According to one or two of my correspondents, it is high time I injected some explicitly religious content into the Hooting Yard Advent Calendar. We have had a Mayan bat god, and Our Lady of the Arctic Wastes, but these are not enough for the more devout among my readers. Today, then, a picture which will I hope give rise to earnest discussions of faith, fury, and foolishness.
On Thursday next, 22nd December at 6.00 PM, ResonanceFM will be broadcasting the Hooting Yard Christmas Special – an hour-long (slightly edited) recording of last month’s Evening Of Lopsided Prose And Lugubrious Music at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey Square. Those of you who were there will be able to relive those golden moments, and those who were unable to attend can hear what you missed, and gnash your teeth, and rend your garments in despair, after which you may want to cheer yourselves up a little by sending Mr Key his Christmas money, via PayPal.
A podcast of the complete, unedited recording will be available shortly after the broadcast, and I will of course post a link to it here.
For today’s advent calendar picture I have raided the London Library blog, wherein one can find this snap (bigger when clicked upon) of the H. Imaginary History shelfmark. One of these days I may write an entire postage about the London Library shelfmarks – particularly those within the Science & Miscellaneous category – which are wildly idiosyncratic, occasionally baffling, and very, very pleasing.
This week in my cupboard at The Dabbler I present a caption competition with a twist. Those of you who can barely think straight due to your excitement at the continuing wonders of the Hooting Yard Advent Calendar will be pleased to learn that, having printed and cut out and pasted with glue to a sheet of cardboard one of the pictures which appeared earlier in the week, you will have an advantage over common or garden Dabbler readers. You will already be familiar with the photograph, and indeed with the caption. So get thee hence and devise your entry for a chance to win untold riches in gold.
It is about time we had a hovel in the Hooting Yard Advent Calendar, so here is one that doubles as a Norbiton allotment shed.
I have taken this snap from Anatomy Of Norbiton, an extraordinary website and a thing of strange and terrible beauty. If you can bear to tear yourself away from Hooting Yard – never an easy task, I know, but with grit and determination it is occasionally possible – I recommend that you immerse yourself in its wonders for several hours.
Today’s thrilling advent calendar picture shows what happened next in the as yet unwritten adventures of the men with whisks and celery. As you can see, the whisks have been discarded, as has the celery, and our trio of doughty ne’er-do-wells are engaged upon a perilous subaquatic mission, pursued by giant jellyfish (actual size).
Picture from Surf : Karmic Voyager
Here is a snippet from Phil Baker’s excellent The Devil Is A Gentleman : The Life And Times Of Dennis Wheatley (2009):
Star Of Ill Omen is an extraordinary performance, with its characteristically fraught and tender Wheatley love story (quite unlike James Bond and his girls) embedded in a mind-bogglingly improbable Cold War potboiler. Realistic details are combined with a larger naivety about space that wouldn’t be out of place in Dan Dare, and there are moments whose sheer weirdness compares with the work of proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel: when, for example, the insects [a breed of hyper-intelligent insects who buzz around like bees and give telepathic orders] show them black and white films of great moments in human history, and
“the bee-beetles who controlled the machine again pressed the lever; again the machine whirred and the words came, ‘Music while you work’, followed by the rumba.”
Wheatley never attempted science fiction again.
It is traditional at Hooting Yard, as Christmas approaches, to wheel out Little Severin, the Mystic Badger, and to pay close attention to his prognostications. The only difficulty lies in interpreting them, for Little Severin’s spooky forecasts take the form of his scrubbling about with his mighty claws among twigs and roots and undergrowth to no apparent purpose. So while we try to work out what on earth it may all portend, here is a snap of the Mystic Badger to print and cut out and paste with glue to your Hooting Yard Advent Calendar.
This is a foolhardy, if heartfelt, request, and perhaps the season of good will is the time to make it. I am seeking a patron – a wealthy person (or indeed persons), perhaps an oligarch or a plutocrat, one at least to whom my modest requirements seem puny – who could help to place Hooting Yard on a sound financial footing. There are readers and listeners who are very generous – you know who you are, and I thank you – but in this instance I wonder if there is a devotee of sufficient riches who could help not only to keep the wolf from the door, but to keep it penned in some distant wolf-prison. If you think you may have sufficient sense, and wealth, to support an impoverished scribbler, please drop me a line (address here). Or, if you cannot help but count among your friends and acquaintances an oligarch or plutocrat or, say, Damien Hirst or Richard Branson, please draw this to their attention. And do not forget there is always that Paypal ”Donate” button to your right.
Those of you who have been following the doings of Mr Key for an improbable length of time will know that in the final decade of the twentieth century I produced four – or was it five? – Hooting Yard Calendars. Certain persons have tried to cajole me into reviving this undoubted boon to the date-befuddled, but for the time being you are going to have to make do with the pale shadow of the calendar proper that is this year’s Hooting Yard Advent Calendar. Today’s picture, however, is the sole remnant of an abortive calendar, from (I think) 1996, which was to be entitled something along the lines of Treasures From The Istvan Plunkett Postage Stamp Collection. This one shows, according to my notes, “a trio of ne’er-do-wells brandishing whisks and celery”.
Today’s advent calendar picture shows Klaus Kinski (1926-1991) explaining himself to a monkey (dates unknown). It is a still from the magnificent Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Werner Herzog, 1972), a film which I watch about once a year, and always find absolutely dazzling.
A letter arrives from Poppy Nisbet:
Dear Mr Key, I have been enjoying your advent calendar very much and have dutifully been printing out the pictures and pasting them with glue to a sheet of cardboard, as you recommend. May I make a request? For many years I have been absolutely fascinated by the Wobbling Virgin of Ballinspittle, and I think she would make a fine addition to the calendar.
It’s a nice idea, but getting a snap of the Wobbling Virgin actually in the act of wobbling has proved impossible. Instead, I hope Ms Nisbet, and indeed all of you, will make do with the equally splendid Our Lady of the Arctic Wastes.
Courtesy of abelincolnjr
ADDENDUM : Ruth Bosch writes “Dear Mr. Key, In my yoot I had some friends who comprised a BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) SWAT team. Their mission being to regularly move a very heavy concrete statue, under cover of darkness and from place to place, so that when the chosen households looked out their morning windows THERE she was. A miracle. They sustained quite a few injuries in the course of this project.”
But why should I, in so vast an Ocean of Books by which the minds of studious men are troubled and fatigued, through which very foolish productions the world and unreasoning men are intoxicated, and puffed up, rave and create literary broils, and while professing to be philosophers, physicians, mathematicians and astrologers, neglect and despise men of learning: why should I, I say, add aught further to this so-perturbed republick of letters, and expose this noble philosophy, which seems new and incredible by reason of so many things hitherto unrevealed, to be damned and torn to pieces by the maledictions of those who are either already sworn to the opinions of other men, or are foolish corruptors of good arts, learned idiots, grammatists, sophists, wranglers, and perverse little folk?
William Gilbert, On the magnet, magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth (1600)
Gilbert Adair, 1944-2011
It’s pig time, at last, in the Hooting Yard Advent Calendar. Here is a picture of pigs doing what pigs do best. And let us not forget that if you gaze at these pigs for an hour or so, any mental or emotional turmoil buffeting your brain will be becalmed, for as we know, the contemplation of pigs in a pig sty is greatly soothing to the frantic.
The snap is from the Animal Photos! website. I like the breezy gusto of that exclamation mark. Perhaps I should rename this site Hooting Yard!