I was mistaken, yesterday, to suggest that Dobson wrote a pamphlet entitled Kitchen Groanings, like the late eighteenth century work of the same name penned by an angry cook-wench or discontented housemaid. I was sure there was some kind of Dobson connection, and leapt to the most obvious thought, that it was yet another out of print pamphlet by the out of print pamphleteer. Unable to place it, however, I knitted my brows and set the tiny engines a-whirring in my pea-sized yet pulsating brain, and eventually, in the middle of the night, I realised I had been thinking of a radio programme made by Marigold Chew in the dying days of 1953.

• Dobson’s Boots
• Dobson’s Kitchen Groanings
• Planet of the Cloth-Eared Bears
• The Bell And The Toads, Etcetera
• Seven Stints

This episode was recorded on the 21st May 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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“The terms of a carver be as here followeth. Break that deer – lesche (leach) that brawn – rear that goose – lift that swan – sauce that capon – spoil that hen – frusche (fruss) that chicken – unbrace that mallard – unlace that coney – dismember that heron – display that crane – disfigure that peacock – unjoint that bittern – untache that curlew – alaye that felande – wing that partridge – wing that quail – mine that plover – thigh that pigeon – border that pasty – thigh that woodcock – thigh all manner small birds – timber that fire – tire that egg – chine that salmon – string that lamprey – splat that pike – sauce that plaice – sauce that tench – splay that bream – side that haddock – tusk that barbel – culpon that trout – fin that chevin – trassene that eel – tranch that sturgeon – undertranch that porpoise – tame that crab – barb that lobster. Here endeth the goodly terms of Carving.”

• Dismember that Heron
• The Muscular Fool And The Other Fool
• Unregistered Ice-Cream Vans
• Timetable
• The Sludge-Banks

This episode was recorded on the 7th May 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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• A Trip to Margate
• With my Fife and my Drum
• Putty Putti
• Bongos for Babinsky
• Dax Pod Clad In Umber
• Shipwreck Is Everywhere
• Upriver
• Pantry Thoughts

This episode was recorded on the 7th May 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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It was a rallying cry, and in its wake pigs were strangled, barns were burned, and doh-si-dohs were essayed. How sweet the memory of those dances of my grandparents’ youth. I was not alive then of course, so I have no direct memory, but I recall, as an infant, sitting in a basket slung over one of grandpa’s bison, and he goading the beast along the lane, and telling me tales of his childhood in the Wenkenblatt, the strangled pigs and the burning barns and the doh-si-dohs.

• Doh-si-doh
• The Sunday Just Gone
• Notes on Skippy
• Old Farmer Frack’s Hair-Cut
• Beerpint Watcher

This episode was recorded on the 23rd April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – at least, sometimes. One of the pamphleteer’s more irritating characteristics was his inability to settle on the keeping of his cards. At times, like Sogol, he pinned them up on every available surface. Then a frenzy would take him and he would tear them all down and shove them into one of his innumerable cardboard boxes. Marigold Chew reports that Dobson spent hours upon hours arranging the cards when they were in their boxes, ordering and reordering them according to various abstruse cataloguing systems. No sooner was he done than he would once again tip them out of their boxes and pin them up on walls and screens and pinboards and what have you. And of course, all the time he was adding new cards to the collection.

• Dobson’s Card Index
• A Magic Trick
• The Boring Dog

This episode was recorded on the 16th April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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Plump, crumpled, costive gumshoe Smedley Blavelpang was in a proper fix. It was the sort of fix private detectives tend to find themselves in. The wind had blown his hat clean away and his gun was jammed and he was trapped behind some bins in an alleyway and the rough tough thug he had been pursuing was closing in on him armed with an unjammed gun full of bullets. It looked like curtains for Blavelpang.

• Plutarch Versus Petrarch
• From Wivenhoe To Cuxhaven By Way Of Ponders End
• Curtains For Blavelpang, Episode One
• Swans On A Towpath

This episode was recorded on the 14th April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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My adoptive parents perished in the Munich air disaster. They had won a raffle to attend the second leg of the European Cup quarter-final between Manchester United and Red Star Belgrade. It was the first time they had left me in sole charge of the pig farm. When the postie came up the lane with the telegram telling me the terrible news, in my convulsive grief I suddenly realised that I did not have the brain of a squirrel, and never had had, and that life held for me greater prospects than mucking about in the woods babbling gibberish and gnawing nuts. I was now the master of a dilapidated pig farm.

• Career Opportunities
• Confessions Of A Door-To-Door Monkey Salesman
• Sieve Project
• Flamboyance And Palsy

This episode was recorded on the 2nd April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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Every now and then I receive letters from readers asking me to give some account of the geography of Hooting Yard and its hinterland. I have a standard reply to such requests, which is to say that through diligent study of the writings you could draw a map yourself. It would involve very close reading, being on the alert for clues and pointers, but all the information any half-competent cartographer needs is present in the texts.

Today, I am going to make things a little easier for aspiring mappers by saying a few words about the train journey from Hooting Yard to that ill-starred fishing village O’Houlihan’s Wharf. Last week it would have been fairly pointless to do so, but the exciting news is that the branch line, long fallen into desuetude, is running again. Using the proceeds from a winning raffle ticket (number 666, beige) a team of volunteers has reopened the line as a cross between a “countryside heritage family leisure facility” and a “cutting-edge arts praxis installation”. I have taken those two phrases from their brochure, a shabby piece of work duplicated on a Gestetner machine, designed perhaps to look like one of Dobson’s out of print pamphlets. Someone has gone to the trouble of hand-colouring all the covers, though, which shows the fanatical devotion of these enthusiasts.

• Pots and Potters
• The Branch Line Less Travelled
• Prudence Foxglove Sunday Schools

This episode was recorded on the 26th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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I paid a visit to my friend Becke Beiderbix in her fortress in the mountains. We had known each other since childhood, growing up on a postwar housing estate, a workaday world of compactness and convention. But Becke was always a singleminded girl who followed her own strange star, and while the rest of us went off to polytechnics and office jobs and became fodder for a peculiarly dull-witted type of English fiction, Becke decamped to the mountains and built herself a fortress with her bare hands. I had no idea where she had picked up the skills to do this, and in truth, when I visited I was astonished to find how solid and immense and impregnable her fortress appeared, a massive edifice perched upon a bluff, as forbidding in its aspect as the Schloss Adler in Where Eagles Dare, but without the Nazi connotations, for Becke was the most apolitical person I have ever known.

• Boiled Black Broth and Cornets
• Blodgett Boils My Lady Kent’s Pudding
• My Pellets
• Elks in Snow

This episode was recorded on the 19th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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We travelled to Hoon by hot air balloon. I took my harpoon, and impaled a wolf that was roaming the woodland below us. We hauled the wolf into the basket of our balloon, by a long and sturdy rope that was tied to the end of the harpoon. We arrived in Hoon, two balloonists and an impaled wolf, making a bumpy landing…

• Pact and Retort
• Banisters Of Crepe Paper And Cow Gum
• By Hot Air Baloon to Hoon
• A life dismantled of muffins
• My favourite pigsty
• Wilf
• Detective Story

This episode was recorded on the 12th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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