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 simply unclear about what I wanted to say. Much has changed, for now I have a clear, eagle-eyed vision, and am somewhat better able to communicate it. Oh, I still fall prey to blather, more often than I ought to, but I have learned to nip it, if not in the bud, then before too many tendrils have swarmed across the sun-dappled pathway that leads to truth and beauty and insight. You see, there really is a bright magnificent upland upon which we can prance, if we can but reach it. I know that now.
Author Archives: Frank Key
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 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.
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.
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.
Hooting Yard : Nightjars Attack Cattle
32. If you eat roasted swallow, you are likely to be attacked by dragons.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.