Sunday, February the 5th, 2006
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In the words of Henry Gally in today's quotation, I take pains to provide Hooting Yard readers with “the most agreeable, most instructive Entertainment that can possibly be desir'd”. One way of doing this is to urge all of you to make yourselves a nice, piping hot cup of tea before sitting down to read the latest bulletins from Haemoglobin Towers. We know that “a nice cup of tea” is the perfect accompaniment to all human (and inhuman) activity, from perusing your favourite website, tracking down that out-of-print Dobson pamphlet, attending the Picnic For Detectives, observing pigs in a sty, or winning with Dick, to encountering Death on his pale horse, alongside War, Famine and Pestilence. Suggesting that you make your nice cup of tea piping hot is just a little touch I tend to add, to make things even more agreeable.
But readers need more than tea to make the Hooting Yard experience truly gorgeous, as I learned the other day. I went out for a walk in the cow-riddled fields near the Blister Lane Bypass. There was a crowd of people massed by a churn. The sun was black, the moon was red, the stars were falling, the earth was trembling. And then the crowd, impossible to number, carrying flowers, shouted amid the hotless sun, the lightless moon, the windless earth, the colourless sky: “Frank, Frank, what we need is some sort of website, a blog even, that would act as a companion to Hooting Yard. It could be used for notes and queries, references, additional material, all sorts of excitements. If we had a resource like that, we would be better placed to devote our lives to the study of your work, instead of being distracted by fripperies!”
I listened carefully, at least until that last bit, at which point I thought they were shouting about a bespectacled plectrum botherer, and I fled. The nearest place to hide from the roaring throng was a byre. I slumped on straw and gulped piping hot tea from my thermos flask. Overhead, the sky was suddenly filled with thousands upon thousands of migratory ducks. I do not know where they were migrating to, or from. They made such a din that I put blobs of putty in my ears. When I peered out from my shelter, I saw that the crowd had dispersed. I thought briefly about wheat. And then I trudged home, and scribbled down some ideas for the Hooting Yard Annexe. Come trudge with me now, and we shall pay a visit…