515: No Such Thing As A Reindeer Stockbroker

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Dan Schreiber is not with us today, unfortunately.

He is off doing community service.

By which I mean he's doing jury duty, which means he won't be here this week or next.

But in his place, we are joined by our colleague and very, very good friend, Liing Li.

Now, some of you, the super duper fish fans, will already know who Liing is.

She has appeared on our Meet the Elves feature in Club Fish.

She was so good on that that we decided to ask her onto the main podcast.

I'm sure you're going to really enjoy it.

She's absolutely brilliant.

If you want to know more about all the other elves, then go to no suchthingsaffish.com forward slash apple and no suchthingsaffish.com forward slash Patreon.

And if you go there, you can hear all the other episodes of Meet the Elves, as well as drop us a line, which is our mailbag show, compilations and much, much more.

Anyway, there's not much more to say today, apart from really hope you enjoyed the show with Liing and on with the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoban.

My name is Anna Tashinski, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Leeing Lee and we are gathered here today with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

So in no particular order, here we go.

Liing, what's your fact?

My fact this week is that during World War II, Bletchley Park was forced to have a teacup amnesty.

So it was an amnesty like where you have to go and turn your teacup in.

Yeah.

And you won't be arrested.

You won't be arrested.

And you won't be around.

There was a memo that was sent out that said, it is regretted that owing to losses, it is no longer possible to provide service crockery for morning and afternoon teas.

Wow.

And that was all they did at Bletchley.

Yeah, they only drank tea.

They didn't do any important work at all.

No longer providing service crockery for morning and afternoon teas.

I feel like that's the point at which.

England really started to decline.

Yeah, the start of England's decline was the middle of World War II.

Is that what was it?

Yes.

Counterpoint.

Wasn't the famous thing about Bletchley was that Alan Turing, who worked there, used to chain his mug to the radiator.

Yeah, and then

poor Alan would be teased by people picking the lock on the chain and nicking his teacup just to annoy him.

If he can't set a code on his lock that's not possible to break by the others, then I don't know if I trust this guy to win our war.

The thing about Turing is I read an interview with someone else who worked at Bletchley, and apparently when he wasn't in his office, he used to tie his mug to his hand.

So So if they go outside, there was a big lake at Bletchley and they'd often have like a picnic out there and he would be there with it tied by rope to his hand so no one could steal it.

Fantastic.

Wasn't there a rumor that they threw crockery into the lake?

Do we think that was just a rumor?

Well

yeah, that's an interesting question.

So I found quite a lot of sources, kind of diary entries and sources or sources.

Very good, very good.

I went to Bletchley myself and dredged the lake and found sorceries.

And I found some sources

that people like Josh Cooper who was the really kind of eccentric head of the air section he would go around the lake finish his coffee and then throw his cup into the lake

and also there's a good reason for Alan Turing to change his mug up because apparently his deputy Hugh Alexander would also be known to throw his teacups into the lake.

Why?

Was there a reason for it?

Was it like a celebration or was it, oh, we've cracked today's code?

They were all Greek.

Right, exactly.

They would just smash the plates and throw the teacups away.

Yeah, it feels like that, doesn't it?

Yeah, and well, it wasn't just lakes as well.

There was another memo that said that they ended up finding loads of cups and saucers in the shrubs.

It feels like there's some kind of weird Easter egg hunt game going on that we don't know about.

If we know anything, it's that they were good at keeping secrets at Bletchley.

And I think this one is still Official Secrets Act.

Yeah, because Lee and you emailed them and asked them if it was true, right?

Yeah, well, the thing I was mostly interested in checking was something that said that after the war, the administrators at Bletchley dredged the lake, hoping to find kind of discarded equipment that was used to kind of crack the Enigma code and really fascinating kind of historical artifacts.

And instead, all they found was giant heaps of cutlery and crockery and tea sources and stuff, which would have been fantastic.

So I emailed them just to double check.

And I talked to this amazing woman called Heather.

Hi, Heather, if you're listening.

And she said that.

She's always listening.

She's she's actually translating what we're saying into three languages simultaneously

yeah it's being encrypted right now but she said unfortunately they think it's a myth or certainly a bit of an exaggeration but they do know that certainly josh cooper may have thrown a cup in once

we're so interesting

they're drawing us away from the real story i think that's it that's it as other said maybe actually it's something very secret to do with the way that we cracked codes or fought the war and they just don't want people to know.

Fair enough.

Should we say, maybe for international listeners?

I think we should.

What actually was.

Now we can speak feminists.

Right.

So early 40s, Britain on the ropes.

There's a war going on.

There's a war going on.

We're about to go downhell.

The T-service has declined dramatically.

The Nazis have overrun Europe.

And they are communicating using Enigma machines.

They look like typewriters and they allow you very easily to encrypt what you're saying.

It divides it into blocks of of letters.

It looks like complete rubbish.

And the Germans are so confident about the security of Enigma because there are 364 billion possible codes and there's a new code every day.

They're so confident they just transmit the messages.

They don't try and jam the signal or anything.

So these messages are out there and they're undecipherable.

It's a nightmare.

You know, completely possible.

Cocky.

And that was their mistake.

Because Polish intelligence had just cracked Enigma just before the war and handed part of the secret, a big part of it, to British intelligence.

So at Bletchley Park, which is this country estate in England, the British government gathers together hundreds and hundreds of code crackers and administrators and people who set to work, including famously Alan Turing, but like thousands of people.

And lots of people who do a lot of a variety of stuff, right?

Like famous chess players or people who are great at solving crosswords.

Yeah, like that one just sort of piles into Bletchley Park and starts solving codes and cracking codes.

And it goes on until the war ends.

And it's amazingly successful.

It is.

And also the thing about Bletchley, again, that it's famous for here is the fact that it was mostly women.

So it was, women outnumbered men at Bletchley by about eight to one, I think.

And they were there doing that mechanical work of every day taking down all the clothes that were coming through.

Yeah.

In fact, I hadn't realised that Baroness Trumpington, who was a real character in British politics until she died a few years ago, was at Bletchley.

I swear there was a period where sort of any elderly posh woman in sort of the 90s when I was growing up had actually been at Bletchley at some point.

Because also they weren't allowed to say anything, were they?

Yeah.

So it was like national secrets for so long, so long, so long.

And then the 90s came along, and everything got declassified.

And everyone went, oh, yeah, I was there.

Yeah, so was I.

Oh, yeah, I was.

Well, they had a whole thing where they were trying to recruit what they called boffins and debs.

Boffins being kind of clever people and debs being debutantes, as in high-society, socialite women.

Oh, why?

Because they felt that, you know, they had that kind of level of education.

And they were often not bilingual.

Exactly.

They often, they could speak french or they could speak german or they'd had a university education and so as you say it turns out that a lot of the people there came from quite high society and then they found themselves you know bunking with all of these random people in bletchley because they were posh they were often like quite eccentric and prone to misbehavior because they could get away with it so a lot of the women would um bunk off constantly and go and shag their boyfriends for instance there was one woman who was in charge called pamela rose who she was actually an actress she wanted to be in the west end and she was in charge of overseeing 50 women in one of the huts.

And one of them was actually Baroness Trumpington, who was called Jean Campbell Harris at the time.

And at one point she had to stuff Baroness Trumpington into a laundry basket and rolled her down the corridor into an officer's room, I think, who was quite annoyed, who was trying to do serious work.

To make her escape.

I think it might have been a bit of japery.

I'm not sure if it was a genuine punishment or

bad news.

We've lost another 30,000 troops at sea.

One of the convoys has been sunk by the U-boats, which was due to us not cracking cracking a vital message.

Good news.

We all had a great team building exercise that we've got in laundry basket.

It was amazing.

They would, when they turned up, they would be asked two questions.

One, do you like crossword puzzles?

Two, are you engaged to be married?

Those are your first two questions.

And then if you said, yes, I like crosswords and no, I'm not engaged, they go, okay, now you can have an interview.

Oh, you're through.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also, the thing, the amazing thing about the secrecy is just how secret it was.

As in, you don't know what the person in the next hut is doing.

You don't know what the people in the same room as you are doing.

So often you don't know what you're doing.

I've been in some jobs where I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't really know what anyone else was doing.

Is it possible you've worked at GCHQ without knowing it?

That could be true.

I thought I was an accountant because it's just numbers.

Oh my.

You've done some significant stuff, I bet.

Oh, my God.

Without realizing.

But

you're just like cracking these and you're grinding through huge numbers of huge amounts of information.

And, you know, Churchill wrote a six-volume history of the Second World War, never mentioned Bletchley because it was still super, super secret, because they had to hide the fact that towards the end of the war, Hitler was an open book.

As in Bletchley Park, we're getting and translating and deciphering his messages before Robel or Ger or whatever.

That's incredible.

And then you have to pretend they haven't.

Yeah.

And the fact that the secrecy lasted for so long as well, there are so many veterans who, you know, took the secret to their graves, or there are amazing stories of, you know, husband and wives who met at Bletchley but didn't actually know what the other person was doing.

And then they had kids and they couldn't tell their kids what they were doing during the war as well.

And so it was just decades and decades and decades of secrecy.

And what was really fascinating to me is that the first person to kind of publish a book about what happened at Bletchley was treated as such a traitor by a lot of the veterans who were there.

It was quite self-aggrandizing.

It was, you know, kind of like, oh, I did this and I did this.

That was vital to the war effort and all of this.

So that was probably another reason he sounded like a bit of an arrogant prick.

But

for a lot of the veterans at Bletchley, it was one of those things where it was, you know, it's secret and we're going to take those secrets to our graves.

Have you guys been there?

Yeah, I've been

a while ago.

Actually, I can't remember much about it, pathetically.

Yeah.

I was there for a public speaking competition as a teenager.

Unfortunately, you were engaged to be married, so you

get a job there.

I hate crosswords.

Right, that's cool.

Oh, that's cool.

Do you know if you were interviewed there?

Another question you might be asked was if you were interviewed by Dilly Knox, who was one of the most important people at Bletchley, and he was a real eccentric.

And he would ask people the question,

which way round do the hands of a clock go?

Brilliant.

What would you say to that?

Lockwise.

You're out.

You put the minute hand on first and then the hour hand.

And then the second hand?

You're building a clock.

Oh, I see.

You've interpreted it that way.

The second hand goes right at the bottom, I think.

You've thought outside the box.

But no, the correct answer, according to him, is it depends whether you're looking at the clock or whether you are the clock brilliant um that's interesting because i imagine no one got that right so how on earth did we manage to get anyone

it sounds a lot like the kind of questions that you think get asked at oxbridge interviews and things like that and considering there's so many people there were from Oxbridge, maybe they did kind of think outside the box in that way.

I think it was that sort of thing.

What was the name of the person that you said wanted to be a West End actress?

That was Pamela Rose.

Pamela Rose.

So I wonder when Pamela Rose was at Bletchley whether or not she joined the Bletchley Park Dramatic Club.

She did.

She loved it.

She did.

Yeah, I'm sure she did.

I love reading about this.

So at Bletchley, it turns out that there was quite a campus-like feel there.

A lot of people, you know, their university was interrupted by the war and they got recruited by Bletchley.

And so one particular veteran described it as being like their university.

So there was all the other kind of stuff that you'd associate with uni.

There was like social clubs.

they had Christmas pantos that they put on.

Andy's like, I don't remember any of this at uni.

I remember being debagged a lot.

You were the one in the laundry basket, weren't you?

But one person that I found that I thought was so interesting is that Olivia Newton-John's dad,

Bryn Newton-John, he was an officer at Bletchley

and he was a member of the drama club.

No way.

Really?

You find his name, Bryn Newton-John, in all of the

for all the shows that they'd put on.

Just on the results they got, because

it is quite abstract and it's very sort of, you know, there's people like poshos in the countryside.

And actually, lots of them weren't posh.

Lots of them were Wrens, women's Royal Naval Service, who were getting on with the basic work every single day.

But some of the things they did, for example, they worked out the location of every milk cow in the Atlantic Ocean.

That's pretty easy.

I reckon I could do that now.

Another one on the bottom.

So the milk cows were the tankers that were in the Atlantic, and they were to refuel German U-boats.

Oh, really?

There were, you know, a couple of dozen maximum, and they obviously were the most significant thing for the entire U-boat operation.

They were all located thanks to Enigma, and they were all sunk.

So the U-boat, that was a big part of winning the war against the U-boats.

I really like one of the ways that they worked.

Like you say, the Germans had improved the Enigma.

So we did know how they worked, but it was still hard to crack the codes every day.

And so what you needed was some information that you knew so when they sent the information you know what you're looking for and so what they did was they would drop bombs in very obvious places and they drop it in a place where you know exactly where it is and so the germans then would send a message saying there's been a bomb in you know 25 miles north of dresden or something and you know what 25 miles north of dresden is and you know probably might even by then know that you're looking for the word meinen which is german for a mine or a bomb so you would know what you're looking for.

It was called gardening.

I think this is the kind of thing where we're like, that's so clever.

And if you were one of the actual co-breakers listening, you'd be like, God, that's the most basic

thing.

Wow.

Can I give you something on crockery and throwing crockery around?

So this fact was perhaps about people throwing crockery.

So I thought I'd look at plate smashing in Greece.

I've seen various articles about where it comes from and some people say, oh, it's an ancient Greek thing that they would do in funerals.

I'm not really so sure.

I think it might be quite a modern thing that came in the 1960s and 70s.

But actually, in 1969, it was banned by the military dictator, Georgius Papadopoulos.

He banned any plate smashing in Greece because it was so dangerous.

Oh, not because we didn't have enough crockery for afternoon tea anymore.

No, because they set up these

factories where you would make fake crockery.

Amazing.

So it was like, it was real crockery.

It was made of china and stuff, but it was like really low quality.

There was no patterns on it, anything like that.

It was just something that was made deliberately so you could then smash it.

And there were 53 manufacturers of these fake plates in Thessaloniki alone.

Stop it.

Yeah, honestly.

Very good.

How many plates were being smashed?

There was, in the 60s, up to 100,000 per month, it's estimated.

Why?

At the end of your meal.

If you go to a Greek restaurant,

they'll smash the plates for you.

It's just like a traditional.

They'll smash it for you.

You don't even get to the smash it.

Well, you used to do it yourself, and then health and safety came in, and you would get some waiters would, you know, put on their glasses so that they don't get anything in their eyes and do it.

They'd actually take them away for the controlled explosion.

And today there's only one manufacturer of fake plates in the whole of Thessaloniki.

That was actually what you remember when Greece had a terrible recession around the time of the credit crunch.

That was mostly caused by the fake plate industry, wasn't it?

Yeah.

But, like, what is a fake plate?

Isn't what's a fake plate?

It's interesting because you could still use them as a plate.

Absolutely.

But they're much cheaper to manufacture.

They're not bothered if there's cracks in there or anything like that.

There's no patterns on there.

They're just white china plates.

Not as fun to smash, though.

I bet they were proper hardcore smashers who still went for the sort of £100 property.

You still go to

the museums in Athens.

Is this why we're not giving the Parthenon marbles back?

We you think they're going to be used in a sort of smash orgy?

I don't know if you've seen the Elga Marvels, but they are quite smashed already.

Well, why do you think they got like that in the first place?

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact is that 18th century sea captains sometimes use their sailors as sails.

Brilliant.

This is actually in a book called Sea People by a woman called Christina Thompson, and it's such a good book.

It's so fantastically written.

And this is a practice called Manning the Four Shrouds.

And it was used throughout kind of the great age of sail, which I suppose is 15th century to 19th century, a long period.

And basically, if the wind is too high, if there's a big gale, if there's a storm, then it's very dangerous to put your sails up because they could be completely shredded, the mast could be toppled, the boats could be.

Oh, yeah, you don't want to get any of your sails shredded.

Instead, put one of your men up there.

We've got 400 sailors and only one big sail.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Send up Stanley Bigshirt.

Is that a reference to my friend?

Yeah, that's very good because we've never mentioned him on here, have we?

No, I don't think so.

We used to have a friend whose nickname was Stanley Bigshirt.

Yeah, yeah.

That's so good because it worked for the listener and then it worked even better for James on a higher level.

Thank you.

So, this is where the captain of a ship would say to Stanley Bigshirt and Co.,

could you please climb up onto the four shrouds?

So, the shrouds of a ship are, if you see a big sailing ship, there's what look like,

you know, like assault course rope ladders and climbing frames.

Yeah, like these rigging kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly.

That rigging is what the shrouds are, and they're what support the masts, and you can climb up them really easily.

So, the sailors would all climb up and they'd spread out their hands and legs, and they'd literally just face up against the wind.

Just sounds like utter nonsense, doesn't it?

So, they'd need a density of sailors such that it was a solid wall of sailors.

Yeah.

That's a lot of sailors.

One of the sailors.

The sails kind of hold in, can't they?

And still be pretty functional.

But you get most of the effect.

I think that was because you didn't want it to be too strong.

That was the thing.

They're not going to be as strong as a sail.

But there was one.

There was a ship captained by Sir Hyde Parker in the 1700s where 200 sailors were sent up into the rigging.

The one that Christina Thompson in her book refers to is Commodore George Anson, who was involved in the War of Jenkins Ear, which I think we must have mentioned.

I think we have.

And again, for international listeners, this was a huge deal for Britain.

The War of Jenkins Early.

I actually think for British listeners,

the War of Jenkins Ear is, I don't think it's GCSC syllabus.

It was about seven years.

No, I'm thinking of the Seven Years' War.

Sorry, no, disregard that.

That was a bigger deal.

He goes, World War II, World War I, War of Jenkins Ear are the three main things on the syllabus in English schools, certainly.

And basically, there's the War of Jenkins Ear in 1740, which was named after a humorous slam in Parliament where someone waved an ear around.

Google it.

And it was after I thought someone's

blowed off.

His ear got cut off in a naval fracar.

I thought it did, and then didn't the cut off ear get waved around.

I think I might have made up that bit.

I've embellished it in my head.

Yeah.

I don't think you're allowed props in the house of Parliament.

That's the rule.

You're right.

That's why they've had to remove the official rubber chicken from Parliament.

It's really exact.

They're allowed the scepter.

That's the one prop they have.

Anyway, this captain recorded in his diary in 1740 that we dared not venture any sail abroad, so instead we had to put the helm away, as in, I think, face the helm towards the wind and man the four shrouds.

And in kind of classic 1700s understatement, he recorded it.

It proved successful for the end intended, although one of our best men did go overboard.

Wow.

So yeah, good trick.

Feels like a rare move.

Yeah, it must have been.

They were kind of doing it often.

I would say it was what we might call a life hack.

It came up a bit.

I was reading in a

Captain's Weekly.

These 12 weird tricks.

Do you won't believe number eight?

Sailors hate him.

But, like, was that the only thing they used the sailors for?

Could you have used one as an oar, for instance?

Exactly.

Like, your tallest, straightest soldier.

Big pony.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't read.

You could look into that because they did sometimes.

I read one thing in an 1810 book of sailing instructions that said, if you're in a gale, you either man the foreshrouds or if you've got some spare canvas or hammocks, which I guess the sailors are desperately struggling for hammocks at this point, to get up there instead.

If you've got some hammocks, you'd put them up there instead.

Well, that did actually happen once with the hammocks, but in the 1920s.

So that was a good, what, 200 years?

After they were still using

random hammocks and blankets and things.

So why were they doing that?

Yeah, so there was a US submarine that ran out of fuel and lost communication.

Sailed, not very useful in the submarine.

You would think.

You would think.

There should be a milk cow around here somewhere.

Well, actually, it had taken them all out at that point.

And they They thought, how are we going to get home?

And so the commanding officer basically commanded his men to grab the hammocks and grab the blankets and grab the bunk bed frames and they built masts and sails and put them on their submarine and sailed their submarine home.

That is so cool.

Submarines were mostly surface vessels, weren't they?

In the 10s and 20s.

Were they just called Marines then?

Well they couldn't go down for long, could they?

They could early proto-submarines.

Did everyone on board have to hold their breath when they were in?

God.

Age of Sail stuff is so, is so cool.

Like, I just, I really, really like all of it.

So, I got some nautical slang for you.

Oh, yeah.

Manning the foreshrouds thing.

I thought we'd get Christmas point.

So, this is to a guide to nautical slang from John Hard, and it was published only about 30 years ago, so it's got some more modern stuff.

Um, Bronzy Bronzey.

It's where you come third in a battle.

That's right.

Really bad result.

Gold and silver, And you're like, ah, bad news.

We got Bronzy Bronzy this time.

Didn't even lose.

No, that's Suntanned.

If you're Suntanned.

Bunch of bastards.

The French.

Always correct.

But

also some tangled rope.

Bunghole.

Ah, now.

Is it.

Is it actually?

The newest recruit always had to.

It was part of the initiation ceremony, wasn't it?

Bunghole here, yeah.

No, that's just some cheese.

What?

What?

Cheese.

Do they use the cheese sometimes to bung up holes in the shit?

I don't believe so.

It's just bunghole is cheese.

Do you know what a nip cheese was?

Oh, no.

This was in a book called The Sailor's Wordbook, An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, which is a very, very old

cheese.

Nip cheese.

So I'm imagining it's not a kind of cheese.

Is it just mice on boats?

Oh, that's a great one.

No, it's not quite that.

Lean, any ideas?

Oh, I mean, yes, but

don't hang that kind of thing.

Is it a nipple thing?

No, it's not an Andy.

Well, it's quite.

As if

you guys are parents, you've heard of like neck cheese, right?

Oh, and then they get stuck in the folds.

Yeah, you know, like, you know, kind of when a baby's breastfeeding and then the breast milk kind of dribbles down and then kind of gets stuck in the folds of their neck.

Yeah, it's not a cheese-like status, I have to say, in my experience.

I've never been able to ferment it properly.

But despite your best efforts, is it?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I love any cheese.

No, it's not the same as that, but on the nipples.

It's the name for a purser's steward.

So the person who looks after the money.

If you imagine like cutting bits of cheese

to kind of share the money.

It's like cheese pairing.

He's a bitch.

He's exactly like that.

Stingy.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know why we call a poop deck a poop deck?

It's a shat on it.

No, I don't know.

Everyone shat on it.

That's what they did with it, yeah.

What's a poop deck?

Well, particular deck on the ship.

It's not the main deck.

It's the back, the back.

Well, there's the fore deck, there's the main deck, and that.

I don't know where the poop deck is, actually.

Well, if you knew that it might give you a clue is it at the back it's on the stern and it comes from the french la poop which means the stern lovely boat that's great and for that reason you have some other things you have the pooping sea

and that is where you're going down the sea and the the current is going at the same speed as your stern so your rudder can't really get any purchase because you're going at the same speed as the water that's great do you know what a bunting tosser is

someone from the jubilee is it like that's right

actually you're you're dead on oh have i well it kind of it's it is flag related it's so it's a sick it's a radio operator and that would traditionally have been a signalman uh who has is raising the signal flags and so bunting tosser that's exactly what i said nice

snorkers

just sausages guys just sausages oh

and the beach master the beach master uh he was someone who stood on the beach and said this way guys this way keep going keep going keep going oh too far too far oh do you know what i'm gonna give you that yes right well and again this is gonna be something completely different did he have those kind of like ping pong bats

it's a superior officer who was appointed to lead the storming party the beach master so yeah yeah whereas we talked do you remember we talked two weeks ago about elephant seals their beach masters are

of uh junior Yeah, is there ever been a situation where an elephant seal beach master and a British naval beach master have been um mixed up with hilarious consequences?

Dozens.

Oh, no, you've got the storming party.

There's just one elephant seal with his harem of a hundred females.

That's great.

I mean, you would run away, wouldn't you?

Yeah, scary.

This is sort of relates back to the Bletchley fact, but there was a Cornish pirate called Robert Cullyford, and he once loaded loaded their cannons with china crockery in the hope that it would tear the sails of the opposition ships.

That's a great idea.

How'd that work?

It did not work well.

They actually exploded into a fine powder by the time they had met the enemy sails.

So just sort of rain, dinner.

Nice bit of rain.

Yes.

I think they also did that in the Trojan War, didn't they?

And that's why Greek people to this day smash plates

at the end.

Have you heard of the Pine Tree Riot?

This is a thing that pretty much prompted the American War of Independence and was directly related to the Navy.

Okay, well, was it tax-related?

Yes.

I'm just getting it all right.

Actually, you have got right.

So basically, Britain and France both wanted to build ships, and to build a ship with a big mast, you need a big tree.

I got this, by the way, from a brilliant book called The Age of Wood, which is such a good book.

You thought it was something different, didn't you?

Britain had very little forest at this time, partly because turned it all into ships, and had to get them from America.

Because in America, there are these gorgeous, massive pine trees that will make a cracking mast.

And

they had all sorts of trouble.

They basically decreed, right, all trees over 24 inches across, which is what you need for a ship's mast, they belong to the crown.

And we mark them with a little arrow, and they're ours.

And you can't have them, you colonists.

And in fact, having wide floorboards was a sign that you were a patriotic American colonist, that you were cocking a snook at the British because you had had used these wide trees rather than going.

You can rebel you with your wide floor boards.

And this all led to this confrontation where the British sent the authorities to try and say, Look, these really are our trees.

And the Americans kind of sent them away with their tail between their legs and embarrassed them and humiliated them.

And this was a thing called the Pine Tree Riot.

And that was 1772.

And that pretty much led on to the Boston Tea Party, 1773.

And from there, you know, it just sort of all went from there.

Everything went downhill.

Yeah, but that was like, that was mostly mast related.

Interesting.

Yeah.

The age of word, by the way, just count the rigs.

That'll do it.

Fantastic.

James, we did sign a 300 page contract just broken.

I was looking a bit into what sails are made out of.

And nowadays, they can be all sorts from natural fibers like cotton and flax to synthetic fibers like nylon, polyester, all of that.

But one thing I found that was quite interesting to me was that hemp was used basically throughout the ship for everything.

So, hemp oil was used in the lamps, the sailors would wear clothing made out of hemp, the ship's logs would be written on hemp paper.

But it turns out that some of these massive sailing ships would actually carry hemp seeds with them so that if they ended up in a shipwreck or they had damage, they could plant the seeds to grow hemp

and then mend their rope or their canvas because hemp is one of the fastest growing plants on earth.

That's fantastic.

So cool.

And they would use hemp to make the canvas for the sails and the ropes.

And the word canvas actually comes from the word cannabis.

Oh,

yeah,

same plant as hemp.

Which is

for any squares listening.

Sorry, just a quick mention of the old wacky baky.

throw that in there.

Okay, we should move on to fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that reindeer can chew in their sleep.

Oh, that's useful.

It's so cool.

Gambiscon must do good business in the reindeer community, doesn't it?

So it's really clever.

It's all to do with where they live, because they live in the very high regions of the earth.

Not necessarily higher, I would say.

I mean, further north, not like on top of Everest.

Okay, we're being squares about it.

This is why you never travel north of Watford.

You're like, oh, it's so high.

I can't get the oxygen.

Okay, they live in the Arctic Circle.

We're being like, dweeby.

Yeah, sure.

And they,

obviously, the light there changes a lot, doesn't it?

So some of the year, it's always light.

Some of the year, it's never light.

It's dark for ages.

And they have a very, very weak body clock.

So in summer, they have to eat a great deal all the time to gain weight to survive the winter.

And they're ruminants, so they bring food back up from one of their stomachs and they keep chewing it.

And

because they're having to do a lot of this during the summer, they will regurgitate food and they will keep chewing it.

while they're asleep.

We weren't sure before what they were doing.

They just look a bit dazed and a bit dozy.

And the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research have measured their brain waves while they're doing this,

standing around chewing.

And it turns out they are in a light state of sleep while they're eating.

That's That's brilliant.

Wait, we couldn't tell if they were asleep, do they not have their eyes closed?

I think brain activity is a better guide, isn't it, than whether you've got your eyes closed?

It's not like every time you close your eyes, you're asleep.

No, I know.

I just feel like I'd know if I just looked at a reindeer, you'd be like, Well, they're obviously asleep.

You've just fell asleep for a second there.

Yeah, that thing is really interesting about their body clocks because it means they don't get jet lagged, right?

So, our body clock is 24 hours.

Yeah, we deal with the light, the dark, we're on a 24-hour clock.

If we go through some time zones, then we're not on 24 hours anymore and we're all over the place.

But if reindeers would do regular flights to Australia,

like they might do once a year to deliver presents, for instance,

they wouldn't get jet lagged.

And the interesting thing about that is, you know, there are gene variants that cause this.

And maybe we can turn those genes on and off in humans one day to stop humans from getting jet lagged.

That feels like a drastic intervention yeah we would also we would also grow horns and

um yeah reindeer reindeer are cool aren't they most of my facts here about the sami people who are obsessed with reindeer um but well i say obsessed obsessed with hugely reliant on them for their survival guys get over this obsessed with oxygen and water

No, I love the Sami people.

They are the people who live up in the Arctic Circle, really, in the northern parts of Norway and Sweden and Finland.

The high places of the earth.

The high places, yes.

So they paid their taxes in live reindeer for a long time.

They have special designations sort of in the sort of equivalent of the Magna Carta of that region.

So it's called the Lap Codicil and it was a clause added to the 1751 treaty which designated the borders of all those countries.

And it said that they are allowed to move totally freely across borders because the reindeer need to move across borders and they need to herd them.

Although herding reindeer is basically just following them, I think.

Oh, really?

The reindeer go where they want to find food and to get sustenance to go to better climates, and the Sammy people just follow them to make sure they keep walking.

That's mostly true.

You can get them to go in the direction you want, and the way you do that is you piss in a bottle and you carry it around with you.

And if they start going in the direction you don't want them to go in, you pour a little bit in this direction and they all go, Oh, piss, lovely, and they all walk towards where the piss scale is because it's like got salt and minerals and stuff like that.

Oh,

just a life hack, we call that good to know

anyway.

They have over a thousand words for reindeer, do they?

They really do because reindeer are so important.

So they'll they have like a liami, which means a short, fat female reindeer.

They have a snari, a reindeer whose antlers are short and branched.

A najiru is an unmanageable female.

And they're a bit sexist, these names, aren't they?

Uh,

yeah, there's no room for your woke political niceties in the unforgiving tundra, James.

Well, there's a lot of snowflakes up there I have heard so

that's cool they do have a word for a bull with one testicle so maybe the feminist reindeer are getting upset and cutting off the testicles of the males um they have night vision goggles effectively inside their eyes reindeer reindeer reindeer nice not the gummy not with that any people

no so reindeer's eyes change colour over the season so they're golden in summer and then they're blue in the winter and the reason that's helpful is that in winter they can see a lot more uv light and the reason that uv light is helpful is that their favorite food is this thing called reindeer moss

disappointingly it's a kind of lichen but it's really yummy and it's very nutritious and there's a lot of it about in the arctic so reindeer love it and uh they like to find it and it's impossible for a human to find it because it's pale but to a reindeer it's incredibly obvious where the patches of reindeer moss are because it looks a completely different color to them because i think snow gives off uv light doesn't it?

Whereas it doesn't, so it looks like dark to some snow.

Because they have this ability to see the UV light, they can see where the moss is.

So it's very, very cool.

They're very well adapted for their environment.

What's interesting is that they're not actually 100%

sure how the eyeball actually changes from golden to blue.

And we should say, as well, actually, that the colour change is not in your iris.

So, because otherwise, it sounds insane that they only discovered this in like 2013.

It's like, wait a minute, we've domesticated these guys for how long?

We've not looked at their eyes.

So, yeah, it's not that you're looking looking at them on the outside and their eye colour changes.

It's the inside.

It's the thing called the tapitum lucidum, I think I'm saying that correctly, which is kind of on the back of the eye and it does all of the reflecting of the light round your eye.

Well, you would see that, I reckon, is if you were taking a photo of a load of reindeer and one of them looked directly at the flash, I reckon you would see the change of colour there.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's why if you photograph animals in the dark, yeah, that's their tapitum lucid.

Because that's why we get red eyes is because the back of our eyes is red because it's got a lot of blood in there.

And so when the flash goes, you see the light.

The light goes into the back of your eye where all the blood vessels are.

And that's why you get red eyes.

Is that where you get red eyes?

Yeah, yeah.

In old, like mostly in old, is it on film photos?

Do you get that on digital photos now?

I've seen it.

Yeah, newer photos, yeah.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah.

No, I've never done.

So that doesn't point that no one had ever taken a photograph of a reindeer before.

I would think it.

I've never taken it with flash, at least.

I think it's quite hard to take a photo of reindeer.

They're very camerashi, aren't they?

Well, they have a very shiny nose.

Brilliant.

Oh, your nose has come out red in this one and this one.

I didn't know the UK has reindeer.

I was incredibly excited to find that out.

In the wild.

Yeah.

There's one wild herd of reindeer and they're at the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre.

But they are wild.

It's not a zoo or an enclosure.

They're not penned.

High up.

Very high up, near Inverness.

I mean, probably in the top of the mountains, because it's the Kairngorms, I was thinking, as opposed to...

Well, that too.

And they were introduced by this great couple, Mikel Utzi and his wife, Dr.

Ethel Lindgren, in 1952.

Probably overshadowed by the change of monarchy and the Everest expedition, but still.

And they gave them all these furious reasons of why we could, because it's basically early rewilding, you know, it's just by any other name.

And the reasons they gave, these two scientists, they said, well, great source of meat, great source of fur, useful for military transport in case of the Cold War turning hot.

Oh, sure.

I saw that and I couldn't work out what...

Did they imagine that they would be bringing the reindeer to the Soviet Union and using them to transport stuff like military equipment or maybe being invaded.

Nuclear winter, maybe, and so we get a load of snow.

It might be useful.

There was a story in the Russian press in the, when was this?

It was in the 2000s that criminals, like gangs were using reindeer to do their crimes.

And the reason being that they were in Siberia, so the police are coming to get them.

And the police had snowmobiles, but the reindeer were quicker than the snowmobiles.

And so the criminals realized that and they would use them to

get away vehicles.

Yeah, yeah, getaway reindeer.

Cool.

Would they ride them?

You can't.

No, they're like pulled on sleighs.

Yeah, okay.

It doesn't sound weird, these gotnick Russian criminals being pulled by

children running to them, guys.

Well, if you've just robbed a bank, though, you've probably got sacks of money waiting on the back of the sleigh.

Yeah.

Someone will fall in.

Maybe that's the origin of the Santa Claus myth.

But the Kengorm Reindeer Centred staff, very excitingly, they did a naked calendar just a few years ago.

Naked humans or naked reindeer?

Naked.

The reindeer, I think, were mostly in harnesses and things, but the humans were driving them.

They didn't shave them all.

They all died, of course.

No, but there were 17 herders, and they're all posing in the all together to raise money for the Kengorm's mountain rescue team.

Do we approve of this?

I mean, like, I don't mind that group of what were they, Women's Institute people doing it the first time.

You've repeatedly turned down my idea, James, for a fish nude calendar where we're all hiding behind facts.

But this trend of people doing this,

I'll just give you a line from the photographer who

said, it's very cold

in the Kairn gods.

Taking pictures of my naked friends and colleagues, not to mention my girlfriend's mum, was certainly a surreal experience.

I can't believe they fell for it, she said.

He goes from town to town proposing naked calendars.

It's a brilliant idea for a pervert scan, isn't it?

Just go to another office.

I'm just wondering if you like a naked calendar.

Jerry!

What a dark film Canada Girls become when you put that lens on it.

Oh,

good gracious.

More stuff on reindeer.

They are very fast.

The robbers are right.

And they're fast and very young.

They can outrun an Olympic sprinter when they're only a day old.

Stop it.

That's so cool.

What?

Newborns can stand and walk almost straight away and then within an hour they can run.

That is amazing.

Which is good.

It makes me wonder if they sort of do that competition like within 15 minutes.

Some parents are like, mine's actually running already.

Insufferable.

You should get Santa's reindeer to be your financial advisors.

Because they're not employed for the rest of the year.

Very nice.

Oh, yes, or they're free in January for the tax deadline.

Exactly.

They're twiddling their hooves otherwise.

So, what it is, is that a team of researchers at Dartmouth College, bearing in mind this is an Ivy League university, right?

They did a very, very serious study where they got a bunch of Santa's reindeer at a local kind of Christmas theme park.

They were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donna, Blitzen, Rudolph, and Boris.

Nice.

Boris was a trainee.

Can I just ask, are these real reindeer and are they really Santa's reindeer?

They are real reindeer and Santa is real.

So okay, cool.

Yeah, they're living reindeer.

It wasn't like mod.

Okay, yeah.

And what they did was they laid out copies of the Wall Street Journal's stock pages on the floor of their barn and they got them to select stocks that they wanted them to buy.

So they made hoof prints on the newspaper pages and then they went and purchased these stocks to create a reindeer portfolio.

And they found that it outdid the SP 500, which is the kind of top 500 companies in the US.

It outdid the growth of those companies by 5%.

And apparently, that's statistically significant.

What?

Is it?

Apparently, so, says the Ivy League researchers.

But the thing that they don't.

That is, sorry, just to say, that is significant.

If you could make 5%

more than the average on the stock market and you could consistently do that, then you'd be very rich.

Yeah, you'd be doing well.

That's the consistently thing, isn't it?

Well, how did all we have is evidence that they are?

Well, over six months, but the reason why they did this was kind of to prove that senators and congressmen who are often in America accused of using their inside knowledge to play the stock market,

What they did was they compared the portfolios of the senators to the reindeer portfolio and found that the reindeer was still better than the senator than the congressman who had inside knowledge.

And one of the researchers actually said that it turns out that these politicians are as feckless as the rest of us at stock picking.

Well, it could be that they're scrupulously honest and they don't use any of their internal knowledge.

Very, very good point.

Very good point.

And maybe they prove that with the reindeer portfolio.

It could be reindeers are absolutely massive inside the hills.

They're going around the country once a year.

Like while Santa's delivering the presents, they're hacking into emails.

They're going through the filing cabinet.

That's why, yeah, they always take a bite out of the apple, drink the sherry, and go through all of your books, too.

Why are there hoof prints left inside the house after he's been?

It doesn't make any sense.

No, you're so right.

Do they fall down the chimney?

They should be on the roof.

Yeah.

Hoof on the roof.

That's a good title for a children's book.

Lovely.

Don't give your reindeers carrots.

Why not?

I don't know any reindeers.

Next question.

No, I'm listening.

I do.

Yeah, well, just because we were saying about you know sherry and mince pies, I mean, don't give them them either.

But yeah, they can't digest them.

But what am I going to cover my penis with in the naked calendar?

I'm treating

maybe there's some other baby vegetables that I make.

I don't know.

See if I can find a runner bean.

Great stuff.

Okay.

All right.

It's time to make

a pee is not going to be big enough.

Okay.

It is time for our final fact this week, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that from 1841 to 1851, the MP for Thirsk thought he was a bird.

He was then replaced by a man who was later killed by a turnip.

Was he killed by an actual turnip or another MP who thought he was a turnip?

He was killed by an actual turnip.

Do they get into the campaign literature?

Vote for me, the other guy thinks he's a bird.

I'm safe around turnips.

There wasn't much in the way of campaigning in these days, especially in Thirsk, where all of these people all got in without any opponents.

Who do you want to hear about first?

the bird of the bird man i think okay the bird man of thirsk um was a guy called john bell basically in this area they had to have an mp they had a railway and and there were a few people living there they had to have an mp and there wasn't really anyone to do it a few people from outside of the town came in they might want to do it but no one in the town wanted to vote for them so they all voted for this guy called john bell because his family owned half of the houses in the town and everyone liked them And you know, he was the right man for the job, really.

So they voted for him.

But after he'd been in there for a little while, it turned out that he was of unsound mind.

And they did an inquiry as to his unsoundness of mind, which took place at the Three Tons Hotel in Thirst, which is now Wetherspoons.

And in this inquiry, they said that he sometimes fancied himself to be an eagle and made motions with his arms as if endeavoring to raise himself from the ground to fly.

He was also convinced that someone was trying to poison him with iodine in his tea.

Iodine.

A bit of a callback to the last episode.

Iodine.

And then on other occasions, when in company, he would forget that he was at the dinner table and start to undress himself.

Okay.

But in those days, there was no way to get rid of someone.

If they were an MP and there wasn't an election,

and even if there was an election and people there wanted to send back the same guy, there was no way to get rid of them if they were of unsound mind.

I guess I don't even know how you would now, because in fact, then legislation was introduced and then there were various upgrades to it, but I think it was all repealed in about 2012 or 13.

So, you know,

I can't imagine any of a lot of them.

Yeah, any of our politicians would be of unsound mind.

You're right, it's just not relevant anymore.

And anyway, he unfortunately died.

Was he an honest MP, by the way, or was he feathering his own nest?

Very good.

Thank you.

Any more of that?

No, no, no.

I just had that one stored up and I didn't want it to sit around inside me.

I can't wait for your turnip pun that's upcoming.

Because he was replaced by a guy called Sir William Payne Galway.

And he was out shooting in the parish and he walked across a turnip field and he fell with his body onto a turnip.

I'm quoting from the York Herald here.

He fell with his body onto a turnip, sustaining severe internal injuries.

No, that's a fake excuse when he turned to the hospital, isn't it?

Hoover, I just

was nakedly shooting in a field and he fell and the turnip went up his ass.

Oh no.

No,

he fell on the turnip and injured himself and the next day he failed to recover.

And turnips are not, I mean, they're not funny things to fall, like to fall onto.

They're big serious, they're big hard things, you know.

I mean, turnips are inherently funny, I think.

Sorry, I don't know why I said that, but they're not being funny.

He wasn't the only MP who died in a turnip-related incident.

I don't know if you guys found the story of Lewis Fenton, the Whig MP for Huddersfield.

No, No, okay, okay.

He

died a little earlier than this.

This was 1833, about 50 years before, and he fell out of a window at home.

He very sadly died of his injuries, you know, tragic.

And his widow explained that he was in the habit of going up to the attic to look out of the window at a piece of ground where his turnips were growing.

Oh, yeah.

To make sure that the cows had not, also his cows, had not got into the turnip enclosure and were not, you know,

when he'd disappear for hours at a time, he'd be like, no, darling,

I'm watching the turnips.

I promise, I'm watching the turnip.

Strange noises because in that attic, no, no, that's just my turnip watching.

Maybe we can imply anything unsavoury about a turnip.

And he probably just was looking so much that he overbalanced and tipped out of the window.

Must have been, must have been, yeah.

I was just the word for the mental disorder that you have when you think you are, let's say, a bird is clinical lycanthropy, which I just looked up and I was wondering whether it was a thing people.

I'd be a werewolf.

I think lycanthropy must be werewolf it comes from the idea of yeah exactly being like a wolf but it applies to thinking you're like any animal I guess they couldn't be asked to come up with a different word for

a zoothropy

it must be more common to think you're a wolf but I just

I like the Wikipedia page on clinical lycanthropy just because it used the case history of a 25 year old man who was sent for treatment during a period of excessive hand washing irritable behaviour decreased sleep and acting like a buffalo

buffaloes famously obsessively wash their hands.

They do.

No, that's a bison.

Brilliant.

There you go.

Brilliant.

That's a bucket list joke.

That was fun.

I got that from a Christmas cracker 25 years ago, and I've been trying to shove on it in.

Oh, my God.

Very nice.

The MP's page on Wikipedia for notable MPs with records of various directions is unbelievably good.

I don't know who's written it, but it's.

What do you mean, records and directions?

So here's one.

The youngest MP ever in the House of Commons in England.

Oh, yeah.

Christopher Monk, who was elected MP for Devon aged 13.

Yeah.

How old did he become a monk?

That's the question.

Brilliant.

You know, the interesting thing about Christopher Monk, I haven't seen that page, but I do have him in my notes.

Fantastic.

He, in 1681, arranged a boxing match between his butler and his butcher, which is the first recorded boxing match in England.

That's really good.

Yeah, 1681.

He's a very mad of the people as well, wasn't he?

And the butcher won, we know, but we don't know much more about that.

He had a big right hook, didn't he?

Yeah, I like it.

Thank you.

They're all coming out tonight.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

But the oldest OP, Samuel Young.

No,

that's brilliant.

Served until he was 96 years old.

Really impressive.

I mean, yeah.

How old was Baroness Trumpington when when she died?

She was

old.

Well, she was in the Lords, and I think most people in the Lords are at least 90, aren't they?

But, you know, Parliament, sort of Parliament wasn't for a long time, it was very

unofficial, but you know, it was local landowners, and then it was barons.

And then, as they gradually extended the right to vote to more people, they gradually thought,

probably can't be only baronets.

We've got in the House of Commons.

Whatever.

I liked George Sitwell, who's actually Edith, Edith Sitwell, the poet's dad.

But he was an MP in the 1880s and 90s, MP for Scarborough.

And he was just a fun guy.

He spent his time writing books.

He wrote books on pig keeping in the 13th century, Leper's Squints, Acorns as an Article of Medieval Diet and the History of the Fork.

Leper's Squints.

Yeah, wrote a book.

I don't think he got these books published.

He sounds very much like a QI researcher.

Yeah, he really does.

Researching random topics of his own interest.

He does, and actually very creative as well, as we all have to be, because he invented a musical toothbrush that played a song while you cleaned your teeth.

That is good.

That was a good thing.

Single in the 1880s.

Yeah.

He also invented a mini gun for shooting wasps and the sit well egg.

It was

nothing.

You know,

you didn't sit on it.

It wasn't a Gwyneth Paltrow kind of clean code.

You're sitting well.

Show me well.

You've got an egg up there.

No, it was made of smoked meat, which was the yolk, and then it was wrapped in the white, which was rice, and then a synthetic shell around it.

And he tried to sell it into Selfridge's.

So he was trying to have a new Scotch egg, basically.

Kind of.

Scott with rice, did you say?

With rice, exactly.

It looks like an umutsubi, like the kind of Japanese one.

Yes, I was actually going to say sushi, but it sounds like you've said the proper thing that it is.

Apparently, when he went to Selfridge's, he walked into the front door and said, I am Sir George Sitwell, and I brought my egg with me.

Hello, dragons.

I love Ignatius Timothy Trebich Lincoln.

So do I.

Another man of the people, judging by his name, really.

But he had the most insane C D of anybody I have ever heard of.

So he was born in Hungary to an Orthodox Jewish family.

He was a student rabbi, but then he became wanted for petty theft.

So he fled to London, he became a Christian, and then he went to Canada as a Presbyterian missionary.

And and then he went back to England as an Anglican curate, and then he was an MP for Darlington in 1910.

He ran out of money, so he stopped being an MP.

He became a speculator in Romanian oil, a German continental spy in World War I, and then a munition merchant in China.

And then he converted to Buddhism, became a monk, and then tried to become a Nazi collaborator.

That all sounds very tiring.

He could have just been a liar.

And then you could do all that stuff.

That's true.

But the absolute cherry on the cake for me is that he made contact with the Nazis, right?

Because he said to him, listen, I have declared myself the Dalai Lama.

Very powerful man.

And I am backed by the Japanese.

The Tibetans were less keen on this idea, but the Japanese were like, yeah, this random Hungarian, Jewish, Christian, MP guy, he can be our Dalai Lama.

And he said, I can help you lead a Buddhist uprising in the the East for the Nazis.

That's a great alternative history of the war, right?

Did they go for it?

Unfortunately, they didn't.

Sadly,

sadly, sadly, the Nazis didn't.

But how amazing would history would have been if the Hungarian Dalai Lama.

Good grave.

The names are incredible.

What was he called?

Ignatius?

Ignatius Timothy Trebich-Lincoln.

They do have just good names.

I don't know whether it's like minor aristocracy who are the kind of people to wear MPs of the 17th century, but Sir Freshville Hollers,

Brimsby.

I was looking at MPs who'd been injured in the line of, not the line of duty, actually, just in their lives in general, because there were lots who lost arms in sea battles, as Sir Freshville did.

Sackville Tufton was wounded at the Battle of Schudeveld.

Brooke Watson lost his right leg to a shark in Havana in 1749.

I mean, these guys had really interesting careers.

What was he doing there?

Sailing around.

Fair enough.

He was being used as an oar, wasn't he?

John Stubbs, I love this.

This is a really interesting one.

He was the MP for Great Yarmouth.

He lost a hand for distributing a pamphlet in 1579.

What, to a lion?

Papercut.

Bad paper cut.

His pamphlet was titled, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf Whereunto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the bands.

And it was arguing that Queen Elizabeth was too old to have children.

and she should therefore not marry the Duke of Anjou, who was a French prince.

And he was sentenced to death.

And then that was commuted to losing a hand.

And then just before it happened, he said, Pray for me now.

My calamity is at hand.

Oh, yeah.

Just my

last little pun to go before.

He should have had a podcast.

You would have loved my bison, shell girl.

Speaking of excellent names, just a very quick one here for you.

The Labour MP for Brockstow from 1929 to 1953 was called Seymour Cox.

Brilliant.

Wow.

Brilliant.

I can't believe I've I've never heard of him.

I mean, as if you're not going to cross next to his name.

You don't need to campaign for Seymour, do you?

Seymour Cox.

Yeah.

That was his name.

It was also his campaign slogan.

But that's like a name that Bard would ring up Mo Barr with.

Seymour Cox.

I don't know what X-rated Simpsons you've been watching.

Oh, dear.

Wow.

Seymour Cox.

Just one more silly MP or eccentric MP.

Yeah.

God, it's so hard to choose.

There have been so many, but I do like John Mitten, who was a Tory MP in 1819.

Not for very long because he found it really boring.

But he just did lots of fun stuff.

He once rode a horse into a hotel in Leamington Spa and rode it up the grand staircase in the middle onto a balcony and then jumped it down from the balcony over the diners in the restaurant below and out through the window.

If you're rich, a man

are middle class, you could be a cuck.

I don't even think it was middle class to be honest.

He was very, very, very,

he would hunt a lot and like to do it naked.

Sometimes he'd start a hunt clothed and then apparently get so excited mid-hunt that he'd strip off all his clothes and then arrive back naked.

And in winter as well, so quite hardy.

And he hunted ducks on a frozen lake naked as well.

He liked animals.

I don't know if that ingratiates himself.

He sound like he did because he was hunting all the time.

He liked very specific animals.

I love animals.

I love shooting them.

I love hunting them.

Much like a lot of people who like hunting and killing certain animals, he loved other animals, like his horse, who he used to nap with by the fireplace and who lived inside his house with him.

He's one of these people who...

The stories are incredible, and you think he would have been a nightmare to have in your extended family because it's always mad Jack Mitten's turned up and done something wacky again.

Yeah.

I think he died in poverty and debt in prison at the age of 30.

Oh, did he be 30?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Am I allowed to say good?

Well, yeah, you can say what you you like.

Yeah, yeah.

He was a very eccentric dude.

He was, he loved being naked.

No, it's not eccentric.

No, it's illegal.

It's not illegal.

It's actually only illegal if you're causing harm or distress or intending to.

Sorry, you don't need to justify yourself to be unnaked.

And that very well positioned baby carrot saves your blushes anyway.

My calendar is not a company one.

It's just this is actually legal calendar 2024.

I'm not intending alarm or distress.

If you feel it, that's on you.

Well, I apologise if.

Sorry about the way you feel.

Okay, that's all of our facts, and thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

In the meantime, you can get in touch with any of us on various social media accounts.

James, I'm on Twitter at James Harkin.

Andy?

At AndrewHond.m.

Lee?

I'm not on anything.

Good on you.

Me neither.

But if you want to get in touch with the lot of us, you can email podcastqi.com or you can tweet at no such thing.

Or feel free to go to our website where you can get all our episodes and links to various other things that we do.

That's no such thing as a fish.com.

That will also give you a link to Club Fish, which is our special secret society, subscriber society, where we put all of our good content.

I think it's where you can buy Andy's new calendar, isn't it?

It certainly is.

You actually get sent one whether you want to or not.

You have to pay extra not to get the calendar.

And other than that, please join us again next week for another episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.