I am very pleased to announce that the latest episode in the Grizzled Old Fool series of multi-platform cultural interventions has been released. Grizzled Old Fool At The Haberdashery sees the grizzled old fool going to a haberdashery to buy buttons and cloth and pins. As usual, he is chewing a plug of tobacco and wearing his trademark battered old hat. He behaves ineptly in the haberdashery, piddling in his trousers and overturning a display stand of thread samples. In a particularly poignant moment, he is mistaken for Mark E Smith of The Fall and prevailed upon to sing an extempore version of “City Hobgoblins†to the haberdasher’s excited children.
Category Archives: Hooting Yard
Hooting Yard : Four Leatherette Corner Flaps
The USS Milquetoast Jesuit is sponsored by L’Oreal, and is powered by light-reflecting booster technology, just like Andi MacDowell’s hair. Captain Biff is contractually bound to use various L’Oreal hair products, but if he had his way he would smear his ginger mop with grease from the engine room.
Hooting Yard: The Legend Of The Golden Pig
The circumstances in which I first heard the legend of the golden pig were oddly similar to those of the Sermon on the Mount. Crushed in a multitude, I followed a beardy man up on to a hillock, and sat down and listened to him speak… well, more or less. There were two or three of us, rather than a heaving mass of humanity, it was a flat field, not a hillock, and we did not listen to a beardy man speaking to us directly but to the disembodied voice of a woman, broadcast from a radio set perched on the back of a farmer’s cart. The voice belonged to the Woman Of Twigs, the radio set was pneumatic, and the cart belonged to mad Old Farmer Frack. It was his field we gathered in, and it was partially flooded.
There was no sign of the horse we assumed must have pulled the cart into the middle of the field. Old Farmer Frack only had one horse, named Desmond, so it was likely he had led it off along the lane to the fruit and nut market. It seemed he planned to leave the cart in the field for some time, for its wheels had been removed. I had seen the cart before, so I knew that they were the big wheels of Motown, to where, at a guess, they were being returned. There were wheels within wheels, too, and it had to be assumed they were also bound for Motown.
- Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips
- The Legend Of The Golden Pig
- Thicket
- Some notes on Ayn Rand
- Crushed and Squashed
- Wisps and Clumps
This episode was recorded on the 1st May 2008. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.
Hooting Yard: Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind The Panel
Dobson wrote extensively during the period when he was hunkered down in a janitorium. The key pamphlets from this time were collected in a compendium and published as a thick paperback with a garish cover design suitable for sale at airport bookstalls. It is thought to be the only instance where Dobson’s name was embossed in gold. Alas, this failed to impress the reading public, and very few copies of the book were sold, although we should bear in mind that I write of a time before mass commercial aeroplane travel, so there were fewer airports, and even fewer airport bookstalls, and only a handful of customers frequenting those that did exist.
One early airport bookstall worthy of note was that opened at Tantarabim Rustic Airfield by Marigold Chew’s cousin Basil Chew. Basil was a peg-legged pear-shaped man with tremendous Ruritanian moustachios, a fuddle-headed entrepreneur whose every business scheme failed. He simply had no grasp of reality, his view of the world being at once mistaken, hallucinatory, and plain wrong. If one were unkind, one would call him a blockhead. But he had charm, and winning ways, and when he twirled those fine moustachios people swooned with besotment. Thus he was able to convince a few foolhardy financiers to back his airport bookstall, where, under the delusion that aeroplanes flew at the speed of a peasant trudging along a muddy country lane and that passengers would need extremely fat books to keep them occupied.
- Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind The Panel
- The Influence Of Ploppy Noises In The Works Of Pebblehead
This episode was recorded on the 24th April 2008. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.
Hooting Yard : Poop Deck Vampires
Captain Cake had gone to sea in a battered and leaking ship. He drank his grog from a bakelite cup. When he walked upon the orlop deck he sang in vulgar Latin, and every morning he made the sailors pray at Matins. The bo’sun had a voodoo doll pierced with many pins.
Hooting Yard : Duffel Coat Cuffs
Dear Mr Key : I was minding my own business, sitting on my bench in the attic room of the Mercy Home For Abandoned Infants Made Of Wood, when my attention was drawn to your article entitled Wooden Child And Fiery Serpent And Trees. I should at once make it clear that I am a wooden child and that I often run errands along the very same lanes of your bailiwick such as the one shown in the picture, and that on numerous occasions when running such errands I have been menaced by serpents belching forth flame from their mouths or from their fundaments and sometimes, terrifyingly, from both.
Hooting Yard : Fat Horse Brain Media
Tiny Enid knew all there was to know about the capture of ostriches. As we sat together gulping down tumblers of lukewarm tap water, she gave me some tips.
Hooting Yard : By Aerostat to Hooting Yard – Part 2
What an old slowcoach I was! – so busy rooting around in my haversack that I did not use my eyes. Mopsa was right. I followed her pointing finger and saw a tremendous brickish portal, ornamented with lozenged carvings of quicklime, bilberry and glunt. I had reached my destination. Somewhere behind those gates lurked Burble, and I was coming for him. Mopsa’s wheelchair was soon knocked back into shape, and she rattled off towards the outskirts of Hoon. Before she left, and despite my protestations, she insisted that I take half of her biscuits. As soon as her back was turned, I ground them into the muck beneath my boot. I could not bear the distractions of shortbread: my mush-bags would suffice.
Hooting Yard : By Aerostat to Hooting Yard – Part 1
It had been two years since one of Dobson’s communiques had uprooted me from my rut and catapulted me into frantic adventure; three years before that I had been sent on a mission, ranging over four continents; the year before that embroiled in a world-shattering plot; and there had been at least half a dozen earlier escapades. No doubt these Dobson-inspired excitements were meant to be wild and life-enhancing, yet I yearned for tedium and futility. Trudging out of the boiler room, I began to sob. It would be weeks, perhaps months, before I could once again wallow in monotony and ennui.
Hooting Yard : The Blötzmann Technique
Trawling through the various biographical documents which survive, I have found no indication that Tiny Enid ever professed any religious impulses whatsoever, nor, for that matter, any more broadly spiritual leanings. Indeed, all accounts agree that she was a severely practical type of heroic infant, never more essentially herself than when solving very concrete problems, usually involving the rescue of persons imperilled. One thinks, for example, of Tiny Enid abseiling down a crevasse to deliver a life-saving polythene bag of nutritious bread pudding to the half-starved, half-frozen polar explorer Sir Blinky Cheeselip, or digging a tunnel under the Vindervandersee to reach a trio of extras from a Werner Herzog film trapped in a subterranean pool rife with blind albino aquatic tentacled beings each with thousands of razor sharp fangs and unassuageable appetites. One pictures Tiny Enid kicking a git in the head with her big black boot.