Resonance FM: Hooting Yard On The Air

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 down, magnificent in his imperiousness. Abominable, Sulphurous s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Direct Download

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. I’ve been hiking with the devil. Satan left me in a thicket on the wild and windy moors. But I’ve got my trusty compass and my pipe clamped in my jaws. I am smoking in the thicket. I hope to see my whaler soon. Don’t go hiking with the devil. Keep your compass in your pocket. I am thinking about blubber. Blubber is my candle light. It’s a comfort in this thicket on the wild and windy moors to think of blubber candle light, for the devil trapped me in this thicket and it is a pitch black night. Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips The Legend Of The Golden Pig Thicket Indifferent Auks Did You Know? Crushed And Squashed Wisps And Clumps Quotation from Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia by Isaac G Briggs This episode was recorded on the 3rd July 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Direct Download

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 to rent a warehouse to store all his cups and shields and trophies. To think that he had won all the major Tyrolean sprinting events before he was twenty years old is to gasp in wonder. A Snapshot From The History Of Athletics Feral Childhood Days O Bootpolish Basil And Guido s Kropotkin Fanfaronade Bobnit Tivol Quotation from Dreamthorp: A Book Of Essays Written In The Country by Alexander Smith This episode was recorded on the 19th June 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_06_19.mp3)

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 The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_06_05.mp3)

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 On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_05_29.mp3)

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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_05_22.mp3)

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 wearing his trademark battered old hat. He behaves ineptly in the haberdashery, piddling in his trousers and overturning a display stand of thread samples. In a particularly poignant moment, he is mistaken for Mark E Smith of The Fall and prevailed upon to sing an extempore version of “City Hobgoblins” to the haberdasher’s excited children. Dirk Bogarde, With A Moustache, In A Vaporetto Grizzled Old Fool At The Haberdashery O er The Hills And Far Away The Great Emblotchment Old Halob : A Biographical Note The Game Of Glossop This episode was recorded on the 15th 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_05_15.mp3)

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 danger threatens, as it often does, he tousles his mop with one hand while punching the starship’s complicated control panel expertly with the other, all the while barking out commands to his crew. His accent is a curious mixture of Wyoming, Luxembourg, and vampire. He is extremely fond of Janacek’s String Quartet Number One, “The Kreutzer Sonata”, and likes to have it played by the starship band at moments of high peril. When they are otherwise engaged, for example if they have been beamed down to a newly discovered planetoid to give an impromptu concert of Thomas Beecham Lollipops, Captain Biff loses his rag and flies into a temper tantrum, with much uncontrollable flapping about and twitching. Dobson s Blotter Letter Of Complaint Three Examples Of Uncontrollable Flapping About And Twitching Quotation from Black Pool For Hell Maidens by Hal K. Wells This episode was recorded on the 8th 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_05_08.mp3)

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 of us, rather than a heaving mass of humanity, it was a flat field, not a hillock, and we did not listen to a beardy man speaking to us directly but to the disembodied voice of a woman, broadcast from a radio set perched on the back of a farmer’s cart. The voice belonged to the Woman Of Twigs, the radio set was pneumatic, and the cart belonged to mad Old Farmer Frack. It was his field we gathered in, and it was partially flooded. There was no sign of the horse we assumed must have pulled the cart into the middle of the field. Old Farmer Frack only had one horse, named Desmond, so it was likely he had led it off along the lane to the fruit and nut market. It seemed he planned to leave the cart in the field for some time, for its wheels had been removed. I had seen the cart before, so I knew that they were the big wheels of Motown, to where, at a guess, they were being returned. There were wheels within wheels, too, and it had to be assumed they were also bound for Motown. Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips The Legend Of The Golden Pig Thicket Some notes on Ayn Rand Crushed and Squashed Wisps and Clumps This episode was recorded on the 1st 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_05_01.mp3)

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 in gold. Alas, this failed to impress the reading public, and very few copies of the book were sold, although we should bear in mind that I write of a time before mass commercial aeroplane travel, so there were fewer airports, and even fewer airport bookstalls, and only a handful of customers frequenting those that did exist. One early airport bookstall worthy of note was that opened at Tantarabim Rustic Airfield by Marigold Chew’s cousin Basil Chew. Basil was a peg-legged pear-shaped man with tremendous Ruritanian moustachios, a fuddle-headed entrepreneur whose every business scheme failed. He simply had no grasp of reality, his view of the world being at once mistaken, hallucinatory, and plain wrong. If one were unkind, one would call him a blockhead. But he had charm, and winning ways, and when he twirled those fine moustachios people swooned with besotment. Thus he was able to convince a few foolhardy financiers to back his airport bookstall, where, under the delusion that aeroplanes flew at the speed of a peasant trudging along a muddy country lane and that passengers would need extremely fat books to keep them occupied. Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind The Panel The Influence Of Ploppy Noises In The Works Of Pebblehead This episode was recorded on the 24th April 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_04_24.mp3)

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 a jacket made of tin, and he made the bo sun walk the plank till he fell into the churning sea. All the sailors rollicked with glee. So Captain Cake sat in his cabin reading a book about gourds. Then they landed on an island of bloodthirsty hordes. The purser chucked the voodoo pins at the leader of these folk, who put down his sword and began to choke. Captain Cake wanted to be the island king, but they already had a god with bright and fluttery wings, and the god made the captain bow down on the sand. So if you sail the hectic seas be sure to understand that leaking ships can run aground at the drop of a hat. If only Captain Cake had realised that. Neglected Crunches Second Letter From A Wooden Child Download News More About Captain Cake Quotation from The Tachypomp by Edward Page Mitchell Quotation from William G. Boykin This episode was recorded on the 10th April 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_04_17.mp3)

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 wooden child and that I often run errands along the very same lanes of your bailiwick such as the one shown in the picture, and that on numerous occasions when running such errands I have been menaced by serpents belching forth flame from their mouths or from their fundaments and sometimes, terrifyingly, from both. Botany Lesson Buster And Radbod Letter From A Wooden Child Some Rare Editions Of The Bible : Number One Bring Forth, Devil, Your Elks Quotation from The Moonstone Mass And Others by Harriet Prescott Spofford This episode was recorded on the 10th April 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_04_10.mp3)

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 Persian Fire: The First World Empire, The Battle For The West by Tom Holland This episode was recorded on the 3rd April 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_04_03.mp3)

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. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_03_27.mp3)

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, and I was coming for him. Mopsa s wheelchair was soon knocked back into shape, and she rattled off towards the outskirts of Hoon. Before she left, and despite my protestations, she insisted that I take half of her biscuits. As soon as her back was turned, I ground them into the muck beneath my boot. I could not bear the distractions of shortbread: my mush-bags would suffice. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008_02_28.mp3)

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 earlier escapades. No doubt these Dobson-inspired excitements were meant to be wild and life-enhancing, yet I yearned for tedium and futility. Trudging out of the boiler room, I began to sob. It would be weeks, perhaps months, before I could once again wallow in monotony and ennui. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008-02-21.mp3)

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, usually involving the rescue of persons imperilled. One thinks, for example, of Tiny Enid abseiling down a crevasse to deliver a life-saving polythene bag of nutritious bread pudding to the half-starved, half-frozen polar explorer Sir Blinky Cheeselip, or digging a tunnel under the Vindervandersee to reach a trio of extras from a Werner Herzog film trapped in a subterranean pool rife with blind albino aquatic tentacled beings each with thousands of razor sharp fangs and unassuageable appetites. One pictures Tiny Enid kicking a git in the head with her big black boot. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008-01-31.mp3)

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, to shorebound submariners who had polished many a periscope with many a rag in their time. Their testimony is often overlooked in our universities and think-tanks, more’s the pity. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008-01-17.mp3)

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 erasure, overprinting and churlish emendation. My studies were interrupted by a sudden and ferocious thunderstorm. Shoving the diagrams hastily back into the canister, unfortunately tearing one of them, I hobbled back to my shelter, where my viper was busy biting the head off an unidentified rodent. Tossing my crutches into the corner, I lay back on my pallet and spent a profitable hour mucking about with bits of wire and driftwood to make a trap for bats. A New Year Tanager Gigantic Bolivian Architectural Diagrams Blodgett s Schloss This episode was recorded on the 10th January 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_2008-01-10.mp3)

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. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_December_13th_2007.mp3)

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 the chief symptom of which was a compulsion to pray in public. Smart had long been thought one of the minor religious poets of the 18th century, best known for the Song To David. Jubilate Agno itself was unknown until an edition was published in 1939 under the title Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam. But it was the 1954 edition edited by W H Bond which gave us the poem in its accepted form, and which has led to Smart being hailed as a great original, and his poem much more than simply the ravings of a lunatic.Jubilate Agno is divided into four fragments, the second of which is subdivided again in the edition from which this reading is taken. It is, in the words of one writer, a vast hymn of praise, glorifying God and his creation. So, with that in mind, listen carefully to what may be the first complete reading of the entire poem on the radio – if anyone knows of any other broadcasts, please let us know, Jubilate Agno is read by Frank Key and Germander Speedwell. It will be broadcast at mid-day on the 27th December 2007. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_Special_-_Jubilate_Agno_vbr.mp3)

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. (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_December_6th_2007.mp3)

“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 across the waves to rescue you. Preserve your energy, and stop trying to prise that last whelk from the rock, for soon you will be sitting at my kitchen table wolfing down a slap-up hot dinner of non-seafood items!” (more ) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_November_1st_2007.mp3)

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. (more...) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_22nd_November_2007.mp3)

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. (more...) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_15th_November_2007.mp3)

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 a pudding, and though of course not every pudding preparation was the occasion of a flap, the incidence of such flaps was obviously more frequent. One or two psychoculinary statisticians have attempted to put a precise figure on the occurrence of pudding flaps, and one feels pity for them, pity mixed with mocking laughter. Sooner or later, I think, we are going to have to accept that we will never know how often the making of a pudding was done in a state of flap, certainly not to a statistically significant extent. Pudding Flaps A Bit Of A Kerfuffle Down By The Bins Outside The Barn Being A Robber Baron This episode was recorded on the 11th October 2007. 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_October_11th_2007.mp3)

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 to Runway Number Nineteen, where on this fogbound morning a supersonic überjet from a bygone era sat rusting on the gravel. (more...) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_October_18th_2007.mp3)

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 anthems, using his fists, and sometimes sticks, on the base of an upturned biscuit tin. He would have eaten all the biscuits for his breakfast, of course. Blodgett had learned by heart the national anthem of almost every state and statelet on the planet, reduced each one to its rhythmic core, and bashed them out on biscuit tins. He would do this at home, or by the edge of a pond, or halfway up a hillside. In truth, it mattered not where he was, for he had fallen into a routine. Thursday meant biscuits for breakfast, then bashing out anthems. So energetically did he thump and bash that by the end of his recital the biscuit tin would be a dented and effectively destroyed thing. Apparently he passed the ruined tins on to Jasper Poxhaven, the sinister scrap metal dealer whose yard was a few doors away from Blodgett’s chalet. Bashing Biscuit Tins Colossus Oily Git Notes Towards A History Of Blister Lane Bypass Allocation of Hooting Yard Weeks This episode was recorded on the 6th October 2007. 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_-_October_6th_2007.mp3)

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 published his big fat Symposium on the problem. The garlanded laureate of pseudo-sci fi hermeneutic psychobabble persuaded over a hundred movers, shakers, and hysterics to respond to the poser put by Numan, and then toured the radio and television studios giving inaccurate summaries of their replies. (more...) Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_On_the_Air_-_2007_June_27th.mp3)

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 was first broadcast on the 20th May 2007. 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 The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase. Photo by hoof666. Download audio file (Hooting_Yard_On_the_Air_-_2007_June_20th.mp3)