Here at Haemoglobin Towers there is much whirring and clanking as the finishing touches are put to your favourite book of the year, the annual Hooting Yard paperback. The publication of this mighty tome is imminent, imminent I tell you!
Meanwhile, never resting on our laurels, and determined always to extend our global reach, possibly into extraterrestrial zones, the thought occurred to present one of the new and gorgeous Hooting Yard lapel accoutrements to a living luminary. This lucky luminary could then act as our ambassador when hobnobbing with the great and good and with that Fry person. But upon which luminary should we bestow this signal honour? Readers, you decide!
I snap my fingers and, foof-la!, inaugurate the Hooting Yard Friday Quiz. (It is likely, not to say inevitable, that tomorrow I shall snap my fingers again and, foof-la!, abolish the Hooting Yard Friday Quiz, so make the most of it while you have the chance.)
This week’s challenge is to identify correctly the forty-seven fictional characters listed yesterday in the piece Unhinged By Cream Crackers. You need to provide the title of the work, be it a novel or a play or a film or what have you, where the character first appeared.
The first person to post a full and correct list in the Comments will win a modest prize. I do not yet know what it will be, but I will think of something, and it will not be a world cruise aboard the HMS Corrugated Cardboard.
It was an overcast morning in July. Pansy Cradledew was up and about at an ungodly hour. Some time later, her inamorato woke up, and, glugging his morning coffee, asked:
“So what have you been up to so early in the day, my sweet, my darling dear?”
“Oh, I pulled the head off a bat,” replied Pansy.
Her inamorato spluttered a mouthful of coffee and almost choked, until it became clear that the bat in question was not some flesh and blood and sinew pipistrelle, but a model bat made from terracotta-coloured modelling clay. Pansy, it transpired, had fashioned a figurine of the hideous bat god Fatso, his “look” based on the equally hideous bat god Camazotz, and the removal of the head was a temporary measure to expedite the drying and setting process. Nonetheless, her crack o’ dawn activity led to the conversational exchange reported, causing much merriment and the splitting of sides.
I hesitate to tread into that realm where blogging and cupcakes collide, as it is territory where Brit at Think Of England stands proudly alone, far above the petty doings of mere mortals.
I do think it worth mentioning, however, that next month I shall be taking a trip to Mortlake, where I shall be served with a nice cup of tea accompanied by a cupcake emblazoned with the Monas Hieroglyphica of the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee. See below, for the mystic symbol, if not the cupcake, which I assume has yet to be baked. A full report on this extremely sensible outing will follow in due course.
Every so often I find myself devising grand schemes and projects. These rarely come to fruition. One that did, probably because it was modest in its ambitions, was last year’s set of alphabetic postages here at Hooting Yard, where I adopted the constraint of posting twenty-six consecutive entries, entitled A through to Z. One that didn’t was the plan that my pre-Wilderness Years pamphlet House Of Turps would be the first volume in a series of twenty-six. I think this scheme failed primarily because it was never clear in my then-fuddled brain how the succeeding twenty-five pamphlets were intended to relate to the first one.
So the likelihood is that the preposterous plot hatched this morning will remain incomplete, if indeed it is ever even begun. It occurred to me that I ought to devote my time to tippy-tapping a blog postage for every single word listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, in alphabetical order. According to Oxford Dictionaries, “the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries”. Since January 2007 there have been 1,607 Hooting Yard postages (this is the 1,608th) to which one can add just short of a thousand entries in the archive for the previous format between 2003 and 2006. Clearly I would be taking on a gargantuan task, particularly given that I would want each and every postage to be packed with sweeping Dobsonian paragraphs of majestic prose. Even if I confine myself to the obsolete words – a highly tempting grand plan in itself – it would take years and years of toil, quite possibly more years than remain to me on this spinning terrestrial globe.
I may, however, make a start, in the near future. Foolhardy, I know, but then I am living in a fool’s paradise, am I not?
Prompted by his recent piece in The Dabbler, I decided to improve my ornithological knowledge by reading Tim Birkhead’s The Wisdom Of Birds. And lo! that is how I began my Easter Sunday on this sunny morning, to the sound of cawing crows outside.
I am afraid to say I am ready to hurl the book across the room in exasperation. This is an expensive and lavishly-produced Bloomsbury book, and by page 18 I have fought my way past no fewer than three howling typos: a missing indefinite article on page 2, “who” for “how” on page 6, and “know” for “known” on page 18. This is proofreading-by-spellcheck, and it simply isn’t good enough.
I shall persevere, for the time being. But this slipshod approach fatally undermines the pleasure of reading, for me. Tim Birkhead has been ill-served by his publishers. I’d insist on getting the whole print-run pulped and starting again, with a competent copy editor.
UPDATE : Still on page 18, and another one! – “principle” where what is meant is “principal”.
For the past few days I have fallen victim to the disorder known as vacancy-between-the-ears. Contrary to popular belief, this malady does not mean that the head is entirely empty. There are, for example, certain fugitive thoughts that flit through, such as “I think I shall make another cup of tea” or “I shall pop out to the corner shop and spend my latest Old Halob subscription”. But when vacancy-between-the-ears strikes, the victim is hard pressed to have more interesting thoughts than these, and it is the more interesting thoughts that give rise, in the general run of things, to Hooting Yard postages.
So, for example, the idea of nipping out to buy a pouch of acrid Serbian tobacco does not lend itself to paragraphs of tremendous prose, of which postages are wrought. It is, of course, possible that something exciting may occur during the nipping-out, such as the sight of a flock of bitterns, or the inadvertent stepping into a puddle, or perhaps a religious revivalist meeting with hymns and tambourines and hellfire-and-brimstone preaching. But one of the distressing effects of vacancy-between-the-ears is that even diversions such as these fail to set the cranial synapses a-snapping. The scribbler is bereft.
In these circumstances, the best thing to do is to embrace the vacancy and make no effort to cram anything into it. There will be the usual cupboard o’ stuff at The Dabbler on Friday, but otherwise Mr Key has decided to wait for ideas to plop into his head, like manna from heaven.
Back soon.
When Sebastian Coe spoke of “the greatest tickets on earth”, he was talking twaddle, but at least it was amusing twaddle. Too often, the twaddle babbled by politicians and others is composed of readymade phrases seemingly used to fill time – or, in written form, space – without the inconvenience of thought.
One practice that has become ubiquitous is an inability to say “diverse” without immediately adding “vibrant”. The most recent culprit I noted was the cabinet minister Francis Maude, on last week’s Question Time. Having told us how great it was that the country is “diverse”, and not really knowing what else he wanted to say, after a very brief pause he added “and vibrant”, clearly playing for time.
Similarly, the front page headline on a recent issue of my local council’s Pravda-style newspaper was a quote from a resident announcing “I love that the borough is so diverse and vibrant”.
Can one be diverse without being vibrant? Or vibrant without being diverse? And, if interrogated, chained to a chair in a dank basement, could most of the people trotting out this stuff define what they actually mean by “vibrant”?
Hooting Yard – it’s diverse! It vibrates!
Beware, earthlings, for the tentacles of Hooting Yard creep ever further in our tireless pursuit of global dominion. Most recently, Mr Key turns up on the SubGenius Hour Of Slack Podcast (The Church Of The SubGenius Weekly Radio Ministry) where he can be heard reciting the Lark Rise To Candleford peasant version of Captain Beefheart’s Old Fart At Play, in among an hour of sound collages and Devo cover versions. Thanks to Outa_Spaceman for his “intervention”, if that is the word I am looking for.
Those lovely people at Hubermann’s have been in touch regarding the Hooting Yard Christmas Gift Guide. Anticipating vast hordes of shoppers sweeping into view from the blasted heath beyond the vintage carpark, they have asked me to do a spot of market research so they have some idea of what to stuff into the bin outside the bargain bin basement. Please help by indicating below which of the five items you will definitely be buying for your nearest and dearest.
And from The Dabbler to The Drabblecast. This second sponsored show includes a marvellous version of “O Say Can You See” sung by Mr Key’s son Ed, with full musical accompaniment, and then Mr Key himself giving some tips on what to do if you wake to find hoofprints on your ceiling. Once again, Norm Sherman provides a superb musical background. Listen and learn.
Hooting Yard’s campaign for global dominion continues apace with the first of four “sponsored” episodes of Norm Sherman’s Drabblecast fiction podcast. Hear Mr Key read a story with added music and sound effects! My thanks are due to Norm and to Salim Fadhley. Follow the link and home in on episode 188, and remember there are three more to come, each with Hooting Yard-related enticements.
Last week we looked at self-tidying swans, and we can now extend our ornithological researches courtesy of Johnny Seven. Mr Seven, incidentally, is a man to whom you should be profoundly thankful. Not only does he present the excellent “Pull The Plug” show on ResonanceFM, but he is currently the sound engineer charged with making sure Mr Key’s dulcet tones are transmitted into your ears every week.
Long, long ago, in the last century, Johnny snapped a gang of self-tidying seagulls. He writes: “Taken on Tuesday 10th December 1984 (I know this since it’s written on the back of the photographs), I was interested in the slate-grey blanket of fog shrouding the trees on the embankment in Putney. No sooner had I set up the tripod than the hungry birds came (picture no.1). See their expectant little faces. Imagine their disappointment when croutons were not scattered. I moved further back to get a wider (and, to be honest, less pleasingly composed) view, and the gulls moved further up the railing toward me, increasing in number (picture no.2, and detail).”
You will note that, unlike the self-tidying swans, these self-tidying gulls are not accompanied by an equal number of water gulls. This is due to their choice of emperchment, upon railings, if, indeed, it was a conscious choice. Who can say what weird shenanigans occur in the tiny brains of birds? One thing we can be sure of is that they know how to line up very neatly, with the precision for which self-tidying gulls are applauded, in some circles.
Reading Gilbert Adair’s second Evadne Mount mystery, A Mysterious Affair Of Style (2007), I note that his film director character Rex Hanway has a cat called Cato. This served to remind me of a personal favourite from the implausibly vast Hooting Yard archives, the 2004 quotation from Spine-Tingling Tales Of Glucose Deficiency by Istvan Scrimgeour : “He had two pets: a cat called Doge and a dog called Cato.”
