Saturday 31 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 365

Felpham 31/12/11:

Friday 30 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 364

Aldwick 30/12/11:

Thursday 29 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 363

Aldwick 29/12/11:

Wednesday 28 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 362

Bognor Regis 28/12/11:

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 361

The Trundle 27/12/11:

Monday 26 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 360

Hotham Park Duck Pond, Bognor Regis 26/12/11:

Sunday 25 December 2011

Wigging.

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 359

Bognor Regis 25/12/11:

Saturday 24 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 358

Felpham 24/12/11:

Friday 23 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 357

Singleton 23/12/11:

Thursday 22 December 2011

The Hooting Yard Christmas Special

A complete recording of An Evening Of Lugubrious Music & Lopsided Prose, featuring Mr Key and Outa_Spaceman and Pansy Cradledew, is now available as a podcast from ResonanceFM. Might I suggest that, on Christmas Day, you lock the family in a cupboard pull your chair upto the fireside and listen, rapt and awestruck?

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 356

Felpham 22/12/11:

Wednesday 21 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 355

North Bersted 21/12/11:

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 354

Felpham/Bognor Regis Border 20/12/11:

Monday 19 December 2011

An Evening of Lugubrious Music and Lopsided Prose: To London.


To London.

I enjoy train travel. 
Possibly because I travel off-peak.
Front-facing window seat with a table and I'm a happy man.

As soon as the train starts moving, instead of gurning out of the window at the peasant filled fields, I pull out my current note-book and start writing out all the song lyrics, again.
My concentration broken only once as the train stops at Gatwick Airport and subsumed by what appear to be angry lobster people continually shouting abuse at one another whist juggling suitcases and screaming off-spring.

After many more hilarious ups & downs the train eventually pulls into Waterloo Station.
I filch some sugar cubes from the unattended refreshment trolly and, on reaching the front of the train, give them to the pulling horse. 
I'd always assumed the Bognor Regis to Waterloo train was pulled by a pair and this may in fact be the case, one of the pair could have been unhitched at Clapham Junction and either rested or put on other duties.

I'm slightly nervous as I've been informed that I am to be met from the train my Mr. Key himself.  
I make sure the chin-strap on my helmet is extra tight this time.
Senses at full volume, I cross the barrier and crouch low, embracing the margins.
I light the Blotzmannscope and make a tentative sweep.

Locked!

Christopher Plummer?

No, my mistake, it's Mr. Key himself.

The Christopher Plummer moment is understandable when I explain that Mr. Key is wearing a smart Tyrolean Jacket, a jaunty Tyroean hat and clutching an alpenstock.
Piled around him are hundreds of brown leather suit-cases and wooden trunks.  
He is accompanied by a crowd of children, more urchins really, wearing clothes made from old curtain material and, stood alongside him, the most ferocious nun I've ever seen.

I was about to break cover when the nun's gaze fixed on me and suddenly I found it quite impossible to move.
She crossed the concourse in a menacing and deliberate manner, straight to my hiding place in the glass horse trough..
She stood over me and I watched her face ripple above the surface of the water.
She grabbed me by the throat, hauled me out and dropped me on the floor where I coughed and spluttered for several minutes before regaining my composure.

 "TAKE THIS!"  she said bendind over me shoving something toward my face,  "Mr. Key, in the unlikely event that he may have something to communicate to you,  will contact you using this device."
"Under no circumstances are you to approach within 2 metres of Mr. Key unless Mr. Key's life is threatened you will then be expected to throw yourself between Mr. Key and the assailant."
"DO YOU UNDERSTAND?".
I nodded, she turned on her heel and walked back toward the urchins.

I looked at the device I'd been given, it was a Metal Tapping Machine!
TrueIy I had arrived in the big city.  
I emptied the horse trough water out of my ukulele.

One of the urchins ran over and handed me a grubby piece of paper.  In nail-scratch font, it read:

At the sound of the Horror Horn you will join the rear of Mr. Key's entourage and be escorted to the limousine fleet.
You will join the last vehicle in the line for the journey to your destiny.


The Horror Horn sounded loud and long. 

Urchins leapt each to a suit case or trunk and hoisted them on to their backs. Mr. Key turned and began walking toward the exit, the nun fell in behind him and the urchins began to lumber in their wake.
When the station seemed more or less deserted I guessed it was my turn to follow on.

Outside the station I noticed the iMaxio cinema was showing 'Key! The Movie". 
I walked along the row of highly polished red limos and, at the end of the line, got into the back of an old white Transit-van-Morrison.
I peered through a hole in the van roof as we proceeded at a stately pace toward…..
And there it was!  
Gleaming!  
Twinkling!   
A beacon.
A sword of golden light thrust into the clouds,
Haemoglobin Towers!

2 hours later, after undergoing the various scanings, probings and interrogations that regular visitors to Haemoglobin Towers seem to take as a matter of course,  I am shoved, in non-to gentle a manner, into a lift.
The lift attendant turns to me and says, "To which level do you wish to proceed?".
"I dunno" I replied.
The attendant's face clouds over, "Is that problematical?" I ask.
"No, is not pro-blem-atical" he says, stretching out the word problematical in a pantomimic way.
"I know what level I now proceed you to".
That didn't sound good.

I watch the electronic level indicator. It's scale impossible for the lay-man to decipher, the needle flicking back and forth, this way and that, lights flashing, bells ringing, steam escaping.
The lift stops with a jolt and my head hits the ceiling before my knees hit the floor.
The lift attendant laughs and laughs and laughs.

"Your name's on the list, pal" I think to myself.

I step out of the lift into luxury as I have never seen.
 The exciting control hubs, the gleaming surfaces, the pods.
A pod tree to be more precise.  I reach up an pluck a blue iLeonard from it's branches.

From her reclining position, on a golden chaise-long in the shape of a pig on it's back, a be-turbaned flapper giggles and shouts over to a figure sat at an escritoire in the shadows, "Tonight's "offering" for the ceremony has arrived", she fluted.
The figure rose from the escritoire and started to walk toward me.  As the shadows fell away I knew it was him, Mr. Key.

I was ready, all the training, all the sacrifice, focused onto this moment.
Let him get close, let him get close, so close that there will be no mistake this time.

Mr. Key, hands behind his back, stalks across the marble tiles, I met his gaze head-on, he suspects nothing and suddenly we are face to face.
Now is the moment.

In one deft move I duck down, open my ruck-sack, whip out my cape and throw it round my shoulders, 
"Key!" I bellow, whist extending a potential hearty hand-shake.
Mr. Key reels back like a man who's seen his own ghost, the flapper, Pansy Cradledew no less, shrieks and drops several stitches from the alpaca vest she's knitting.

I reach into the folds of my cape and turn it up to full power. It billows pleasingly though there is no wind on which to do so.
"Spaceman!" they chime in unison.
"It is I" my lofty reply.

"We thought you had abandoned us" said Mr. Key, furiously pumping my proffered hand.
"All is well, all is well, Hooting Yard, Hooting Yard, Ha Ha and Gazebo!" trilled Ms. Cradledew as she did a frighteningly elaborate skippy dance around the room.
Mr. Key fixed me with the steely gaze that has been known to kill the smaller members of the rodent family and said "time is short, we have a helicopter waiting. There may just be enough time to get to the venue before some poor sod has his entrails ripped out by wailing Yardistas! "
We entered an altogether more pleasant lift, still the same attendant as before though.
The moment the etched crystal glass doors closed it revolved through 180 degrees to appear on the outside of the tower and shot toward the roof.
"I'll brief you in the chopper" Mr. Key shouted as we ducked under it's spinning blades.
"Give me a moment" I said, "I have some unfinished business with your lift attendant."
"You've got one minute and we're gone!"

I drew out my sharpest ukulele and headed back to the lift.

To find out what happens next tune into Resonance 104.4 (in the London area) or pick up the mp3 feed from the site at  6 p.m. on Thursday 22nd of December.

(The winter solstice y'know, oh, yes)


Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 353

Bognor Regis 19/12/11:

Sunday 18 December 2011

Pod-Test.

image
errr,
Hello,
just testing

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 352

Comet Corner, Middleton 18/12/11:


Saturday 17 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 351

Bognor Regis 17/12/11:

Friday 16 December 2011

Annoying

Thanks to experimental film maker Ned Ouwell for permission to use her "Blue Eye" movie clip. 

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 350

Chichester 16/12/11:

Thursday 15 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 349

Marine Park Gardens Aldwick 15/12/11:

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 348

Charlton Down 14/12/11:

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 347

Oving 13/12/11:

Monday 12 December 2011

Ignorant Ornithology and Sudden Enthusiasms. (a poem in words and pictures by OSM)

Letter to Mr. G. Webster of The Pavilion of Innocent Pastimes:
(reads)
Dear Sir,

Please find enclosed an rough sketch of an ferocious creature that swooped to attack me this evening as I changed my bandage.
Would it be possible for you to confirm that this creature is, in fact, an eagle?

O.S.M. B:nn

An Eagle?
Mr. Webster replies:

"That's a bewinged potato, you're not catching me out that easily!"


And so Linda made Pease Pottage:
Not to scale
I think I need a holiday.

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 346

North Bersted 12/12/11:

Sunday 11 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 345

Bognor Regis 11/12/11:

Saturday 10 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 344

Felpham 10/12/11:

Friday 9 December 2011

Cardboard Reality Interventions 2011: No. 343

Bognor Regis 09/12/11: