The image intended to illustrate this pod-cast, a picture of two jars, failed to upload to the server.

(This episode features  a weird crackling sound)

Ahoy there, Frank!

I thought you might be interested to hear about the little routine I have devised for myself to help me winkle out the deep and deeper meanings of your many and various postages. This is what I do. As soon as I have finished reading, I get up from my chair and go straight to the bathroom, wherein I fill the sink with ice cold water, steep in it a towel, and then wrap the towel tight about my head. This is to prevent my brain from overheating. I next gargle with Dr Baxter’s Effervescent & Volatile Gargling Fluid, and cut a few capers while gargling, though the vigour of my capers is constrained somewhat by the cramped dimensions of my bathroom.

• Sword Of Wisdom
• Jars And Moss
• Carry Me Down
• Words And Meaning
• Pointy Town Drinking Dens
• Cornish Light

This episode was recorded on the 16th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 7:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The very next day, a few miles inland in the awful little village of Gack, he killed a monkey-trainer named Perkins, and made such a racket while doing so that dozens of police cars screeched up to the hovel wherein the fell deed was done. The coppers formed a ring of steel around the hovel and waited for the maniac to emerge. Hours passed. Eventually, Detective Captain Cargpan himself, Babinsky’s Nemesis, strode to the door and banged his big blackbegloved fist upon it. It opened, and there in the fetid gloom stood the picturesque, striking-looking parson, the Reverend John Chippendall Montesquieu Bellew, whose head of hair was like a great ball of spun white silk.

• Your Ogsby Packaging
• With My Siphon And Funnel (accompanist: Daisy Dormer-Court)
• Origins Of Innit
• Pious Purposes In The Islands
• Comprehension Test
• Babinsky, Master of Disguise
• Gethsemane Picnic Time
• Trenchmore & The Cushion Dance

Musical Interludes Provided Throughout By: Daisy Dormer-Court.

This episode was recorded on the 9th September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 1:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Curpin tracked down reports of locust swarms. He honked twice, slipped beneath the sea, went to work on a huge pile of food, and tore up lettuce, his pouch unfolding. His rattling became a sizzling. Even the nearby gravel-crushers were keenly aware of Curpin’s bone finger ring, embedded in mud. Gently, in order not to raise clouds of ooze, he blocked its incredible roped sledge and ox-hoof. Caught in a fish-hook curve, or pumped into the expensive bicycle crates, he touched up the ginger facade, decked his troublesome horse, and tampered no more with the tin roof. In fear and chaos, under a bridge or a water-tower, he became dusty blue with age. [Clears throat.]

• A Lecture Delivered In The Big Tent At Hoon
• The Hapless Bivalve!
• The Glimpsed Cases of Sherlock Holmes
• Dr Johnson, Duck Killer

This episode was recorded on the 2nd September 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 1:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In 1821, for unfathomable reasons, Jarvis Greasecollar’s star waned, and not a theatre in the land would stage, nor cobble, one of his productions. He fell out with Swausage, endured a mysterious calamity in yet another seaside town, and his wife ran off with a dapper gentleman of foreign extraction. Years later, she was to play a shadowy role as a counter-revolutionary in the revolutionary turmoil that engulfed a continent.

• Looking For Love (Not Posted at Hooting Yard)
• The Fatal  Dowry
• A Purblind Ultra-Crepidarian
• Ticking Off Hitchens

This episode was recorded on the 12th August 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 2:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I tore up the few puny pages of prose I had written about hay in nosebags, and instead submitted to the magazine a piece about swill for pigs. Alas, later that day, listening to the news on the wireless in the clinic’s rumpus room, I learned that the skyscraper housing the offices of Beasts Of Barnyard And Field had collapsed after attack by woodworm and weevils and tiny, tiny beings that bore through cement, and the magazine had ceased publication. Ha!, I thought, I am not going to let that stop me. And it has not.

• On Sawdust Bridge, Harangued.
• Gack Versus Cashew
• Hay In Nosebags
• Pliny’s Parrot
• Tiny Enid’s Unhatched God Egg

This episode was recorded on the 5th August 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 2:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I might be forced to take refuge in the dingly dell hotel. In the normal run of things, of course, I avoid it. Sometimes, while gathering my nuts and fruits, I come close to the hotel car park, and hide behind a shrub. I have seen the major domo of the hotel striding purposefully across the car park, even making his way into the dingly dell itself, where he stops and sits on a log and smokes a cigarette.

• The Soutane-Attired Nemesis of Sea Monsters
• Lupins?
• The Hermit of the Dingly Dell
• Swoons, Shudders, Convulsions & Dread
• Hamstrung, Pointy & Downcast.
• Pippy Bag Project
• Teeth and Sparrows
• Pitiful Flotsam

This episode was recorded on the 29th July 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 2:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Now, imagine the scene. It was shortly after breakfast time on a cold and storm-tossed morning in the 1950s at the home of the twentieth century’s most magnificent pamphleteer. Dobson had eaten his bloaters. Marigold Chew had something eggy. They were still sitting at their breakfast table. Outside, hailstones were pinging.

“Marigold, o my darling dear,” boomed Dobson, “I have devised a marvellous plan! Listen carefully. You often comment upon what you consider to be my breathtaking ignorance of the natural world. And though I usually swat away your charges, as a giant may swat away a dwarf, I have, this day, found within myself a reservoir of humility, and I must admit there is a certain truth in what you say.”

• Dobson’s Abortive Pliny
• Dobson in Dreamland
• A Cautionary Tale

Dobson's Abortive Plinny [ 30:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Now, I was reluctant to march off to my nearest egg shop to buy the extra eggs I would need. For one thing, I had no idea how many eggs that might be. Also, what was I going to do with them all when my experiment was done? One can only eat so many eggs before becoming disgusted at the prospect of yet another egg-based meal, and it would be a terrible sin, and a waste of money, to let them rot uneaten.

• Vapours and Slime
• Eggs, Stick
• Concerning The Recent Excavations In The North Transept Of St. Bibblybibdid’s Church
• The Eighth Dwarf
• A Wilderness Of Rubbish
• Breakfasts Of Kings

This episode was recorded on the 8th June 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Standard Podcast [ 0:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Blötzmann’s interest in the alignment of tree clumps in the East Kent area was prompted not, surprisingly, by Tony Wedd’s important study of the alignment of tree clumps in the West Kent area, but by a stray reference in a yellowing old copy of the St Bibblybibdib’s Parish Magazine And Religious Tirade, where a writer identified only as “Righteous Wanderer In The Woods” makes mention of a wander in the woods when his righteousness was tempted by some sort of hobgoblin tree spirit, green and pagan and covered in leaves and twigs. The author claims that, after fleeing from this sprite in fear for his immortal soul, he lay in the bath and realised that the trajectory of his fleeing, if represented in diagrammatic form, was analagous to the pattern made by a journeyman hiking between the cantons of Switzerland in alphabetical order.

• The Alignment Of Tree Clumps In The East Kent Area.
• The Song Of The Borts Of Pray
• Film Studies
• Chalet ‘O Prose
• Fair Stood The Wind For Frank
• The Manufacture of Tinplate
• Alphabet

This episode was recorded on the 17th June 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Hooting Yard 2010/06/17 [ 30:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hunting animals is the sport of fools. Nearly all animals run away when pursued. Ferns, on the other hand, stay right where they are, so you can go crashing through thickets with much gusto, a determined jut to the jaw, every so often emitting cries of panic or revelation, or both, all the while safe in the knowledge that your quarry is not dashing away over the fields, vanishing over the horizon, leaving you and your band of fellow adventurers exhausted and stupid and empty-handed.

• The Abominable Example of Little Beggar Boys
• Kaka, Dunga
• Organised Fern Hunt
• Pang Hill, Potatoes, and Grunting
• Vase as Hat
• Blodgett and his inner concrete lining

This episode was recorded on the 10th June 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Hooting Yard: [ 30:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download