Here is one of those occasional Hooting Yard music playlists. All these pieces come recommended by the bloated janitor. He may be an unapologetic Blunkettite, but he knows his musical onions, apparently.

Hammond Song, The Roches

Two-Headed Boy, Neutral Milk Hotel

Manolete, Weather Report

Plastic Factory, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

The Old Man’s Back Again, Scott Walker

Misumo Bo Tamo She, King Bruce & Black Beats

O’er The Hills, Martin Carthy

Jackie And Edna, Kevin Coyne

Born Secular, Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins

In Love, The Raincoats

Young Stalin sounds like an instructive and entertaining biography, and I will add it to my reading list. I mention it here, though, simply as an excuse to celebrate the name of the author, Simon Sebag Montefiore. I want that middle name! Granted, Frank Sebag Key does not have the mellifluous multisyllabic beauty of Simon Sebag Montefiore, but it will have to do.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; or The Whale is a work of matchless genius, and it may be considered sacrilege to tamper with the text. I can’t help but feel, however, that if the opening line was “Call me Sebag” it would somehow be even better.

Incidentally, I discovered that Simon Sebag Montefiore is married to the sister of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. A rich pap-brained partygoer is an unlikely Hooting Yard heroine, but I have had a measure of admiration for Ms Palmer-Tomkinson ever since, on television a few years ago, she uttered the immortal line “Those are Uri’s underpants. Burn them”. Uri being, of course, the dismal charlatan Uri Geller.

Unfortunately, Madame Boubou did not enclose a snapshot of her engulfment by ectoplasm with her Message From Beyond. As luck would have it, a trawl through the Hooting Yard Archives turned up this picture which enables lucky readers to see with their own eyes the amazing phenomenon of ectoplasmic hoo-ha:

According to The Minnie Harrison Page, what we see here is “ectoplasm emanating from the Medium’s mouth. Taken in complete darkness using Kodak infra-red plate. Exposure by means of powerful ‘Sashalight’ bulb through ‘Wratten’ glass filter – extremely deep ruby-red colour. The Ectoplasm is emanating from her mouth and in this form it is quite transparent, very similar in appearance and texture to chiffon.”

Those of you who think Minnie Harrison is sitting there in her 1948 Middlesbrough sitting room with a net curtain stuffed in her mouth are sadly deluded and will not get a helping of Madame Boubou’s delicious Boiled Rhubarb Surprise.

I have received in the post what can only be described as a screed from Madame Boubou, who describes herself as a “mystic channeler”.

Dear Mr Key, she writes, I was in my kitchen boiling an enormous pan of rhubarb when I was of a sudden engulfed by wisps of ectoplasm and a voice spoke to me from the Other Side. Please note that this is the same place you describe as the ethereal realm in your piece entitled Annals Of The Frankish Kings, or at least I strongly suspect it is. Of course there are many realms, oh many many many, and we have cognisance of a mere handful. The vast majority of people are only familiar with the one realm, this earthly one, but I am a mystic channeler and thus have access to more realms than I can shake a stick at, the ethereal realm, or Other Side, being one of them. What happens is that the spirit beings who languish there sometimes find themselves impelled to send messages to those of us in this solid world of concrete and cement and soil and pebbles and clods. It is no easy matter to breach the awful chasm that divides us, and that’s where I come in. Even when I am puttering about engaged in workaday activities such as boiling up an enormous pan of rhubarb, my channels remain open.

I would explain further but I suspect your puny brain would be incapable of grasping the eldritch nature of my gift. As that wag H P Lovecraft put it, “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. I can vouch for that. Anyway, all this is by way of preamble to the marrow of my message, which is that I have to pass on to you a complaint. As the ectoplasm wafted around me, I became aware of a voice being channelled through the mystic Aether. You may not be surprised to learn that it was the voice of Pippin the Short, of whom you wrote in the aforementioned Annals Of The Frankish Kings. Here is what he said, faithfully recorded using my Pencil of the Paranormal, which, as luck would have it, I had sharpened under a zinc and copper pyramid just before putting the rhubarb on the boil. I have omitted the hideous guttural gurgling noises which began this mystic communication, but otherwise give it verbatim:

O Madame Boubou! You must pass on a complaint to a place called Hooting Yard. It must be known that I am not a Frankish king short of stature. “Pippin the Short” is a mistranslation of “Pepin le bref”. I should rightly be known as Pippin or Pepin the Younger, for I have an older brother named Carloman. That is all that is meant. You cannot imagine how fed up I am of being thought a diminutive king when in fact I am a king of average height. Please make sure this misunderstanding is corrected tout suite, or I may have to consider litigation, which can get frightfully complex in this ethereal realm. Enjoy your rhubarb.

After what sounded like a choking sob, the voice grew silent and the ectoplasm dispersed. I was about to stir my enormous pot of boiling rhubarb when another voice crashed in from the Beyond. This time it was houri-eyed siren of the silver screen Pola Negri, who channelled a message of titanic importance through me. However, what she had to say is no concern of yours. I trust you will admit that you have traduced the reputation of Pippin the Younger and rectify your error at once.

Yours sincerely, Madame Boubou the Mystic

An extract from Mrs Gubbins’ so-called Mission Statement:

“We will seek new ways to enhance our readers’ Hooting Yard experience. For example, we should strain mightily to harness the awesome power of the interweb to create what I think are known as multimedia formats. We should exploit different platforms and portals. The site will strive to be a critical hub for the Hooting Yard community. Now get on with it! You can make a start by bunging in a few pictures so that readers can visualise those Frankish kings mentioned in Annals Of The Frankish Kings, or at least some of them.”

Ever mindful that Mrs Gubbins has a matchless grasp of what really matters in this often perplexing world, we have taken her advice. Here, then, are three of those Frankish kings.

Pippin The Short

Charles The Fat

Louis The Pious

This picture is taken from the Hooting Yard Calendar 1994.

It has been suggested to me that I ought to transfer the vast Hooting Yard Archive 2003-2006 into this blog format so that readers can skip happily about tracking down their favourite items with ease. That sounds like a job for a factotum. Is it possible to be one’s own factotum? While I ponder such an imponderable, I may post a few orts and scantlings from the Archive here, in a whimsical manner. This, for example, which first appeared on Thursday 18th March 2004.

A card popped through the letterbox today from the Morning Star Church Of God. I wondered if this was evidence of some new alliance between the Communist Party and evangelical Christians. Maybe the sermons would consist of harangues from the editorial pages of the Morning Star about the necessity of building the class struggle by going on strike every five minutes. I looked in vain for a hammer-and-sickle-and-crucifix motif on the card, then turned my attention to the text:

Are You A Victim?, it read, Every person is victimised by Satan, either by Depression, Stress, Heart Problems, Baroness, Skin Diseases, Kidney, Cancer, ENT and many more. No Hope + No Cure = No Peace. But There Is Hope.

My initial surmise about the Communist element was clearly correct. Not only does Satan plague us with ailments and infirmities, but sets the aristocracy against us in the form of that Baroness. I pictured a sort of fairy tale baddie, or “Baroness” Margaret Thatcher, though of course it’s hard to tell the difference.

Incidentally, when I am eventually ennobled, as is bound to happen sooner or later, I think I’d like to be a Baron. The title has a medieval, or Mitteleuropean quality about it that ‘Lord’ or ‘Earl’ or ‘Duke’ somehow lack.

The front page of the online Guardian was recently redesigned, and there is a piece in today’s paper about readers’ reactions. Some people like the new look, some don’t. “Emily Bell [online editor… sorry, ‘director of digital content’] has made it clear that there is no going back,” apparently, but the disgruntled among the readership can rest assured – “she is listening to the feedback from users. Comments posted to her blog are being reviewed and sorted into ‘silos of concern’ to be considered by editors, web developers and designers.”

I think what is meant here is that she has sorted out the comments, putting like with like. There are comments about fonts, ease of navigation, arrangement of menus, and so on. What I want to know is why a simple ‘category’ becomes a ‘silo of concern’? Do they think this sounds clever? Does it make the job of the unpaid work experience trainee doing the sorting out more exciting? “Pashmina, I want you to go through all the comments we’ve received and place each one in its SILO OF CONCERN!” I expect there is a Hub around which all the Silos are arranged, and each Silo will be dealt with in a series of Tranches.

John Birt made a career out of this kind of gobbledegook in his days at the BBC, where an ‘arrow’ became a ‘directional pointing device’, for example. Why does no one ever take these people aside and gently point out to them that they are embarrassing themselves? Straightforward pomposity I could understand, but it’s more like the bureaucratic equivalent of teenage poetry, where the (mis)use of ‘big words’ is a hapless attempt to confer profundity.

According to the OED, which even the witless twelve-year-olds at the Guardian must have heard of, there are four distinct meanings of silo.

1. A pit or underground chamber used for the storage of grain, roots, etc.
   

2. spec. A pit, or an air- and water-tight chamber, in which green food is preserved for fodder by ensilage (cf. SILAGE); also, a cylindrical tower or other structure erected above ground for storing grain, fodder, etc.
   

3. A large bin used for the storage of loose materials, as cement, etc.
   

4. An underground structure in which a guided missile is stored and from which it may be fired.

Hmm. A large bin. Perhaps a ‘silo of concern’ is a new euphemism to disguise what really happens to readers’ feedback.

I hope that all Hooting Yard readers have become devotees of the magnificent BibliOdyssey. Today the site has a particularly splendid set of Remarkable Persons:

“John Bigg, the Dinton Hermit, baptized 22nd of April, 1629, buried 4th of April, 1696. He lived [..] in a cave, had been a man of tolerable wealth, was looked upon as a pretty good scholar, and of no contemptible parts. Upon the restoration he grew melancholy, betook himself to a recluse life, and lived by charity, but never asked for any thing but leather, which he would immediately nail to his clothes. He kept 3 bottles that hung to his girdle, viz. for strong and small beer, and milk; his shoes are still preserved; they are very large, and made up of about a thousand patches of leather.”

In a piece on the Guardian Books Blog, Lee Rourke identifies “the greatest first line of any novel I have ever read”, the opening of Ann Quin’s Berg: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .” Some of the commenters propose their own favourite first lines, and one links to a list of the “hundred best” from a website called LitLine. There is no explanation of how the hundred were selected, or by whom, but it makes for an occasionally intriguing read.

I had been thinking of compiling a list of the hundred best opening lines from out of print pamphlets by Dobson, and maybe one day I will do so. Certainly near the top of the list would be “There was a thunderstorm, and I discovered I had mislaid my bus pass” from How I Mislaid My Bus Pass During A Thunderstorm.

Meanwhile, having managed to type a couple of paragraphs while wheezing and spluttering due to my fever-racked condition, I am going to reward myself with A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit Down.

You don’t visit Hooting Yard to read about Paris Hilton, but there is something magnificent about this story from yesterday’s Guardian. I have emboldened the most jaw-dropping passages:

… the heiress and socialite yesterday appealed to fans to sign an online petition urging California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to commute her 45-day sentence for driving while disqualified. “If the late former president Gerald Ford could find it in his heart to pardon former president Richard Nixon after his mistake(s),” reads the appeal, “we undeniably support Paris Hilton being pardoned for her honest mistake as well, and we expect that the governor will understand and grant this unusual but important request.”

Ms Hilton, 26, was sentenced on May 5 after being pulled over while driving her £120,000 Bentley along Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, in February. Her licence had been suspended for 36 months last year for driving while drunk. She had told the judge she was not aware this meant she was unable to drive, since she never read her own mail. “I have people who do that for me,” she said. “I just sign what people tell me to sign.”

The letter to Mr Schwarzenegger says Ms Hilton should be freed because “she provides hope for young people all over the US and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives.”

Ms Hilton’s lawyers have filed notice of her intent to appeal. Should that fail she will be required to present herself to the women’s prison in south Los Angeles on June 5. There she will share an austere cell, wear an orange jumpsuit and pass the time with just three magazines or a book, though she will be in a “special needs” wing thanks to her celebrity status.