“Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and, though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien.” – Robert Lynd, The Pleasures Of Ignorance

• Song of the Grunty Man
• Days o’ Bootpolish
• A Further Note on Pigs
• Quotation from The Pleasures Of Ignorance by Robert Lynd
• Quotation from Reading Made Easy For Foreigners by John L. Huelshof
• Quotation from Nineteen Impressions by J. D. Beresford

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 9th August 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by zenera.

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“Now and again, it will do you a power of good to spend a Wednesday morning tramping along a high ridge, blowing a trumpet and waving a banner. If you can persuade others to join you, so much the better. It will not matter if you are tuneless and raggle-taggle – the experience itself can pump vital energy into your blood, oxygenating your brain and feeding crucial nutriments into your integuments.”

That is the advice I was given by my mentor, or at least by a book handed to me by my mentor on the day I said farewell to him for the last time. It was not a day I am likely ever to forget. After the dawn calisthenics, we had sausages for breakfast. I have never tasted the like, before or since. God only knows what they were made of. Ambrosia, perhaps, or manna. My mentor was kind enough, for once, to overlook my disgusting table-manners, even going so far as to hand me several extra napkins from his precious supply. When I had finished mopping up my drool and spillages, he beckoned me with the Claw Of Gack, and we headed off up into the hills to that lair of his which until now had been forbidden to me. Had I not eaten such a gigantic breakfast, my heart would have been palpitating. As it was, my corporeal being was preoccupied with its digestive functions, freeing my brain to do the palpitations.

Once inside the lair, or cave, my mentor handed me a trumpet and a banner and the book which I have already mentioned, and then he vanished in a puff of inexplicable roseate vapour. I was alone. I waited for the vapour to disperse and then I strode out of the cave… no, I must not lie, I minced out of the cave, and I tumbled down the hillside, battering my trumpet in the process, and I rummaged around in my mentor’s pantry until I found more sausages, and while I cooked them I practiced a few toots on the trumpet, and I read the book – the passage quoted above comprises the complete text – and then I unfurled my banner. And when I had finished eating all of the sausages, I set out to make my own way in the world.

• A Note about Pigs
• Intriguing News from the World of Letters
• Trumpets and Banners
• Mansfield
• The Rotation of the Globe
• Quotation from The Monkey God by Seabury Quinn

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 2nd August 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by daniel_cosman.

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There is something very weird about this spinney, but I have a toothache, so I am oblivious to the weirdness. I have come to the spinney at the suggestion of my dentist. She is a so-called “new dentist”, one of a growing band of revolutionary tooth interventionists who have torn up the rule book.

“Go home,” she said, ushering me out of her waiting room none too gently, “Boil up a paste of sorghum, goat’s milk and raspberry jam, sprinkle with hundreds and thousands, mould it into a brazil nut sized blob, and tuck it into a tiny muslin bag tied at the top with butcher’s string. Go to the weird spinney and put the bag on the ground near one of the beech or sycamore trees, then go and conceal yourself behind shrubbery. In due time a squirrel will come to get the bag to add to its winter store. Oh, I forgot to tell you to have your camera with you. Grab a snapshot of the squirrel as it frisks away with your bag of paste. When you have developed the photo, make it the centrepiece of a shrine in your living room. You may add to the shrine whatever festoonments take your fancy. Four times a day, prostrate yourself before the squirrel-shrine and plead to have your toothache taken away. I have written down on this card the recommended form of words for your pleading. Now off you go.”

With that, she propelled me out into the street. Now here I am in the weird spinney, and a squirrel has taken away the bag of paste I prepared exactly as my “new dentist” prescribed. I have taken the photograph, but rather than sprinting home, I am somehow compelled to stay here, squatting in the shrubs. Perhaps that is why it is called ‘the weird spinney’, because of this overpowering sense that I am rooted to the spot, unable to leave, that somehow great peril is in store should I try to stride away across the heath to home.

I take my portable metal tapping machine from my jacket pocket and try to make contact with my dentist, but all I am able to receive are eerie howling noises, like a mighty wind announcing the apocalypse. I am about to try again when I notice that I am surrounded by squirrels, hundreds upon hundreds of them, savage squirrels with sharpened claws, ghost squirrels from an unimaginable past, phantoms in a phantom spinney, and the aching in my tooth redoubles, and the sun is blotted out and the sky is black.

• The Weird Spinney
• Reader Profile
• Cake And Pastry Person
• Shem, Ham, Japheth and Minnie Crunlop
• God News

This episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 26th July 2006. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Photo by S*W*Q.

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