The Turn of the Tide

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I'm Dr.

Adam Rutherford.

And I'm Dr.

Hannah Frye.

And you are going to send us your everyday mysteries.

And we are going to investigate them.

Using the power of science.

Science.

Science.

I like it.

Washing into your podcast feed this morning.

Or afternoon.

Or evening.

That's how podcasts work.

Very good.

We're having a very salty, ocean-based theme for the Curious Cases this week.

And we managed to get through this entire episode without making a single pirate gag.

Yar, that we did.

Until then.

Today we are diving into something that happens twice a day, every day.

Do you want to take a guess, Adam?

Is it brushing your teeth?

No, this one's more national, maybe even global importance.

Is it feeding my dog?

No, cute though.

Thank you for mentioning Jesse again.

It's the tides twice a day, every day for the last several billion years or so.

And we have got two questions today about tides, and you can read them out.

Okay, so the first comes from listener Lynn Godson, who asks, why isn't high tide at the same time at all points around the coast?

Good question, Lynn.

And the second, this one from Tim Mosedale, is why aren't we harnessing the power of tides on a more commercial scale?

Okay, we're going to come to that second question a little bit later.

But as for the first, Lynn is quite right about the timings of high tides, as you would know if you watched the local BBC weather forecast from her area.

Times of high water.

Padstow is 7.22 and 19.43, Portland 8.41 and 21.09.

For our surface, surf's been good so far this week.

It's good again.

It's very soothing, listen to that.

Indeed.

Well, look, Padstow and Portland are not that far apart.

Padstow's on the north coast of Cornwall, Portland's on the south coast of Dorset, so they're about 148 miles if you drive over Dartmoor.

Thank you very much, Google Maps.

And yet, the high tides, they're more than two hours apart, which is quite intriguing.

Yeah.

It's difficult to imagine how ill-equipped I am to answer this particular question.

Even with Google Maps.

Even with Google Maps.

So, as ever, we have summoned an possibly the expert on this subject, Helen Chersky, oceanographer from UCL, paddle boarder, Arctic Explorer, general all-round good egg.

Welcome to Curious Cases, Helen.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Right, so let's just deal with the basics first.

And you have to treat me like a slightly simple child with this in this regard.

It's the moon that causes the tides, right?

Mostly.

Don't make that face at me.

Damn it.

I knew it was going to be more complicated than this.

So it is true.

So the root of the whole thing is gravity.

And it's the moon's gravity pulling on the earth and its oceans that causes most of the tides.

But the moon is not the only thing out there with gravity.

The sun is much, much bigger, but much, much further away.

And so it does have an influence as well on the tides but it's a it's a small fraction of that of the moon so it's mostly about the moon okay i get that but how does that mean that there are two high tides a day because the moon only goes overhead once a day

the thing you need to remember here is that it's not technically true that the moon is orbiting the earth the moon and the earth are orbiting each other there's a point which is their center of mass which is actually inside the earth a little way and they're both orbiting around that point so it's like imagine you've got a roundabout and the roundabout is is spinning around, and the Earth and the Moon are kind of on opposite sides of it almost.

So they're spinning around each other, around a central point.

It's just that that central point is inside the Earth.

So basically, that means that there are two forces.

The ocean is liquid, that means it can move around in response to the forces on it.

And there are two forces that matter here.

One is the gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth and its water.

And the other one is a centrifugal force.

So if you had a bucket of water and you can spin around and hold that bucket out horizontally and the water will stay in the bucket because there's a there's a it's effectively like there's a force pushing it outwards because it's rotating.

So those two things are both going on.

Now on the side of the earth closest to the moon the gravitational pull of the moon is stronger than the centrifugal force and so there's a bulge of water towards the moon but on right away around the other side

the gravitational pull is a little bit less and the centrifugal force is even more.

So the centrifugal force pulling outwards also makes a difference.

And so you've got these two bulges on either side of the Earth lined up with the Moon.

And then what's happening is that the Earth is spinning inside that pattern.

So in this model, as you go underneath a bulge, you get a high tide.

And as you go underneath the sort of thinner edges, you get a low tide.

And then you go through a high tide again and a low tide.

And that's all within one day.

I think that's a really brilliant way to describe it.

I think people imagine it is like as though you had a magnet sort of sucking all of the water out.

All right, I'm going to pretend that I understand this.

But so there's two tides, there's two high tides a day, and is that the same everywhere on Earth?

Right, so then it gets complicated.

And the reason it gets complicated is because the love of the ocean, which is my favorite thing, is constrained by the land.

So if you had a planet that just had ocean, then the water could sit in these two perfect bulges and it could do perfect things and that would be fine.

But we've got all this land getting in the way.

So the ocean is split up into these basins.

What's actually happening is that water is pretty much confined in each basin.

So water in the Atlantic Ocean stays in the Atlantic Ocean, and water in the North Sea pretty much stays in the North Sea.

So there's a kind of all these little bowl shapes that have water in them.

And so what's actually happening is that water is kind of sloshing around all these different ocean basins.

And it's dealing with all the shape of the coast.

And it takes time for water to move around.

And when you add all those different influences up, there are some places where when you add it all up they only get one.

See this now does make sense to me because I think that there is an assumption when Hannah you were talking about how we just imagine that all the water is sucked onto one side of the planet that there's a completely free-flowing system but it's not that at all and and you know the the tides in the mediterranean are pretty insignificant compared to i don't know Cornwall.

Yeah.

So the Mediterranean has a very narrow inlet at Gibraltar.

So it's it's I think it's 14 kilometers wide.

It's not very deep.

You basically can't get the water in and out.

But it is also, I'm pretty sure it's close to a place where the tidal range is very low.

You know, that's part of the reason why it took a long time for them to work out what was going on with tides.

So the Greeks, obviously, you know, this great age of intellectualism

sat on the Mediterranean, didn't really notice them very much.

Because there is no tide.

Because there's barely any tide there.

And then the Greek Pythias went on a holiday to Britain.

Sort would rather do it the other way around,

went on a holiday to Britain, noticed that it was very cold and subject to frosts,

but also noticed the tides and was the first person to connect them up to possibly being to do with the moon.

It wasn't until much, much later that we had equations for how they really work.

I want to know about the bigger picture here though, Helen.

Has there always been tides?

Like for as long as we've had the Earth and the Moon, have we always had tides?

We have always had tides, but they haven't, they're actually having an influence on the Earth-Moon system.

The first thing is they haven't always worked in the same way because over geological time, obviously continents move closer together and further apart, and that means that your basin shapes change shape.

And so the patterns of the tides will have changed over time.

The other thing is that it takes a lot of energy to move water around.

And it's not like that energy is, you know, we know energy can't be created or destroyed.

It's not kind of free in the universe.

It's coming from somewhere.

And the place it's coming from is this rotating Earth-Moon system.

So So the tides are tugging on the Earth and the Moon and also on the shape of the Earth and the Moon themselves.

And that is slowing them down.

And so the day on Earth used to be,

there's still some debate, I think, but I think it used to be around 22 hours.

So it spun faster and it's slowed down because over time the tides both in the land and in the ocean have pulled on it, dragged it, slowed us down.

Stealing energy from decoupled systems.

Filching it.

I like that a lot.

I like that a lot.

And I guess we're talking about this in a sort of generic way when actually the tides change during the course of the year.

So sort of, you know, salty seafaring types talk about neap tides and spring tides.

I don't really know what either of those things are, but that affects

the tidal range, presumably.

Yes.

So as the year goes on, lots of things change a little bit.

So for example, the moon actually changed its distance from Earth a little bit because it's on an elliptical orbit.

And so sometimes the Moon is a bit closer to us, in which case the gravitational pull is a bit stronger, and sometimes it's a little bit further away.

And then the Sun is also out there contributing a bit, and the relative orientation of the Moon and the Sun matters.

Because if the Moon and the Sun are both pulling in the same direction, you get a really big tide.

And that's what a spring tide is.

It's nothing to do with spring whatsoever.

And if the Moon is pulling at 90 degrees to the Sun,

so they're kind of sort of cancelling each other out, then you get low tides, and that's what neat tides are.

And then, and then, so there's all these things to do with the sort of little orientations in the system that you have to add up if you want to get a tide prediction.

In terms of, I mean, I know obviously tides have a big impact on things like fairy timetables, which is important,

but it's difficult to overstate the impact that they've had on life on Earth, too, right?

Yes, there's lots of ways into this.

So

one of them is that there are lots of organisms that have mating mating cycles, for example, that depend, they use moonlight to synchronise their lifestyle, whatever their lifestyle is, and in some cases to navigate because it's a very bright thing when it's in the sky.

Tides also generate an intertidal zone, which is, you know, in this country we have quite large tides compared with lots of other places.

And so if you have a shallow beach, there's a place where the tide, the high tide goes up to and the low tide goes down to.

And that area in between is really interesting because it's a kind of in-betweeny place.

It's not really land and it's not really really ocean.

It's a really difficult place to live because you've got to deal with salt water if the ocean's over you or fresh water if it's raining and it's low tide.

And you've got to deal with UV light and salt water and it's difficult.

And so that's a very fertile place for place.

It's a transition region.

So it's very important for life to kind of grow.

Well, no, I mean, you're definitely talking my language now and talking about evolution.

And in fact, a really significant part of human evolution in that the first foraging or coastal areas, foraging has happened, we were eating sessile sessile foods foods that don't move things like shellfish but i want to ask you a different question which is in the modern era is human caused climate change affecting the tides is the way that we're changing the environment changing the way that the tides work in a very slow way so basically that one of the effects of climate change is that sea level is increasing and although in theory at this moment in time we could make tide predictions millions of years into the future in practice we can't because it depends on how much sea level rise we get, and that will affect the exact tide times in different places.

Okay, well, you've touched on where we're going next with this, which is actually to go back to Lynn's question: why is the high tide reached at different times around the coast?

Why is it different in Padstow as it is from the south coast of England?

So, we asked Deborah Greaves, Professor of Computing and Mathematics at Plymouth University, an all-round seafaring expert, to have a go at this.

High and low tides around the UK are different in different locations and they happen at different times.

And this is because as the tide goes in and out, as a result of the interaction with the gravity of the moon and the position of the moon and the way the earth rotates, we get a tidal bulge that sort of sweeps around the globe.

And so that travels at a certain velocity and it will reach some areas before others.

Also, because of the shape of the coastline and because of the bathymetry, the shape of the seabed, the different water depths and the different landforms that the sea is moving around, then

the tidal range itself is also different in different parts of the world and different parts of the UK.

So for example we have a tidal range and that's the tidal range is the difference between high tide, the highest point of high tide and the lowest point of low tide.

So it's the height difference of the water surface.

And in the seven estuary that can be up to 15 metres, so really high.

But then in some some other parts of the UK, for example, around the coast around Lowestoft, then it's more like two metres or under two metres.

Helen, Deborah mentioned a word there that I haven't heard before, which is bathymetry.

Bathymetry is just the shape of the sea floor.

So it's all the lumps and bumps that make the sea floor three-dimensional rather than just a flat piece of paper.

So, what is the impact that that has on tides?

It does a few things.

The first thing is it slows them down.

There is, if you imagine a current, you know, if water wants move because the tide is moving, it's got to run over the sea floor and there's friction.

And so that will slow down the currents.

And so it could mean that the water gets longer, takes longer to go in that direction, for example.

It also changes how the water moves because if it's super, super shallow,

it's a lot harder to get a bulge of water over the top, and so that will slow things down.

And then also, you've got, you know, inlets and bays, and it'll be easier for water to take some routes rather than others, and so it'll shape the way that the flow happens.

So, bathymetry is really important in tide prediction.

The ocean is not just a flat plate.

Do they make a big difference then, these estuaries and turns and corners, and lumps and bumps?

Yes, especially in places where there is an inlet, and the sort of inlet that makes a big difference is here in London.

We're recording this in London.

The Thames is just down the road.

And the Thames in London is an estuary, it's not a river, and it's tidal, it's tidal all the way up to Teddington Lock.

And the tidal range is quite large, it's around six or seven meters, and partly that's because humans have built embankments-you know, basil jets great embankments, and they've narrowed in the system.

And instead of having tidal flats out in the parts of the estuary that are closer to the ocean, we've kind of built inwards and trapped it in.

So, the tide, you know, that that does increase the height of the tide a bit.

But basically, the river is flowing out, but when there's a high tide, the sea is also flowing in i checked the tide times today and at london bridge which is closer to the mouth of the river i think high tide is i think it was 12 09

and up at richmond which is much further inland the tide the high tide time is an hour and 10 minutes later

even though it's all on the same estuary yeah well it takes water time to move around that's you know if you've got a tidal bulge coming in from the sea it takes water time to shunt it out on a train wouldn't you?

Or a paddleboard.

Hold on a minute, though.

So if the Thames is tidal, if you live in London, can you claim that you live on the coast?

I have tried.

I have yet to convince anyone that Putney on Sea is a real place, but that's not going to stop me.

There's beachfronts down on the south bank.

One point, though, actually, the idea of storm surges, because of course the Thames barrier

is there to prevent storm surges coming through.

How does the weather impact tides?

The weather's impact on tides out in the open ocean is quite small, but at the edges it matters quite a lot and it matters because

the atmosphere, even though it's very sort of

nebulous, we can all wave our hands through it and we can't really feel it, it's actually pushing on the ocean.

And the amount of that push is

that's what atmospheric pressure is, that's the amount of push.

Now, if you look at a weather forecast during a big rotating storm, the sort that come across the Atlantic and hit Britain, you'll see that in the middle, the pressure is lower.

And it can be lower by a few percent, sometimes up to 10%.

So, what that means is that in the middle of a storm, right in the middle, the pressure is lower, so it's pushing down on the ocean less.

And so it's a bit like if you push down with both hands on a balloon, but leave a hole in the middle, the balloon will kind of bulge up into the hole.

And that's what the ocean does in the middle of a storm.

So you get this kind of little bulge, which is only some, you know, a few centimetres, can be a bit more than that, depends on the weather.

So, then if your bulge in the sea in the middle of the storm turns up at the coast at the same time as a high tide,

that water, the high tide, can then push even further inland because it's sitting a bit higher up.

So, it can, when it goes in, it can go in further.

Is that all it is?

An extra few centimetres for the storm surgeon?

It depends.

You can also get a bit of a current running with it, but it can be up to about 50 or 80 centimetres in a really

storm that's got a very low, very low pressure at the centre.

Okay, well look I

feel like this has a bit of big revelation for me.

I'm having some epiphanal moments here, but basically you know this sort of very naive view that I had that well the tides are caused by the moon

is so simplistic as to be almost meaningless and definitely idiotic.

So Helen Chowski can you just wrap up this question, Lynn's question?

I think the answer is it's immensely complicated, right?

But what is the answer to Lynn's question why we have different tides at places which are just a couple of hundred miles away from each other?

It's because water is constrained and always trying to catch up.

And so it's moving in different directions and different places.

And that means that high tide happens at different times in different places.

Okay, if you remember at the top of this programme, there were actually two questions that we had been sent in about tides.

And our second one came in from Tim Mosedale to curiouscases at bbc.co.uk and was all about using using tides to generate electricity.

Why are we not harnessing the power of the tides on a more commercial scale?

Well this seems like a good point to me because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine but the tides as Knut testified are unstoppable.

Helen is it possible to harness this tidal power?

We've just talked about how far tidal range can go, you know, many meters.

Surely that's something that we can actually extract energy from.

There are two principles which are useful here.

One of them is that tides take water up, and if you have water that is up, high up, you can get energy out of it by letting it run down.

And the second one is that tides move water around.

And so if you push water, you've got a current, and you can extract energy from that current.

So it's always going to be one of those two things.

And the tidal range version of this, what are the actual mechanics of how you might be able to extract energy from that height differential?

In principle, it's always quite simple.

You open a gate to something, to a confined area,

you let it fill up as the high tide fills up, and then you close the gate, and then the tide goes down on the outside, but you've still got all that water on the inside, and then you let it out through something that's got turbines effectively.

And so you can extract that energy as it drains back out into the low tide environment.

Got it.

So a little bit like a dam, but you're controlling the height of the water rather than a big wall.

The other option where you're not exploiting the vertical differential, but the actual currents.

Well, that's something that Deborah Greaves told us about.

Well, tidal range is one way of harnessing the tidal power, but the other approach is to use the tidal stream technology.

And this uses the currents that are generated as the tide comes in and out.

So, as the tide comes in and out around the world, it's being drawn around through the oceans and around the landforms in this long wave.

And that generates tidal currents.

And those are particularly high in certain regions, For example, between an island and the mainland, around the Orkney Islands, there are some high tidal currents and the Channel Islands and also around a peninsula.

You often get high tidal currents around peninsulas as well.

So, if we want to extract power from the tidal currents, then we use a turbine which is a little bit, looks a little bit like a wind turbine, but it operates under the water.

And so, quite often, this will be a three-blade horizontal axis turbine and that might be sitting on the seabed.

Or alternatively, there are some designs where the turbine is actually supported on a floating barge or a floating support.

You know, this is actually not a new idea, Factor Ans.

The first patent on harnessing energy from the oceans was in 1799.

What was it connected to, though?

I mean, like, were they waiting for the national grid to be invented several centuries later?

Yeah, either that or a failed experiment of underwater grain grinding.

No, actually,

if we're being completely fair, this idea was for the waves not beneath the water.

Wave power, not tidal power.

Okay, we'll get on to wave power in just a bit.

But as for tidal power, well, that's already in action on a small scale around the country, as Deborah Greaves explains.

So there are a number of different demonstrations sites

being developed, and these types of tidal turbines are being deployed, but at fairly low levels at the moment.

So, for example, there's a project called Majen up in the Pentland Firth, and that's been operating for a number of years now with four 1.5-megawatt turbines.

So, that's a total of about six megawatts, and it's going to be increased in the next few years.

And that will supply power to about 4,000 homes.

So, these are really at demonstration phase at the moment, being demonstrated at relatively small scale.

And we should see larger investments going into them and further development and commercialization of this type of energy extraction.

Well Helen these tidal turbines I mean they sound amazing answer to all of our problems limitless green energy surely so I mean these schemes are interesting because in there tidal energy does have one very good thing going for it which is that water is heavy and that means that you can get a lot of energy out of a little bit of it not moving very far compared with wind for example.

You need a great big wind turbine.

You could have quite a small tidal turbine, but because water has a lot of, it's just got a lot of mass that's being pushed along, that gives you a lot.

There are a few practical problems.

One of them is environmental.

You know, these are places where a lot of sediment is moving around.

As we said, the tides are highest nearest to the coast.

So close to estuaries, lots of sediment is moving around.

So that gets...

tangled up in your in your turbines.

It's also very necessary for life.

You know, you've got fish swimming around, you've got a whole environment that depends on being able to do whatever it's going to do, and these things are going to get in the way of what's moving around naturally.

A theme emerging in this programme is: it turns out the ocean's super complicated, and isn't just sloshing around.

Thank you for that, Helen.

Just make a face over it.

The ocean's this amazing thing, it's complicated and it does things, and it's beautiful, and it is not just a blue pond.

Well, speaking of blue ponds, can you hear that?

I can.

Thank you for bringing sound effects to work today.

What is is it?

My pleasure.

It is the wave pool at the University of Plymouth's Coast Laboratory, which, as well as being on the coast, stands for Coastal Ocean and Sediment Transport Laboratory.

Is it a bit like those wave machines you used to get at the local pool when you were a kid?

Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

Anyway, it's there that Deborah Greaves, who's also director of the UK's Super Gen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub, can recreate the conditions out at sea.

So they can test wave devices which might be used in real-world energy generation.

We can create multi-directional waves, we can create focused waves so we can create a very large wave event if we want to.

We might want to understand how a device will operate under operating conditions, normal conditions, not too extreme.

But then we might also want to understand how well it's going to cope under storm conditions like we've experienced.

Wave energy is more predictable than wind, it follows the wind and tends to stay around a lot longer.

And of course for the UK you know we're surrounded by the coast and so it's on our doorstep.

But yeah there's a vast resource of wave energy and there are many different approaches to how wave energy can be converted.

In some cases they might be close to the shore or on the shore line itself, fixed to the shoreline.

In other cases they might be in the near shore environment and floating or they might be also on the seabed.

And the types of device that have been developed include buoys that move around in heaves, so that means they move up and down as the waves pass, so they move following the action of the wave.

They may have multiple bodies that react against one another, so like a hinged raft for example, that has two different sections.

And in the hinge between the two you might have a power take-off system which is a a generator which is used to convert that motion into electricity.

And then some other types of technology might involve an air chamber or an oscillating water column which has an air chamber above it and then that drives the air to flow through an air turbine.

And yet other devices use some very novel devices that are being developed at the moment might use a flexible membrane type structure that flexes and creates either a exchange of fluid between flexible and rigid volumes, or perhaps a bulge wave that travels down the flexible device.

So some really

different approaches to wave energy conversion and some very different concepts being developed and investigated.

You looked a little bit sceptical throughout that, Helen.

Well, the thing is, so I work on breaking waves and bubbles.

That's kind of what I do.

And so I spend a lot of time building instruments that are going to get bashed by the ocean.

And

once you're underneath the water,

it's a calmer environment, even when there are big things going on.

But if you're at the surface, it's a really violent place.

And so

I'm sure people are working on these things and there's lots of potential.

However, it's such a difficult place to work because water is really heavy.

And if you get a wave overtopping something, that's a huge, great big thump.

It's got to survive.

And

getting to these things to maintain them is difficult.

So I don't necessarily think it's impossible.

I do think that compared with other ways of getting energy, there's a lot of complications.

You say it's a violent place, the surface.

The fluctuations in the levels of violence are really dependent on the weather and the climate as well.

Earlier this year, we had Storm Eunice,

which was very dramatic.

Presumably this technology has to withstand

increasing frequencies of really significant weather events.

Yes, and it's also got to withstand it while not floating off or drifting away or getting disconnected or damaging itself or anything else.

And so it's not trivial.

And

you don't want these things right up against the coast because they could hit people or get loose.

But the further away from the coast you put them, the more vulnerable they are to everything the ocean is going to throw at them.

On the other hand, though, if you do the calculations on this, I mean, on paper, there is...

plenty of power to be harnessed by the sea.

I mean, if a reasonable solution was found to these problems, it could genuinely solve Britain's energy problems.

Look, we all need renewable energy sources, and they're going to be different solutions in different places.

And so, if there is a way to make it cost-efficient without damaging the ocean, then we need these technologies.

My feeling is that they'll only ever be the right solution in some places.

And compared with other solutions like wind and solar, which are already way, way ahead in terms of

the

cost per unit energy and the technology, I think it would be hard for these to catch up, but they may well be the right solution in some places.

Okay, overall then,

maybe there's some potential here with significant technical issues to overcome before we get there, but there is nonetheless hope that maybe something like this would be the right solution in certain areas in the future.

I think that's fair.

Well, thank you very much for joining us.

Helen Chesky and Deborah Greaves.

Well, Professor Fry, when it comes to the question of how the tides work, can we say case solved?

Yes, the pirouetting dance between the moon and the earth creates two tides a day.

But the shape of the land, and the ocean floor, and the weather, and a whole host of other factors were all sticking their oar in.

And that is why high tide is in different parts of the country at different times.

But as for harnessing the relentless power of the seas for energy generation, a bit more tricky.

But watch this space maybe while sat on the dock of a bay watching the tides roll away

and come in again.

Technically, Otis was wrong about that lyric.

He said the tide roll away.

Now we know it's two.

It should really be tides rolling away.

Well,

Helen Chersky is still with us.

She's an oceanographer.

Otis Redding was a soul singer.

Who's right?

Obviously, the oceanographer.

But you would say that, wouldn't you?

I'd also like to add that at one point we referred to the oceans and was promptly corrected by Helen.

There's one global ocean.

Come on.

Is that right?

Is that how we talk about

the ocean, meaning all the free-flowing water on Earth?

They're all connected, so all the salty bits are part of one ocean, yeah.

How about that?

The seas?

There are lots of different seas.

That's okay.

It's important to get these things right.

Yeah.

Next time someone refers to it as the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, I'm going to jump in and be a right pain about it.

As is the way.

Yes, indeed.

Should we do a curie of the week?

I think we probably should.

Fast and curious, occasionally

So, this is coming from Aigol Veyland, which I think is a Norwegian name.

He says, Thanks for a great show.

Having been a curio since before we even had an official designation, we like that.

Old school, I've often wondered what it takes to grab a badge.

For a long time, the somewhat dogmatic conclusion has appeared to be a loud, resounding no, but on reviewing my own research on the matter, I feel forced to push forward an experiment to disprove this hypothesis.

As such, enjoy your theme song arranged for the classical guitar.

Mmm, interesting.

Hang on.

The interpretation of that letter is that he doesn't have any discernible talents that warrant a badge.

And so he's just cobbled something together in the hope that it will all pass the test.

Well, let's find out, shall we?

I really appreciate that effort.

I think that was really great.

It does slightly remind me of a time when I was about 20 and I used to work in a bar.

And on a Friday night, after the bar was closed, everyone would sit down who worked there and have a drink and there was one guy who every week brought his guitar

to work so he could sit there and play to us after after hours and no one ever asked him to play his guitar

or ever showed him any encouragement whatsoever and yet he would sit there and make us all sit quietly and listen to him and I'm not saying that that's what this person is like I'm just saying that's what it reminds me of I think that's incredibly mean and so I am taking the reins here.

And I award you, Dr.

Aigle Veyland Curio of the Week.

He's also included the tabulation.

So for the guitarists out there, he's actually written out

the music in tab form, which I'm going to take home and learn and play myself.

Hang on a second.

This guy is a surgical resident in vascular surgery.

I know.

One would hope that they are slightly better with their hands when it comes to having them inside the chest of another human.

I just hope you never get sick and need surgery in the hospital of southern Norway, Christiansand.

I think it's brilliant.

Well, thank you very much, Siegfried.

We really appreciate your letters and your submissions for Curia of the Week and your questions, as always.

Send them through to curiouscases at bbc.co.uk and we will see you next week.

All right, here we go, OT.

Five, six, seven, eight.

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