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 rock music. Adding to the disjuncture was the fact that Ignapfando resembled Clement Attlee, down to the finicky moustache and an inadvisable line in hats.

Nevertheless, when he went to his priest for confession the following Sunday, there could be no doubt about the upheavals of his passion.

• Total Eclipse
• Claude
• Massacre Of The Innocents At Hoon
• Vaporetto Or Bus?
• Then The Boisterous Man
• And No Birds Sing
• Whither Blenkinsop?

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 17th January 2007. 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 The Horned Jack Lizard.

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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 Dobson.

• Saint Mungo: Read And Learn
• Quotation from The Strange Life Of Nikola Tesla by Nikola Tesla
• In A Bog
• Pontiff!
• About Enchatons
• Norwegian Wool
• Jarvis And Cubbit
• Quotation from Cosmic Friends by Jimmy Goddard

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 10th January 2007. 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 the queen of subtle.

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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 out into the world, or at least into this bilgewater-befouled corner of it, posted as they are on a noticeboard outside the pet shop, from which they are rapidly torn down and stuffed into the pockets of those citizens who collect them with something approaching mania.

• Pansy The Adept
• In The Bleak Midwinter
• Christmas Dinner
• A Pedant’s Righteous Nostrums

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 20th December 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 GloomyCorp.

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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 research laboratory far, far away.

The Professor suggested to Gertrude that she get her laptop and look up his website, where she would find an essay subtitled Paupers’ Drool A Quack Potion And No Substitute For Rational Explanation When Emboldening Tiny Ones Terrified By Electrical Storms.

• Quayside Harpy
• Pauper’s Drool
• Cake And Pastry Person

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 13th December 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 Night Owl City.

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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 threw up on some rudders.

• Dobson And Longevity
• About Belt, Bong & Yaw
• Tales Of The Marshes

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 6th December 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 Pathfinder Linden.

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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 daffodils, the broom and japonica, the creeping jenny, the old man’s beard and the cow parsley, the speedwell and flax and dock and hops and oxlip and crocuses and teasel, and the geraniums and foxgloves and fleabane and jonquil and lobelia grow in such heavenly profusion, when the person from Potatovag drew up beside me in his death-trap jalopy, and shouted “When did you last clap eyes on the potatoes of Potatovag?”

• Shrivelled
• On The Air
• Once Upon A Time
• Glue: Some Do’s And Don’ts
• The Potatoes Of Potatovag
• Since You’ve Been Gone
• Tex Mex Jiffy Bag Sprites

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 29th 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 countrygirlatheart.

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• A Poem
• An Abandoned Zoo
• Bilgegrew’s Bible

This 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.

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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 a Deity – it does not matter which one – your first instinct is to lash out in terror and alarm. You sock the God on its jaw, cutting its lip. Now, it is not blood which flows from the wound, but ichor, a colourless ethereal fluid which ran through the veins of all the Greek Gods. If you are of a vampiric bent, be sure not to suck the ichor oozing from the God’s cut lip, for though it confers immortality on the Deities, it will be ruinous to you as a mere human, for it will poison you.

• Untitled Work In Progress
• A Refutation Of Some Of The Less Plausible Claims Made by Dennis Cargpan In His Woeful Lecture Delivered From The Balcony Of The Civil Hall At Bodger’s Spinney On Thursday Last During A Hailstorm To A Gathering Of Ingrates And Orphans
• Fictional Substance Of The Week
• A Series Of Unfortunate Cows
• A story featuring Tony Buzan

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 8th 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 Steve Crane.

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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 get at Hooting Yard is rain, sometimes torrential, sometimes a drizzle, and this is true.

What my critics fail to note is that, ensconced in a cabin somewhere over by Blister Lane Bypass, we have a superb forecaster. I speak, of course, of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger. When it comes to predicting the weather, Little Severin is second to none, not even to the BBC’s magnificent Dan Corbett. If you have not watched Dan, visit That’s The Weather For Now and be amazed. Little Severin the Mystic Badger has not yet been blessed with a fan site all his own, but it can only be a matter of time.

• Succour For Convulsive Infants
• Ice Chaos
• The Parish Wolf
• Dobson’s Chartreuse Weskit
• He Preened, Eating Bloaters

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 14th February 2007. 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 Oneras.

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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 that we go. The alternative is that we spend yet another afternoon trying to tether the wild goats, and I am not sure I can take much more of that, so the balsa wood factory it will be.

• Deworming Your Goat The Hooting Yard Way
• Sieves And Basins
• The Story Of The Lame Dog, The Caged Bird, The Drowned Cat, The Gold Watch, The Whisky Boy And The Insane Boy
• Reading from The Insane Root by Mrs Campbell Praed
• Me And My Homunculus
• An Outing
• So You Want To Become A Haruspex?
• Docking Hack
• Orrery Sleuth

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 1st 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 ptrob59.

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