Foghorn Quotes

Cuddles screamed. It wasn’t a braying noise, it was an ear-slapping shriek of pure donkey outrage, like someone got hold of a foghorn and tried to strangle it.

The foghorn of Boston Light moaned across the harbor, a sound Teddy had heard every night of his childhood in Hull. The loneliest sound he knew. Made you want to hold something, a person, a pillow, yourself.

Opportunities are whispers, not foghorns.

Fragrance should never be worn like a thick scented choker, where the scent emanates from the neck in strong blasts like a foghorn! Rather, it should sparkle like twinkling stars, where small bursts disperse here and there, they elude us, pique our curiosity and make us want more.

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.

So my mother was one of the few people on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.

But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moanmusic of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.

At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.

Here"-she handed me the coffee-"I was just bringing this up to you." "Oh,wow,that's really nice of you," I replied, mentally adding Lara to my list of People Who Are Awesome. At Hex Hall, we were practically blasted out of bed in the morning by an alarm that was somewhere between a foghorn and the baying of hell hounds. People bringing you coffee in bed was a way nicer way to wake up.

Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a fog-horn;

Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary Somewhere up in the eaves it began: high in the roof – in a sort of vault between the slates and the gutter – a small leak. Through it, rain which came from the east, in from the lights and foghorns of the coast – water with a ghost of ocean salt in it – spilled down on the path below. Over and over and over years stone began to alter, its grain searched out, worn in: granite rounding down, giving way taking into its own inertia that information water brought, of ships, wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour. It happened under our lives: the rain, the stone. We hardly noticed. Now this is the day to think of it, to wonder: all those years, all those years together – the stars in a frozen arc overhead, the quick noise of a thaw in the air, the blue stare of the hills – through it all this constancy: what wears, what endures.

But he wanted to smile. He would have done, if he'd been able. Surely that had to be the most important thing. The jabbing at his leg stopped for a bit, then started up again. Then there was a lovely, short pause, and then- Damn, that hurt. But not enough to cry out. Although he might have moaned. He wasn't sure. They'd poured hot water on him. Lots of it. He wondered if they were trying to poach his leg. Boiled meat. How terribly British of them. He chuckled. He was funny. Who knew he was so funny? "Oh, my God!" he heard Honoria yell. "What did I do to him?" He laughed some more. Because she sounded ridiculous.Almost as if she were speaking through a foghorn.Oooorrrrhhhh myyy Grrrrrrrrrd. He wondered if she could hear it,too. Wait a moment..Honoria was asking what she'd done to him?Did that mean she was wielding the scissors now?He wasn't sure how he ought to feel about this. On the other hand...boiled meat! He laughed again,deciding he didn't care.God,he was funny.How was it possible no one had ever told him he was funny before?

His voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports.

Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time, the sound was down deep inside her, a long wordless cry for things that weren’t never going to happen.

She noticed the lemony yellow light in her dream and heard nothing of her alarm clock so continued to dream and dreamt of Jamestown and the sound of the foghorns over the water and the gulls and every night that was the breath of the day before.

Maybe all exiles are drawn to the sea, the ocean. There is an inherent music in the working sounds of docks and harbors and there were times when he thought that all the melancholy beauty of the blues was present in a foghorn, wailing out to sea, warning men of the dangers that awaited them. Increasingly

We have had the thickest fog ever for several days. All night and all day we can hear the sirens on the different islands and headlands, and the ferries and ships at anchor in the bay keep their foghorns bellowing. We can not see the bay at all nor any part of San Francisco except the few close houses on Russian Hill. The foghorns sound so mournful and distressed, like lost souls calling to each other through the void. (Of course, no one ever heard a lost soul calling, but that’s the way it sounds.)

A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to be everything.

He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses, and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And the time was gone forever.

hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish.

A hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish.

these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Few sounds were to be heard at that early hour, only the drone of the airship’s engines and the mournful mournful moans of the foghorns, which seemed almost to be searching for one another, somewhere along the silvered and twisted ribbon of river.

Mrs Pitt shouted up the stairs for her daughter with a voice like a foghorn, then smiled cheerfully at Calvin. "She'll be down in a mo," she said, and showed him in to the front room, which was a colourful sea of Lego bricks with a small child bobbing in it.

Trust me when I say that everything you've ever felt has been experienced by another human being before you. You may not think so, but its true. That is what poetry is. It exists to remind us of this very fact. Poetry is mankind's way of saying that we are not entirely alone in the world; it offers a voice of comfort to resonate down through the ages like a lone foghorn's mournful call in the nautical night. Poetry is a stepladder between the centuries, from ancient Greece to tomorrow afternoon. Your problem is you just haven't been introduced to the pure poets - those who hit the head and the heart. The masters. But luckily for you, you have pitched at the right place. I'd say it is almost as if it were fate, if I could bring myself to believe in such an ethereal concept.

Opportunities are whispers, not foghorns. If we can’t hear their soft rhythms—if we are too busy rushing about, waiting for thunderclaps of revelation, inspiration, and certainty—or if we can spot them but can’t nurture them into real advantages, then we might as well be blind to them.

That same night I dug Lampshade on Fillmore and Geary. Lampshade is a big colored guy who comes into musical Frisco saloons with coat, hat, and scarf and jumps on the bandstand and starts singing; the veins pop in his forehead; he heaves back and blows a big foghorn blues out of every muscle in his soul.

what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five' 'or what?' I say. 'what, what' she says. I say, 'I thought we were playing Would You Rather...?' She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. 'Marla,' I say, 'you get the wisdom because you don't anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.' She says, 'You don't understand the rules to this game.

Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish. The sound got louder until it was almost deafening, and then it stopped. In that silence, I began to drift down into the darkness, descending at first so slowly and steadily, I felt I was being lowered on pulleys--by angels with gold-spun ropes around my body, I imagined, and then by the electric casket lowering device they used at both my parents' burials, and so my heart quickened at that thought, remembering tat I'd had parents once, and that I'd taken the last of the pills, that this was the end of something.

Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry.

The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazes me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.

Remove this quote from your collection “The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazes me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.

Slogan For Humanity (The Sonnet) Let's slogan for humanity above the cacophony of politics. Let's slogan all together for the people and not bookish morality. Let's slogan for humanity above the drumbeats of bigotry. Let's slogan for the souls in misery and not nationality. Let's slogan for humanity above the foghorn of policies. Let's slogan cause we are responsible, not cause we’re aggressive. Let's slogan for humanity above the siren of world peace. Let's slogan being peace incarnate beyond all doctrines illusive. Let's slogan for humanity above the noise of traditions. Let's slogan all together trumping all worship of sects. Let's slogan for humanity above the gunshots of authoritarianism. Let’s slogan as just, free and brave beings, not loyal subjects. Awake and Arise my sisters and brothers to slogan for all of humankind. We are the light and we are the might that's needed during this ominous tide.

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

Gravity's Rainbow" Come on with me through ruined liplock Across Tangian deserts we'll flock Madcap Medusa flank my foghorn We'll change four seasons with our first born. All ships of sense on hyper ocean All kinds of chaos still in motion My culture vulture such a dab hand I'll steal you from the year 4000 Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity I'll always be there Uh-oh my future love I'll always be there For you, my future love Your tears leave trails of Tick fall blur room Autonoma the room is bloom groom Those crippled lines that I can't get to You'd slip through time but I won't let you Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity I'll always be there Uh-oh my future love I'll always be there For you, my future love Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity I'll always be there Uh-oh my future love I'll always be there For you, my future love Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity I'll always be there Uh-oh my future love I'll always be there For you, my future love Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity Come with me, come with me We'll travel to infinity I'll always be there Uh-oh my future love I'll always be there For you, my future love

There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

Commercial firms turned out Claghorn shirts and compasses (the needles always pointed south, son); Delmar cut two Claghorn records, I Love You, That Is and That’s a Joke, Son, and Warner Brothers pirated the concept for use in a series of cartoons. The strutting cartoon rooster, Foghorn J. Leghorn, was an obvious steal from Delmar: the cutting irony, he said years later, was that the cartoons were copyrighted, so that, from then on, “in order to do Claghorn, I had to ask permission from Warner Brothers.

with an Excel spreadsheet?” I made a face like that was ridiculous, but of course there had been an Excel spreadsheet. As soon as everyone was ready, we set off. Joni tramped away in one direction with my seven-year-old, Maggie, whose foghorn voice sent birds skittering into the sky as she harangued her aunt to hurry so they could get back first. “It’s not a race,” Joni said, fading into the tree line. “I want to get the biggest log,” Maggie bellowed. Joni’s own kid, Lola, refused to leave the camp. With the infinite disdain of a teenager, she said there was no need to fatigue ourselves. Fatigue ourselves. Lola went gliding in her slow-motion gait to pluck dead twigs from the trees, like a nymph picking enchanted fruit for a heartsick knight. She high-stepped off into the undergrowth and, for all I knew, changed into a deer, such was the inscrutable nature of my niece, the Lady Lola. By contrast, the all too scrutable Billy was screaming to go with the big boys, who I knew would abandon him up a tree given half a chance. “Carry me,” he said no more than five feet from the camp. So he scrambled onto my shoulders, his arms clamped in a fierce little

The scene had unfolded obnoxious as a foghorn but faded away softly like a page turning in a book.

Lacan implies that learning to live without the kinds of fantasies that protect us from our lack entails an epistemological leap to a vastly different existential attitude. In particular, Lacan invites us to acknowledge that regardless of all the busy and clamorous activity that we habitually undertake in order to suppress or ignore our lack, deep down we know that there will always be moments when it breaks out into the open with the piercing clarity and sadness of a foghorn. No matter how many layers of fantasy we wrap around this hollow in our hearts, it reverberates through us like a muted but persistent echo that carries the uncanny messages of what most terrifies us about ourselves. From a Lacanian viewpoint, our existential assignment is to heed that echo, to withstand moments when nothing fills the void, and to work through the realization that neither we nor the world —nor any of the objects of this world— can ever live up to the perfection of our fantasies. Our task, in other words, is to learn to endure the sharp points of existence without being irrevocably devastated.

Rachel, as tall as the boys, with eyebrows that grew faster than a lie and a voice like a foghorn.

Draconic singing can best be compared to a concert of bagpipe drones (no chanter, just the drones), occasionally interrupted by a solo from a lighthouse foghorn. At

Dr. Carroll,” the warden said, his voice sounding like Foghorn Leghorn, “Ben Carver is a psychopath. He’s incapable of empathy or remorse. If you see something human in him, that’s only because he’s playing the part.

Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship's foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others - 'buzzers', as they were called - from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the 'knocker-up'; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week.

Are you sure you don’t remember anything from that night?” Eli said as he brushed the ashen remains of the card off the table onto the floor. All the computers in the room beeped at once, the noise like a high-pitched foghorn going off. I jumped in my seat and nearly fell out of it. Selene wasn’t so lucky. She tumbled to the floor as Buster gave another hard buck and rolled to the right. “I’m sorry!” Eli shouted to the room at large. It wasn’t the first time one of us had upset the place. “I’ll bring a vacuum next time. I promise!” The computers beeped again in final scolding then fell silent. “Great headquarters you got here,” Lance said, rubbing his ears. “Just one more reason for you not to join us,” Selene said, getting to her feet. Buster wheeled toward her, but she put a hand up. “No. You stay. I warned you last time what would happen if I fell off again.” If it were possible for a chair to look crestfallen, Buster did.

Turner sounded his foghorn three times, the “Sailor’s Farewell.

Always,’ said Evie and Max together. Points for harmony. In truth, in the six years she’d known him, Max had barely mentioned his mother other than to say she’d never been the maternal type and that she set exceptionally high standards for everything; be it a manicure or the behaviour of her husbands or her sons. ‘No engagement ring?’ queried Caroline with the lift of an elegant eyebrow. ‘Ah, no,’ said Evie. ‘Not yet. There was so much choice I, ah...couldn’t decide.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Caroline, before turning to Max. ‘I can, of course, make an appointment for you with my jeweller this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll have something more than suitable. That way Evie will have a ring on her finger when she attends the cocktail party I’m hosting for the pair of you tonight.’ ‘You didn’t have to fuss,’ said Max as he set their overnight cases just inside the door beside a wide staircase. ‘Introducing my soon-to-be daughter-in-law to family and friends is not fuss,’ said Max’s mother reprovingly. ‘It’s expected, and so is a ring. Your brother’s here, by the way.’ ‘You summoned him home as well?’ ‘He came of his own accord,’ she said dryly. ‘No one makes your brother do anything.’ ‘He’s my role model,’ whispered Max as they followed the doyenne of the house down the hall. ‘I need a cocktail dress,’ Evie whispered back. ‘Get it when I go ring hunting. What kind of stone do you want?’ ‘Diamond.’ ‘Colour?’ ‘White.’ ‘An excellent choice,’ said Caroline from up ahead and Max grinned ruefully. ‘Ears like a bat,’ he said in his normal deep baritone. ‘Whisper like a foghorn,’ his mother cut back, and surprised Evie by following up with a deliciously warm chuckle. The house was a beauty. Twenty-foot ceilings and a modern renovation that complemented the building’s Victorian bones. The wood glowed with beeswax shine and the air carried the scent of old-English roses. ‘Did you do the renovation?’ asked Evie and her dutiful fiancé nodded. ‘My first project after graduating.’ ‘Nice work,’ she said as Caroline ushered them into a large sitting room that fed seamlessly through to a wide, paved garden patio.

What’s wrong with you boy? You look like two miles of bad road!

younger boys gently but firmly, and after dinner they all went to their rooms to settle down, call friends, watch TV, or do whatever they wanted. Jake came to check on her, tucked into Seth’s room. “Are you doing okay?” “I couldn’t be happier, and they’re not crazy at all, they’re terrific!” It was a house full of love. It filled every space and reverberated from the rafters. “They’re on their best behavior for you. Wait till the boys get into a fight and start throwing things at each other, and my dad’s two little monsters arrive on Christmas Eve and Day. My mother says they’re both hyperactive, and Genevieve thinks they’re fine.” Antonia loved Eloise, when she and John arrived the morning of Christmas Eve. They all had lunch together and went for a walk on Ocean Beach. The fog was hovering just beyond the coastline, and you could hear foghorns in the distance. It was such a picturesque little city. Antonia loved

The story within me aches like an untreated wound. It's unheard and I need to speak it. It roams my insides like a caged animal gasping for air. It trembles.

Take it down three notches in volume, Foghorn, or I will dick punch you.

Notes on the Leper Colony and Insane Asylums on Robben Island In the winter, wild North westerly gales sweep in across the Island, battering the shore and bringing with them a dense sea mist that shrouds everything in its path. Despite the light and the foghorn many ships have foundered on those dark rocks. Perhaps this gives rise to the story that it is not only the crying of the seabirds that can be heard on dark winter nights. There are other stories about lost souls…

Notes on the Leper Colony and Insane Asylums on Robben Island: In the winter, wild North westerly gales sweep in across the Island, battering the shore and bringing with them a dense sea mist that shrouds everything in its path. Despite the light and the foghorn many ships have foundered on those dark rocks. Perhaps this gives rise to the story that it is not only the crying of the seabirds that can be heard on dark winter nights. There are other stories about lost souls...

The Beginning Sergeant Smelly was a normal man. He lived in a normal village, full of normal people and had a normal address. He lived at 1 Normall Street in the village of Normall Normall. The village was so normal they named it twice. His first name was eighty-three percent normal—Norman. Most people knew him as Normal Norman from Normall Normall; a rotund and jolly man who lived an exceedingly normal life. Well, normal, if appearing in court on exploding fart charges was normal. Normal, if producing fire from your butt was normal. All of his body parts were normal. Apart from one: his butt. His butt was abnormal. It used to be a normal butt, but everything changed in the blink of a fart. Sergeant Smelly's face glistened with sweat and his heartbeats quickened as the judge read out the charge. "Sergeant Smelly, you are here today because you could not control your soldiers, not to mention your bottom. You are hereby charged with the crime of producing exploding fire-farts. How do you plead?" asked Army Judge Mental. The stout sergeant considered the question and his thoughts transported him back to the day it all went smelly. One fateful morning, Sergeant Smelly lay in bed suffering from a horrible cold. Empty boxes lay scattered across the floor, and the bin overflowed with used tissues. He groaned as he pulled the last tissue from the box. A passer-by in the street below jumped as he heard the foghorn sound. He inspected the contents of the tissue (Sergeant Smelly, not the passer-by) and wished he had not. It was time for action. The suffering soldier dragged himself out of bed and got dressed. He wore a waterproof jacket on top of his uniform, as his army blazer was not snot-proof. Not that any of his other clothes were snot-proof. He trudged downstairs and made himself a hot lemon with honey, then switched on his laptop. After an extensive internet search, he found the best remedy to fix the cold was to feed it, so he plodded into town and searched for a place to eat. The first eatery he found had a ridiculous name, but the café was almost full. He watched the customers from the window as they tucked into their food. The plain wooden tables and basic white tablecloths oozed simplicity, but the gorgeous grub eclipsed the plain interior. Silence filled the air as customers tucked into delectable dishes and drifted off to food heaven.  But an odorous pong emanated from the café, and it was not the food. Sergeant Smelly did not smell the malodorous stench due to his blocked nose and cold. The cold was so bad it came alive. Colin the Cold smelled the awful pong and begged his owner to reconsider. He tried in vain to turn his attention to the sandwich shop, but Sergeant Smelly did not hear him. Colin the Cold saw disaster around the corner. Major Disaster walked around the corner and greeted him in a bright and cheery fashion. "Morning, Smelly," said Major Disaster in a bright and cheery fashion. Colin the Cold was correct and sensed nothing good would come of Sergeant Smelly eating at Café McPoo. It had Disaster Area written all over it, but the police apprehended the graffiti artist, and he was hard at work wiping the words ‘Disaster Area’ from the front of the café. Colin the Cold frowned and prepared himself for the worst. And so it began.

But Sol was asleep. Sol was snoring. Billy and the gang grabbed ahold and tried to lift him out of it but Sol was as heavy and loud as a whale that had swallowed a foghorn and Billy was getting nervous. Sol was snoring loud enough to wake up Billy’s dead grandmother and right now that was the last person to whom Billy wanted to explain himself. Every attempt at waking Sol was met with cow-like inertia. ‘It aint no use,’ whined Billy, ‘we’ll have to leave him and hope he stays dumb.’ Billy Panacea and the gang cleared out, leaving Sol sound asleep in a corner. The cops had a field day. There was more evidence than they could comprehend, and god knows he had a motive. ‘So you finally did it eh Joe?’ said Chief Henry Blince. ‘That’s right Chief,’ said Solitary, beaming. ‘I did it alright. My prints are all over this premises.’ Sol was sentenced to twenty years, and he sat in his cell chuckling at what could be achieved with a well-measured dose of sleeping tablets. Two weeks later Billy Panacea and the gang brought Sol’s contentment to an end when, in a fit of remorse and criminal fraternity, they nitroed the jail and busted him out.

It was an extraordinary moment, and Maigret would never forget the taste of it. First the late-night weariness, and that smell of wet wool. That unknown corridor that seemed to go on for ever. Again they heard the foghorn.

That's what you get for pretending to be asleep." "How is trying to touch my brain with your hair a suitable punishment for fake sleeping after being woken up by your bed-shaking snores?" Her eyes narrowed and she shoved at my shoulder. "I don't snore." "You're totally right. The fog horn must have been all in my head.

Opportunities are whispers, not foghorns

Most opportunities never announce themselves with trumpets and confetti. They’re easily missed, mistaken, or squandered. They can be scary. And they never come with a 110% money-back guarantee. They’re often nothing more than chances to improve on something other people are already doing. Opportunities are whispers, not foghorns.

From a frost-white dwelling emerged a man whose bird’s nest hair and pantomime complexion betrayed a long affair with the vine. His foghorn voice spewed forth an impure torrent of oafish ignorance, pronouncements that could have penetrated through walls from indoors.

She gets to her feet, mumbling something about feeding Hector, only for her father to bark out that his only daughter ‘cares more about her bloody cat than she does about me’ at foghorn volume.

I don't believe in love anymore, the foghorn blasted it out of me.

We may think of them as silent, but fish make many sounds that are rarely appreciated by the human ear. Clownfish chirp and pop by gnashing their teeth together. Oyster toadfish hum and blare like foghorns by quickly contracting muscles attached to their swim bladders. Croaking gourami make their signature noise by snapping the tendons of their pectoral fins. Altogether, more than eight hundred fish species are known to hoot, moan, grunt, groan, thump, bark, or otherwise vocalize.