This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 4th October 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.
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.
Befuddled By Cormorants is available for purchase in print and digital formats. Please visit www.lulu.com for more information.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 3rd 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.
“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 some other means of illuminating his criminal intent.
But not only was he a clumsy thief, he was a thief who lacked foresight. Because the day was still light when he set out from the hut o’ ne’er-do-wells where he lived, he seems to have assumed it would still be light when he approached the wooden fence which divides my back garden from the old muddy lane. But it was no longer light. I lived so far away from the hut that it took him hours and hours to reach my garden. His route was crooked and even convoluted, for he hugged the hedgerows and dared not stride across open fields, nor follow main roads, and nor did he risk using any of the public transport systems available, the pneumatic railways or the canal barges, for, being bent on crime, he did not wish to be seen.” Extract from ‘The Agony In The Garden‘.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 27th September 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by Muffet.
“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 unhatched eggs, and when they hatch they will hatch millions of magnetic mute blind love monkeys.” Extract from Far Far Away
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 6th September 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by oswaldo.
“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 in an agony of twitching fits, I became aware of a message on my metal tapping machine.
Weakly, I reached for it, nearly falling from my rumpled pallet as I did so. And when I read the message, I was convulsed anew, as if ten thousand demons with ten thousand forks were pricking me ten thousand times.” Extract from ‘Radio Transcript’.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 30th August 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by Curtis Perry.
“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 peak in Darien.” – Robert Lynd, The Pleasures Of Ignorance
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 9th August 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by zenera.
“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 pump vital energy into your blood, oxygenating your brain and feeding crucial nutriments into your integuments.”
That is the advice I was given by my mentor, or at least by a book handed to me by my mentor on the day I said farewell to him for the last time. It was not a day I am likely ever to forget. After the dawn calisthenics, we had sausages for breakfast. I have never tasted the like, before or since. God only knows what they were made of. Ambrosia, perhaps, or manna. My mentor was kind enough, for once, to overlook my disgusting table-manners, even going so far as to hand me several extra napkins from his precious supply. When I had finished mopping up my drool and spillages, he beckoned me with the Claw Of Gack, and we headed off up into the hills to that lair of his which until now had been forbidden to me. Had I not eaten such a gigantic breakfast, my heart would have been palpitating. As it was, my corporeal being was preoccupied with its digestive functions, freeing my brain to do the palpitations.
Once inside the lair, or cave, my mentor handed me a trumpet and a banner and the book which I have already mentioned, and then he vanished in a puff of inexplicable roseate vapour. I was alone. I waited for the vapour to disperse and then I strode out of the cave… no, I must not lie, I minced out of the cave, and I tumbled down the hillside, battering my trumpet in the process, and I rummaged around in my mentor’s pantry until I found more sausages, and while I cooked them I practiced a few toots on the trumpet, and I read the book – the passage quoted above comprises the complete text – and then I unfurled my banner. And when I had finished eating all of the sausages, I set out to make my own way in the world.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 2nd August 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by daniel_cosman.
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 about bats, and even more about heraldry. To gain a precarious foothold in the latter, one of my sources was Pimbley’s Dictionary of Heraldry.
I must say, having read it in full, that this is the very model of what a dictionary can be. Seldom have I found such a rigorous approach to the act of definition. Pimbley’s are clear, succinct, and remarkable. Take this, as just one example: there you are, thumbing through your heraldic dictionary, wanting – even needing – to know what is meant by the phrase ‘Barry bendy dexter and sinister’. Pimbley defines it as ‘a combination of barry and bendy dexter and sinister’. Isn’t that perfect? You close the book, thump your fist on your escritoire, and furrow your brow, older and wiser than you were but a minute ago.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 19th July 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by Magister Spencer Boegeman.
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.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 12th July 2006. More information can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by Great grey owl.
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 course it is the former that gain attention. Who can forget the ruination visited upon Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard in the 1930s, all those crop failures, diseases, fires, murders, contaminations and inexplicable barn collapses, which ceased only when a marauding night-time squirrel was captured in a net by Father Dermot Boggis and subjected to the full rigour of his holy wrath? It took six months for the exorcist to expel every last vestige of fiendishness from the squirrel, leaving the poor bushy-tailed mammal thin and shrivelled and exhausted and close to death. And yet, as it was slowly revived by the coddling of Old Ma Purgative at her verdant squirrel sanctuary, so too did the farmyard flourish anew, with majestic fields of golden wheat, gleaming new buckets replacing the old rusty pails, and happy, happy pigs.
This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 14th June 2006. More information can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by ThroughWaters.
