The

niffer
A PERIODICAL FOXY COMPENDIUM
ISSUE NO. EIGHT — 1 SEPTEMBER 2010

F ROM T HE S NOUT installment, a Cocky-related drink or pub is

put under the alcoscope with the result that
This Sniffer is a slim one that celebrates the
you are gradually furnished with a complete
supinity of summer. For a month now, we
compendium of boozy dos and don’ts, as
have been led to assume that Cocky has been
filtered through a vulpine sieve. In this
lying beneath a tree, mashed on mushrooms,
instance, you are requested to consider the
fucked on fungus, trashed on toadstools,
hallucinogenic promise of badger-related
watching a fantasy world drift by while the
sunscreen…
real world sits on ice. Egged on by his hazy
hallucinatory bender, I have embraced an
All the beer, wine, shampoo and aftershave
aestival reverie of my own. A dreamy cloudy
has evaporated in the late summer sun.
daze of bugger all. I too have squatted in my
You’ve munched up all the mushrooms in
virtual woodland hideout and mused on Bob,
every forest and glade. You’re in a
black birds and Nora. And soon I will
psychoactive desert. Shit! Don’t panic,
stretch and yawn and wipe the snot from my
though. Just stop thinking and open up your
man-snout. I will blow the dust off the
schnozzle for a moment. There. That smell.
printing presses and crank the handle once
What is it? Metallic, chemical, artificial.
again. All your favourite eructations,
And it’s all around you. Sunscreen! Yes,
micturations and regurgitations will return
you’ve slathered your body in it so you don’t
in the ninth issue of this slimy organ we like
end up looking like a podgy lobster-pink
to call The Sniffer. But for now, nibble on a
Brit abroad. But have you ever considered
snack of word and picture.
sucking the expensive white stuff from that
plastic nipple instead of squeezing it into
T HE I NFOXICATOR
your palm?
The Infoxicator is a tribute to our foxy
On a recent trip to Whole Foods, home of
protagonist’s occasional tendency to get off
hemp footwear, yoga books and organic
his tits on aftershave and glue. In each

–1–
lemons that cost $20 each, I browsed the
sunscreen section and chanced upon a
champion tube of the stuff: Badger SPF 30.
The art on the outside tells a tale of
infoxicatory goodness. There’s a badger look-
ing especially monged trudging along in the
late afternoon. The mongitude can’t just
stem from heat-stroke. He looks like he’s “on
one”. He’s tilting at the perigee of a ravey
wobble and he’s lifting his clawed paws into
a drum-and-bass juggle. To cap it all, we get
a peek into his hallucinatory world. He
imagines that he has a green basket strapped
to his back and in that basket sits his melin-
culus, a shrunken effigy of his badgery self.
It all points to a few hours of getting off
one’s nut.
But if you do as I did, you will open the tube
and squeeze a globule of the salve onto your
tongue, palpitating with excitement all the
while. You will swish it around your mouth
with a good measure of spit. You will gulp
down the pasty mix. And then you will wait.
And wait. And wait plenty more. For this
Badger is not the loyal henchman of the
–2–
Ballad. He is a dissimulating bastard. He
wants you to throw your cash at a crock of
shit in a crock of gold’s clothing. There is
nothing remotely inebriational about this
potion despite the pictorial tease. It’s a big
fat dud. It may keep out the ultraviolets and
stop you frazzling your face off, but it won’t
help you check out for a few hours. I blame
the organic movement and the sunscreen
scaremongers. If they hadn’t decided that
oxybenzone is unsafe and that we should all
be rubbing zinc oxide on our sensitive parts
instead, we’d be on for a real rave.
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 shines a street-speak spotlight on Fit
the Eighth and reveals a street-shuffling
conspiracy of crackers, crisps and crackpots.
T INFOIL Known to The American as
“aluminum foil,” tinfoil is the stuff
British people use for wrapping a
decapitated turkey before roasting it, for
keeping a cheese and pickle sandwich
fresh until lunchtime, and for “chasing
the dragon” (otherwise referred to as
“smoking the heroin”). Americans may,
however, know “tinfoil” in its adjectival
sense.
 The tinfoil hat, anecdotally worn by
paranoiacs who want to stop governments,
God or Hitler controlling their minds via
satellite, is now the dunce’s cap of the
conspiracy nutjob. If you are asked where
your tinfoil hat is, you are probably being
ridiculed for disbelieving that man
landed on the moon in 1969.
S ALT - AND -V INEGAR C RISPS Finish a
bag of salt and vinegar crisps, pour the
remaining crumbs into your hand and
then vacuum them up all at once with
your mouth. You will not be able to do
this without contorting your face,
sticking your tongue out, clenching your
anal sphincter and stamping your foot.
This last residue of potato-shard-
drenched-in-acid-and-salt distills the
economically devious essence of Britain’s
favourite pub snack. So osmotically
mouth-parching and tongue-punching are
these addictive nibbles, that you need to
buy at least three pints of beer to
accompany each pack.
C REAM -C RACKERED Knackers, and their
recruitment into a metaphor for
tiredness, have been discussed before in
the Companion. But lest anybody begin to
–3–
decipher what the blazes a Cockney is
talking about, the shrivelled, hairy and
humble knacker has been encrypted in
another level of East London blather.
Cream crackers, the square, dry, no-frills
accompaniment to a British cheese plate,
are the nom de rhyming slang for
knackers. And, by extension, when a
Cockney mumbles into his dish of jellied
eels that he’s “cream-crackered,” he’s
telling you, if you’re still listening — and
bully for you if you aren’t — that he’s
knackered.
T RAMP Allow yourself to consider this
tautological teaser: Some tramps are
probably tramps, but not all tramps are
tramps. The lexical ocean that separates
ex-colonizer from ex-colonized is
responsible for the confusion. US tramps
tend to be saleswomen of the body, be they
call girls to Governors, crack cluckers
turning tricks for rock, or both. UK
tramps are walkingmen of the streets,
tatterdemalions who snuggle up in
cardboard boxes and beg for change with
outstretched fingerless gloves. There has
been and always will be some crossover
between the two populations. But not
much.
 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

–4–