wind was howling across the desolate moors. It was an incredibly howly wind, and they were almost unbelievably desolate moors. Such desolation has seldom been howled upon by wild winds anywhere, ever, throughout the records of time, since the unimaginably distant past when the moors were an alluvial plain across which roamed weird primitive [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Fatal Duckpond As far as I can ascertain, the second album by the band VRIL has been made without any bee involvement whatsoever. These eighteen new waxings by the group – now a quartet – form the soundtrack to the European arthouse film classic The Fatal Duckpond.. Seven hours long, black and white, and silent for large [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dixon of Dock Green Dixon went to Dock Green. It was a small patch of grass, hardly a lawn, at the edge of the dock. The dock itself was one where huge steamers came into port from faraway lands, carrying all sorts of exotic cargo. The cargo was mostly packed into wooden crates, which were winched from ship to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Abasement in a Basement Just as a bus is the best place for abuse, you should ideally perform abasement in a basement. There is something about the subterranean nature of the location which lends itself to the embrace of personal wretchedness. Abasement in a Basement The Stinerian Gnomes: An Introduction L’Homme qui Grogne Mops Held High Tonsured Buffoon This episode was recorded on the 6th [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Cow & Pins Every so often I receive letters from readers asking for background information on particular features of Hooting Yard. My usual practice is to ignore such enquiries and stuff them into a cardboard box, and to shove the cardboard box into a dark cranny. But sometimes I feel impelled to shine a torch into the cranny, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Kitchen Groanings I was mistaken, yesterday, to suggest that Dobson wrote a pamphlet entitled Kitchen Groanings, like the late eighteenth century work of the same name penned by an angry cook-wench or discontented housemaid. I was sure there was some kind of Dobson connection, and leapt to the most obvious thought, that it was yet another out [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Kitchen Groanings I was mistaken, yesterday, to suggest that Dobson wrote a pamphlet entitled Kitchen Groanings, like the late eighteenth century work of the same name penned by an angry cook-wench or discontented housemaid. I was sure there was some kind of Dobson connection, and leapt to the most obvious thought, that it was yet another out [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dismember that Heron “The terms of a carver be as here followeth. Break that deer – lesche (leach) that brawn – rear that goose – lift that swan – sauce that capon – spoil that hen – frusche (fruss) that chicken – unbrace that mallard – unlace that coney – dismember that heron – display that crane – [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dismember that Heron “The terms of a carver be as here followeth. Break that deer – lesche (leach) that brawn – rear that goose – lift that swan – sauce that capon – spoil that hen – frusche (fruss) that chicken – unbrace that mallard – unlace that coney – dismember that heron – display that crane – [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: With My Fife and my Drum With my fife and my drum I wandered in the hills. I tooted my fife and I banged my drum. This was why I was wandering in the hills, for I had been banished from town. My tooting and banging unnerved the good burghers, and the bad burghers too, and I was escorted to the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: With My Fife and my Drum With my fife and my drum I wandered in the hills. I tooted my fife and I banged my drum. This was why I was wandering in the hills, for I had been banished from town. My tooting and banging unnerved the good burghers, and the bad burghers too, and I was escorted to the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: “Strangle a pig and burn down the barn and doh-si-doh your partners!” It was a rallying cry, and in its wake pigs were strangled, barns were burned, and doh-si-dohs were essayed. How sweet the memory of those dances of my grandparents’ youth. I was not alive then of course, so I have no direct memory, but I recall, as an infant, sitting in a basket slung over [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: “Strangle a pig and burn down the barn and doh-si-doh your partners!” It was a rallying cry, and in its wake pigs were strangled, barns were burned, and doh-si-dohs were essayed. How sweet the memory of those dances of my grandparents’ youth. I was not alive then of course, so I have no direct memory, but I recall, as an infant, sitting in a basket slung over [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Card Index The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Card Index The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Curtains For Blavelpang Plump, crumpled, costive gumshoe Smedley Blavelpang was in a proper fix. It was the sort of fix private detectives tend to find themselves in. The wind had blown his hat clean away and his gun was jammed and he was trapped behind some bins in an alleyway and the rough tough thug he had been [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Curtains For Blavelpang Plump, crumpled, costive gumshoe Smedley Blavelpang was in a proper fix. It was the sort of fix private detectives tend to find themselves in. The wind had blown his hat clean away and his gun was jammed and he was trapped behind some bins in an alleyway and the rough tough thug he had been [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Confessions Of A Door-To-Door Monkey Salesman My adoptive parents perished in the Munich air disaster. They had won a raffle to attend the second leg of the European Cup quarter-final between Manchester United and Red Star Belgrade. It was the first time they had left me in sole charge of the pig farm. When the postie came up the lane with [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Confessions Of A Door-To-Door Monkey Salesman My adoptive parents perished in the Munich air disaster. They had won a raffle to attend the second leg of the European Cup quarter-final between Manchester United and Red Star Belgrade. It was the first time they had left me in sole charge of the pig farm. When the postie came up the lane with [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Branch Line Less Travelled (CORRECTED) Every now and then I receive letters from readers asking me to give some account of the geography of Hooting Yard and its hinterland. I have a standard reply to such requests, which is to say that through diligent study of the writings you could draw a map yourself. It would involve very close reading, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Branch Line Less Travelled Every now and then I receive letters from readers asking me to give some account of the geography of Hooting Yard and its hinterland. I have a standard reply to such requests, which is to say that through diligent study of the writings you could draw a map yourself. It would involve very close reading, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Branch Line Less Travelled32 Every now and then I receive letters from readers asking me to give some account of the geography of Hooting Yard and its hinterland. I have a standard reply to such requests, which is to say that through diligent study of the writings you could draw a map yourself. It would involve very close reading, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Tunnel Vision Episode 3 of 10: Frank Key. Frank Key shuffles through a series of tunnels beneath West Dulwich to lament the forgotten histories of The Puckington Tunnels and Pointy Town sewers. Tunnel Vision is a new series recorded entirely in London’s sewer system. Producer/presenter Bruno Rinvolucri duped a collection of writers, musicians, activists and academics into wading [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Tunnel Vision Episode 3 of 10: Frank Key. Frank Key shuffles through a series of tunnels beneath West Dulwich to lament the forgotten histories of The Puckington Tunnels and Pointy Town sewers. Tunnel Vision is a new series recorded entirely in London’s sewer system. Producer/presenter Bruno Rinvolucri duped a collection of writers, musicians, activists and academics into wading [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Boiled Black Broth and Cornets I paid a visit to my friend Becke Beiderbix in her fortress in the mountains. We had known each other since childhood, growing up on a postwar housing estate, a workaday world of compactness and convention. But Becke was always a singleminded girl who followed her own strange star, and while the rest of us [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Boiled Black Broth and Cornets I paid a visit to my friend Becke Beiderbix in her fortress in the mountains. We had known each other since childhood, growing up on a postwar housing estate, a workaday world of compactness and convention. But Becke was always a singleminded girl who followed her own strange star, and while the rest of us [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: By Hot Air Baloon to Hoon We travelled to Hoon by hot air balloon. I took my harpoon, and impaled a wolf that was roaming the woodland below us. We hauled the wolf into the basket of our balloon, by a long and sturdy rope that was tied to the end of the harpoon. We arrived in Hoon, two balloonists and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: By Hot Air Baloon to Hoon We travelled to Hoon by hot air balloon. I took my harpoon, and impaled a wolf that was roaming the woodland below us. We hauled the wolf into the basket of our balloon, by a long and sturdy rope that was tied to the end of the harpoon. We arrived in Hoon, two balloonists and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Tiny Enid and the Dustbin of History The sun was sinking when Tiny Enid arrived at a compound surrounded by a security fence. She smiled to herself at the thought that, though she may have neglected to bring mountaineer’s rope and clambering hooks, she never went anywhere without her razor sharp security fence slicing shears. Dipping into her pippy bag to get [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Puckington Tunnels It was a big fort, with delightful crenellations, and many flags, and it had the shiniest portcullis outside of Navarre. This was Fort Hoity, sister fort of Fort Toity, and an extremely interesting fort in its own right. For underneath Fort Hoity ran the Puckington Tunnels, those tunnels you may have come across in your [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Inky Puck Stampings In his later years, Blodgett amassed a collection of inky puck stampings, kept in an album bound in the starch-stiffened fleece of a lamb. The fleece was spotted with unexplained bloodstains which Blodgett made no attempt to remove. He could have used a patent bloodstain eradication spray goo as manufactured by Don Federico’s Royal And [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Vanessa Redgrave And The Revolutionary Space Cadets The Cow & Pins was a singularly squalid tavern, much frequented by human scum. Once, long ago, it had been a coaching inn, but the construction of an efficient canal system destroyed the coach trade, and bargees passing by aboard their barges upon the canal were a salubrious lot who drank tea from flasks and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Nebuchadnezzar Lives Bluestocking polymath Dot Tint has a new book out next month, a magisterial study of aquatic birds entitled Dot’s Ducks. There are two very curious things about this hefty hardback, and I think it right that you are made aware of them before shelling out your cash for a copy. Judith And Holofernes Dot’s Ducks Spillage On Cambric Lars [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Bruno La Poubelle If you have a dinghy, be sure to maintain it properly. Like all seagoing craft, dinghies can suffer from wear and tear which, if allowed to continue unchecked, will imperil their ability to remain afloat, especially in choppy seas or when sucked into a maelstrom. Mr Bewg’s Reference The Lost Lozenge Dingy Maintenance Blind Men And Ostriches The Fishmonger’s Prayer This [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Monk’s Rhubarb Timothy appears, & flies come-out. Mrs Snooke’s Tortoise This episode was recorded on the 26th December 2008. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Monk’s Rhubarb Timothy appears, & flies come-out. Mrs Snooke’s Tortoise This episode was recorded on the 26th December 2008. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Aerated Lettucewater There was once a woodcutter who had a burning sense of injustice. He dwelt in a cottage deep in the forest, where there was plenty of wood for him to cut. A day’s walk to the west was the cottage of a charcoal burner, and a day’s walk to the east was the hovel of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Aerated Lettucewater There was once a woodcutter who had a burning sense of injustice. He dwelt in a cottage deep in the forest, where there was plenty of wood for him to cut. A day’s walk to the west was the cottage of a charcoal burner, and a day’s walk to the east was the hovel of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Pectoral Splat is a tiny, stricken village in Cornwall, and it was here, on a muggy summer’s day in 19–, that a peasant pushing his barrow of countryside filth along a lane was astonished to encounter a small child roaring and spitting and growling and scrabbling in the muck. Its gender was indeterminate, but its savagery [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Pectoral Splat is a tiny, stricken village in Cornwall, and it was here, on a muggy summer’s day in 19–, that a peasant pushing his barrow of countryside filth along a lane was astonished to encounter a small child roaring and spitting and growling and scrabbling in the muck. Its gender was indeterminate, but its savagery [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Henchmen Are From Mars, Damsels Are From A Girly Planet Prince Fulgencio had a heart of stone and his palace was a palace exceeding glum. No, no, it was not a palace, it was a castle, turreted and towered, with many flags and banners flying, every one of them showing blasphemous heraldic devices. All sorts of abominations featured on those flags, from unicorns with five legs [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Henchmen Are From Mars, Damsels Are From A Girly Planet Prince Fulgencio had a heart of stone and his palace was a palace exceeding glum. No, no, it was not a palace, it was a castle, turreted and towered, with many flags and banners flying, every one of them showing blasphemous heraldic devices. All sorts of abominations featured on those flags, from unicorns with five legs [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Downmarket Rags You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are the sort of weedy milksop who gets sand kicked into your face by musclebound beach bullies of pronounced homoerotic tendencies. The search for the hero must be addressed with rigour, and you must not allow yourself to be distracted. That is why [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Downmarket Rags You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are the sort of weedy milksop who gets sand kicked into your face by musclebound beach bullies of pronounced homoerotic tendencies. The search for the hero must be addressed with rigour, and you must not allow yourself to be distracted. That is why [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Mail Order Mannlicher-Carcano Sniper’s Rifle If you are planning to introduce the phrase “let the cat out of the bag” into a conversation, you can give your words a weightier punch by having a bag with a cat in it, ready to be released at the right moment. This is a variant on the argument from demonstration, and when we [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Mail Order Mannlicher-Carcano Sniper’s Rifle If you are planning to introduce the phrase “let the cat out of the bag” into a conversation, you can give your words a weightier punch by having a bag with a cat in it, ready to be released at the right moment. This is a variant on the argument from demonstration, and when we [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Foppish Lassitude It was long believed that Preen wrote the Four Last Songs in his deathbed, out on a balcony in the mountains, while in the final ravages of tuberculosis. New research shows that in fact he composed these towering pieces on horseback, while riding along various clifftop paths, and it was his horse that was tubercular. Armed [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Foppish Lassitude It was long believed that Preen wrote the Four Last Songs in his deathbed, out on a balcony in the mountains, while in the final ravages of tuberculosis. New research shows that in fact he composed these towering pieces on horseback, while riding along various clifftop paths, and it was his horse that was tubercular. Armed [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Eggy Wanderlust Slow botany developed as a reaction against all those people who go galumphing about the countryside, across fields, through copses and spinneys and extensive forbidding woodland, or indeed through jungles teeming with exotica, and are forever shouting �Oh look! See the serried ranks of campion and bladderwort dotted among the bracken over yonder!� or �Gosh! [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Eggy Wanderlust Slow botany developed as a reaction against all those people who go galumphing about the countryside, across fields, through copses and spinneys and extensive forbidding woodland, or indeed through jungles teeming with exotica, and are forever shouting “Oh look! See the serried ranks of campion and bladderwort dotted among the bracken over yonder!” or “Gosh! [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Goat-physiology Monitoring Mechanism I have been wondering if it is time for Hooting Yard to obtain a kitemark.� Readers from overseas will wonder what on earth I am babbling about, so let me explain. Every single person in this country, man, woman and child, upon seeing a little picture of a kite, knows viscerally that whatever it is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Goat-physiology Monitoring Mechanism I have been wondering if it is time for Hooting Yard to obtain a kitemark.  Readers from overseas will wonder what on earth I am babbling about, so let me explain. Every single person in this country, man, woman and child, upon seeing a little picture of a kite, knows viscerally that whatever it is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Diligent And Miserable When the cows come home they may be disconcerted to find you in their meadow, with your tilted head, and some of them may become fractious. Fractious cows can be dangerous, so it will help if you have your acolyte armed with some sort of cow-protection device. This might be made of corrugated cardboard, or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Diligent And Miserable When the cows come home they may be disconcerted to find you in their meadow, with your tilted head, and some of them may become fractious. Fractious cows can be dangerous, so it will help if you have your acolyte armed with some sort of cow-protection device. This might be made of corrugated cardboard, or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Sextants And Astrolabes Jean-Paul Sartre�s trilogy The Roads To Freedom has fallen out of fashion somewhat � as if that mattered � yet it remains a classic. But for a book with a bit more existentialist heft, I recommend Pebblehead�s bestselling paperback The Roads To Jaywick. That blighted, benighted, dilapidated seaside town, has of course, provided fodder for [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Voodoo Pigs I do not know who awaits me in the upper chamber, although I now know that whoever it is will half expect me to be carrying a wafer. I can use the filthiness of my gloves as an excuse for not doing so. It is an excuse I have flourished on many occasions, not always successfully. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Hideous Bat-god Fatso Ordinarily, when we think of harpies we think of Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno, or as she is sometimes known, Podarge, the three sisters of Greek myth, bird-women who kept stealing, and befouling, food from Phineus and were generally vicious, violent and cruel. Tennyson called them “These prodigies of myriad nakednesses, / And twisted shapes of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Tony Buzan After I posted the piece entitled Denktash Fugue Syndrome, in which mention is made of Mrs Gubbins and her knitted tea cosies, I was deluged with mail from younger readers who complained that they had no idea what I was talking about. The general tone of these missives was along the lines of �Oi, Mr [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Lugubrious Dismay Without wishing to generate further controversy over what is, in any case, a pointless and trivial matter, I should add that I have recently completed a lengthy work, at fifteen volumes just one book short of Sabine Baring-Gould�s Lives Of The Saints. It is a comprehensive study, with lots of illustrations and diagrams, of all [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Forty Years Of Hell In A Bauxite Mine Bring me a cuppet of foaming grog! And bring me some rags to mop up the spillage! Bring me a lantern to light my way through the gruesome lanes of your gruesome village! Me And My Monkeys A Talk On Dobson In The Bird-loft For Flute Accompaniment This episode was recorded on the 17th July 2008. A complete transcript of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Van Bronckhorst�s Syndrome Slipping out of a den of vice through a side door, slinking with surprising elegance along a night alley thick with the leavings of debauchery, he whistled Oh Danny Boy, attracting the attention of police officers. Threatened with truncheons and prosecution, he turned upon those who would do him harm a basilisk stare, and faced them [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Executive Seating Pod In a thicket, with a compass, I am thinking about blubber. I use blubber for my candles. I�m the captain of a whaler. Some use tallow, I use blubber. It gets smoky in my cabin. I�m not in my cabin now. As I said, I�m in a thicket. I�m on shore leave for a fortnight. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Riding A Wild Horse More than twenty years ago, I wrote a short piece in which I described being hunched among shimmerings. Looking back, it occurs to me that I didn�t really know what I was talking about. I was just blathering. I often blathered in those days, both vocally and when doing my scribblings. I think I was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Peanuts And Hazelnuts One has only to consider the records broken by Bobnit Tivol to recognise him for the superb sprinter he was. Leafing through old athletics almanacks, his name appears again and again and again, invariably in capital letters, annotated by one, two, or even three stars, at the top of every list. They say he had [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - Part Two Part Two of a reading from Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - a pamphlet (out of print) published in 1991 by the Malice Aforethought Press. Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - PartTwo This episode was recorded on the 5th June 2008. For more information please visit Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - Part One Part One of a reading from Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - a pamphlet (out of print) published in 1991 by the Malice Aforethought Press. Danny Blanchfowler, A Life In Football - Part One This episode was recorded on the 29th May 2008. For more information please visit Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Nightjars Attack Cattle 32. If you eat roasted swallow, you are likely to be attacked by dragons. Sixty Unassailable Facts About Birds This episode was recorded on the 22nd May 2008. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Pebblehead�s Twaddle I am very pleased to announce that the latest episode in the Grizzled Old Fool series of multi-platform cultural interventions has been released. Grizzled Old Fool At The Haberdashery sees the grizzled old fool going to a haberdashery to buy buttons and cloth and pins. As usual, he is chewing a plug of tobacco and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Four Leatherette Corner Flaps The USS Milquetoast Jesuit is sponsored by L�Oreal, and is powered by light-reflecting booster technology, just like Andi MacDowell�s hair. Captain Biff is contractually bound to use various L�Oreal hair products, but if he had his way he would smear his ginger mop with grease from the engine room. He is that kind of captain. When [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Legend Of The Golden Pig The circumstances in which I first heard the legend of the golden pig were oddly similar to those of the Sermon on the Mount. Crushed in a multitude, I followed a beardy man up on to a hillock, and sat down and listened to him speak� well, more or less. There were two or three [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind The Panel Dobson wrote extensively during the period when he was hunkered down in a janitorium. The key pamphlets from this time were collected in a compendium and published as a thick paperback with a garish cover design suitable for sale at airport bookstalls. It is thought to be the only instance where Dobson�s name was embossed [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Poop Deck Vampires Captain Cake had gone to sea in a battered and leaking ship. He drank his grog from a bakelite cup. When he walked upon the orlop deck he sang in vulgar Latin, and every morning he made the sailors pray at Matins. The bo’sun had a voodoo doll pierced with many pins. But Captain Cake had [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Duffel Coat Cuffs Dear Mr Key : I was minding my own business, sitting on my bench in the attic room of the Mercy Home For Abandoned Infants Made Of Wood, when my attention was drawn to your article entitled Wooden Child And Fiery Serpent And Trees. I should at once make it clear that I am a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : The Imperious Mother Of Xerxes My temper did not improve as I lumbered slowly into town. There seemed to be not a single street, building, lamp-post or duckpond that had not been hijacked by the Tourist Board for its counterfeit history. Even when I popped into a snackbar for elevenses I could not escape. Dobson’s Swat Team Pilgrimage To Pointy Town Quotation from [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Fat Horse Brain Media Tiny Enid knew all there was to know about the capture of ostriches. As we sat together gulping down tumblers of lukewarm tap water, she gave me some tips. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_03_27.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : By Aerostat to Hooting Yard - Part 2 What an old slowcoach I was! - so busy rooting around in my haversack that I did not use my eyes. Mopsa was right. I followed her pointing finger and saw a tremendous brickish portal, ornamented with lozenged carvings of quicklime, bilberry and glunt. I had reached my destination. Somewhere behind those gates lurked Burble, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : By Aerostat to Hooting Yard - Part 1 It had been two years since one of Dobson’s communiques had uprooted me from my rut and catapulted me into frantic adventure; three years before that I had been sent on a mission, ranging over four continents; the year before that embroiled in a world-shattering plot; and there had been at least half a dozen [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : The Bl�tzmann Technique Trawling through the various biographical documents which survive, I have found no indication that Tiny Enid ever professed any religious impulses whatsoever, nor, for that matter, any more broadly spiritual leanings. Indeed, all accounts agree that she was a severely practical type of heroic infant, never more essentially herself than when solving very concrete problems, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Unaccustomed Competence Rags, pumps, the sea, and crime. Those are my areas of hard-earned expertise. I learned what little I know in the school of rags and pumps and the sea and crime, that is to say, in everyday, unlettered learning, in the town square of a foul and vinegary seaside resort, under torrential rain, listening, rapt, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : The Helmet of a Conquistador Munching a whelk, I turned my attentions to the diagrams themselves. They were fearfully complicated. I am no architect, and at first all I could make out were miriad lines meeting at angles and criss-crossing each other seemingly at random. Most of the diagrams had been subjected to revision, and there was much evidence of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium I have never been a fan of comic books, nor have I developed a taste for graphic novels. I can admire the skill and inventiveness, but somehow I can�t drum up genuine enthusiasm. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_December_13th_2007.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Jubilate Agno Jubilate Agno is a long poem by Christopher Smart. It was written between 1758 and 1763, during which time Smart was incarcerated in Mr Potter�s private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He had been admitted there after a stay in St Luke�s Hospital for the Insane, where he had been sent due to a religious mania [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Dutch Kleptomaniac Stamp Collector At the end of 1967 I met my penfriend Doris, who I had been writing to for three years. We fell in love, and were engaged on November 1st. Eight days later, from a bus in her home town of Blackburn, Doris saw a silvery UFO. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_December_6th_2007.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Frizzy-haired Minstrel �Fear not, nipper!� she cried, �I am Tiny Enid and I have alerted the Air Sea Rescue Station at St Bibblybibdib to your sorry plight by attaching a message to the leg of a cumulet. The bird is flying its little heart out even as we speak, and soon a lovely big lifeboat will scud [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Joie De Bogs Regular readers know that my grasp of matters ornithological is second to none, so it is only fitting that I have been asked to compile an anthology of fictional works with the word �owl� in the title. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_22nd_November_2007.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Snackbar Hooligans This was not the first time I had been given a pancake hint at a seaside resort, and as I headed off towards the steep steps up to a lawn and a crazy golf facility, I cast my mind back to an earlier occasion. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_15th_November_2007.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Pudding Flaps A while ago I wrote about hiking pickles, and today I want to address the equally important topic of pudding flaps. Flaps about pudding are rarer than they once were, chiefly because puddings play a less critical role in our diets than used to be the case. Time was when no meal was innocent of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Reinvigorating The Citizenry Whooper swans whooped on the airport pond. Beyond it, by the grain silo, the airport squirrel skittered and twitched, as if terrified. But it was on home ground, and scared of nothing. As with all squirrels, its twitching was merely the outward sign of its high metabolic rate. A path led from the grain silo [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bashing Biscuit Tins If you were fortunate enough to be hanging around with Blodgett on a Thursday morning in the middling years of the last century, you would as likely as not have been witness to a display of rare skill. For it was Blodgett�s endearing habit in those days, on Thursday mornings, to bash out various national [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Numan Question A generation ago, the aeroplane pilot and sage Numan asked �Are friends electric?� It was pertinent then, and is perhaps more so now. Over the years, many thinkers have grappled with Numan�s question, but it is fair to say that none has been able to give a satisfactory answer. Much publicity was generated when Pilbrow [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Farmyard Slurry To those among the gathered peasants who were existentialists familiar with Sartre, it was apparent that Bonkers Maisie was plucking phrases from the book at random. To the rest, the words took on a haunting grandeur. Some wept. All were transfixed. The Huffington Post Tidy Is As Tidy Does Bonkers Maisie The Sick Pig Himmelfarb Boot Bath This episode of Hooting Yard [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Jean-Claude Unanugu If you spend a bit of time thinking about the matter, it becomes apparent that human ingenuity has created a myriad of pastes. At one end of the spectrum are thick pastes, tacky to the touch, and at the other are pastes so runny that they are akin to goo. There are other ways of thinking [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Drainpipe Trousers In the old town of Plovdiv, Ugo plopped his pod onto a stool. Ugo�s ma said, �Ugo, why are you using a pod instead of a jar?� Ugo�s ma was blind, but she knew that the plop of Ugo�s pod was different to the plop of his jar. �Oh, ma,� said Ugo, �My jar is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Legendary Department Store It was pale and fierce, gulping down a bowl of soup. I wondered if it was Jah, come to deliver me from Babylon, but I have a very shaky grasp of Rastafarianism, so I cast that thought unto the winds. The Pabstus Tack Trilogy Pale And Fierce A Byword For Utter Gorgeousness Pebblehead Versus Pebblehead This episode of Hooting Yard [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Glassy-eyed Noodlehead I think we were meant to see the captain as a kind of Ahab figure, obsessed and mad as well as sinister, but for me this effect was flawed by the fact that it was a rented tugboat. Bagshaw/Shawbag did not own it. Every week he had to slip some coinage into the waiting palm [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Local Gaar-pot Drinking Hut Autumn. Shipwreck. Curtains. Exile. Frost. Balconies. Pandaemonium. Hedgerows. Banisters. Carpets. Hinges. Remembrance. Hair. Custard. Dribble. Fanfares. Dampness. Bauxite. Trousers. Canals. Boskage. Lasciviousness. Tunics. Spigots. Iron. Cranks. Floozies. Doppelgangers. Tin. Bales. Agony. Loss. Lust. Love. Crack. Bang. Crunlop. Lars Talc is dead. A reading from Characters; or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons by Sir [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Whirling Tangle Of Peasants “Now and again, it will do you a power of good to spend a Wednesday morning tramping along a high ridge, blowing a trumpet and waving a banner. If you can persuade others to join you, so much the better. It will not matter if you are tuneless and raggle-taggle - the experience itself can [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : A Man Without A Ditch We all know that there was an age known as the Epoch of Snares, but it is surprising how little is generally known about it. This was a time when giant badger-like beings roamed the hills of the earth, when the oceans were deeper, darker, and more terrifying than they are now, and when only [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Crime-fighting Chops O! Savage & vile & pink & bloated thing! Curs’d uncanny globule of despair! Monstrous, too! So pale & shuddering! Its gleaming talons clawing at my hair! . Hast this being come t’ announce my doom? Its head is like a chaffinch or a gull. It has been sent by Doctor Bogenbroom, Invoked by minstrel-wizards Jethro Tull. Quotation from Shamanism In Siberia by MA [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars Hooting Yard is excited (possibly overexcited) to announce publication of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, a decisively sensible novella of high adventure, derring-do, and baffling conspiracies. Prior knowledge of arcane philatelic imponderables is useful, but not necessary. The book also contains two shorter pieces, one of which features mute blind magnetic love monkeys. Far [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Particularly Toothsome Marmalade I shall go. I shall bestride my horse that is known as the Big Frightening Horse That Gallops, and you shall watch us vanish in the dust as we ride into the sunset, heading for the huge and terrifying fiery Mountains of Awfulness. Old Farmer Frack “He Which Is Filthy, Let Him Be Filthy Still” True Adventures Of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Goose Grease And Lavender From the lych-gate of St Bibblybibdib�s, looking westward, on a clear day one can see the top of the Bl�tzmann mast, with its cherry and dun pennants. Turning to the east, the prospect is of fields rippling with wheat and rhubarb and hollyhocks and stinkwort, punctuated by ha-has and the occasional scarecrow. No wild jabbering pigs [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Embedded With Floral Motifs Dobson�s Six Lectures On Fruit were among the most highly-regarded of his works, held in an esteem that the contemporary reader finds unfathomable. Revisiting these pamphlets, it swiftly becomes apparent that Dobson has no idea what he�s talking about. The revised view of the Lectures is put best by one upstart young Dobson scholar, who [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard : Cramp Medication I stared at the cows, and the cows stared back. They showed no sign of letting me pass. And then it dawned on me that they must have been sent as emissaries to stop me returning to the prog rock bewilderment home where Primrose tended to ghouls. The cows were trying to save me from becoming [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Beam Of Fantastic Glee There was a heroic bus driver, and his name was Kim Fat Goo. He drove his bus through puddles. He drove it straight and true, though he swerved if he saw a duck or a pig or an infant human tiny or a succubus or an incubus as he steered towards the briny. He drove [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Black Gold Green Crushed Crepe Hat Miles away, Dobson was smoking his pipe and lackadaisically paying out the wool, hand over hand. Suddenly, he felt it jerk, and held on tight. And then he was yanked free of the thorny brambly creeping greenery rife with puffy spiders and venomous beetles and dragged across a wasteland of fields and gravel pits and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Ruritanian Princedom �Hearken ye, stooped mendicant at my gate! I am Good King Wenceslas, and I am looking out, and I can see you, poor and shivering in your rags, for the snow is deep and crisp and even. There are not even any tracks in the frozen white expanse, such as would be made by wolves or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Interrogated By Interrogators The out-of-print pamphleteer had a deep and abiding reluctance to pay for gas, and often considered living somewhere powered entirely by electricity, or the wind or the sun, or indeed existing without being dependent upon any source of energy whatsoever. But, as Marigold Chew has noted, rail as Dobson might, he was drawn inexorably to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Crapwing One day, after a huge breakfast, Ignapfando had a total eclipse of the heart, just like that songstress whose name escapes me. He did not look as if it was happening. Indeed to the untrained eye Ignapfando looked as if he was asleep, rather than in the throes of convulsive emotional turmoil accompanied by strident [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Science Does Not Rest From bulkhead to poop-hatch, instructions are being shouted back and forth by the ship's crew. The mighty sun is gleaming bronze. Flags are flying and the sky is alive with auks and terns and guillemots. Below decks in the gloomy cabin, the two men reluctantly greet each other. This was the historic moment when Blodgett met [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Adept Of Goon Fang It has to be said that most of the inhabitants of O'Houlihan's Wharf are not worth writing about. They are, with few exceptions, a grey and insipid bunch. One of those exceptions, however, is the pedant from whose pen streams a series of righteous nostrums, or possibly nostra, regularly sent outinto the world, or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Discombobulate The Grizzled Marine Person Lightning flashed and thunder roared. Up in the playroom, still cowering behind the arras, the Infanta Gertrude was startled to receive a message on her metal tapping machine. It was from Professor Sigismundo, the wild-haired, wild-eyed boffin who had been banished from the princedom a year before, and who was now based at an important [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Little Alphonso The Memory Man Fooling around in Didcot, Yaw found some bones. Those bones were Bong's bones.Belt's matron ate his cheese. Yaw muttered. He fell about in fits. At the waterworks, Belt broke corks. His elk was in a tent. It looked like Bong. Bread rolls and snacks were stacked in crates. Yaw put them by his flask. He [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Splendid Buzzy Insects So, yesterday it happened that I was accompanied by this Boswellboswell person. There I was, standing on the bridge in the rain, humming, and peering over across the fields to where the phlox and pansies and pinks, the hellebore and hollyhocks, the marigolds, verbascum and charlock and mimosa, spurge, gorse and erica, the lupins, the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: When Is The Feast Day Of St. Mungo? .A PoemAn Abandoned ZooBilgegrew's BibleThis episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 15th November 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key's Hooting Yard website, and the perfect Hooting Yard On The Air companion Befuddled By Cormorants is available for purchase. Photo by Meatshield.Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_On_the_Air_-_November_15th_2006.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Graveyard Poets Of Pointy Town Imagine you are in Ancient Greece, taking a stroll on Mount Parnassus. One of the Gods of Greek mythology suddenly appears in front of you. Imagine too that you are not of a placid and thoughtful nature (as I am sure you are) but a temperamental hothead prone to violence. Surprised by the sudden appearance of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Rancorous Squeegee Goblin This episode of Hooting Yard On The Air contains the story 'Ice Chaos' which was written including words sponsored by listeners, in aid of raising funds for Resonance FM.Now, it has been pointed out to me more than once that I am hardly qualified to talk about extreme weather conditions, as the only weather we [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Terrifyingly Pale Fists I was sent some tickets in the post yesterday, as a special treat. I know that Tim the radio meteorologist says that Thursday will be a day of driving rain and howling gales, and I know that it will be the fourth day of our fast, and we will be famished, but I am determined [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Buttercups And Tod How To Eat Mashed Potatoes Next To A Lighthouse Tiny Enid Extinguishes A Volcano Those Gubernatorial Bells In Loopy Copse Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Pageantry The Taxonomy Of Ducks, Swans & Geese Is In A State Of Flux This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 4th October 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Befuddled By Cormorants A treasury of bedtime tales for pallid and sickly infants, Befuddled By Cormorants is a collection of fifty two stories from Hooting Yard On The Air, Frank Key's acclaimed radio show on Resonance FM. How I Plunged Into The Bottomless Viper-Pit Of Gaar Misprints Frustum, Tang, Sluice Gods Befuddled By Cormorants is available for purchase in print and digital [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: C is for Pol Pot "It was the middle of the night, and there was no moon, or I should say the moon was hidden by monstrous black clouds, so it was very, very dark. Nonetheless, one would have thought the thief who clambered over a fence to steal things from my back garden would have carried a torch or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Geological Upheavals "Far, far away, there is a galaxy of shattered stars, stars crumpled and curdled and destitute, and there is a planet tucked in among these sorry stars, a tiny pink planet of gas and water and thick foliage, and tucked in among the fronds and creepers and enormous leaves of this foliage lie millions of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bag Quandary "There. Now, one consequence of lying abed groaning and whimpering in the throes of neurasthenic horrors is a disinclination to write. Some might choose to call this writer's block, or even idleness, but they know not whereof they speak. At least one acquaintance made this accusation in the past fortnight. As I tossed and turned [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Banished from the Palace "Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and, though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one had come on it silent upon a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Absurd Mancunian Polymath "Now and again, it will do you a power of good to spend a Wednesday morning tramping along a high ridge, blowing a trumpet and waving a banner. If you can persuade others to join you, so much the better. It will not matter if you are tuneless and raggle-taggle - the experience itself can [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Pang Hill and Blister Lane. There is something very weird about this spinney, but I have a toothache, so I am oblivious to the weirdness. I have come to the spinney at the suggestion of my dentist. She is a so-called "new dentist", one of a growing band of revolutionary tooth interventionists who have torn up the rule book. "Go home," [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Foamy Potation. Regular readers will have gathered that the bulk of the prose in Hooting Yard is the result of many, many hours of painstaking research. Before writing Pipistrelle Pursuivant, for example, I needed to know a lot more about heraldic bats than I did when I woke up that morning. Indeed, I had much to learn [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Lineated Tiger Heron. A special edition of Hooting Yard this week. This is a kind of list programme, as in lists; L I S T, and it's dedicated to Jed Fadhley and to other little tinies that need to be lulled to sleep.A list of 5 film directors, 2 jazzmen, 1 astronomer, 1 newsreader, 34 stars of stage, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Inexplicable Barn Collapses. There is great disparity in the fiendishness of farmyard fiends, and some diabolists have argued that Beelzebub treated the whole matter with an uncharacteristic lack of diabolic concentration. For every farmyard that is stricken by an energetic fiend, there are many more that can pass for years, even decades, in untroubled bucolic peace. But of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A guide to Orbin Linseed's great novel. For those of you interested in such things, this story was first published many years ago in an addition of 8 copies. Each of the copies was in a ring-binder, it was hand-written - and its an alphabetical story - and each of the letters was hand-illuminated in watercolour. The Brink of Cramp This episode of Hooting [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: B For Bim Brethren, we find ourselves, today, in a village in China. Perhaps some would feel inclined to ridicule rather than applaud the patience of a poor Chinese woman who tried to make a needle from a rod of iron by rubbing it against a stone. We may scoff and laugh and snicker like rude and common [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Extra-sensitive Roseate Bellerephon System A reading from the very rare and highly prized book by Frank Key 'Twitching And Shattered'. Forty Visits to the Worm Farm - Parts 1 to 20 This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 24th May 2006. Frank Key's Hooting Yard website. Photo by macop. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_May_24th_06.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb Trellis was mere figment, vapour. He appeared to different people at different times as a sort of phantom. He was a tabula rasa, on to which those who met him inscribed their dreams, their yearnings, their hallucinations. All, that is, except Blodgett, in whose presence Trellis took on a terrifying reality. He would snivel, and Blodgett [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Potato Cyst Eelworm Doctor Cack was the foremost potato scientist of his day. He rented a disused Leaking Building in the grounds of the House, together with a number of surrounding huts, in which he and his team of top flight tuberologists lived and worked. Most of their unbearably exciting scientific equipment was located in the Leaking Building, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Lactose-Intolerant Nitroglycerine Boffin Intensive and scrupulous new biographical research on Old Halob, the crusty and cantankerous sporting legend who was for many years the coach and mentor of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, has revealed an amazing fact. (I think that sentence really ought to have an exclamation mark at the end, to emphasise just how exciting it is.) According [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Potted Autobiography Occasionally the Hooting Yard postbox is choked with letters from readers all of which say, in so many words, "Frank, tell us what you're really like". My natural diffidence makes me reluctant to respond to such pleas, but today I have changed my mind. Here, then, is a brief but devastatingly accurate pen-portrait of "Mister [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Describe A Typical Dobson Breakfast Scene On the face of it, this sounds like a simple enough assignment. It is, of course, anything but. Those who have even a passing acquaintance with the titanic out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson know that the words typical and breakfast can never be crammed together. It is an understatement to say that he had mixed feelings about [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bucephalus and the Cephalopods in the Bosphorus It was not night-time, sultry or otherwise, when Bucephalus arrived at his destination. It was day, bleak, grey, and wretched, and the majestic horse stood still at the river's edge, snorting. Alexander the Great did not expect him back in Macedonia for a week. Remember this is the Ancient World, so such landmarks as line [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Ogsby Steering Panel Were you lucky enough, when you were a tiny tot, to receive an Ogsby’s Steering Panel as a birthday gift? I was. I still remember with absolute clarity waking on the icy cold morning of my tenth birthday, and finding at the foot of my bed a rectangular object wrapped in old newspaper, on which [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: A Bonkers Alibi If you are suspected of having committed a crime, and are placed under arrest by law enforcement officers, never provide an alibi which is bonkers. This advice holds true whether you are innocent or guilty, or even in that grey area between the two, like a Kafka character. Let us assume, for the purposes of our [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bygone Beliefs Frank dedicates an entire episode to a reading of the chapter “Superstitions Concerning Birds” from the book “Bygone Beliefs: Excursions in the By-ways of Thought” by H Stanley Redgrove, published in 1920. This episode was recorded on 21st December 2005 and was the final episode of the year. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_December_21st_05.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Some Hotels, A Hollyhock, The Ponds There are seven hotels. Their names are Crone, Crustacean, Flask, Infection, Miasma, Unbearable and Vagabond. Each is built of cheap and rusty metal and perched on the edge of a precipice. There are seven precipices, over each of which a scientist of note has plunged to a watery death during the past two weeks. In [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: House of Turps Part 2 The conclusion to Frank Key’s exciting House of Turps. In this episode we learn of Slobodan Curpin’s fate, and also that of the twelve exiles of Hoon. This episode of Hooting Yard on the Air was recorded on the 23rd of November 2005. Frank Key’s “House of Turps” has ISBN 1 871197 40 6. Download audio file [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: House of Turps Part 1 The long-awaited first volume in Frank Key’s important 26-part history of the House of Turps. In this introductory work, Key outlines the bilge and the bindweed, the dust and the dribble, the whelk and the drudge. The true founder of the House of Turps is here revealed for the first time, vile and crumpled and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Velcro, Dubbin and Crayons The Tantarabim Carton was recovered from an old potting shed by Dobson, during one of his forays into what he called anarcho-’patapsychoarchaeolontology. It is a ceremonial carton which was used for unknown purposes during ceremonies prosecuted by the Bleach-Splattered Tantarabim Priesthood. Grim and horrifying these rituals may have been, but not the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Administration of Lighthouses Today I am going to talk to you - at you - about wisps and clumps. Gaining an insight into wisps and clumps will not give you a complete understanding of the physical universe in all its matchless wonder, but it is a start. Indeed I can think of few subjects which prove a better [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Phial of Broth Sopwith was ushered to a seat at the top table, and a hush descended on the tent as the first course was brought in by the Hooting Yard Duckpond-Cleaner, whose name was Cackbag. This geriatric half-wit carried a capacious tureen containing gallons upon gallons of an iridescent broth, flavoured with pap, rime and bonemeal, and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Pabstus Tack and Pabstus Sludge When Pabstus! Pabstus! was installed on his throne there was carnival and carousing. Fools danced around maypoles and jesting roisterers roistered and doistered as if tomorrow would never come. No one has ever been able to count the pies that were cooked that day. Many, many people drowned at the swimming gala at the Old [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Billy Parallelogram Hands up those of you who remember the cartoon character Billy Parallelogram. For decades in the last century he appeared weekly in The Pabulum, a comic which also featured Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Whereas all Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet’s adventures followed a strict, unchanging formula, you could never guess what might happen in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Smashed Gods In those days we had many gods in Gaar, but only one was authentic, the one whose name could not be uttered. In addition, we had fifteen green-eyed weasel gods, a pair of plastic marchmont gods, the hideous centipede god of Tuesday evenings, Bosh the crumpled god, eighty squirrel gods, numberless gods with two or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: An Important Appeal UPDATE: The auction is now open. You can bid on eBay until 8pm next Sunday. In the meantime you can discuss this auction on the Resonance Forums. My name is fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol and I�d like to speak to you today on behalf of the Hooting Yard Benevolent Fund For Distressed Out Of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Bobnit Tivol Variety Half-Hour For many years in the last century Mudchute was the home of a monomaniac. Actually, to call Caspian Sea Spanglebag a monomaniac is not strictly true, for he had not one but two abiding obsessions. The first, which is of little interest to us, was his conviction that the tyrant of the Soviet Union was called [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Through Clenched Teeth Through clenched teeth, in municipal yet verdant parkland, sprawled on grass, Blodgett recited the alphabet. “A is for vinegar,” he grunted, “B is for worms, C is for villains swinging from the gallows…” A little voice inside Blodgett’s head told him to stop. He knew he had got it wrong again. He rolled himself down the gentle [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Important Lark Information Imagine, just for a moment, that you live in ancient Latvia. Now look at today’s date. Gosh! It’s Kazimiras Diena, the festival which commemorates the return of the larks! Being an ancient Latvian, you know full well that larks are passerine birds of the predominantly Old World family Alaudidae, small terrestrial birds with often extravagant [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Groist What is the Groist? Throughout the centuries, or to be more specific, in the summer of 1127, during most of March 1784, and last week, human beings have asked this question. And I should be specific about those human beings too, root and branch. I am not entirely sure that “root and branch” means anything [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Picnic for Detectives On Thursday, I mentioned in passing Picnic For Detectives. This annual event has become one of the key dates in the Hooting Yard calendar, which is somewhat surprising, given its inglorious beginnings. The very first Picnic For Detectives was hardly a picnic at all, and the official historian of the event estimates that only a handful [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Ornamental Pond Guilt When Blodgett worked as a brain analyst, in the period immediately after a war, he became intrigued by cases of what was dubbed Ornamental Pond Guilt. One Saturday afternoon, pursuing his own projects in an otherwise deserted lab, he discovered that by exposing samples of dead brain tissue to an all-enveloping gas filtered through a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Those Gubernatorial Bells O how they clanged, those gubernatorial bells! It is eighty years now since their peals sounded, but still I hear them in my head. They clanged ceaselessly, all day and all night, deafeningly loud, for years on end. Cows stood dazed in the fields around the bell-tower, many, many cows, too many cows to count, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: How I Plunged Into the Bottomless Viper-Pit of Gaar For too many years to count I travelled the world visiting bottomless viper-pits. I studied them, sketched them, photographed them, and wrote up lengthy and detailed descriptions of each and every one. My patience is almost inhuman, and it needed to be, because sooner or later some well-meaning numbskull would ask, in relation to this [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Rules of the Game Little is known of the origins of football, a game which is today one of the most popular sports throughout the Northern Lands. According to De Smet [see The Punnet, Vol XVI No.9], football began when tribal elders in the hinterland around Hoon took to mucking about after the annual ritual ostrich-battering. Thumper, on the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Book of Gnats So was a tempest loosed upon the city, and its very fabric uprooted from the mud. Whirling and howling, the city was dispersed upon the firmament, coming to rest none knew where. And the mud spawned all manner of noisome pests, squirming and wriggling to escape the gigantic puddles which were left in the wake [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Blodgettesque Farming Methods Today it is of decisive importance that I tell you about Blodgettesque farming methods. The techniques pioneered by Blodgett in his heyday are breathtaking. Consider, for example, the uses to which a Blodgettian farmer will put hay. There are many, many diagrams in the manual which show bales of hay being commandeered for all sorts [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Cuppid Cuppid is, as you might expect, related to Cupid, although there is a lot more than that extra P to help you distinguish between them. Cuppid is composed of both toxic and non-toxic gases, and tinkles a little golden bell whenever it alights upon the hairy back of a bison, which it often does, for [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Vanquishment of Anaxagrotax One of the more arresting facts about Dobson is that he spent a five-year period living in an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. Such was the hold on him of this location that he devoted no less than sixteen pamphlets to it. According to the statistician Aloysius Nestingbird, Dobson wrote more words about this factory [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Bird-recognition skills O what can ail thee, horoscope reader, alone and palely loitering? Make sure you treat yourself to an electric bath and a session in a sensory deprivation tank. The Bale of Gas in your House of Stupidity has incalculable effects. You will stand on the steps of the Insane Asylum, and hundreds of men and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: What you should know about the Carpenters Karen played the drums and sang. Her brother Richard played keyboards and supplied backing vocals. Unfortunately, Karen died young. Richard is still alive, still active in music, but The Carpenters as a duo are no longer with us. These bare facts stated, astute readers will note the remarkable similarities between The Carpenters and the homonymic The [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Forgive and Forget Frank narrates victorian morality story about the perils of certain vices. This episode contains a single story, written not by Frank Key, but Edwin F. Roberts. This episode was first broadcast on the 16th March, 2005. Download audio file (podcastidentdry.mp3)Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_March_16th_05.mp3)Download audio file (Resonance%20Review%20Roadshow.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: The Churn in the Muck (Reloaded) Update: This item had the wrong audio attached, please refresh it. “You asked me to save the village from Doom. I have communed with a variety of weird and tiresome shades to seek guidance. You are correct, your village is imperilled. There is only one way to rescue it from the coming agony. Three of your [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Two Monks and the Blood of a Duck Then Brother Fabrizius strangled another teal. “Hand me that retort, Brother Arpad, so that I may decant into it this teal’s gore.” Brother Arpad reached for the retort and in so doing smashed an alembic. There was a sound of bells. The monks were called to compline. For each canonical hour they allocated a duck [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Soup Committee “Dobson woke up one wintry morning with an idea in his head. This was not uncommon, but usually his ideas could be - and were - dashed off in a brief pamphlet. Not so the gigantic multi-volume work he pictured in his mind, a compendium of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Promo: The Exciting Hellebore Shew A Promo for Dan Wilson’s first series for Resonance FM: The Exciting Hellebore Shew. To subscribe to this series, visit the Hellebore Archive or pick up the highlights from the Resonance FM podcast collection. Download audio file (helleborepromo.mp3)Download audio file (podcastidentdry.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Promo: Epistaxis Time A promo for Epistaxis Time. If you would like to subscribe to Epistaxis Time, head over to http://epistaxis.aa.stodge.org (for the complete archive and RSS feed), or the Resonance web-site for highlights. Download audio file (EpistaxisPromo.mp3)Download audio file (podcastidentdry.mp3) Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Tales of the Uncanny They called him MacTavish, and he was the village wrestler. He lived in a room above the post office. No other living being ever set foot in the room until the day MacTavish died. They found him lying on his bed, as if he were asleep, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Scrofula and Penitence in the Middle Ages Scrofula is the Latin word for brood sow, and it is the term applied to a tuberculous infection of the chain of lymph glands in the neck, creating swellings between the angle of the jaw and the top of the breastbone. It has been known to afflict people since antiquity, and during the Middle Ages [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Curd Back in the days of Stalin, it was a brave soul who mocked the Comintern. Uncle Joe and his myrmidons tended to get attacks of the vapours when ridiculed. Svetlana B was not particularly brave, however. For one thing, she mocked the Comintern from the comparative safety of a radio shack hidden in a village [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: Gods More thrilling stories from Hooting Yard. This episode was first broadcast on January 19th 2005.“Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. These are gods. They are not toys or trinkets, plastic figurines or dolls made out of scraps of wool or straw. They are gods. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. These too are gods. Mighty, imperious gods. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hooting Yard: �Johnfowlsopoly� At a loose end one blustery Thursday morning, Dobson decided to write a lengthy critical analysis of the The Life & Times of Captain Cake. He began, as he always did, by sharpening his pencil. That done, in a single burst of inexplicable enthusiasm, he penned [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache |