Rags, pumps, the sea, and crime. Those are my areas of hard-earned expertise. I learned what little I know in the school of rags and pumps and the sea and crime, that is to say, in everyday, unlettered learning, in the town square of a foul and vinegary seaside resort, under torrential rain, listening, rapt, to shorebound submariners who had polished many a periscope with many a rag in their time. Their testimony is often overlooked in our universities and think-tanks, more’s the pity.
Category Archives: Hooting Yard
Hooting Yard : The Helmet of a Conquistador
Munching a whelk, I turned my attentions to the diagrams themselves. They were fearfully complicated. I am no architect, and at first all I could make out were miriad lines meeting at angles and criss-crossing each other seemingly at random. Most of the diagrams had been subjected to revision, and there was much evidence of erasure, overprinting and churlish emendation. My studies were interrupted by a sudden and ferocious thunderstorm.
Hooting Yard : Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium
I have never been a fan of comic books, nor have I developed a taste for graphic novels. I can admire the skill and inventiveness, but somehow I can’t drum up genuine enthusiasm.
Hooting Yard: Jubilate Agno
Jubilate Agno is a long poem by Christopher Smart. It was written between 1758 and 1763, during which time Smart was incarcerated in Mr Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He had been admitted there after a stay in St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he had been sent due to a religious mania the chief symptom of which was a compulsion to pray in public.
Smart had long been thought one of the minor religious poets of the 18th century, best known for the Song To David. Jubilate Agno itself was unknown until an edition was published in 1939 under the title Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam. But it was the 1954 edition edited by W H Bond which gave us the poem in its accepted form, and which has led to Smart being hailed as a great original, and his poem much more than simply the ravings of a lunatic.Jubilate Agno is divided into four fragments, the second of which is subdivided again in the edition from which this reading is taken. It is, in the words of one writer, a vast hymn of praise, glorifying God and his creation. So, with that in mind, listen carefully to what may be the first complete reading of the entire poem on the radio – if anyone knows of any other broadcasts, please let us know,
Jubilate Agno is read by Frank Key and Germander Speedwell. It will be broadcast at mid-day on the 27th December 2007.
Hooting Yard : Dutch Kleptomaniac Stamp Collector
At the end of 1967 I met my penfriend Doris, who I had been writing to for three years. We fell in love, and were engaged on November 1st. Eight days later, from a bus in her home town of Blackburn, Doris saw a silvery UFO.
Hooting Yard : Frizzy-haired Minstrel
“Fear not, nipper!†she cried, “I am Tiny Enid and I have alerted the Air Sea Rescue Station at St Bibblybibdib to your sorry plight by attaching a message to the leg of a cumulet. The bird is flying its little heart out even as we speak, and soon a lovely big lifeboat will scud across the waves to rescue you. Preserve your energy, and stop trying to prise that last whelk from the rock, for soon you will be sitting at my kitchen table wolfing down a slap-up hot dinner of non-seafood items!â€
Hooting Yard : Joie De Bogs
Regular readers know that my grasp of matters ornithological is second to none, so it is only fitting that I have been asked to compile an anthology of fictional works with the word “owl†in the title.
Hooting Yard : Snackbar Hooligans
This was not the first time I had been given a pancake hint at a seaside resort, and as I headed off towards the steep steps up to a lawn and a crazy golf facility, I cast my mind back to an earlier occasion.
Hooting Yard: Pudding Flaps
A while ago I wrote about hiking pickles, and today I want to address the equally important topic of pudding flaps. Flaps about pudding are rarer than they once were, chiefly because puddings play a less critical role in our diets than used to be the case. Time was when no meal was innocent of a pudding, and though of course not every pudding preparation was the occasion of a flap, the incidence of such flaps was obviously more frequent.
One or two psychoculinary statisticians have attempted to put a precise figure on the occurrence of pudding flaps, and one feels pity for them, pity mixed with mocking laughter. Sooner or later, I think, we are going to have to accept that we will never know how often the making of a pudding was done in a state of flap, certainly not to a statistically significant extent.
This episode was recorded on the 11th October 2007. 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 : Reinvigorating The Citizenry
Whooper swans whooped on the airport pond. Beyond it, by the grain silo, the airport squirrel skittered and twitched, as if terrified. But it was on home ground, and scared of nothing. As with all squirrels, its twitching was merely the outward sign of its high metabolic rate. A path led from the grain silo to Runway Number Nineteen, where on this fogbound morning a supersonic überjet from a bygone era sat rusting on the gravel.