August has been exceedingly fecund here at Hooting Yard, with more postages in a single month than at any time since the site reared its gorgeous head almost seven years ago. However, I now wish to alert readers to the possibility that things may quieten down for a week or so, the reason being that a critical stage has been reached in the production of this year’s Lulu paperback. Yes!, fear not, fairly soon now your Christmas-present-purchasing-befuddlement will be washed away, like the blood of the lamb, with the publication of another fat (350 pages or thereabouts) anthology of mighty lopsided prose, direct from Mr Key’s pea-sized yet pulsating brain to the printed page!

The mind-numbing business of bashing the book together is at an advanced stage, formatting the text and proofreadnig and reformatting the text, etcetera etcetera ad nauseam.. This ought to be a simple matter, but as the ever-reliable Mr Fadhley, who directs the operation, points out, the programme used to create the book “was designed by nerds for nerds and is monstrously complex”. Think of that when, eventually, you clutch the treasured tome in your dainty little hands, as tiny as Scriabin’s, if that is an approximate description of your hands, though I realise it may not be. You may have huge hairy paws. It matters not.

So for the next few days at least I will be trying to tackle the remaining monstrous complexities. Should anything momentous bubble up in my cranium I shall try to post it here, but I thought it worth alerting you that things may quieten down just a tad.

Meanwhile, you might want to make a day trip to Beccles.