The
niffer
A PERIODICAL FOXY COMPENDIUM
ISSUE NO. TWO — 6 MAY 2010
F ROM T HE S NOUT
A few days ago, you were given the chance to
read Fit the Second of Cocky's ballad. If
you're anything like me, you probably found
the fight scene exhilarating and the Mother
Mercury macaroon propitiation nerve-
wracking. Parker certainly knows how to
crank the handle and keep the action
flowing. And with what phraseological
chops! We all have our favourite Cocky
tropes: “the inward bulge of tears”, “the
occasional stampede of a night-train
overhead”, “the blind roots of Time woggling
around like snail-horns”. But I put it to you
that Parker is more than just an Amisian
anthropomorphist. The latest installment of
balladry reveals him to be a consummate
cataloguer of cack:
“I’ve seen them genuflecting behind him in
the park, his ‘owners’, bending low to cherish
his hot turds in plastic mittens. His turds
are pretty amazing — great swarthy chunks
all seamed from the pressure of his tip-top
bowels and reeking of the good life like
–1–
issues of Vanity Fair. How different from
my own wracked bulletins, the dots and
dashes, produced in a trembling-tailed
crouch while looking over my shoulder…”
This vivid and biologically accurate
comparison of canine and vulpine stool
would make a faecal ecologist proud.
Literatteur he is. But if Parker ever gets
tired of telling mammalian tales, he might
consider a second career as a professor of
poop. As soon as I encountered Otto's
swarthy, seamed chunks and Cocky's
wracked bulletins, I thought of the Bristol
Stool Form Scale, the lingua franca used by
doctors to classify the bowel movements of
their patients:
Type 1: Separate hard lumps, like nuts (hard
to pass)
Type 2: Sausage-shaped, but lumpy
Type 3: Like a sausage but with cracks on its
surface
Type 4: Like an Italian sausage or snake,
smooth and soft
Type 5: Soft blobs with clear-cut edges
(passed easily)
Type 6: Fluffy pieces with ragged edges, a
mushy stool
Type 7: Watery, no solid pieces. Entirely
liquid
The latest installment of
balladry reveals Parker to be a
consummate cataloguer of cack.
The Author: I did have the Krays in
mind, yes. This archetypal split personality
that unifies itself in a series of terrible acts
and dominates a whole community. It's
fascinating stuff.
The Editor: So the ravens are meant to
shit us up, then?
The Author: Definitely. They're the bad
guys. And among other bad guys, they're the
worst guys.
The Editor: Hold on a moment. [Closes
eyes; thinks hard for several seconds; reopens
eyes.] OK. Thanks. I'm officially shat-up.

T HE I NFOXICATOR
When the arc of Cocky's adventure is
complete later this year, I am going to press
Imagine a swaying drunkard propping him-
a new non-fiction project upon Parker. I
self up against the bar well after last orders.
want him to dazzle crappers and crap
He is expounding blearily upon the complex
aficionados everywhere with a tour de force
connections betwixt fox and booze; you are
rewrite of the Bristol Stool Form Scale. I
nodding and trying not to breathe in any of
want posters of his sparkling prose to adorn
his sour ale-itosis. In each issue of The
the walls of every proctologist’s consulting
Sniffer, a fragment of this inebriated
room in the land. I want the world to
monologue is slapped around the face, told to
celebrate the naissance of a scatological
behave and then presented for your attention
visionary.
as The Infoxicator, a tribute to Cocky's
occasional tendency to get off his tits on
O VER A P INT aftershave and glue. In this installment, we
consider a rare and wonderful English beer
The author of The Ballad of Cocky the Fox called Tally-Ho.
and the editor of The Sniffer are known to
enjoy a chinwag over a pint. In each edition,
The Sniffer eavesdrops on their beery
blathering and presents a randomly chosen
chunk of it to the readership.
The Editor: Here's a quote from Fit the
First: “I even heard ravens have been seen in
the Borough. Not just any ravens either: the
Twins.” As soon as I read this, I thought of
the Kray twins in their matching black suits
terrorizing the East End of London. Did
you have the Krays in mind when you
dreamt up the two ravens?

–2–
I remember the first and only time I tasted
Tally-Ho. Let me start again: I remember
the first and only time a bully called Tally-
Ho walked up to me in a pub, stuffed my
mouth full of molasses and barley, and then
clunked me on the head with the hard end of
a riding crop. The pub in question was The
Wenlock Arms in East London, a shabby
shrine to real ale that was only ever full of
beards, beer guts and crosswords. I would
often stop in here on my way home from
work for a pint of their most recently
revealed obscurity.
On this occasion, gulled by the rustic
quaintness of the hunting scene becresting
the beer pump, I chose the Tally-Ho. Right
from the first mouthful of this liquidized
and highly noxious sticky toffee pudding, I
knew I was in trouble. Egged on by my sweet
tooth, I knocked the whole thing back in no
time and before my brain could catch up, I
asked for another. “It’s powerful gear, that,”
was as close as the landlord came to warding
me off a second pint. But order it I did. As I
glugged away, and as this bastardly syrup
snuck up behind me with a cosh, he gave me
a bit of background. Tally-Ho was brewed by
Adnams, an outfit based in sleepy maritime
Suffolk known for their complex but
manageably strong ale, Broadside. But
unlike Broadside, Tally-Ho was made to
–3–
order. You phoned up the brewmaster, told
him how many barrels you wanted and then,
at some point, the commissioned chemical
weaponry would turn up at your pub.
The landlord was starting to tell me that
Tally-Ho was actually a barley wine and
that he had laid down this barrel for a year
before serving it, just to add an extra
percentage point to the ABV, when my head
began spinning. I cut the publican off
mid-sentence, weaved across the carpet,
bashed my way out through the swing doors
and somehow got myself home. Just two
pints of this devilishly delicious elixir and I
was all over the place.
If you ever see Tally-Ho on tap, have a pint.
It tantalizes the taste buds with its malty
sweetness. But stick to just the one unless
you want to find yourself, like Cocky,
“splayed horribly in the turret of a plastic
climbing frame, at the bottom of the wrong
garden”.
F OX F ACT
For the last fifty years, geneticists in Siberia
have been selectively breeding the
wildness out of silver foxes and selling
them as expensive and exclusive pets. Not
only have these Cocky cousins become tamer
over the years, but they have lost their foxy
musk and they wag their tails and bark like
dogs.
T HE C OCKY C OMPANION
Each edition of The Sniffer features an
extract from The Cocky Companion, a
Rosetta Stone for decoding the less obvious
elements of Cocky’s London vernacular. This
extract covers the argot of Fit the Second
and dwells on four of our brushy antihero’s
favourite pastimes: fighting, eating,
drinking and swearing.
R UCK In the elegant, gentlemanly sport of
rugby, a ruck formally describes a phase
of play that evolves when the ball drops to
the feet of a huddle of players. In the
ugly, ignoble world of street bastardry, a
ruck is a sudden, scuffling to-do that
usually involves fists to faces and boots to
bollocks. Or, in the case of urban
scavengers, scratches to snouts and teeth
to testicles.
D UFF U P Not to be confused with “up the
duff”, to duff someone up is to give them a
sound beating. It evokes dull thuds,
uppercuts and temporary deafness. It is
considered more polite than “beat seven
shades of shit out of”.
J AFFA C AKES In 1927, an accidental gen-
ius of a confectioner called John Lang-
lands took a small circle of sponge,
slapped on some orange goo and then
concealed this visually unappealing mess
with dark chocolate. The result was the
Jaffa Cake, an inimitable accompaniment
to a strong cup of tea, whose mention is
enough to elicit gushy sighs of longing
from even the hardest of East End hard
men. Tip: If you must dunk this moreish
oddity in your cuppa, pull it out
immediately or you’ll end up with a
bittersweet citrus porridge that even a
greedy fox would turn his snout up at.
H EAD & S HOULDERS “I didn’t know you
had dandruff.” “I don’t!” This irritating
refrain lodges itself permanently in the
eardrums of anybody who has seen an
advert for Head & Shoulders, Britain’s
–4–
most famous anti-dandruff shampoo. But
here’s the thing. Why would you rub a
foul-smelling fluorescent blue gloop into
your hair unless you did actually have
dandruff? Nobody has ever publicly asked
or answered this question.
P RAWN K ORMA If you are within earshot
of a pissed-up, post-pub curry pleb, who
judges a person’s character by how
pointlessly hot he likes his Indian food,
and you order a prawn korma, expect to
be shouted at and hit on the back of the
head by a dense and doughy lump of naan
bread. The yellow, innocuous and
meatless prawn korma is regarded in the
lore of masochistic curry machismo as
nothing more than a warm seafood
milkshake. If you must eat (drink) one,
make sure you do so in an empty
restaurant before nightfall.
A RSE Everybody knows that “arse” is the
British English equivalent of “ass”. But I
can’t squander an opportunity to point out
that “arse” is a much more effective
phonemic representation of buttockly
curvature. And while a kick in the ass is
a friendly spot of slapdash horseplay, a
kick up the arse is an impressively
aggressive instantiation of the will to
power.
S HITEY In 1983, an Oxford professor of
linguistics found himself musing upon
the “ass/arse” dyad while taking his
afternoon tea. His attention turned to
“shit”. Here was “arse”, the expressive and
determined older brother of “ass”. Could
“shit” be so siblinged? After a few minutes
of brainstorming and scribbling, the
professor wrote and promptly underlined
“shite” on his blotter. Long, elegant and
powerful; just the ticket. Within half an
hour he had declined it fully and given
birth to “shiter”, “shiting” and “shitey”.
 G ET F OXED H OW C HAMPION THE R ABBIT
F EELS ABOUT C OCKY
In the last Get Foxed, I asked you to assign a
number between 0 and 9 to each of the ten In my back half, strength: a soft powerhouse.
letters that appear in the following sum so In my front half, tension:
that the sum is mathematically correct: my paws like the hands of a child
gripping the top of a wall, peeping over.
HUGHES + HAYES = BADGER
There were three possible solutions to this And in my middle, a single syllable of love
sliver of alphanumeric cunning: spoken again, and again, with the pulse.
386395 + 31295 = 417690
Rolling in every morning,
659604 + 62304 = 721908 smelling of cuckoo juice,
689601 + 65301 = 754902 or of other foxes,
he returns to me.
In this Get Foxed, you are invited to find the
Cocky characters and species sneakily buried
Gruff, sometimes; cheerful, other times.
in the following imaginary fragments of
Never cruel, and always with the good nosh.
conversation:
Example: “His fur makes him look like a Out there bravely all night
member of a bad Germanic heavy metal amid the big nothings,
band!” (BADGER) the big nowheres,
And then back to me, protective.
1. “He’d use his nasty, sharp fangs to
Whatever he does is right.
attack.”
2. “A fox who’s too scared to do anything Friends we are, great friends,
on his own? Ha! Yes!” seeking each for each the same sweet ends.
3. “Whatever cards you were holding, this No change in him could test the loyalty
hulking menace would trump you.” of brainless long-eared me.

4. “You’re telling me he’s not top dog? —James Parker

Don’t be silly.”
5. “He’s a dozy, placid bugger. He won’t
grab, bite, scratch or kick.”
6. “Did he used to hang around at the back
of the pub? Obviously.”
7. “If he saw a gerbil lying peacefully in a
pile of sawdust, he’d lick his lips.”
8. “When he turns up with his brother, it’s
the beginning of a Grave New World.”
Again, the only prize is a cup of your own
smugness. The answer will be published in
the next edition of The Sniffer. And now I
bid you Get Foxed. Not a rabbit

–5–
 T O T HE S NOUT
Sir,
How big is Champion in comparison with
Cocky? Cocky says of Champion that he's
“something of a monster in his rabbit way,”
but in the one illustration we've seen of them
so far, Cocky looks much larger. However,
Cocky is standing, while Champion is
hunkered down over his Quavers.
On days when Champion isn’t so mentally
indisposed – when, say, he is noshing
contentedly on Quaver crumbs — Cocky has
no need of engaging in any such
dissimulation.
I hope this helps to clarify matters.
Yours sincerely,
The Editor

Yours faithfully, ***

Noah Jungles If there are questions you would like to ask

or remarks you would like to make, you can
***
do so by emailing the editor of The Sniffer
Dear Mr. Jungles, (sniffer@hilobrow.com).

It is understandable that you feel a little

dimensionally confused. One of the most
impressive components of Cocky’s cunning is
his ability, through the manipulation of
light, space and angles, to change his
perceived size and shape. In some situations,
it is to his advantage to appear much larger.
In others, a smaller stature better suits his T HE S NIFFER
purpose.
EDITOR & WRITER
Patrick Cates
For example, on days when Champion
suffers low self-esteem and regards himself P UBLISHERS
Matthew Battles & Joshua Glenn
as cosmically insignificant, Cocky might
of HiLobrow.com
choose to diminish himself in the hope of
boosting his friend’s ego strength: I LLUSTRATION
Kristin Parker
W ITH THANKS TO
Generous backers of Cocky the Fox
& Kickstarter.com
please direct all enquiries to
sniffer@ hilobrow.com

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