I thought I was getting on quite well, and was certainly showing no signs of delirium or derangement or discontent. Then I happened to mention the business to a colleague, who suggested that it was perhaps the contents of the inner glove compartment, the stuff I had crammed into it, with which I needed to get in touch. This was a revelation which necessitated a further round of metal tapping machine messages. From the responses I received I was able to draw up a lengthy list of items. Granted, this was a list of the things my car-owning acquaintances kept in their actual glove compartments, rather than the contents of my own inner one, but it gave me something to work with. And work I did, my mental cogs whirring away, greased and thrumming.

• Two Monks Took The Blood of a Duck (revisited).
• Skew, Wiff
• Bird Binder
• My Inner Glove Compartment
• Am I So Poised?
• Troilus and Cressida Quotation

This episode was recorded on the 16th June 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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There was no sign of the twinkly-eyed ancient, but I saw the quantity surveyor, heading home from work. I accosted him, and told him I had got my lost rag back. I thought he would be pleased, but his eyes filled with tears, and he said:

“What does it profit a man, that he regains his rag but knows not the measure of the quantities he has surveyed?”

And he swept past me, hugging his briefcase to his chest, and trudged away into the salt and sand-strewn streets as night came crashing down.

• (Two Broken)
• I Lost My Rag
• The Forty Thieves
• Two Monks Took The Blood Of A Duck

This episode was recorded on the 9th June 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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No longer at a loose end, I tracked down, within my quarters, a pot and some soil. The soil was dry, so I added, from a spigot, a spot of water to endamp it, and I placed the pot of soil on a shelf. Then I pressed the bud into it, to reverse iceberg depth. That is, one-eighth of the bud was submerged in the soil while seven-eighths remained visible. Now I would wait for it to grow. Reasoning that it might be intimidated by the glint in my eye if I peered at it for hours upon end, I took off my jacket and hung it upon its hallway hook and went upstairs to bed, where I soon enough fell into a deep sleep, troubled only by a couple of occasions, in the depth of night, when I woke suddenly, barking and howling.

Hop With Tongs

The King’s Speech

The Worm In The Bud

The Worm In The Bud: Notes For Your Reading Group

Those Reading Groups

Useless Phrases.

This episode was recorded on the 2nd June 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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I am fairly sure that Dobson was at one time a member of his local Moorhen Appreciation Society. The out of print pamphleteer joined it for reasons we can only guess at, for as we know the space in the human brain devoted to ornithological matters was in Dobson’s case either utterly vacant or so clogged up the synapses misfired. He was forced to resign his membership when it became clear that he could not tell the difference between a moorhen and a heron, and embroiled the Society in legal entanglements in the bird courts. His pamphlet Well, They Both Have Beaks And Feathers, For Christ’s Sake! (out of print) recounts the whole sorry saga, though it is quite an exasperating read for those of us who are more engaged with the avian world than Dobson was.

• Quiz Time At The Dabbler
• Service Pack 6
• The Moorhen Appreciation Society
• Pang Hill Plop Pit
• The Glass Man
• Git On A Bough

This episode was recorded on the 19th May 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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I was almost blind with tears, but that did not stop me thrusting the point of my poniard through the giant’s gigantic heart. Its foul impure giant’s blood gushed, splattering me from head to toe. It crashed to earth, writhed, and perished. I was in no fit state to sort out my business at the viaduct. Sheathing my bloody poniard, I wended my way home, past the spinney and the duckpond. When I had hosed the giant’s blood off my coat and my cardigan and my shirt and my scarf and my trousers and my underpants and my socks and my shoes and my Homburg, I sat in the bath for an hour. Then I took five fresh leeches out of the leecharium and affixed them one by one to my torso. The first four I named Fee and Fi and Fo and Fum. The fifth, I decided, would remain nameless, like the nameless horror in the eerie barn at Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard. Thus I paid tribute to my lost leeches, my lost blood.

Anniversary

Fee Fi Fo Fum

Q & A: Lothar Preen

P.S.

P.P.S.

Swamp Demons

This episode was recorded on the 21st April 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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News just in that weedy versifier Dennis Beerpint has been appointed Poet In Residence at Beppo Lamont’s Travelling Big Top Circus. Chief among his duties is to write a life in verse of the circus strongman, Lars Tax, also known as The Mighty Lars. So strong is Mr Tax that he has been known to hoist o’er his head a container lorry cram-packed with smithys’ anvils while pulling a concert hall across a field with his teeth. For the duration of his residency, our fey poet has been billeted in Lars Tax’s caravan, a flimsy construction of balsa wood and straw regularly subject to ruinous damage when the strongman engages in such mundane activities as yawning or combing his hair. By more or less imprisoning him with his subject, it is hoped that Beerpint will dash off a vivid “Life” fairly quickly, after which he can concentrate on other Big Top topics, including clowns and bears and trapeze artists and lions.

• Notes and Queries
• Libyan Proverbs
• The Pillow Pamphlets
• Lars Tax, The Circus Strongman
• Ornithological Dabbling

This episode was recorded on the 7th April 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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It is not known how much money Dobson received for his poptart puffery. The records show that, although the swans-and-pebbles-related fine was paid in full, his gas supply was cut off on St Creak’s Day of that year, and not reinstated until the first day of Vice President Nixon’s visit to Venezuela, as recounted in Six Crises (1962).

• Rock n’ Pop News
• Things Beginning With B
• Extract From The Encyclopaedia of Eggs
• The Funnel, Volumes One & Two
• About The Funnel
• Dogs & Frogs & Toad-Like Creatures
• In Heaven

This episode was recorded on the 31th March 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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Extended version of “An Evening of Lugubrious Music and Lopsided Prose” Recorded at Woolfson & Tay Bookshop 18/11/11.

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But what of Chamfer Ticktape himself? How did he paint, in swathes of brightly-coloured emulsion, the hideous countenance of the deckhand, without himself succumbing to gibbering, and to insanity? For years, the noted Royal Academician has refused to speak of his painting, referring all enquiries to his PR toady, a master of obfuscatory fol-de-rol. At various times, this slippery fellow has hinted either that the artist was blindfolded as he painted, or that his brain was protected by a mysterious carapace, or that he prepared a “painting-by-numbers” grid and directed the execution from behind a screen, his assistants then being carted off one by one to the very same grim bleak windswept granite asylum, perched on the hillside, where they are kept in a separate wing, also locked, in which they gibber insanely while sucking on wafers. Not one of these tales is likely to be true. Some say the deckhand is a self-portrait of the painter, but how could that be? Chamfer Ticktape is a man-about-town, sweeping in and out of fashionable restaurants and nightspots, in cape and muffler, pursued by paparazzi, and he does not leave in his wake a trail of the gibbering and insane.

• Tales of Ugo (Pt. 1)
  Fruiterer’s Gleam
  Victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion In Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Complete List.
  Deckhand With Mop
  Tales of Ugo (Pt. 2)

This episode was recorded on the 17th March 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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On Easter Sundays and other Christian festivals the pointyhead detectives experimented with divan-arrangements somewhere between orderly and chaotic. They had never been able to settle upon an optimum disposition, for they were only too aware that some crimes were best solved with the divans lined up in a row, or in a stellar pattern, while other crimes were cracked when the divans were arranged haphazardly. The one thing they all agreed upon was the effectiveness of their cerebral approach, as pointyhead detectives, reclining upon divans, smoking their pipes, looking to the untrained eye as if they were half-asleep and lost in lassitude.

• A Dislike of Inappropriate Buttons
  Bloaters And Mayonnaise
  Adventures of the Pointyhead Detectives
  Ingrate Ghoul, Scattered Sprig
  Mayonnaise and Bleach
  Bemufflement of Clangings

This episode was recorded on the 10th March 2011. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Storiesand Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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