Author Archives: OSM

Hooting Yard: Take One Weasel….

I squelched across the marsh, in driving rain, and linnets sang within my brain. There were no linnets to be seen, just crows, drenched crows, drenched crows. I lit my pipe and sucked, and heard the caw of a drenched crow. The rain was pelting down as I made my slopping way from marsh to town. And in the town, no linnets, no, nor crows. Just shuttered kiosks and the stadium. An athlete threw his javelin in the air. I watched it soar then stab the sodden grass. I went to the canteen. An arty print of crows hung on the wall. I slurped a bowl of steaming warming broth, and then I caught a bus back to the marsh.

This episode was recorded on the 28th October 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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Hooting Yard: Further Spookiness At South Mimms.

“I’m afraid I have never seen any of your plays,” said the glintist, “My work keeps me fantastically busy, and on the rare occasions I might be free to make a trip to the theatre, I often have to go to a kiosk on a seaside pier where a charlatan healer makes enigmatic passing movements of his hands over my anomalous windpipe.”

This episode was recorded on the 21st October 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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Hooting Yard: W to Z to South Mimms.

Twas midnight as I crept through the graveyard. The sky was pitch black, the stars obscured by clouds. My Toc H lamp shed only meagre light, and I stumbled many times over the rough and ravaged ground. Somewhere an owl hooted. I hooted in reply, mischievously, for even in so macabre a circumstance I retained my joie de vivre. Well, you have to, don’t you, when surrounded by doom ‘n’ death ‘n’ memento mori?

This episode was recorded on the 14th October 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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Hooting Yard: P. to V.

If it was shortly after dawn that you sank into your quagmire, bleary-eyed on a morning hike, you at least know that you have many hours of light ahead, and this knowledge should help you to keep your pecker up. After all, statistically, the longer the daylight, the more chance there is of a peasant passing by. I have not studied statistics, and of course there are all sorts of variables to take into account, but I think I can safely say that you have more reason for optimism if you have sunk into a quagmire early in the morning rather than at dusk, as the sun sinks in the west and the sky turns black. You can adjust the intensity of your hope or hopelessness based on what o’ clock it is when you sink, for of course it may be neither dawn nor dusk but two-thirty in the afternoon or one minute past midnight. If the latter, should you survive your ordeal, you would be well-advised to review your decision to go marching about the bleak countryside in the middle of the night, and resolve not to do so in future, if it can at all be avoided

This episode was recorded on the 7th October 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

 

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Hooting Yard: H to O

 

Over the years I have watched various crew members of ships, from Rear Admirals to barnacle scrapers, perform all sorts of baffling physical manoeuvres, and not once have I thought any of it fitted the definition of jiggery-pokery, except on one occasion when I was aboard a very sinister ship which sailed into a clammy mist, in which all sorts of ugly shenanigans took place until, at the last, I was marooned, with several other paying passengers, upon a remote atoll, populated only by squelchy creeping things, and bereft of paper and pencils and writing desks and panels of adamantine hardness.

 

H Pt. 02

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J

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This episode was recorded on the 30th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

 

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Hooting Yard: A-H

You shall knit tea-cosies and scarves and miscellaneous woolies, and at the very instant they are completed, they shall unravel and you will knit them again from scratch. From dawn until dusk and through the cold dark horrors of the night, you shall knit much like Sisyphus hopelessly pushing his boulder uphill. As he gaped to watch it roll down to the bottom of that hill, so shall you see your knitting unravel until all you have to show for your toil is a tangled skein of wool, wool you must knit again and again into a tea cosy or a scarf or a wooly. The only sound in your chamber shall be the interminable clack clack of your knitting needles.

This episode was recorded on the 23th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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Hooting Yard: Sword Of Wisdom

The image intended to illustrate this pod-cast, a picture of two jars, failed to upload to the server.

(This episode features  a weird crackling sound)

Ahoy there, Frank!

I thought you might be interested to hear about the little routine I have devised for myself to help me winkle out the deep and deeper meanings of your many and various postages. This is what I do. As soon as I have finished reading, I get up from my chair and go straight to the bathroom, wherein I fill the sink with ice cold water, steep in it a towel, and then wrap the towel tight about my head. This is to prevent my brain from overheating. I next gargle with Dr Baxter’s Effervescent & Volatile Gargling Fluid, and cut a few capers while gargling, though the vigour of my capers is constrained somewhat by the cramped dimensions of my bathroom.

This episode was recorded on the 16th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

 

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Hooting Yard: Your Ogsby Packaging.

The very next day, a few miles inland in the awful little village of Gack, he killed a monkey-trainer named Perkins, and made such a racket while doing so that dozens of police cars screeched up to the hovel wherein the fell deed was done. The coppers formed a ring of steel around the hovel and waited for the maniac to emerge. Hours passed. Eventually, Detective Captain Cargpan himself, Babinsky’s Nemesis, strode to the door and banged his big blackbegloved fist upon it. It opened, and there in the fetid gloom stood the picturesque, striking-looking parson, the Reverend John Chippendall Montesquieu Bellew, whose head of hair was like a great ball of spun white silk.

Musical Interludes Provided Throughout By: Daisy Dormer-Court.

This episode was recorded on the 9th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

 

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Hooting Yard: A Lecture Delivered In The Big Tent At Hoon.

Curpin tracked down reports of locust swarms. He honked twice, slipped beneath the sea, went to work on a huge pile of food, and tore up lettuce, his pouch unfolding. His rattling became a sizzling. Even the nearby gravel-crushers were keenly aware of Curpin’s bone finger ring, embedded in mud. Gently, in order not to raise clouds of ooze, he blocked its incredible roped sledge and ox-hoof. Caught in a fish-hook curve, or pumped into the expensive bicycle crates, he touched up the ginger facade, decked his troublesome horse, and tampered no more with the tin roof. In fear and chaos, under a bridge or a water-tower, he became dusty blue with age. [Clears throat.]

This episode was recorded on the 2nd September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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Hooting Yard: Looking For Love.

In 1821, for unfathomable reasons, Jarvis Greasecollar’s star waned, and not a theatre in the land would stage, nor cobble, one of his productions. He fell out with Swausage, endured a mysterious calamity in yet another seaside town, and his wife ran off with a dapper gentleman of foreign extraction. Years later, she was to play a shadowy role as a counter-revolutionary in the revolutionary turmoil that engulfed a continent.

This episode was recorded on the 12th August 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

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