Prince Fulgencio had a heart of stone and his palace was a palace exceeding glum. No, no, it was not a palace, it was a castle, turreted and towered, with many flags and banners flying, every one of them showing blasphemous heraldic devices.
Category Archives: Hooting Yard
Hooting Yard : Downmarket Rags
You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are the sort of weedy milksop who gets sand kicked into your face by musclebound beach bullies of pronounced homoerotic tendencies. The search for the hero must be addressed with rigour, and you must not allow yourself to be distracted. That is why you should immediately head off towards the dunes and find a secluded nook where you can cogitate uninterrupted. Take your towel with you, and your picnic basket, and the piccolo you brought to the beach with you to practise upon and which was the cause of much cruel merriment to the bronzed hulks who kicked sand in your face.
Hooting Yard : Mail Order Mannlicher-Carcano Sniper’s Rifle
If you are planning to introduce the phrase “let the cat out of the bag†into a conversation, you can give your words a weightier punch by having a bag with a cat in it, ready to be released at the right moment. This is a variant on the argument from demonstration, and when we are looking at methods of adding heft to what we say, it can be very effective.
Hooting Yard : Foppish Lassitude
It was long believed that Preen wrote the Four Last Songs in his deathbed, out on a balcony in the mountains, while in the final ravages of tuberculosis. New research shows that in fact he composed these towering pieces on horseback, while riding along various clifftop paths, and it was his horse that was tubercular.
Hooting Yard : Eggy Wanderlust
Slow botany developed as a reaction against all those people who go galumphing about the countryside, across fields, through copses and spinneys and extensive forbidding woodland, or indeed through jungles teeming with exotica, and are forever shouting “Oh look! See the serried ranks of campion and bladderwort dotted among the bracken over yonder!†or “Gosh! If I’m not mistaken there must be thousands of snapdragons scattered along the railway cuttings!â€
Hooting Yard : Goat-physiology Monitoring Mechanism
I have been wondering if it is time for Hooting Yard to obtain a kitemark. Readers from overseas will wonder what on earth I am babbling about, so let me explain. Every single person in this country, man, woman and child, upon seeing a little picture of a kite, knows viscerally that whatever it is that the picture of a kite is attached to is an absolutely fantastic thing, and they can confidently begin to drool with glee. Why this should be so is not quite clear, but is probably bound up with age-old traditions of bureaucratic twaddle.
Hooting Yard : Diligent And Miserable
When the cows come home they may be disconcerted to find you in their meadow, with your tilted head, and some of them may become fractious. Fractious cows can be dangerous, so it will help if you have your acolyte armed with some sort of cow-protection device. This might be made of corrugated cardboard, or alternatively of tin foil. Best to consult a catalogue of cow-protection devices beforehand, with your acolyte at your side.
Hooting Yard : Sextants And Astrolabes
Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy The Roads To Freedom has fallen out of fashion somewhat – as if that mattered – yet it remains a classic. But for a book with a bit more existentialist heft, I recommend Pebblehead’s bestselling paperback The Roads To Jaywick. That blighted, benighted, dilapidated seaside town, has of course, provided fodder for any number of potboilers, including Jaywick – West Of Clacton and The Sordid Sands Of Squalor, but Pebblehead’s is a fundamentally serious work, and there is a lot about cows in it, which is always a good thing.
Hooting Yard : Voodoo Pigs
I do not know who awaits me in the upper chamber, although I now know that whoever it is will half expect me to be carrying a wafer. I can use the filthiness of my gloves as an excuse for not doing so.
Hooting Yard : Hideous Bat-god Fatso
Ordinarily, when we think of harpies we think of Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno, or as she is sometimes known, Podarge, the three sisters of Greek myth, bird-women who kept stealing, and befouling, food from Phineus and were generally vicious, violent and cruel. Tennyson called them “These prodigies of myriad nakednesses, / And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable, / Abominable, strangers at my hearth / Not welcome, harpies miring every dish” but that may be more a reflection of the poet’s fevered mental state than of the destructive wind-spirits themselves.