Resonance FM: Hooting Yard On The Air

Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Card Index

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:28:11 +0000

The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – at least, sometimes. One of the pamphleteer’s more irritating characteristics was his inability to settle on the keeping of his cards. At times, like Sogol, he pinned them up on every available surface. Then a frenzy would take him and he would tear them all down and shove them into one of his innumerable cardboard boxes. Marigold Chew reports that Dobson spent hours upon hours arranging the cards when they were in their boxes, ordering and reordering them according to various abstruse cataloguing systems. No sooner was he done than he would once again tip them out of their boxes and pin them up on walls and screens and pinboards and what have you. And of course, all the time he was adding new cards to the collection.

This episode was recorded on the 16th April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: Curtains For Blavelpang

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:12:19 +0000

Plump, crumpled, costive gumshoe Smedley Blavelpang was in a proper fix. It was the sort of fix private detectives tend to find themselves in. The wind had blown his hat clean away and his gun was jammed and he was trapped behind some bins in an alleyway and the rough tough thug he had been pursuing was closing in on him armed with an unjammed gun full of bullets. It looked like curtains for Blavelpang.

This episode was recorded on the 14th April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: Confessions Of A Door-To-Door Monkey Salesman

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:27:27 +0000

My adoptive parents perished in the Munich air disaster. They had won a raffle to attend the second leg of the European Cup quarter-final between Manchester United and Red Star Belgrade. It was the first time they had left me in sole charge of the pig farm. When the postie came up the lane with the telegram telling me the terrible news, in my convulsive grief I suddenly realised that I did not have the brain of a squirrel, and never had had, and that life held for me greater prospects than mucking about in the woods babbling gibberish and gnawing nuts. I was now the master of a dilapidated pig farm.

This episode was recorded on the 2nd April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: The Branch Line Less Travelled (CORRECTED)

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:10:25 +0000

Every now and then I receive letters from readers asking me to give some account of the geography of Hooting Yard and its hinterland. I have a standard reply to such requests, which is to say that through diligent study of the writings you could draw a map yourself. It would involve very close reading, being on the alert for clues and pointers, but all the information any half-competent cartographer needs is present in the texts.

Today, I am going to make things a little easier for aspiring mappers by saying a few words about the train journey from Hooting Yard to that ill-starred fishing village O’Houlihan’s Wharf. Last week it would have been fairly pointless to do so, but the exciting news is that the branch line, long fallen into desuetude, is running again. Using the proceeds from a winning raffle ticket (number 666, beige) a team of volunteers has reopened the line as a cross between a “countryside heritage family leisure facility” and a “cutting-edge arts praxis installation”. I have taken those two phrases from their brochure, a shabby piece of work duplicated on a Gestetner machine, designed perhaps to look like one of Dobson’s out of print pamphlets. Someone has gone to the trouble of hand-colouring all the covers, though, which shows the fanatical devotion of these enthusiasts.

This episode was recorded on the 26th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Prudence Foxglove Sunday Schools

Tunnel Vision

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:00:18 +0000

Episode 3 of 10: Frank Key.

Frank Key shuffles through a series of tunnels beneath West Dulwich to lament the forgotten histories of The Puckington Tunnels and Pointy Town sewers.

Tunnel Vision is a new series recorded entirely in London’s sewer system. Producer/presenter Bruno Rinvolucri duped a collection of writers, musicians, activists and academics into wading knee deep through swollen rivers of effluvia along the miles of tunnel beneath London. Tunnel Vision’s troglodytes explore this hidden and somewhat mysterious subterranean environment.

This episode was originally broadcast on 11th August 2009.

Email: brinvolucri@yahoo.co.uk

Hooting Yard: Boiled Black Broth and Cornets

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:35:43 +0000

I paid a visit to my friend Becke Beiderbix in her fortress in the mountains. We had known each other since childhood, growing up on a postwar housing estate, a workaday world of compactness and convention. But Becke was always a singleminded girl who followed her own strange star, and while the rest of us went off to polytechnics and office jobs and became fodder for a peculiarly dull-witted type of English fiction, Becke decamped to the mountains and built herself a fortress with her bare hands. I had no idea where she had picked up the skills to do this, and in truth, when I visited I was astonished to find how solid and immense and impregnable her fortress appeared, a massive edifice perched upon a bluff, as forbidding in its aspect as the Schloss Adler in Where Eagles Dare, but without the Nazi connotations, for Becke was the most apolitical person I have ever known.

This episode was recorded on the 19th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: By Hot Air Baloon to Hoon

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:40:42 +0000

We travelled to Hoon by hot air balloon. I took my harpoon, and impaled a wolf that was roaming the woodland below us. We hauled the wolf into the basket of our balloon, by a long and sturdy rope that was tied to the end of the harpoon. We arrived in Hoon, two balloonists and an impaled wolf, making a bumpy landing…

This episode was recorded on the 12th March 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Banisters Of Crepe Paper And Cow Gum

Hooting Yard: Tiny Enid and the Dustbin of History

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:41:25 +0000

The sun was sinking when Tiny Enid arrived at a compound surrounded by a security fence. She smiled to herself at the thought that, though she may have neglected to bring mountaineer’s rope and clambering hooks, she never went anywhere without her razor sharp security fence slicing shears. Dipping into her pippy bag to get them, she read a sign affixed to the fence. Large Flat Windy Uninhabited Plains Municipal Hygienic Waste Disposal Chute Compound, it said. Tiny Enid stamped her club foot and let out a shrill cry. The dustbin of history was neither a dustbin nor an ash heap but a chute! This put an entirely new complexion on her adventure. To salvage those things that had been deemed historical irrelevancies, she would have to find where the chute terminated, somewhere subterranean, and she had not brought a spade. One option, of course, was to fling herself recklessly down the chute, but that would be like toppling over the edge of the dustbin. She put the shears back in her pippy bag and sat down to think. She wondered if the lesson to be learned from the answer to Father Tweakling’s moral conundrum could help her now. A burning tower, a starving puppy, the Devil incarnate, and now add a hygienic waste disposal chute…

This episode was recorded on the 26th Feb 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: The Puckington Tunnels

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:18:21 +0000

It was a big fort, with delightful crenellations, and many flags, and it had the shiniest portcullis outside of Navarre. This was Fort Hoity, sister fort of Fort Toity, and an extremely interesting fort in its own right. For underneath Fort Hoity ran the Puckington Tunnels, those tunnels you may have come across in your reading, if, that is, you have been reading about tunnelling systems as a change from your usual diet of chicklit, gitlit, and zadiesmithlit.

This episode was recorded on the 19th Feb 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: Inky Puck Stampings

hooting.yard@googlemail.com (Frank Key) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:44:53 +0000

In his later years, Blodgett amassed a collection of inky puck stampings, kept in an album bound in the starch-stiffened fleece of a lamb. The fleece was spotted with unexplained bloodstains which Blodgett made no attempt to remove. He could have used a patent bloodstain eradication spray goo as manufactured by Don Federico’s Royal And Ancient Portugese Spray And Paste Company, but he chose not to. Boffins in a lab were recently given the opportunity to scrape minuscule quantities of the blood off the binding. When they subjected it to tests, they were able positively to identify it as the blood of a fruitbat. Curious indeed, but no more curious than much else about Blodgett’s later years.

This episode was recorded on the 12th Feb 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.