The
niffer
A PERIODICAL FOXY COMPENDIUM
ISSUE NO. THIRTEEN — 11 NOVEMBER 2010
F ROM T HE S NOUT
There is an apocryphal story about the BBC
Home Service (the World Service’s domestic
arm that was neutrally retitled “Radio 4” in
the 60s) that I like to dust off whenever
there is a discussion about the triviality of so
much television and radio news nowadays.
One evening, the hour arrived for a news
bulletin. The chimes sounded and the
newscaster spoke along these lines: “Good
evening. This is the Home Service at 6
o’clock on August the 14th. Today, there is
no news.”
…penetratingly…
The days of no news are long behind us,
sadly. But in the spirit of nostalgia, and in
the spirit of not having to come up with
something penetratingly analytical to say
about the latest Cocky installment in the
week that the Sniffer’s editorial offices are
moving up hill and down dale, I direct your
attention to the next paragraph.
Hullo. Welcome to From The Snout. Today
there is no meaningful content.
–1–
H IS M ASTER ’ S C HOICE
Each installment of His Master’s Choice
considers a single album that has graced the
gramophone of Cocky’s creator and master,
James Parker. On this occasion, we attach
bells to our legs, dance around a maypole
and celebrate Songs From The Wood by the
impossibly unfashionable folk rock troupe,
Jethro Tull.
A man with a head of hair on his chin and a
beard on his head prances around in raggedy
clothes like a homeless jester. His eyes bulge;
he screeches through his flute and he breaks
away periodically to mumble something. All
throughout, he twitches and laughs to
himself. Is there a more appropriate
standard-bearer for an earthy, bucolic tale
about talking animals than Jethro Tull’s
front man, Ian Anderson?
“Let may breng ye-hoo songs frum the werd,”
begins Anderson in that curious folk accent
where random vowels are replaced by other
vowels in an attempt to conjure up a time of
madrigals, maidens and mead. His band
mates join in a capella and, before you know
it, the flute pipes up and the rest of the
instruments dive in. Is that a harpsichord in
the background? Of course it is! But if you
hate folk music, don’t panic. Keep at it until
the two-minute mark. You’ll be treated to an
intricate prog breakdown wherein Tull
reveal themselves to be a bunch of highly
original and highly talented oddball
instrumentalists.
So the opening track just described is a
microcosm of the whole album. Folky
her-di-diddly-hi-ho voices and acoustic
strums that give way to off-centre grooves.
And this is the schizoid influence I divine
when reading the Ballad. I imagine Parker
closing his eyes in Starbucks to shut out the
blinking cursor. He cranks up Songs From
The Wood and listens. Before he knows it,
he’s sucking dryad tit and stroking druid
staff. He’s in the eclogue zone: gardens,
fields and summer rain. And Parker must
see himself in this couplet:“A singer of these
ageless times / With kitchen prose and gutter
rhymes.”
But then the electrics arrive. A whole new
energy. The lilting drive of the drums and
the propelling precision of the bass. The
flute, the harpsichord, the chimes, the
handclaps, the analog synths. It’s enough to
shake Parker from his Arcadian reverie and
throw him into the circus ring of word
acrobatics and narrative sword-swallowing.
He’s on fire because he’s eating fire.
–2–
I personally don’t care for Anderson’s
bearded Wicker Man malarkey. But I’m
happy to let his band of merry men carry me
off into the land of prog every few minutes.
Most importantly, though, I see how both of
these disparate strands are knotted together
in Parker’s prose.
O VER A P INT
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: In a recent Sniffer, I defined
Essex as this Jekyll and Hyde county. Ugly
and dangerous near London, picturesque and
wealthy further out.
The Author: Yes. I remember that.
The Editor: Well, I know you used to live
there. So how do you view it? What do you
think of when you hear the word “Essex”?
The Author: For me, Essex is rural. Tidy
rural. All of the English countryside was
tamed thousands of years ago and nowadays
it’s just cultivated wilderness. Although,
between all the carefully manicured
hedgerows, there are still these nutty little
pockets of the wild. Ferrety woods, rookeries,
that kind of thing. And it seems even tidier
than when I was a boy growing up there.
When I visited this summer, it all looked a
lot more “managed”.
The Editor: And the trees were smaller?
The Author: Yes. Exactly. I’m sure being a
lot older now made a difference. But I was
still able to surrender to the wilderness. And
having Harry with me helped.
The Editor: You mean you were able to
see the countryside through his eyes?
Childhood by proxy?
The Author: Yes. He was my conduit back
in.
The Editor: So what did he make of
Essex?
The Author: Oh, he loved it. He absolutely
loved it. He trotted about all over the place.
He was so happy.
The Editor: Great stuff. And given your
recent visit, perhaps an answer to this
question will be right near the surface.
What do you miss most about the old gaff?
The Author: What do I miss most about
England? I miss... I miss a certain…
The Editor: Packet of Quavers?
The Author: Yes. No. A certain… dryness.
Now, I don’t mean wittiness. Because, as we
all know, American humour is as complex
and sophisticated as any other brand of
humour. But when you’re with a bunch of
Englishmen in a pub, everything feels
low-key and droll. People are careful about
what they say. And this is a good thing. You
don’t just come in and blurt out all your shit,
like people do over here. When I first
arrived in the States, I thought most people
were insane. All this information that gets
volunteered as soon as you meet somebody. It
takes you a while to realize that this is just
the American way. Randoms telling you
their life story on the bus, on the train, in
the street and so on. And you have no
comeback because, as an Englishman, you’re
not trained to do the same. You just stay
quiet and nod politely. I miss the English
reserve.
The Editor: [Stays quiet and nods polite-
ly.]
T HE I NFOXICATOR
The Infoxicator is a tribute to Cocky's
occasional tendency to get off his tits on
aftershave and glue. This time round, you
–3–
will learn about a puritanical-sounding
London wine bar called The Fox Reformed.
Amidst the yardie crack houses, white
underclass drinking schools and
back-of-the-shop bush-meat freezers that
characterize Hackney, you will find a little
upper-middle-class oasis called Stoke
Newington. The backbone of this upmarket
enclave is Stoke Newington Church Street, a
narrow, curvy thoroughfare full of bourgeois
boutiques and Fairtrade coffeeshops. If you
start at the eastern end and walk west
towards the church, the sea of off-road
strollers will eventually dry up and you will
come upon a windowed wine bar with a dark
red fascia. This is the institution known as
The Fox Reformed.
To get me into a wine bar under normal
circumstances, you would have to bludgeon
me over the head repeatedly with a bottle of
Chateau Lafite Rothschild and then drag my
unconscious corpse inside. If you wanted to
complete the pretence, you could prop me up
at a table and curl my lifeless knuckles
around the stem of a burgundy balloon. But
nobody would believe you. I live a life of real
ales and low-brow pubs, and that’s obvious
from my demeanour.
And yet I used to love The Fox Reformed
back in my Hackney days. Maybe it was the
bar full of veteran cruciverbalists poring
over several tough cryptics at once and
periodically thumbing through the house
copy of Chambers for inspiration. Maybe it
was the charming welcome always offered by
Robbie, the Einstein-haired, plummy-
voiced, bowtie-wearing landlord. Or maybe it
was the dedication of the establishment to
the strategic art and probabilistic science of
backgammon (The Fox Reformed has, for
many years, had a reputation as a breeding
ground for champions of the game).
So if you like wine, crosswords,
backgammon or old English eccentrics, pop
along for a visit. If you like all four,
consider renting the flat upstairs.
of each hand. And it is not
uncommon/un-come-on to hear the
come-on=ness embellished with the
rhetorically marauding “You want some?”
Often, however, all of this prancing and
shouting leads to nought. Nobody comes
or goes anywhere.

F OX F ACT
When Peter Criss was kicked out of
proto-hair-metallers, KISS, by his band
mates in 1980, Eric Carr took up position
behind the drum kit. Nobody really knows
why they painted Carr’s face to look like a
fox or why they started calling him The
Fox. But there are rumours. Apparently, he
used to drench his snare drum in sweat C HAP “Chap” is the shortened form of
during rehearsals and concerts, and this “chapman”. That sounds like a nugget of
sweat smelled uncannily like fox piss. bullshit a struggling writer would scoop
up while searching the cobwebby creative
T HE C OCKY C OMPANION recesses of his noggin for something to say
Each edition of The Sniffer features an about “chap”. But it’s true. Chaps were
extract from The Cocky Companion, a Roset- once chapmen, salesmen of cack, peddlers
ta Stone for decoding the less obvious of tat. At some stage the “man” and “men”
elements of Cocky's London vernacular. This were dropped. And at a later stage, you
extract rustles up a chap/champard sandwich didn’t have to sell stuff to be a chap; any
on “come on, my son” rye. old bloke could be one. But then the posh
set stole it and gents, fellows and sirs
C OME -O N -N ESS The “come on” evidenced
became chaps overnight. “Hello, old chap!
in “come-on-ness” relates to fight not
Care to look at the series of ancestral
fuck. A seducer gives his prey the
portraits in the library that show I’m the
come-on with various peacock-like
fuckwitted product of centuries of
physical gestures: the Roger Moore
inbreeding?” “I’d love to, my dear chap!”
eyebrow, the George Clooney smirk, the
Vic Reeves thigh-rub. An assailant, on
the other hand, gives his prey the
come-on with an angry shout of “Come
on!” or “Come on, then!” This fisticuffal
foreplay is often accompanied by a
stretching out of the arms and a
beckoning flap-into-palm of the fingers

–4–
F RANK C HAMPARD Chelsea fans will
disagree with what I am about to write.
Good. Frank Lampard is the name of a
gangly, entitled midfielder with an
overbite who has operated as the diseased
heart of the English football team for
what feels like the last 40 years. How
many times have we had to watch him
slap his hands to his forehead in
unjustified disbelief as one of his poorly
aimed free kicks from 30 yards away flies
off into the crowd? Frank Lampard: the
overpaid, overrated overbite. I can only
imagine that Cocky the Fox is a Chelsea
fan. Why else would he bestow this term
of ensmearment on the comfortably dumb
cony, Champion?
M Y S ON For many years, I thought the
Cockney moniker, “my son”, was exclusive
to horses. Every Saturday, my father
would lean forward on the edge of his
armchair and, with a hand clutching a
betting slip, gesticulate wildly at the
television, in the hope that an outburst of
momentary lunacy would encourage his
backed nag to poke its head over the
finishing line first. “Go on, my son! Go
on, my son! Go on!” There usually
followed a second or two of suspended
animation. And then: “Fuck. Fucking
bugger it.” More often than not, he lost.
–5–
G ET F OXED
In the last Get Foxed, you were asked to
identify the missing two letters at the
beginning of eleven words such that the
initial letters taken in sequence yielded the
name of a character from The Ballad of
Cocky the Fox. The problem with this
request was that only ten words were listed.
(An errant fox urinated on one of the words
after the puzzle had been constructed
thereby rendering it illegible to the printer.)
Accordingly, The Sniffer apologizes to you.
Here is the complete list of completed words:
B LATANT
A SCETIC
R EPROVE
E CLIPSE
L ACONIC
Y AWNING
T ENUOUS
H APLESS
E PITOME
R ESPITE
E MULATE
You will notice that the list acrostically
identifies Barely There as the Cocky
character in question.
In this Get Foxed, you are cordially required
to wrap your cerebrum around a teaser that
involves Cocky the Fox and Shakes the
Badger dancing an ambivalent travel tango.
The distance between Cocky the Fox’s hutch
in the Borough and Shakes the Badger’s sett
on the Northside is 7.8 miles. Cocky starts
off running towards Shakes’s sett at 7 miles
per hour. At the same time, Shakes starts
running towards Cocky at 6 miles per hour.
As soon as Cocky runs into Shakes, he turns
back and heads home to his hutch. When he
gets there, he turns round again and runs
back to Shakes. When he reaches Shakes, he
turns round and heads home. Cocky repeats
this love-hate back-and-forth until Shakes
arrives at his hutch. By this time, how far
has Cocky run in total?
H OW T HE R AVENS
F EEL A BOUT C OCKY
Snared, suspiring, condemned
to be who you are, wherever you are,
stuck in your fur, caged in your bones,
you do what you have to do.
It¹s entertaining!
Run over here, run over there,
breathless and bright with despair.
We love it!
Wriggle you may, twitch you might,
but know this -
the trap was set by you,
and not by us.
—James Parker
T O T HE S NOUT
Sir,
In my field (Evolutionary Biology),
"allopatric," "peripatric," "parapatric," and
"sympatric" are commonly used terms
referring to organisms whose ranges or
distributions are — respectively — non-
overlapping/isolated, closely adjacent but
non-overlapping, immediately adjacent but
not significantly overlapping, and
overlapping/identical. Clearly, the author of
"Cocky the Fox" has made a close study of
such distribution patterns, and what's more
has familiarized himself with the latest
–6–
thinking in Biogeography. Bravo to him for
doing so. I write, however, because it has
occurred to me that this newsletter is edited
and written pseudonymously: "Patric(k),"
eh? A weak pun, at best. Unmask yourself —
a pseudonym is a coward's resort!
Tsk-tskingly,
(Dr.) Jonah Lunges
***
Dear Dr. Lunges,
Shit. You are right in thinking that there is
no such person as Patrick Cates. “Patrick
Cates” is a hastily concocted nom de plume
that I use to dissociate myself from any of
my writing that I consider vulgar, tawdry
and of low quality. But I beg of you: Keep
this revelation to yourself. I don’t want
readers of The Ballad of Cocky the Fox
thinking that I would sully my lofty
authorial standing by pulling together a rag
of such amateurism and unseemliness as The
Sniffer.
Yours sincerely,
James Parker
***
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
(sniffer@hilobrow.com).
 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

–7–