Jubilate Agno is a long poem by Christopher Smart. It was written between 1758 and 1763, during which time Smart was incarcerated in Mr Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He had been admitted there after a stay in St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he had been sent due to a religious mania the chief symptom of which was a compulsion to pray in public.

Smart had long been thought one of the minor religious poets of the 18th century, best known for the Song To David. Jubilate Agno itself was unknown until an edition was published in 1939 under the title Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam. But it was the 1954 edition edited by W H Bond which gave us the poem in its accepted form, and which has led to Smart being hailed as a great original, and his poem much more than simply the ravings of a lunatic.Jubilate Agno is divided into four fragments, the second of which is subdivided again in the edition from which this reading is taken. It is, in the words of one writer, a vast hymn of praise, glorifying God and his creation. So, with that in mind, listen carefully to what may be the first complete reading of the entire poem on the radio – if anyone knows of any other broadcasts, please let us know,

Jubilate Agno is read by Frank Key and Germander Speedwell. It will be broadcast at mid-day on the 27th December 2007.

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A while ago I wrote about hiking pickles, and today I want to address the equally important topic of pudding flaps. Flaps about pudding are rarer than they once were, chiefly because puddings play a less critical role in our diets than used to be the case. Time was when no meal was innocent of a pudding, and though of course not every pudding preparation was the occasion of a flap, the incidence of such flaps was obviously more frequent.

One or two psychoculinary statisticians have attempted to put a precise figure on the occurrence of pudding flaps, and one feels pity for them, pity mixed with mocking laughter. Sooner or later, I think, we are going to have to accept that we will never know how often the making of a pudding was done in a state of flap, certainly not to a statistically significant extent.

• Pudding Flaps
• A Bit Of A Kerfuffle Down By The Bins Outside The Barn
• Being A Robber Baron

This episode was recorded on the 11th October 2007. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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If you were fortunate enough to be hanging around with Blodgett on a Thursday morning in the middling years of the last century, you would as likely as not have been witness to a display of rare skill. For it was Blodgett’s endearing habit in those days, on Thursday mornings, to bash out various national anthems, using his fists, and sometimes sticks, on the base of an upturned biscuit tin.

He would have eaten all the biscuits for his breakfast, of course. Blodgett had learned by heart the national anthem of almost every state and statelet on the planet, reduced each one to its rhythmic core, and bashed them out on biscuit tins. He would do this at home, or by the edge of a pond, or halfway up a hillside. In truth, it mattered not where he was, for he had fallen into a routine. Thursday meant biscuits for breakfast, then bashing out anthems. So energetically did he thump and bash that by the end of his recital the biscuit tin would be a dented and effectively destroyed thing. Apparently he passed the ruined tins on to Jasper Poxhaven, the sinister scrap metal dealer whose yard was a few doors away from Blodgett’s chalet.

• Bashing Biscuit Tins
• Colossus
• Oily Git
• Notes Towards A History Of Blister Lane Bypass
• Allocation of Hooting Yard Weeks

This episode was recorded on the 6th October 2007. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the two publications Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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