Were you lucky enough, when you were a tiny tot, to receive an Ogsby’s Steering Panel as a birthday gift? I was. I still remember with absolute clarity waking on the icy cold morning of my tenth birthday, and finding at the foot of my bed a rectangular object wrapped in old newspaper, on which either my father or my mother had scribbled in crayon “Happy Birthday To Our Ten-Year-Old”. I was a dutiful and pious child, so before tearing the package open I repaired to the bathroom to brush my teeth and plunge my head into a sink full of icy water, and then I went downstairs to find my parents.

My mother was in the garden slaughtering insects. I thanked her for my gift and asked where my father was so I could thank him too. She gave me a woebegone look and patted me on the head, mussing my hair in which icicles were beginning to form.

“I am afraid your father had to take the dawn train to a secret military establishment at an undisclosed coastal location – towering cliffs, monstrous waves, shingle – where he will be cooped up for the next six months helping to devise counter-intelligence techniques for use against an enemy so powerful, so ruthless, so fiendish, that it beggars belief,” said my mother, and she tapped the side of her nose, indicating that this startling news was to be kept under my hat, had I but a hat to keep it under.

• The Ogsby Steering Panel
• Saving your Swan From Bird Flu
• Gluten-Free Jabbering Man
• A Buttercup in a Field, and an interview about buttercups.
• Custard

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 22nd of Febuary 2006. Please visit Frank Key’s Hooting Yard Website for a complete transcript.

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Some people think Surgeon’s Biscuit is the name of a town near Kakadamm. Others believe it is an old parlour game popular in the boarding houses of seaside resorts during the 1930s. There are those who suspect it to be the name of a racehorse, or perhaps a racing pigeon, or some other bird or beast of swiftness. Surgeon’s Biscuit is, of course, none of these things. It is simply a biscuit that belonged to a surgeon.

But what a biscuit! And what a surgeon! As biscuits go, it was the finest specimen the surgeon had ever seen. Two thirds of the way down a perfectly ordinary-looking packet of digestive crumblies, there it nestled, a numinous, almost golden thing, some quirk in its baking making it unutterably different from its fellows in the batch. He remembered when he first handled it. He was not a man to transfer his newly-purchased biscuits into a so-called “biscuit tin” or similar container. He ate them straight from the packet, as he had been brought up to do by his rough, tough parents in their rough, tough hovel, who can never have expected little Vladimir to grow up to become an important surgeon.

• A note to our Chinese listeners
• Google.dbsn ( This exciting new search engine can be found on the Hooting Yard Web Page)
• Blotzmann’s Compartment Controversy
• Vox Pop: A Pang Hill Orphan Speaks
• Tiny Little Hands, Decisive Moustachios
• Another Vlasto (Vlasto Cuddy)
• Surgeon’s Biscuit
• Fifty Years Ago (Dobson on the Radio)

This episode was recorded on 1st Febuary 2006.

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Frank dedicates an entire episode to a reading of the chapter “Superstitions Concerning Birds” from the book “Bygone Beliefs: Excursions in the By-ways of Thought” by H Stanley Redgrove, published in 1920. This episode was recorded on 21st December 2005 and was the final episode of the year.

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There are seven hotels. Their names are Crone, Crustacean, Flask, Infection, Miasma, Unbearable and Vagabond. Each is built of cheap and rusty metal and perched on the edge of a precipice. There are seven precipices, over each of which a scientist of note has plunged to a watery death during the past two weeks. In chronological order, those who plummeted were a botanist, a physicist, a phrenologist, an horologist, a laboratory git, a bacteriologist, and an uproariously-moustachioed vivisectionist.

Each had been a paying guest at one of the hotels, though none of them hurtled over the precipice upon which their own hotel teetered. The phrenologist, for example, breakfasted upon porridge in the Hotel Miasma, then threw herself from the pocked and crumbling cliff-face adjacent to the Crone Hotel.

Or was she pushed?

• The origins of the name “Hooting Yard”
• Some Hotels, A Hollyhock, The Ponds
• Hooting Yard Fan Fiction: “Dobson’s Uncanny Time Pod” by Tristan Shuddery
• Swedish Goat News
• A selection of self-help books
• Istvan and Zoltan (on Monday Afternoon)
• Quotations from “New Orleans Superstitions” by Lafcadio Hearn

This episode was first broadcast on 14th December 2005.

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The conclusion to Frank Key’s exciting House of Turps. In this episode we learn of Slobodan Curpin’s fate, and also that of the twelve exiles of Hoon.

This episode of Hooting Yard on the Air was recorded on the 23rd of November 2005. Frank Key’s “House of Turps” has ISBN 1 871197 40 6.

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The long-awaited first volume in Frank Key’s important 26-part history of the House of Turps. In this introductory work, Key outlines the bilge and the bindweed, the dust and the dribble, the whelk and the drudge. The true founder of the House of Turps is here revealed for the first time, vile and crumpled and stinking of ragwort; not unlike the author himself.

After listening, the author asks you not to hurl your iPod over a precipice.

This story was originally published in 1989 in a limited print-run of 300 copies. For those who like to keep track of these things, a second edition was produced as a special gift for subscribers to the ReR Quarterly. This episode of Hooting Yard was recorded on the 16th of November 2005.

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The Tantarabim Carton was recovered from an old potting shed by Dobson, during one of his forays into what he called anarcho-‘patapsychoarchaeolontology. It is a ceremonial carton which was used for unknown purposes during ceremonies prosecuted by the Bleach-Splattered Tantarabim Priesthood. Grim and horrifying these rituals may have been, but not the carton. It is 45 cm. in height, has a jewel-encrusted crimplene base, ivory fluting, ruched silk underbelts, hectic trimmings, a delightful milky-green ribbed spandole, villainous scraping marks, a gutta percha rim, opalescent bison-head motifs, swivelling glutinous beads inlaid with serried gems, fleur-de-lys hatching, precise web-and-tuck dufraiment, talc stipples, a riband nightside opening on the velveteen casing, some rather brusque kaolin relief work, tiny cack-iron clips, berry lagging, a splendid gilt Spode handle, and corky frets on the oversling.

• My Little Blind Crow
• The Windows in the Villa
• Museology (The Discovery of the Tantarabim Carton)
• Crononhotonthologos
• Hoon Hing Boom Bang a Bang
• Notes on Norton the First
• Today’s Soup Recipe
• Mrs Gubbins’ New Publishing Venture
• A Sad Story ( The Tale of Gervaise Birdlip )
• Quotation from “Man From The Wrong Time-Track” by Dennis Plimmer
• Reviews of “Ulysses”
• Quotation from St Bernard of Clairvaux about Jugglers
• Quotation from “The Thing that Dined on Death” by John Knox

This episode was first broadcast on the 26th October 2005. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

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Update: The wrong audio was attached, it’s been fixed now. Sorry!

Some readers will be familiar with the career of the Sino-Dutch artist Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the man who invented potato-peel engravure. Few people know, however, that he was a keen mountaineer. Keen and inept, that is. Ah-Fang was, if nothing else, a visionary, and he had visions of a haunted mountain, its peak shrouded in inexplicable purple mists like something out of a novel by M P Shiel. Whenever he sat shivering in his tent at base camp, Ah-Fang wondered if this mountain, the one he was about to climb, was the haunted mountain of his mind’s eye. He would poke his head out of the frayed flap of his tent, peer up at the majestic rock formation disappearing into the clouds above, and wonder if this, at last, would be the one he had dreamed of since childhood, where he would come face to face with the uncanny, the ineffable.

Physically, Ah-Fang was not really cut out for mountaineering. He was described by a contemporary as “a figure of untold puniness”, and he was indeed tiny and weak, short-sighted, lanky and prone to swooning fits. He was terrified of gnats, horseflies and fruitbats. He had an oversensitive digestive system and had to subsist mostly on thin soup or broth. It was difficult to find a mountaineering team willing to recruit so wretched a specimen, so Ah-Fang did most of his clambering up sheer rock faces solo, a man alone testing himself against the elements.

• Dobson on Peas
• Quotation from The Lady’s Vase by “An American Woman”
• The Magic Mountain
• Crisis in the Sedge
• My Little Blind Dolly
• Quotation from The Talking Deaf Man (The Human Voice)

This episode was first broadcast on October 12th 2005. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard website.

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Today I am going to talk to you – at you – about wisps and clumps. Gaining an insight into wisps and clumps will not give you a complete understanding of the physical universe in all its matchless wonder, but it is a start. Indeed I can think of few subjects which prove a better introduction. Some might talk to you of toads or gazelles or coconut matting, perhaps, or of strange irrefragible lights in the maritime skies, but I stick to wisps and clumps, with occasional forays into bee world.

So, then, what is a wisp and what is a clump? We shall look at each in turn. A wisp might be made of smoke or some other fume, for there are countless fumes, gaseous and otherwise. One guaranteed way of seeing a wisp with your very own eyes is to stand next to a dying bonfire. If you go and stand there too early, while the bonfire is still blazing, perhaps with an effigy of Roman Catholic martyr Guy Fawkes engulfed in the flames, you will not be able to see any wisps, or much else, because the smoke will be billowing, making your eyes water, and if some scamp has placed any noxious substances on the bonfire, such as anything made of rubber or plastic, things will be even worse, and you may feel like choking, indeed you may even choke uncontrollably, and topple to the ground, helpless, helpless, helpless, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were wont to sing, long ago, on the west coast of America. They say that David Crosby’s moustache is to be preserved as a national monument, but I digress.

Basically, what I am saying is: keep away from the bonfire while it is at its height. You want to go and stand next to it as the last embers are dying, for it is then that you will be able to see wisps of smoke. What are their characteristics, these wisps? They are light, delicate, and fugitive. You will see a wisp rising from the glowing ashes, and it will slink upon the breeze for a few moments, and then it will be gone. All that is solid melts into air, according to Marx and Engels in The Manifesto Of The Communist Party (1848), and this is certainly true of wisps, which are hardly solid in the first place.

• Wisps and Clumps
• The Administration of Lighthouses (The Dobson Memorial Lecture)
• Cemetery Birds (The Lopwit)
• Ukrainian Postage Stamp Bees (An exciting parlour game)

This episode was original broadcast on the 5th October 2005. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard Website.

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