Intensive and scrupulous new biographical research on Old Halob, the crusty and cantankerous sporting legend who was for many years the coach and mentor of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, has revealed an amazing fact. (I think that sentence really ought to have an exclamation mark at the end, to emphasise just how exciting it is.)

According to a recently published monograph by Pierre Sugum, Old Halob worked with fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol for forty years without ever suspecting that his protégé was not actually real. The wizened and untidy trainer, with his moth-eaten clothing and offensive hair oil, seems to have overlooked the weekly comic magazine Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol’s Weekly Comic Magazine For Girls And Boys, wherein the sprinter and sometime polevaulter’s breathtaking athletic feats were chronicled by a series of pseudonymous writers and illustrators.

Professor Sugum has also unearthed compelling evidence that one of these pseudonymous writers may have been Dobson. If this is so, it would have been one of the few paying jobs the out of print pamphleteer ever held, along with his hectic janitorial escapades in that tinned milk of magnesia factory in Winnipeg. Sugum is reluctant to say for certain that Dobson wrote the early stories Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol And The Polevaulting Pole That Snapped In Two and Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol Buffs His Latest Medal With A Frayed Rag, leaving it to readers to judge the merits of the case.

It is Old Halob’s ignorance of the athlete’s fictional status which is the most astounding revelation of the article. One has always been tempted to conclude that the wily coach knew more than he let on, and yet this view is comprehensively demolished by Sugum in a couple of sentences.

I wish I could include extracts from this ground-breaking essay here, but I have been informed that Professor Sugum is highly litigious, a monster of depravity, and wallows in a foul pit of moral turpitude, so it would be foolhardy to antagonise him. Instead, here is a snapshot of Old Halob when young, or at least a snapshot that purports to be of Old Halob when young, or a member of his immediate family, or so I’m told, at any rate, credulous poltroon that I am.

• Grots
• Chaps Oozing Charm
• Revelations Regarding Old Halob
• Dark Star Crashes
• Medical Notes on a Mezzotintist
• Pindar Widgery, The Pint-Sized Provocateur
• The Social History of Smoking by G L Apperson
• Byways Of Ghost-Land by Elliott O’Donnell

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 26th April 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by calypso Dragon 13.

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Occasionally the Hooting Yard postbox is choked with letters from readers all of which say, in so many words, “Frank, tell us what you’re really like”. My natural diffidence makes me reluctant to respond to such pleas, but today I have changed my mind. Here, then, is a brief but devastatingly accurate pen-portrait of “Mister Hooting Yard”.

Unlike Maya Angelou, I have no idea why the caged bird sings. Nor am I particularly given to singin’ and swingin’ and gettin’ merry like Christmas. On the contrary, I have an almost fathomless ignorance of ornithological matters and the Yuletide season will find me moping and lugubrious. Thus, if I am ever to write a series of memoirs, it will not do for me to plagiarise Maya Angelou’s catchy titles. I will have to come up with my own ideas, and the strain of doing so makes it unlikely that I will be in a fit state to continue writing once I have hit upon the perfect title for the story of my own life. Of course, if I was able to get my hands on the Cordial Balm of Siriacum that might provide the fillip I need, and I would be able to type away energetically, regaling you with anecdotes from my past, attempting an amusing yet cogent dissection of my current state, and even looking forward to the future with the aid of psychic messages from a squirrel. I beg you to wait patiently, therefore, while I seek a reliable supply of the Cordial Balm. When I have done so, I shall continue with my potted autobiography.

• Squirrels : Emissaries from the Beyond?
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity
• Potted Autobiography
• Was Dobson a Visionary?
• Shipshape

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 22nd March 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by davefitch.

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On the face of it, this sounds like a simple enough assignment. It is, of course, anything but. Those who have even a passing acquaintance with the titanic out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson know that the words typical and breakfast can never be crammed together. It is an understatement to say that he had mixed feelings about breakfast. There were times when he was up and about before dawn, gobbling down a huge bowl of porridge. Thereagain, he sometimes stumbled downstairs at noon, bleary and fractious, waving his arms in dismissal of a proffered slice of toast. From one day to the next, there was no knowing how Dobson would greet the day, and howsoever he did greet it, no knowing with what foodstuffs, if any, the day would commence.

I cannot in all honesty, then, describe a typical Dobson breakfast scene, as is required of me. Instead, I propose to examine two Dobsonian breakfasts, from different stages in his life, to which I will add some observations on a pamphlet he planned, but never wrote, on this important topic. Will that do?

• He Preened, Eating Bloaters (A Typical Dobson Breakfast Scene)
• Epoch of Snares
• O Cure Me (Some medicinal adverts from the Guardian)
• Specks in the Sky (Ask Uncle Dan)

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 15th March 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by Code Poet.

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