The
niffer
A PERIODICAL FOXY COMPENDIUM
ISSUE NO. THREE — 20 MAY 2010
F ROM T HE S NOUT
‘Rrrrrrr… I’ll take ’em ALL on! I’ll do them
like THIS —’ I gave a feint with my head,
to my left, a flycatcher, snapping at air. ‘And
like THIS —’ To the right! Nyap!
Nyap! ‘And then a little bit of THIS —’ A
flurry of shadowboxing, and I fell over and
scraped my nose.
Has Cocky yet balladeered a more poignant
verse? There he is, swaying and reeling in
another narcotic brain fug. He ducks and
weaves and skips. He tries to jab former
glories awake and uppercut future ones into
being. But, drunk on these delusions, he
falls arse over tit. He is Randy “The Ram”
Robinson, Jake LaMotta and Travis Bickle
fused together in vulpine form. He is a plum
covered in fur. He is Cock-up the Fox.
In the first two Fits, we watched Cocky trot
in lordly fashion around the manor. His
ducking and diving was expansive and
pratfall-free. He was the man about town
who knew all the nooks and crannies. Foxes
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didn’t fuck with Cocky. He turned Hughes
into Laurel and Hayes into Hardy with a
couple of flips and a dance. He left us
thinking that he was the de facto guv’nor of
the Borough.
But after the whistlestop prologue and the
fighty fireworks, Fit the Third invites us to
take a breather, make a cup of tea and have
an existential ponder. Who is Cocky? We
eavesdrop on his chummy chat with Paul.
We’re party to his snout-to-snout with Billy.
We get drawn into the inebriated haze of his
internal monologue. And we realize, with a
sip of PG Tips and a frown, that Cocky isn’t
a fox. He’s a messy amalgam of foxy
fragments. He is no one-dimensional Ratty
or two-dimensional Bigwig. He’s a 10-d
antihero for the modern animal age.
Cocky is ballsy fighter and balls-out
philanderer. Pisshead, rabbit-cuddler and
bullshitter. He’ll scratch and snap to the
death to defend you. But then he’ll screw
your missus and steal your dinner. Cocky is
pathetic. Cocky is ruthless. Cocky is
depressed. But, above all, he is Cocky.
O VER A P INT
The Editor: Excellent. I can see it now.
“You calling me a fucking middlebrow?”
Followed by a humungous clash of teeth and
fur.
The Author: Ha! “You middlebrow bas-
tard!”

The author of The Ballad of Cocky the Fox

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: Is Cocky going to evolve into a
true antihero along the lines of a Tony
Soprano or a Vic Mackey from The Shield?
The Author: I don’t want to become the
sort of ponce who critically interprets his
own work for the benefit of the reader. But I
will say this. I chose a fox as the main
character for a reason. Foxes occupy this
strange territory between the human world
and the animal world. And this is especially
true of urban foxes. They are pulled in
different directions by the competing
demands of the environment. And survival T HE I NFOXICATOR
requires slyness, cunning, whatever you want
to call it. But it’s not just bestial cunning; Imagine a swaying drunkard propping
there’s an almost human element to it. In himself up against the bar well after last
fact, Matt [Matthew Battles, Co-editor of orders. He is expounding blearily upon the
The Ballad of Cocky the Fox and complex connections betwixt fox and booze;
HiLobrow.com] thinks Cocky is a HiLo you are nodding and trying not to breathe in
Hero. He’s both highbrow and lowbrow. He any of his sour ale-itosis. In each issue of
has a foot in both camps. The Sniffer, a fragment of this inebriated
The Editor: Genius! monologue is slapped around the face, told to
behave and then presented for your attention
The Author: Yes. It’s a great way of as The Infoxicator, a tribute to Cocky's
looking at it. I’m going to try and sneak it in occasional tendency to get off his tits on
somewhere, I think. Maybe via an insult: aftershave and glue. In this installment, you
“He’s such a lowbrow.” “There he is, hanging will learn about a shower gel called Flying
out with those highbrows again.” “Don’t be Fox.
such a middlebrow.” Actually, that’s it. That
will be the worst insult. “You’re such a The Sex-Appeal Honey Shower. Lascivious,
middlebrow.” licentious, vivacious, and insatiable. With
the finest aphrodisiac essential oils – masses

–2–
of jasmine! (Plus the best three for
controlling PMS.)
Could this septic twaddle seep from any
pustule other than the LUSH marketing
department? Of course not. You haven’t
heard of LUSH? You will definitely have
smelled LUSH. Walk through any upscale
identi-mall in a large cosmopolitan city.
You will pass Kiehl’s. You will pass J. Crew.
You will pass Borders. Abercrombie & Fitch
will then waterboard you with a giant
quasi-liquid stench of terrible cologne. Once
you have told them all you know, you will
recover your sense of smell. And at that
exact moment, a sharp, fizzy, citrus
omnipresence will overwhelm your adenoids.
You will spin around, clockwise and
counterclockwise, confused. “Jesus Christ.
Someone has flooded a soap factory with
gallons of hot orange juice.” That’s LUSH.
So what of Flying Fox, their bottled gloop of
honey, vegetable oil and booze qua sex toy?
When you pay $30 for it, are you getting
anything other than a pseudo-sexy
word-spew from a copywriter’s thesaurus? It
depends. I have given myself a rub-down in
the shower with Flying Fox. The sweet and
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fruity scent doesn’t overpower, you get a
decent lather and you end up like a smooth,
plump grape rather than a wrinkly,
desiccated raisin.
But $30? No. To get your money’s worth, you
need to regard this soapy concoction from an
infoxicatory perspective. Pour the fucker
into a pint glass and hold it up to the light.
Spring marigolds, summer sunsets, autumn
leaves and winter log fires. All at once!
That’s not shower gel in the pint glass, silly.
It’s a bold and brilliantly beery nectar that
would embarrass any prize-winning honey
ale. Have a glug! It slips down like Jesus
Juice at a Neverland sleepover. Soapy and
oily, yes. But inordinately sweet and unfor-
gettably noxious.
(Editor’s Note: Don’t drink shower gel. It’s
probably bad for you.)
F OX F ACT
The male fox, who hunts and scavenges
alone, be it for dormouse, worm or
macaroon, is sometimes known as a “tod”. It
is this characteristic solitude of Cocky and
his ilk that lies behind the expression “on
one’s tod” , meaning “on one’s own”.
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 Third and
shines an exegetic light on sex, slurs and
suburban geography.
S PINNEY Spinneys are small, dense,
wooded areas usually found peppering the
outskirts of British towns. They afford
suitable cover for underage drinkers,
peeping toms and pornography hoarders.
 Our daily walk between Tube station and
public school took my friends and me
through a spinney. I will always
remember it as the place where we once
jeered at a man who we spotted in a
trembling, masturbatory crouch. He
responded to the barracking by standing
up, putting his hands in the air, revealing
his genitals and inexplicably protesting:
“But I was only palming!”
A LL - NIGHT GARAGE The all-night
garage, recognizable to the American
consciousness as the 24-hour gas station,
is a too-brightly lit magnet that attracts
street-dwelling shufflers, ravenous
stoners and post-club drunks. After
midnight, the garage trade is restricted to
Rizlas, sickly sweet milk drinks and
six-packs of mass-produced sugary stodge
sold, more often than not, under the
misleadingly quaint “Mr. Kipling”
marque. In the early hours, all business
with the attendant is conducted via a
small, protectively glassed kiosk.
Transactions often descend into
window-bashing, shouting and stealing.
B ONKERS Crazy, but harmlessly and
fascinatingly so. Charles Manson is not
bonkers (crazy, fascinating but harmful).
Cricket is not bonkers (crazy, harmless
but boring). Dick Cheney is not bonkers
(crazy, boring and harmful). Syd Barrett,
Spike Milligan and Screaming Lord
Sutch, on the other hand, were all
bonkers. Consider any of these British
silly billies when fathoming the “bonkers
glare” of a security light.
S HAGGING An innocent American might
have been bemused to read about an
absent-minded fox swinging his vixen
around the dancehall to the sounds of
1930s big band music. But shagging isn’t
dancing. It’s fucking. Fucking with a
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smirk, a wink and a glance over the
shoulder.
K EBAB In the minds of most Britons, a
kebab is a late-night Turkish-Cypriot
calorie bomb comprising pita bread,
salad, “lamb” and chilli sauce. The kebab
shop owner typically slices strips of the
“lamb” off a hot, rotating, thigh-shaped
blob of “sheep product” with a
ceremonious flourish of a knife that
should really be called a sword. This
sword is also used for threatening drunks
who refuse to pay. A kebab is rarely
eaten. Instead, its contents are scattered
clumsily all over the pavement as the
would-be eater staggers home.
R OTTER If you are a rotter, you are a
mixture of rat, cad, cur and git. You
behave badly and you boast about it. You
are the bastard who treats them mean and
keeps them keen. You are Rod Stewart.
W ANKER A live children’s television
programme called Saturday Superstore
introduced me, and many British
prepubescents like me, to the word
“wanker”. Matt Bianco, a regrettable
jazz-pop outfit who fell into the charts a
few times in the 1980s, were guests one
Saturday morning. Viewers were invited
to call up and ask the trio questions. The
host: “Simon? You’re through to Matt
 Bianco.” Caller: “Is that Matt Bianco?”
Matt Bianco (avuncular, smug): “Yes,
Simon!” Caller: “Well you’re a bunch of
wankers.” I’m not sure if Simon had ever
seen any of Matt Bianco masturbate. I
think he might have been using the word
“wanker” in its metaphorically insulting
sense.
G ET F OXED
In the last Get Foxed, I asked you to find the
Cocky characters and species that had
burrowed down into eight imaginary chunks
of conversation. They now reveal themselves:
1. “He'd use his nasty, sharp fangs to
attack.” (STOAT)
now it clicks away in yours as you try to
identify the following “ix” words – words
that begin with, end with or contain “ix” –
from their definitions:
1. A French comic-book hero.
2. Philosophers’ stone.
3. Mountain-dwelling goat-antelopes.
4. Rashly romantic.
5. A state of obsessive attachment.
6. Spirals.
7. A female public speaker.
8. Tediously long.
9. A coin once worth half a shilling.
10. An ornament found on a tiled roof.

2. “A fox who's too scared to do anything Again, the only prize is a cup of your own
on his own? Ha! Yes!” (HAYES) smugness. The answers will be published in
the next edition of The Sniffer. And now I
3. “Whatever cards you were holding, this
bid you Get Foxed.
hulking menace would trump you.”
(RUMPY)
4. “You're telling me he's not top dog?
Don't be silly.” (OTTO)
5. “He's a dozy, placid bugger. He won't
grab, bite, scratch or kick.” (RABBIT)
6. “Did he used to hang around at the back
of the pub? Obviously.” (BOB)
7. “If he saw a gerbil lying peacefully in a
pile of sawdust, he'd lick his lips.”
(BILLY)
8. “When he turns up with his brother, it's
the beginning of a Grave New World.”
(RAVEN)
In this Get Foxed, you are asked to consider
that beguiling, provocative and voluptuous
object of Cocky’s base desires, Trixie the
vixen. Cocky can’t stop thinking about her.
“Trixie! Trixie! What a vixen! Trixie!” The
ix-ly assonance clicks away in his cortex and
leaves him nursing a set of blue balls. And

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 T HREE M OUSE S ONGS ***

I. Dear Mr. Jangle,

It must be nice for the mice
to live twice.
Once as their little mousey selves,
adhering to the earth¹s floor,
barely worth a drop of drool...
And then again, airborne, as owl-fuel.
II.
At your altar of crumbs like a tiny priest,
heart revving, eyes crossed –
let me help you, mouse!
One strike from me, one bite right there,
and the spores of your terror are released to
the air.
III.
Heed the word of the weasel.
At his command, freezel!
(After that you may feel a slight squeezel.)
Bob’s epithet conjures up a fox with a jovial,
happy-go-lucky demeanour. On hearing it,
the naïf might think thus: “Good old
Holiday Bob. Always whistling while he
walked. Greeting every passer-by with an
exuberant ‘hullo’. What a cheerful chap he
must have been.” But if this naïf had met
Bob, he would have known a very different
fox.
“Holiday” is the darkly humorous
euphemism Bob would always use when
ordering his henchmen to off some sneaky
squirrel or upstart otter. “Go on lads. Give
’im a fuckin’ ’oliday.” On hearing Bob cackle
this snatch of unaspirated slyness, his
heavies would instantly know what he
meant: “Do ’im. I don’t care ’ow. Just do ’im.”
The transgressor might end up a soggy mess
after a sewer drowning. A pincer movement
might force him down a grassy bank and
into a motorway flattening. Or he might
appear skewered by a skinny baguette on a
baker’s back step as a warning to the
Borough.

—James Parker So next time you envisage Holiday Bob, wipe

that perky smile of his face and replace it
with a snarling, menacing grin.
T O T HE S NOUT
Yours sincerely,
Sir,
The Editor
I can understand how Billy Five Wives got
his moniker, but what about Holiday Bob? ***
Can't sleep at night for thinking about this.
If there are questions you would like to ask
Yours faithfully, or remarks you would like to make, you can
do so by emailing the editor of The Sniffer
Honus Jangle (sniffer@hilobrow.com).

–6–
 T HE S NIFFER
EDITOR & WRITER
Patrick Cates
P UBLISHERS
Matthew Battles & Joshua Glenn
of HiLobrow.com
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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