The
niffer
A PERIODICAL FOXY COMPENDIUM
ISSUE NO. TWELVE — 28 OCTOBER 2010
F ROM T HE S NOUT
“Who, or what, is Jackpot?” So asks the
voiceover as Fit the Twelfth finishes. How
do you handle serial cliffhangers and
conundra? Do you piss and whine and mull
and chew? Or do you turn off the internal
telly and wait until you’re told to turn it on
again? If the latter is you, stop reading.
Jump to His Master’s Choice and suck up
some Killing Joke. If the former is you, join
me on a fleeting flit of conjecture and
jumped-to conclusions.
Maybe Jackpot is a badger, the
fuck-off king and emperor of setts.
The first time we read of Jackpot, he is
nameless, an anonymous, horrifying
violence. Barely There the hare sings a siren
song of warning:
For he has struck again! Woooooooh! The
pain, the pain!
A dire dirge. Yet what about that
“Woooooooh!”? Is it eulogy or mockery?
–1–
Shakes thinks mockery and takes unkindly
to it:
Don’t you talk like that Barely… Don’t you
talk about Jackpot like that.
The badgers respect this being. They are
eager to propitiate him with fur and flesh.
Are they scared of him? They’re spellbound,
gloomy, brainwashed, yes. But not scared.
Maybe Jackpot is a badger, the fuck-off king
and emperor of setts. They don’t fear their
own, so this makes surface sense.
Or maybe Jackpot is a not-badger. In the
mind’s eye of a fox, he’s “a ripper”, “a
slasher”, “some kind of mon-sterrrr”. If
Cocky thought badger, he’d say badger. So
what other country creature might he be?
Badgers are the big bad boys. Are there
bigger and badder? A stray pitbull? A
falcon? An angry, goateed, thrashing kind of
monster who rips with voice and slashes
with axe? Is Jackpot what the badgers call
James Hetfield?
Yes. Jackpot is James Hetfield.
 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. In this instance of disc spin,
we dye our hair black, don scruffy granddad
overcoats and scowl through the barely lit
darkness at a pair of speakers that sound as
if they are broadcasting What’s THIS For…!
by Killing Joke.
This album is a drum solo divided into eight
pieces and then sprinkled with a light dose
of angular guitar, a blob of bass and a squirt
or two of high-pitched moaning. That
sounds like a negative review. It’s not. If you
need a record that expresses, rhythmically
and thematically, the endless drudgery of a
life at home (Cocky in the Borough) and the
endless trudgery of a life on the road (Cocky
travelling to and through the Northside),
What’s THIS For…! is it.
As soon as the thumping bass drum of The
Fall of Because opens the album, I start
hearing a gloomy, apprehensive, animal
scuttle across greenbelt fields. Run, run, run.
Stop. Listen. Run, run, run. Stop. Listen.
Then the incongruous, major-chord
cheeriness of the chorus: “And the tension
builds! And the tension builds!” It feels like
one of Parker’s darkly comic moments of
light relief. The whole song structure, in
–2–
fact, seems to mirror the Ballad’s tonal
metre.
The rumbling march continues with
Unspeakable. Hypnotic, circular and
animal. Redolent of Champion’s
non-sequitur nonsense (“Keep running ‘cause
it’s nightmare time. Unspeakaboooow! I
wonder who chose the colour scheme. It’s
very nice.”)
On and on those rolling toms. And the
crying of voice and the cawing of guitar.
Eventually we arrive at Exit. Appropriately
enough, canids bark and howl the song into
life. Is this satire? Then the trudging
drudgery is given explicit vent:
“Noise turns darker. The moments pass. But
the drums keep thundering in a familiar
way. Outside the legions multiply. By and
by, you're still alive. Getting nowhere. Can't
find no way.”
I see how this album sculpts the novel’s
mood. Death and larks. Doom and laughs.
Kills and jokes. What’s the Ballad for…!
THIS.
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: Have you received any
interesting fan mail since you started
writing The Ballad?
The Author: No.
The Editor: Not even from Josh
pretending to be an avid fan?
The Author: Well, he and Matthew send
me editorial emails. And I’m very thankful.
When you let those two mighty intellects
loose on the text, the results are wonderful.
They always make me think in ways I
wouldn’t otherwise think.
The Editor: I see. So you haven’t had
anybody sending you soiled underwear in an
outpouring of infatuation, as a middle-aged
Welsh lady might send hers to Tom Jones?
The Author: No.
[Stares mournfully into pint glass as if try-
ing to divine the future. Raises it slowly to
lips and takes a long, funereal sip.]
The Author: I’ve got a feeling that the
readership is so weeny at the moment. I feel
like we’re just burrowing into obscurity now.
The Editor: Just like the good woodland
mammals that we are.
The Author: Exactly.
The Editor: Down a winding rabbit
warren.
The Author: Deeper into the den, into the
earth’s fragrant darkness. But I’m actually
quite happy with it. Because I now have this
clearer idea of it as a work in progress that
I’m performing in front of people. I’m
completely comfortable with the notion that
there are only three hardcore Cocky-heads
tuning in.
The Editor: But we’re having a lot of fun.
The Author: Yes, we’re having a lot of
fun. That’s the thing.
The Editor: It’s like an open mic night at
a bar. But for twenty nights in a row.
The Author: That’s exactly what it is.
The Editor: On a related note, maybe in
your family, is there anyone of a different
generation who says, “Oh, that’s nice dear,”
but has no idea what it’s all about?
The Author: Oh yes. My Mum. Bless her.
I showed her the first bits of it two years ago
and she said: “I’m sorry, love. I just don’t
–3–
like talking animals. I can’t read about
talking animals.”
The Editor: Great.
The Author: But with the new Cocky,
she’s been incredibly supportive. I don’t
know how she feels about it now that it’s
devolved somewhat. But the first few fits
were pretty tight. The narrative plopped you
along a bit. Her praises for that were very
fulsome. I think she felt I was actually
writing something instead of just farting
around with swearing animals and stuff.
The Editor: So when you write some
profanity issuing from a vulpine mouth, say,
do you ever think: “Oh shit. Mum’s going to
read that.” Do you worry about making her
blush?
The Author: No, thank God. I’ve never
had that problem. I’ve always been exactly as
disgusting as I’ve wanted to be. I don’t know
if I’ve told you this, but one of the first
stories I ever had published was a very
skimpily fictionalized account of me having
a sequence of horrible panic attacks when I
was analyzing transport statistics in an
office in Hammersmith.
The Editor: Jesus.
The Author: To try and ward them off, I
was wanking in a kind of frenzy in the
toilets. You know, just to try and feel like a
human again. Like a body. I was getting so
spaced out. It was actually a horrible
moment in my life. So I wrote about this in
a semi-comedic way and it was printed in a
friend of mine’s magazine. One evening after
it was published, my brothers were having a
meal with my parents and they all passed it
around and read it. When my Dad finished
reading, he put the magazine down, sighed
and said: “Well, at least he’s getting it out of
his system.”
The Editor: Did he mean the words or the
seed?
The Author: Both? Anyway, I’ve always
felt completely free to be as squalid as I
want. I’m just lucky, I think.
T HE I NFOXICATOR
The Infoxicator is a tribute to Cocky's
occasional tendency to get off his tits on
aftershave and glue. In this installment, you
will read an ignorant consideration of a
loosely Ballad-themed wine called Rook.
Mrs. Editor and I were recently engaging in
a midweek nosh=up at our favourite local
restaurant. I wasn’t expecting to find
anything infoxicatory on the drinks menu,
short as it is and familiar as I am with it.
But we had caught the gaff at its autumn
turnaround and the menu had changed just
that day. And, by Artemis, goddess of nature,
forests and animals, what was the first thing
to jump off the weighty card stock? The
Rook. Now, a rook isn’t a raven, granted.
But it’s dark, vicious, noisy and,
fundamentally, a corvus. All of that was
enough to justify an impromptu zoologically
spun review of this birdish booze.
As I’ve confessed here before, I know bugger
all about wine. The last wine review I wrote,
I did so without so much as a sniff or a taste.
–4–
But this time I was with Mrs. Editor.
Between the two of us, I thought, we might
be able to glug some sense out of the bottle.
The wine arrived and the first thing to catch
my eye was the scruffy, whining mess of a
bird on the label. What an embarrassment to
the noble corvus lineage! I could feel the
twitchy, disapproving headshakes of rooks
and ravens all around. “Draw us in red?
With pathetically needy beaks? After being
dragged through the hedgerow backwards by
a falcon? Do us a favour!”
Put off though I was by this ornithological
atrocity, I decided not to send the wine back.
Mrs. Editor took a sip, she gave it the
not-corked nod and the server filled both our
glasses. Before I present a snippet of our
ill-informed babble, here are a few pertinent
facts. The wine is made by the Corvidae
Wine Company of Washington; it’s a blend
of cabernet sauvignon (15%), merlot (45%)
and syrah (40%); and it contains 14.1% alco-
hol by volume. In short, it’s dark, strong and
from a part of America where it pisses with
rain all the time and where people drown
their considerable sorrows with gallons of
beer. On, then, with the tasting tittle-tattle.
The Editor: [Sips.] Mmm. It tastes… dry.
What the hell does that mean? God I really
I don’t know shit about wine.
M rs. Editor: [Sips.] It’s… It’s… Let’s talk
about how it smells. Animals need to know
about smells, right?
The Editor: True. And you’re the blood-
hound.
M rs. Editor: [Sniffs.] Strawberry!
The Editor: Strawberry?
M rs. Editor: Strawberry.
The Editor: [Sniffs and then puts glass
down.] Oh yeah. I see what you mean. It has
that summery sweet smell. A strawberry
note, for sure. [Picks up glass, holds it near Pitlochry for the weekend. “W ear the fox
rim and sniffs again.] I smell… dirty hand. hat,” he replies. Contrary to what you might
think, he isn’t advising you to don a
M rs. Editor: [Sniffs.] I smell balls… Oh.
particular type of fur headgear while you
That’s you. Sorry.
fish. Rather, this is what a twangy
The Editor: [Frowns.] Mancunian sounds like when asking:
M rs. Editor: I smell man-nuts. Dirty “Where the fuck’s that?”
man-nuts.
T HE C OCKY C OMPANION
The Editor: [Frowns. Sips.] It’s very… It’s
very… warming. Each edition of The Sniffer features an
extract from The Cocky Companion, a
M rs. Editor: Yes. That’s the high alcohol Rosetta Stone for decoding the less obvious
content. elements of Cocky's London vernacular. This
The Editor: Hmm. Yes. That’s because it’s extract freely trades three commodities: the
booze. expressive, the ambiguous and the
bastardized.
M rs. Editor: It has a very deep, blood-red
colour. Slightly cloudy. W OT “What” is the well-behaved schoolboy
who finishes his homework every night,
The Editor: [Sips.] It tastes… It tastes…
sings in the choir and knows that
good.
masturbation is a sin. His older brother,
M rs. Editor: [Sips.] Yes. “Wot”, is back on the streets after a
two-stretch for armed robbery. “Wot”
[Thoughtful silence.]
sniffs glue down at the local cemetery. He
M rs. Editor: Do you think it will be clear steals old people’s winter fuel allowance
from this conversation that we know and he has a face tattoo. “What” is
absolutely nothing about wine? shit-scared of “Wot” and rightly so. For
The Editor: Yes. years, “Wot” has teased “What” for the
poncy four-letteredness of his single
F OX F ACT syllable. “Four fackin’ letters? A silent
bleedin’ haitch? You poof.” He delivers
Imagine you, a lost tourist, have the this as he delivers everything: with the
misfortune to be sitting at the bar in a grotty slack jaw of an Estuary English inbred
Manchester pub. You are enjoying a quiet
pint of Boddington’s and poring over the
local area map that will, hopefully, reveal
the whereabouts of Manchester Piccadilly
Station. (You are aiming to catch the 3:20 to
Pitlochry in Scotland for a weekend of
salmon fishing.) A grubby regular standing
next to you sees your geographically puzzled
expression and chimes in with an
unsolicited offer of help. “Where yer tryin’
ter get ter?” You tell him that you need to
find Piccadilly Station because you’re a keen
salmon fisherman and you’re off to

–5–
 and a cold, grim stare that invariably taking the piss? That’s what an
prefigures an act of extreme violence. influential printer must have asked
himself sooner or later, because the
M ESELF One day, an elegant butterfly
monorchid “isn’t it” suddenly appeared.
called “Myself” landed on a leaf and
And then the vowel-heavy,
crawled backwards into a chrysalis. A few
consonant-light thunderhead of Estuary
weeks later, the chrysalis became a cocoon
English billowed across the skies of Great
and a painfully ugly slug-like thing
Britain and threatened the Queen’s with
poked its head out. “’Allo. My name’s
a loud and watery barrage. “Wo-yoo-say?”
Meself. There’s nothing I like more than
“Gahin-dahn-shop.” “Giss-a-go”. It was in
downing five pints of lager and then
this electric storm of dialectical aggro
beating the shit out of the English
that “innit”, the runt of the lettery litter,
language.” “Myself” does perfectly sound
was born.
duty as a reflexive pronoun: “I can look
after myself.” “I watched myself on the
security camera.” “I wish I were flexible
enough to be able to give myself a
fellation.” But “Meself”, along with his
partner in crime “Yerself”, is a revolting,
pig-ignorant social climber. “I kindly
request yerself to send meself an invoice
for the work completed.” “I was minding
meself’s own business, Officer, when the
bloke came up and started attacking
meself’s fist with his face.” “If I throw in
a few ‘selfs” now and then, it’ll make
L UMMOX The onomatopoeically awkward
meself sound a lot cleverer.”
“lummox” brims with associations.
Clumsy lumps who are mocked and easily
flummoxed. Pillocks who slum it on
hillocks and talk a lot of bollocks. Dumb
glum oxes who say “um” a lot. And when
you pluralize the already-plural-sounding
lummox into “lummoxes”, you end up
with a malcoordinated mouthful of
Hobbitses and stomachs that would make
Gollum proud. Lummoxes, then. A word
well-suited to describing the stodgy
I NNIT “Innit” is the third transmutation in immovability of a posse of bulky, badgery
our triptych of lexical cock-punching. In bastards.
the old days, people would use formal
phrasing when seeking validation for
their half-baked opinions. “This colony is
really rather pleasant, is it not?” Then
lips and tongues got lazy, the apostrophic
zealots came along, and “is it not” became
“is’n’t it”. Two apostrophes? Are you

–6–
F UCK - OFF When once accused of needless
grammatical pedantry, a famous
archbishop defended himself by noting
that accurate capitalization is the
difference between helping your Uncle
Jack off a horse and helping your uncle
Jack off a horse. Should you accuse me of
needless grammatical pedantry, famous
archbishop though I am not, I will
defend myself by noting that accurate
hyphenation is the difference between
telling a bouncer that he is fuck-off and
G ET F OXED
telling said bouncer to fuck off. If you
describe an entity as “fuck-off”, you are In the last Get Foxed, you were shown a
declaring that this entity is, in theory, sequence of six letters (K, P, C, O, V, G) and
more than capable of telling other entities asked to envisage, with sound reasoning, a
to fuck off. “I caught a fuck-off sea bass seventh. If you were able to divine the
on Sunday,” you might say to your hidden meaning in this optometrist’s eye
incredulous chum as you approximate its chart, you would have envisaged “S”. “S”
length with outstretched arms. “I’ve got a stands for “Species”, which completes the list
fuck-off hangover,” you might groan to of the seven main taxonomic ranks used in
yourself after waking up in a pile of your biological classification. To wit: Kingdom,
own vomit in a pub car park. “I just Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus,
bought a fuck-off flat-screen telly,” you Species.
might brag to your colleagues in the hope
In this half of the month, you are graciously
of persuading at least one of them to
expected to fill in twenty-two spaces instead
watch the World Cup at your house and
of one. Listed below are eleven seven-letter
relieve you of your chronic friendlessness.
words with their first two letters missing.
But back to our fearsome bouncer. By all
Can you complete the words in such a way
means ingratiate yourself with him by
that, when read in order, the initial letters
telling him that he’s fuck-off. But under
of each word spell out the name of a charac-
no circumstances tell him to fuck off. If
ter who has appeared in The Ballad of
you do, you’ll end up with a fuck-off
Cocky the Fox?
nosebleed.

__ATANT
__CETIC
__PROVE
__CONIC
__WNING
__NUOUS
__PLESS
__ITOME
__SPITE
__ULATE

–7–
 B EING A F OX
Someone tweaked the pain dial again,
and everything pinches and pops –
so I tread light, move fast, because
the ground burns where I stop.
And the smell in my nose is a strange assault
and the noise in my ear is a threat
and I hide when it rains because obviously
I hate getting wet.
Ignored by all opinion,
unjustified by events –
but dilating, dilating, always,
in the lens of your own magnificence.
—James Parker
T O T HE S NOUT
Sir,
If Cocky triumphs in the end, and becomes
boss of the Borough, will he make a speech
to all the animals? If so, will it bear any
resemblance to what Megan Fox said during
a red carpet TV interview at the 2009 Golden
Globes? To wit: “I am pretty sure I am a
doppelganger for Alan Alda. I'm a tranny.
I'm a man. I'm so painfully insecure. I'm on
the verge of vomiting now. I am so horrified
that I am here, and embarrassed. I'm
scared.” Does Cocky even know who Alan
Alda is?
John Anus-Gel
***
Dear Mr. Anus-Gel,
How very perspicacious of you to suggest
that, beneath his cheery veneer and behind
his full-of-it fascia, Cocky might really just
be a diffident fellow prone to bouts of
extreme manxiety/foxiety. While Cocky
wastes none of his vulpine worrypower on
–8–
matters relating to gender and sexuality, you
hit the hare on the bonce when you adduce
Megan Fox’s confession in your assessment
of his character. Like Megan, Cocky is no
stranger to insecurity, horror,
embarrassment and the need to expel the
cadaverous, Quavery contents of his stomach
from time to time.
But will Cocky speak to these internal
ulcerifactors in the event that he is crowned
“guv’nor” of the “manor”? I doubt it very
much. Cocky is not an American Fox; he is
an English Fox. And like his distant,
two-legged cousin, English Man, the
English Fox is hardwired to repress and
suppress anything approximating to an
emotion.
So Cocky is a complex beast whose bravado
belies a stormy brew of feelings. He’s as
fucked as the rest of us. But there’s as much
chance of him acknowledging this in a
victory speech as there is of Edward the Cat
coming back to life in the guise of
Bellerephon, yoking together the Du Noir
twins and riding them through the skies like
a pair of pterripi.
Yours sincerely,
The Editor
p.s. Cocky has never heard of Alan Alda.
However, he did once have a punch-up with
an agoraphobic, tree-bound squirrel named
Alan Alder.
***
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

–9–