During the 1980s, my mother wrote a memoir of her teenage years in Belgium during World War Two. The first version was written in longhand, and then she bought a typewriter, typed it up, and made copies for her children. As far as I know, she never submitted it for publication. The other day, my brother had a bright idea. Why don’t we publish it on the internet?, he suggested. Although it is not written in diary format, I added my tuppenceworth to the effect that it would lend itself to appearing as a blog, so… voila!, here is Ghent In Wartime, a memoir in weekly instalments.

I encourage you all to read it.

The launch of the BBC’s season of programmes devoted to the 1980s stirred a memory, and with it faint pangs of guilt. Older readers will recall that in those far off days there was a phenomenon known as Antmania, built around the antics of one Stuart Goddard and his pop group, Adam And The Ants. They were, for a while, hugely popular, absurdly so, no doubt due to the schemings of their manager, the late Malcolm McLaren.

When the hoo-hah was at its height, my pal David Lines and I concocted what seemed to us to be a flawless money-making plot. We produced a fanzine, entitled Antmania!, using the tools of the pre-internet days – typewriters, Letraset, biros and Xerox – and advertised our eight-page publication in the small ads columns of teenybopper magazines such as Record Mirror and Smash Hits. I can’t recall how much we charged, probably about 50p plus postage, but we sat back and waited for umpteen thousand orders to come in. After all, the records were selling by the million, beloved by young and old alike. In the event, I recall only a handful of copies ever sold, so few that I think we failed to cover our photocopying costs.

What our advertisement failed to make clear, and the reason for those faint pangs of guilt, is that the content of our Antmania! was devoted exclusively to ants, as opposed to Adam And The… We had facts about ants, pictures of ants, even song lyrics about ants, including one about a leaf-cutter ant, I think.

It is extremely unlikely that there is a Hooting Yard reader today who, thirty years ago, was one of the few poor teenyboppers who shelled out for a fanzine about their favourite pop group only to be sent a few pages of twaddle about ants. But if so, that person is now quite obviously sitting on a collector’s item which would sell for much more than 50p on eBay. It might fetch a pound, or even a fiver. So my guilt is somewhat assuaged.

I no longer have a copy of this seminal publication myself, alas.

I am fairly sure the answer to this question is a resounding “Yes!”

“Can we not all remember the time when, on first taking to heart Milton, and afterwards Akenside, – (before knowing anything of Dante,) we conceived the grandest moment of possible existence to be that of a Seraph, poised on balanced wings, watching the bringing out of a world from chaos, its completion in fitness, beauty and radiance, and its first motion in its orbit, when sent forth by the creative hand on its everlasting way?”

Harriet Martineau, Life In The Sick-Room : Essays Of An Invalid (1844)

While I struggle with the act of belching prose from the very core of my being, here is number two in our series in which Outa_Spaceman pigmentises ancient drawings by Mr Key.

The other day the BBC Parliament channel showed a repeat of the general election coverage from February 1974. This is precisely the kind of thing I can watch, avidly, for hours. I rarely essay political topics here at Hooting Yard, but when not engaged in high level research into matters Dobsonian or limning the contours of Bodger’s Spinney or whatever else I prattle on about, I can be a terrible political pointyhead. There is a special fascination with old archive footage – the haircuts, the fruity pronunciation, the clunking technology, the on-screen fug of tobacco smoke, the impossibly youthful appearance of people still in the public eye, the phantoms of those who are dead and gone…

Of many treasurable moments, one in particular stood out for me. Jeremy Thorpe was down in his Devon constituency, on camera yet speaking to the London studio via a large green telephone receiver clutched tight against his ear, and as he signed off he said he was planning to spend the weekend doing lots of gardening before returning to the fray on Monday. Back in the studio, Alastair Burnet said, very casually, “Jeremy Thorpe there, very Voltairean… now, some more results…”

I cannot imagine any presenter today making that comment, either because they wouldn’t be capable of doing so, or, if they were, it would be considered too obscure a reference for the viewers, who need to be treated like slow-witted infants.

I will, of course, be glued to the screen for hours come the forthcoming election, and will enjoy every minute of the coverage. But if any reference at all is made to anything outside the hermetically-sealed world o’ Westminster, it will be to an airhead “celebrity” rather than to an Enlightenment philosophe.

Were he still among the living, my father would have been celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday today. And were the thirty-seventh Potus still with us, he – Richard Milhous Nixon – would have been celebrating his ninety-seventh birthday. I had not previously realised that my Pa was exactly twelve years younger than Nixon. If I were a different kind of writer, I might make much of this, and embark upon a dazzling doublefold psychological study, of thousands and thousands of words. Of course, the result would say a lot more about me than it would about either my father or the late Potus. There would have to be an entire chapter about mashed potato. Nixon enjoyed the act of mashing, my father enjoyed eating the results. And would I find some mystic significance in the number twelve? These are deep waters indeed. What on earth would the twentieth century’s most pernicious brain-softener have made of them?

I must apologise for echoing A A Milne in the title of this postage. (In 1928, in her Constant Reader column in The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker wrote, immortally, “and it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up”, thus telling us all we ever need know about Milne.) But “now we are six” is, in the present case, literally true, for it was on this day in 2003 that the Hooting Yard website came into being.

There was, as aficionados know, an earlier Hooting Yard presence on the interweb, but it was a static site containing a jumble of pre-Wilderness Years odds and ends. On 14th December 2003, however, regular postages from Mr Key’s pea-sized yet pulsating brain began tumbling forth, and continue to do so, with the occasional hiatus.

Many thanks, on this anniversary, to the readers and listeners who stalk the muddy lanes in and around Haemoglobin Towers and Bodger’s Spinney for your support and enthusiasm.

Mooching about Interwebshire*, it is easy to forget those long ago days spent in the seedy village of Inksmudge. Although there are umpteen websites devoted to all sorts of past publishing glories, it is rare – at least in my experience – to chance upon an item I clearly remember snipping out of an old inky paper and slotting in to my teenage cuttings pile. (Why did I never bother to paste things into a scrapbook?)

Those heaps of printstuff were, for the most part, lost or abandoned or buried or burned to a cinder many years ago. So I was delighted, this morning, roaming through the shire, to find this snippet, almost certainly from NME circa 1974. It still makes me laugh, though perhaps now accompanied by a lump in my throat. Tempus fugit, lost youth, blah blah blah…

* NOTE : A term coined, as far as I’m aware, by John Barleycorn at the much-missed According To The Ninth.