Update: The wrong audio was attached, it’s been fixed now. Sorry!

Some readers will be familiar with the career of the Sino-Dutch artist Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the man who invented potato-peel engravure. Few people know, however, that he was a keen mountaineer. Keen and inept, that is. Ah-Fang was, if nothing else, a visionary, and he had visions of a haunted mountain, its peak shrouded in inexplicable purple mists like something out of a novel by M P Shiel. Whenever he sat shivering in his tent at base camp, Ah-Fang wondered if this mountain, the one he was about to climb, was the haunted mountain of his mind’s eye. He would poke his head out of the frayed flap of his tent, peer up at the majestic rock formation disappearing into the clouds above, and wonder if this, at last, would be the one he had dreamed of since childhood, where he would come face to face with the uncanny, the ineffable.

Physically, Ah-Fang was not really cut out for mountaineering. He was described by a contemporary as “a figure of untold puniness”, and he was indeed tiny and weak, short-sighted, lanky and prone to swooning fits. He was terrified of gnats, horseflies and fruitbats. He had an oversensitive digestive system and had to subsist mostly on thin soup or broth. It was difficult to find a mountaineering team willing to recruit so wretched a specimen, so Ah-Fang did most of his clambering up sheer rock faces solo, a man alone testing himself against the elements.

• Dobson on Peas
• Quotation from The Lady’s Vase by “An American Woman”
• The Magic Mountain
• Crisis in the Sedge
• My Little Blind Dolly
• Quotation from The Talking Deaf Man (The Human Voice)

This episode was first broadcast on October 12th 2005. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard website.

Standard Podcast [ 29:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 introduction. Some might talk to you of toads or gazelles or coconut matting, perhaps, or of strange irrefragible lights in the maritime skies, but I stick to wisps and clumps, with occasional forays into bee world.

So, then, what is a wisp and what is a clump? We shall look at each in turn. A wisp might be made of smoke or some other fume, for there are countless fumes, gaseous and otherwise. One guaranteed way of seeing a wisp with your very own eyes is to stand next to a dying bonfire. If you go and stand there too early, while the bonfire is still blazing, perhaps with an effigy of Roman Catholic martyr Guy Fawkes engulfed in the flames, you will not be able to see any wisps, or much else, because the smoke will be billowing, making your eyes water, and if some scamp has placed any noxious substances on the bonfire, such as anything made of rubber or plastic, things will be even worse, and you may feel like choking, indeed you may even choke uncontrollably, and topple to the ground, helpless, helpless, helpless, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were wont to sing, long ago, on the west coast of America. They say that David Crosby’s moustache is to be preserved as a national monument, but I digress.

Basically, what I am saying is: keep away from the bonfire while it is at its height. You want to go and stand next to it as the last embers are dying, for it is then that you will be able to see wisps of smoke. What are their characteristics, these wisps? They are light, delicate, and fugitive. You will see a wisp rising from the glowing ashes, and it will slink upon the breeze for a few moments, and then it will be gone. All that is solid melts into air, according to Marx and Engels in The Manifesto Of The Communist Party (1848), and this is certainly true of wisps, which are hardly solid in the first place.

• Wisps and Clumps
• The Administration of Lighthouses (The Dobson Memorial Lecture)
• Cemetery Birds (The Lopwit)
• Ukrainian Postage Stamp Bees (An exciting parlour game)

This episode was original broadcast on the 5th October 2005. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard Website.

Standard Podcast [ 29:10 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 reportedly thoroughly indigestible.

Cackbag slopped a ladleful of the broth into Sopwith’s rusty bowl, and the majestic entertainer was about to spoon some of the piping hot liquid into his mouth, when of a sudden the tent was filled with cataclasm and pandaemonium.

“Cedric William Spraingue!” The words rang out, re-echoing round the canvas walls. “Tundists have come for you! We will take you now!”

Poor Sopwith, ashen, trembling and incontinent, could do little else but to obey the bidding of the unseen Tundists. As bolts of purple light spurted around the tent, and mesmerising noises deafened the townsfolk, he crawled to the entrance flap, a piteous figure on his hands and knees. As soon as he was through the flap, the uproar ceased, the tent interior calmed, the air grew still. Clamour and rack were no more: but Cedric William Spraingue, alias Guesbaldo Sopwith, was gone. Like so many others, he had been taken by the Tundists.Who knows why, or to what end? Like all who fell foul of Tundism, he was ne’er seen on earth again.

• Once Upon a Time (Cassowary Man)
• The Life and Times of Captain Cake
• The Life and Loves of the Immersion Man
• Dobson’s Leech Mishap
• Films on Television
• The Phial of Broth
• An extract from “The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet” concerning Blodgett and an Ogre.

This episode was first broadcast on the 2nd November 2005. For transcripts of this episode, please visit the Hooting Yard website.

The Phial of Broth [ 29:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 Crumbling Outdoor Pool, and ravens were seen hovering in the sky. A post office person stuck pictures of Pabstus Tack to his hat and was chased across the fields by happily screeching children. But was there a trace of desperation in their screeching?

And tomorrow did come, of course, as everyone knew it had to. That was when the first rumbles were heard of Pabstus Sludge. To appease him, the throne was moved to a higher point on the hill, just above the coppice, where moles betrayed their presence in their usual mole-like way. A gang from the tavern headed thither armed with rifles, until Pabstus! Pabstus! made it known that moles were sacred and must never be harmed. Some say the men turned their rifles on themselves in terror.

Terror, it is said, is the only proper response to Pabstus Tack and to Pabstus Sludge. Wrapped up tight in their cardigans, hanging Tilly lamps from the rafters of their cabins, the braver villagers plot his overthrow. Turnips are chewed. Cigarillos dangle from the soot-blackened lips of the vanguard. Secret anthems, never written down, are mumbled rather than sung. Food poisoning has wiped out most of these souls since Pabstus! Pabstus! first emitted his light and his booms, seventeen years ago.

• A Thrilling Yarn
• Something about Podcasts
• Pabstus Tack
• Max Decharne talks about dictionaries and other important subjects.
• Dispatches from the nib of Van Dongelbraacke
• A description of Professor Zoltan Crunlop’s Crop-Circle Apparatus
• Max Decharne finds yet more poetry in dictionaries.

This episode was first broadcast on September 28th 2005. Transcripts of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

Pabstus Tack and Pabstus Sludge [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 the Billy Parallelogram strip. Sometimes he was accompanied by his cousin, Tilly Dodecahedron, or by the Massed Hordes Of Gruesome And Frightening Things From The Pit Of Foulness.

Sometimes the weekly adventure might be as simplistic as Billy Parallelogram buying an accordion and learning how to play it. There were serial stories, too, spread over two or three months, where Billy Parallelogram would be shown teaching children how to cultivate wheat, or to devise spring, prong and lever mechanisms to automate household tasks, or even to compose majestic symphonies for full orchestra so emotionally charged that listeners would blub into their handkerchiefs. His cousin Tilly Dodecahedron’s appearances often signalled storylines involving bees, turpentine, silhouetteists, farm implements and Dakkadakkadakka. This last was a speciality of the Billy Parallelogram strips, an ill-defined yet curiously unnerving monster goblin with bulging eyes and forehead, seemingly bent on destroying the universe but always distracted by parlour games such as snakes-and-ladders or gluttons-and-rhubarb.

One of Weems’ vile henchmen from the popular cartoon strip “Billy Parallelogram”.

• Horse Begone ( An unfortunate encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoodadooronron Woman )
• Tadeusz Kapisko and his Ears of Wheat
• Dobson in the Land of Nod
• When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto; Or, The Greaves of Way-O
• Give me a Glossary ( an explanation of “When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto” )
• Nomenclature of diminuitive persons who plunge down 150-Ft Cliffs and survive with hardly a scratch.
• Billy Parallelogram
• Metal of the week: Tin
• Dietary News ( Foods of the future )

This episode was first broadcast on the 7th September 2005.

Standard Podcast [ 31:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 more heads, even one god with no head at all, and a god whose breath ignited stars. We had the bucket god and the athletics track god, the god of railway platforms and the gods of puddles. Some gods were ephemeral, tiny things, like your mayflies. Others were massive and solid and permanent. But only one god was real, the God with the upper case G, the one whose name could not be spoken.

Nowadays, those of us who rode the motorcycles in the sidecars of which blasphemers languished, muffled, in pods, are thought of as fanatics. I still get sidelong looks of contempt or loathing when I go to the post office or the greengrocery. I was spat at in the street as recently as six months ago. When I buy my fireworks, they are invariably tampered with, so that they sputter rather than sparkle. I can’t remember the last time one of my fireworks went whoooosh!

My favourite god was the gas god. It made a tremendous growling noise and it was usually sixty feet high, but sometimes smaller. Every now and then, because I was a motorcyclist, it would carry out its godlike doings in my back garden, and I would watch from the window, entranced. Our windows then were made of cellophane, and I would prick holes in my window with the point of a sharpened pencil, the better to appreciate the misty wafts of the gas god.

• Quotation from the Bible
• The Game of Bosanquet (Some handy tips)
• Smashed Gods ( of Gaar )
• Cinematic Dobson ( A Numbers Racket )
• And I Shall Walk
• Murder in the Murk (By Chlorine Winslow)
• Destiny’s Darning-Needle Pierced My Very Soul (A Trebizondo Culpepper devotee’s enrapturement)

This episode was oringinally recorded on August 31st 2005. For transcripts of today’s podcast please visit the Hooting Yard website.

Standard Podcast [ 29:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 Josef Starling, while the heroine of Thomas Harris’ The Silence Of The Lambs was named Clarice Stalin. Being bonkers, Spanglebag was unmoved by the facts that the moustachioed and heavily pockmarked dictator chose the pseudonym “Man of Steel” in preference to his real name of Djugashvili, and that the troubled FBI rookie is a fictional character.

But it was the Mudchute man’s belief that hendiadys is a disease afflicting poultry, rather than a figure of speech, which consumed most of his energies. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Spanglebag declared war on the makers of dictionaries, lexicons, grammars and encyclopaedias. Most of the major publishers of reference books have somewhere in their archives a fat file containing letters with that Mudchute postmark, all written by pencil in tiny, tiny handwriting, their tone varying from mild complaint to violent menace. One example will suffice.

I purchased the latest edition of your wordbook, writes Spanglebag on 23rd June 1989, and was surprised to see you define hendiadys as “a figure of speech in which two words connected by a conjunction are used to express a single notion that would normally be expressed by an adjective and a substantive; the use of two conjoined nouns instead of a noun and modifier”. You then go on to list instances from the Bible, such as “a mouth and wisdom” in Luke 21:15, and “the hope and resurrection of the dead” in Acts 23:6. I do not take kindly to spending money on such drivel, and have torn your worthless book to shreds, and I would have scattered those shreds to the winds from atop a hill, were there any high hills in Mudchute, which there are not, so instead I steeped the shreds in buckets of water until they were but pulp, yes! pulp. Please correct your gruesome error in future editions, or I will ensure you become the laughing stocks of the reference book world, and you will weep with shame.

• Railway Forecast
• “Hendiadys In Mudchute”, pertaining to Caspian Sea Spanglebag, a monomaniac
• Fan Fiction Fad (contributed by R Hanrahan)
• Gods ( a story you may recognise from the episode called “Gods” )
• Last Night’s Dream (about Roy Kinnear)
• Netherlands, Holland, Dutch – What’s That About?

This episode was originally broadcast on August 17th 2005. Full transcripts of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

Standard Podcast [ 30:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 songs and display flights. Often, you have pointed out to your ancient Latvian pals that larks nest on the ground, laying between two to six speckled eggs. Sometimes you get into arguments with your ancient Latvian next hut neighbour, who insists that most larks are fairly dull in appearance. Both of you agree, however, that their food is insects and seeds. Now, amity restored, you set off arm in arm with your neighbour for the festival.

“Look, Arvids,” you say, pointing to a nearby bird, “a lark!”

“Indeed it is, Egils,” says your neighbour, “But what species of lark do you suppose it is?”

• Vaporetto or Bus? A review of “Incredibly Detailed Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into The Provision Of Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard As Requested By Civic Functionaries Many, Many Years Ago.” by Anon
• Land of Nod News (Emily DIckinson)
• More extracts from “Further Science” by Norman Davies.
• Important Lark Information
• A Recipe for Gruel
• Since You’ve Been Gone
• Suzanne Takes You Down

This episode was first broadcast on August 3rd 2005. All of the prose in this podcast can be found on the Hooting Yard website.

Standard Podcast [ 30:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 in that last sentence, but it slipped out, soup to nuts, as did “soup to nuts”, just then. This is what thinking about the Groist does, it seems, love in a mist and toffee apples. I am going to stop referring back, chimes at midnight, to the otherwise irrelevant phrases creeping in to this serious attempt to explain to readers what the, force majeure, Groist is, or was, or will be, or all three, throughout the years, on this delightful planet of ours, Henry.

So picture yourself for a moment as a twelfth century peasant scrubbling around in your accustomed muck. Feel that smock. Your hair will as likely as not be matted, unwashed, and you will have several teeth missing, God be praised, Brief Encounter. There you are, on a rain-soaked morning, trudging up or down the hillside to go to tend your pigs, or hens, and all of a sudden the Groist invades your brain. You are understandably startled, and some think this startlement is what inspired some of history’s mystics, lean and fat, that is, a visitation from the Groist.

• Introduction: The greatest radio programme on Resonance at 4.00 p.m. on Wednesdays (probably)
• How to festoon yourself with old netting
• Take me back to Old Plovdiv
• Ugo Goofs Off
• Bronchitis Person’s Helicopter Journey
• The Groist
• Bilingual Comintern Mocker
• Two days in the life of Blodgett
• How to look after a horse

As ever, transcripts of the stories in this week’s podcast can be found on the Hooting Yard website. This episode was first broadcast on July 6th 2005.

Standard Podcast [ 29:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download