512: No Such Thing As A Dirty Bar Of Soap

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Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the very first episode of Fish in the Year 2024.

This is going to be a really big year for us.

We're incredibly excited.

It's our 10-year anniversary.

10 years of fish this March.

That's over 500 episodes, 29,000 facts.

Well, actually, so far, 29,597 facts, to be exact.

We know that because Andy keeps a spreadsheet.

So thanks to everyone who's been tuning in all this time.

I hope you had a great holiday break.

Hope you had a great New Year's.

We got a great episode for you today.

James is away on holiday at the moment.

So in his place, we have another James, a Rhys James.

I'm sure you're all aware of Rhys James.

He's an amazing stand-up comedian.

He's appeared on multiple TV shows and radio shows, most predominantly, I would say, as a regular on Mock the Week, where for years he was a panelist.

And actually, if you go to Reese's Instagram account, which is at Reese Jamesy, so that's Reese James, but with a Y at the end, you'll find the funniest Instagram account out there, in my personal opinion.

It's the reason I basically stayed on Instagram for a long time.

He's uploaded all of his single one-liners that he's delivered on the show Mock the Week from over the years, and honestly, you will be in tears laughing.

So get that into your life, follow him there, and if you want more long-form stuff by him, you can can go to his YouTube account where you'll find an entire radio show that's been uploaded there, and that's called Reese Search, as in Rhys's name, but mixed with Research.

Reese Search.

And to describe that show, the best way would be to say it's answering all of life's big questions, but done in a sort of brass eye mold.

It's incredibly funny, and you must check it out.

But in the meantime, don't go anywhere because you can enjoy him here on no such thing as a fish.

So here we go.

On with the show.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Rhys James.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go starting with fact number one and that is Reese

soap is the best way to move a building how do we feel about that that was so dramatically presented I really enjoyed it and I actually whacked my bra I had other options I had other options of ways to introduce that headline I went with that basic really simple one but I was gonna do

something like washing removing stains, moving buildings.

Just three of the hats, soap wears.

You know, that's what I was going to go with, but first fact, you know, keep it simple.

But just so I don't know I had that in the locker.

No, no, no, no, no, absolutely.

I think you played it right, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so what's the story here then?

So in Nova Scotia, at last,

it

felt very local news, this story.

And there was like a local news video about it.

But basically, a

old Victorian building that was...

mostly used as a hotel for about 100 years

was going to get knocked down.

Then a company bought it because they wanted to attach it to a planned apartment block sort of 30 feet away.

And instead of moving it the traditional way with rollers, they used 700 bars of ivory soap because that's the softest soap and therefore the slippiest.

And they did that successfully to then get it onto new foundations.

And then once that is complete, they are going to move the whole thing back.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why?

That's the end.

I don't know.

They're going to move it.

Because basically, it's now it's like a protected landmark of this old building, I think.

And so they were going to restore the whole thing and put it back to where it was, which to me just suggests you wanted to move it with soap.

You didn't need to move this.

Yeah, if it's protected, but we've also proved beyond doubt that it's mobile.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter where it is as long as they're protecting it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

On the road.

I found it amazing how little soap you need to move a...

I mean, I looked at the photo.

This is a big building.

700 bars of soap is obviously lots of bars of soap, but it's not that many windows.

The surface area-wise, it doesn't feel like it's a little bit more.

They didn't even use 700 bars.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they took some home, didn't they?

I think some of the builders took, there was 20 to 40 bars left.

So they used most of it.

They estimated quite well.

Yeah, no, but I mean last.

My gosh, don't hear that a lot.

Well, the crazy thing is, this is not the first time that soap's been used to move buildings, but it's clearly an essential ingredient as part of the process of what they're doing.

And it was as they were getting ready to move it that they went, we don't have any soap.

So it's not even like they've bought it in industrial bulk amounts.

What ended up happening was the guy who was in charge of it, his wife Leanne, had to run to 15 shops around the area and buy using 970 something bucks the equivalent of 700 it's suddenly when you say when you put it like that it suddenly sounds quite taskmaster doesn't it's like there's like a panic there of like oh my god and he wasn't this guy sheldon rushton the lead builder guy said i think he said at first he thought i'll just ask my wife if we can use some of our soap from home and it was only when she said we're absolutely not doing that i'm not giving up our personal supply that she offered to drive around which made me think how many bars of soap are you stockpiling in your house?

Yeah, exactly.

But also,

how precious are you about where the soap is your personal supply on?

Sorry, surely if it was like, yeah, you can use some of our old soap, but use some of the budget to get us some new soap.

That's surely the same thing.

You're right.

Has she written diary entries?

It's sort of sentimental value, her own personal soap.

I think once you're mixing work with pleasure, it's sort of

soap.

Yeah.

And it's, um,

we're not meant, we're not actually sponsored by Ivory Soap this week, but it is very, very soft, apparently, and that's great.

So that's really...

If you do use the offer code fish, you are going to get 20% of the money.

You get nothing.

You get absolutely nothing.

You get a weird look.

But so

the basic method you use to move the building is so you dig under the building, don't you?

And then you put steel beams under the building.

Then you lift the whole thing up by one inch on hydraulic jacks.

Just jack it up one inch, and you slide the soap underneath it on trays.

And then I think you lower, then you lower an inch, and it just kind of squishes the soap.

But it's incredibly soapy now.

Yeah, so then you leave it overnight to squish the soap, right?

You sit it on the soap overnight, which I feel like a building's heavy enough that you only need to sit it on the soap for

10 minutes.

These guys are experts, aren't they?

They know what they're doing.

And then what you're trying to create a sort of slip and slide aspect to it.

I bet they don't, they can just push it, and it's just about the weight you push it, where it like curling.

And then it just does it land in the bit you want the building to be in eventually.

Like, no, I pushed it too hard, it's gone in the seat.

It's a thousand of them with brooms

trying to slow it up.

Have any of you curled?

Never.

I've curled.

Oh, I curl.

Sorry, but I curl.

I was trained by the British Olympic curling duo for the Winter Olympics Just Gone.

Yeah.

Claring.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Old Big Time.

Whose names are, and then just insert them if you want to.

They were lovely.

Why were you hoping to be the third member of the team?

Yeah, I did a thing for Team GB's YouTube thing.

I went and had to do four Winter Olympic sports because in the Summer Olympic Olympic podcast, I had said as a joke that I reckon I could master any Olympic sport in a day, right?

And I was just, you know, I was being hyperbolic.

And then suddenly their next series, they said, go on then.

And I mastered none of them in several days.

One of them is curling, though, which was the easiest, but it's like insane at first because also they're not very technical with their language, so they literally just call it grippy shoe and slippy shoe.

And you have one of each.

Oh, that's like bowling.

Right, we're getting a grippy and the slippy.

Yeah, yeah.

So you have, they gave me like this thing that goes under your shin as you slide along at first.

It's basically like a little ice skate, but it just rests.

I think you just have that at first, and then you're supposed to just slide on your actual shin.

But at foot, they give you that at first.

That's like barriers in bowling, I reckon.

Or like the thing you push the ball down to make it.

How did you do that?

Pretty badly, I think.

But it was better than when I had to do speed skating and smashed open my chin on the last shot of the whole thing.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, that was much worse.

They should have given you a little ski for the bottom of your chin, not your knee curly.

Yeah, yeah, that's a chin.

Reese has come in today dressed fully in skis, by the way.

Head to toe, skis for every limb.

Well, the only issue with the idea with this building being the curling system is you could probably get it into place with one big push, but then you might have a rival building behind you knock you out

using the same system.

You know, the Titanic was put on soap.

I think we've said before that the Titanic was put on soap to go down the slipway.

Yeah, like whale blubber and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, it was tallow and oil and soap, and it was 20 tons of it that was used, which I find amazing.

But obviously.

That's more than 700 bars, isn't it?

Yeah.

But I did, so I was just reading a bit more about that.

I'd never read this before, that workers, they would go to the slipway afterwards and try and gather up any spare soap that was left over.

Oh, to use themselves.

Interesting.

But it was also covered in sort of oil and tallows.

You could probably wash it, right?

You could probably wash away that, and then you've got the soap sitting underneath.

I guess so.

Yeah, I don't think soap gets dirt, because you can just wash off the upper leg.

I don't, there is a big debate online about whether you can get soap dirty.

Welcome to the show.

This is the kind of controversy we try to do.

Well, of course you can.

Of course you can.

I'm willing to weigh in on this debate.

Of course you can get soap.

Of course you can get soap.

I believe, of course you can get soap dirty, but it doesn't stop it cleaning you.

So it doesn't matter.

Interesting.

If your soap's dirty, it doesn't make a difference.

The level of dirty it would have to be for the dirt on it to make you dirtier.

Yeah.

And outweigh the cleanliness of the soap being applied to you.

It's so dirty.

Yeah.

But at that point, right off that bar of soap.

Sometimes in horrible pubs, there will be a bar of soap

at the sinks, and you look at it and you think, oh, I'm actually, I'm not sure.

Well, this is, but this is a thing.

There was a report that was done, a sort of a research project to look into how clean actually are in bathrooms, like pubs and stuff.

How clean is the soap that you're getting?

And they've worked out that some of the dispensers are left for so long where they're not maintained and they get cracks in it that you can go to the toilet, wash your hands with the soap and leave with dirtier hands than you arrived with.

Yeah, because they found 15 types of bacteria that were sitting on these dispensers that would make it onto your hand as part of the soap and they would stay and you know yeah but yeah same cool handles in the toilet where you think i know what people are doing in here

i'm gonna i'm gonna make a call on this toilet thing and say it doesn't make your hands dirtier than after you wash them because it doesn't matter if there's bacteria on the soup dispenser on the soup dispenser it does matter

but on the soap dispenser isn't the point of soap that it gets onto your hands and then it makes the uh water and the dirt on your hands more slippery and so it gets them off.

And it doesn't matter if there's bacteria on the dispenser.

It doesn't, it doesn't matter.

The soap immediately gets all of that off.

Which is why it doesn't matter if a bar of soap is dirty.

No, but that's the amazing thing about soap and that's why it's so incredible that we, you know, as a species, discovered it millennia ago.

It not only makes the dirt and stuff on your hands slippery to slide off, but it also has this structure which tears open bacteria and viruses.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Like it's okay.

So I want to read this because I don't want to get it wrong.

Each molecule of soap has a head which bonds with water and then a tail which hates water, right?

So and sort of is hydrophobic, you know, and tries to avoid it at all costs.

That's horrible identity crisis.

I know, I know, I know.

It's a real molecule.

And so the tail seeks oils and fats and things.

And basically, bacteria and viruses, they're surrounded by a lipid membrane, a fatty membrane.

And when they touch soap, the soap kind of envelops it and also the soap molecule tails, which are trying to avoid water, realize there is a fatty layer on that bacterium and burrow into it.

They sort of of wedge themselves in, and that rips the bacterium apart.

So that's the other thing that's going on, as well as making things slippier.

Yeah.

It's just amazing.

It's vegan.

It's incredible, yeah.

And it smells nice.

And it smells nice.

Unless we forget.

That was the main comment of the builders after they moved back to England.

Honestly, they said they went away smelling great.

Do you know, though,

what is better out of, and I feel like I've presented this in a really obvious way now, out of antibacterial soap and just a bar of soap?

Antibacterial.

Dan, you idiot.

I mean, I even said it, so the answer was clear.

No, there's a serious worry that people are converting to antibacterial soap a lot and hand soap.

And there's a guy called Professor Lithgow who works at Monash University in Australia.

And he says that he thinks they should all be banned, antimicrobial soaps, because they're not better than just a bar of soap, even though we, I mean, we've got them all over our house now.

There's a COVID hangover.

Not better than a bar of soap.

Hand soaps where you don't use water are significantly less good because, you know, when you get a hand sanitizer, it's a lot less good.

Yeah, because the water doesn't, you need the water to scrub away and wash off that layer.

And he says that they're causing a huge amount of antibiotic resistance because we're shoving this antibacterial soap at our hands and all the bacteria is becoming kind of superbugs on our hands.

Yes.

And he explains...

Exactly.

We're all going to have just these superbugs living on us.

So really, and this really surprised me, it's not about the antimicrobial chemical properties really, as much as it is about the scrub.

But actually, the key is, as long as you scrub your hands really hard with the water, it scrapes them off.

And with the soap.

And with the soap.

Water does all right, the soap is the thing that really does.

But yes, there's definitely something psychological about the smell and presentation, though, right, of how clean you feel because natural soaps don't feel they obviously are better.

And you could make soap out of just oil and lard basically, can't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, if I'm rubbing oil on my body, I don't feel and lard.

But feeling massively clean.

I know you're saying it's like that and the scrub of that is what actually makes you clean.

Why am I getting so turned on?

I need a scent.

Well, I shouldn't be rubbing myself, but

you need that.

I need a, it has to have a scent, or I won't feel.

Does it?

Well, also,

I've not used a bar of soap for years, and I find a bar of soap disgusting.

Haven't you?

I always only used a barb.

Never a bar.

Never a bar.

Come on.

I don't mind a bar of soap.

Are you a cartoon?

Are you all cartoons?

What do you deal with?

I don't use.

In our house, we have the, yeah, we have liquid soap as opposed to a bar of soap.

But I wouldn't use it.

I would use a little pump.

No, I wouldn't have to do it.

Like a shower gel.

I mean, I've never heard of pump soap.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the concept.

But you should just feel very guilty because, of course, you are single-handedly destroying the world.

No palm oil, you're both pleased.

Always say no palm oil, please.

What's the issue?

Plastic.

Yeah, plastic.

Wait, who are you saying it to?

Your personal soap is.

Say no palm oil, please.

It's my butler.

Sorry, I don't make that clear.

Most soaps, again, I actually haven't bought a bar in ages.

Aren't they covered in quite a plasticky kind of wrapping?

Yes, Dan.

Is it paper these days?

Okay.

Right, there is a spectrum.

What we see is a spectrum is here.

From Anna, who uses only old-fashioned bars of soap that have to be cut from the mother block,

wrapped in grease-proof paper,

yeah, yeah.

Up to Dan, who has those auto-dispensers at every doorway in his house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the other boring, this is such a boring thing to say, but actually, if you use bar soap, it's got a slightly lower carbon footprint in the travel emissions.

Cool, because you're not, you know, with liquid soap, you're mostly transporting the water.

Yeah, but what about, okay, but what about the satisfaction of a foam burst?

Have you ever used a foam burst?

I became briefly obsessed with foam bursts.

It's just a soap that is literally designed to become extra foamy when you're lathering.

And so, you know, you feel it's exciting.

It's very exciting way to start or end your day.

Just feels like you're not engaging with the ethical issues here.

You're very much Sentinel foam based.

And I'm happy for this girl record.

I couldn't give a fuck about the ethical issues here.

I flew here.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the 19th century author Thomas Hardy had two funerals at the same time.

Did you say 19th century author so we didn't confuse him with the 21st century actor?

Because he's still alive.

Yeah, this is Tom Hardy, Thomas Hardy, who wrote, I'm kind of confusing it already, Jude the Obscure, Tass of the Derbervilles, Mayor of Casterbridge.

We don't need the full bibliography.

About 900 poems.

He was a big deal.

He was.

He was mega-famous, actually.

And that was sort of what led to this problem.

Basically, he was meant to be buried in Dorset in his native Stinsford with his first wife, right?

And it was all ready to go.

There was a space on the tombstone for him, his name to be added, you know.

And then he died.

And then his friends, including James Barry of

Peter Pan fame, and Sidney Cockrell, who slightly less well-treated by history, but you know, I'm sure a big deal at the time.

They went to his home basically on his death and they said, we think he should be buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

He's a huge, huge deal.

And

they kind of bullied Thomas Hardy's second wife, Florence, into going along with it.

She sort of said, oh, well, okay, fine.

So they struck a deal whereby he went to Poet's Corner and his heart went to Stintsford.

And then they both had a funeral at 2 p.m.

on the 16th of January, 1928.

And that was the...

I mean, real Sophie's choice for his second wife.

Sorry, you're either going to be buried in Poets' Corner, which is not where you're supposed to be, or with your other wife.

Yeah.

Your previous wife.

Oh, no, we'll just take your heart to your previous wife.

I know.

It's really.

Where the fuck is I coming in on all of this?

Are you taking it in the fly ending up?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's true.

And also, like, well, I think reading into it more, I think his family was there as well.

So that was kind of

yeah, exactly.

Yeah, no, non-poets corner.

And so, because his wife, his first wife, they didn't particularly get on too well, like, deep into the marriage.

To begin with, they did, but there was a lot of

painful marriage, according to a lot of the friends and close relatives and so on.

And herself.

And himself.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So

why did he want to be there?

Well, the family, I guess.

She just happened to be there.

Right.

He felt huge regret about what a dick he was to her, it was said.

He treated her quite bad.

She kept a book.

Oh my god, it's the greatest title I've ever heard.

Yeah, so he found after she died, and they did have this difficult relationship, didn't they?

And she's a very interesting, weird character.

But he found in the attic after she died a diary that she'd written, basically called something like, what I think of my husband,

and just loads of bitching about him.

And he did, and he feels so awful, and he felt really guilty reading that.

And I think he burned it.

I don't know.

Yeah, that was so good.

I feel so bad.

I'm like, okay, let's just put those in the fire.

They aren't the gaslights.

I think that's every husband's nightmare.

Yeah.

Titled that.

Oh, my God.

It's not a dream for every wife, I'm going to tell you.

You're not picking up a book called What I Think of My Husband and expecting a positive review, are you?

He's great.

End of book.

Always helps.

He always listens.

And she lived in the attic.

She just moved into the attic after a while.

A while after their relationship started to go really wrong.

She was kind of the, she was the sane woman in the attic.

Well, I mean, sources differ on the sanity levels.

And then he remarried.

He married Florence, who was 39 years his junior.

There's a big difference, though.

The list of, not even guests at the funeral of Thomas Hardy, but the pallbearers.

You had,

just before mentioned, James Barry.

J.M.

Barry was one of the pallbearers.

You had George Bernard Shaw.

You had the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, as one of the pool bearers.

And then, you know, various other names that were obviously massive.

Two prime ministers being poor bearers, but one of them wasn't prime minister yet.

That's right, leader of the opposition at the same time.

Ramsay MacDonald, who was then the first Labour Prime Minister.

Yeah.

Rudyard Kipling.

And Kipling, yeah.

Also a pool bearer.

I mean.

I guess, is this that surprising?

If Richard Osmond dies, I wouldn't be massively surprised if, like, Sebastian Folk, Ian Quinn.

Yeah, but this is the equivalent of Richard Seuss and Keir Starmer

turning up.

I don't think you get a lot of volunteers to carry that coffin.

He's a big lad.

Oh, yeah, your poor buried list would be very long, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

I wonder how tall Thomas Hardy was because he had 10.

Did he?

Which feels like a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Normally you can fit six.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, good point.

You know.

Very squeezed in.

I know.

I think he was definitely quite puny as a baby.

And his mother gave birth, and they weren't, oh, well, we'll set that aside because it's not alive and we'll retrieve the mother.

And they put him to one side, thinking that he wasn't alive.

And then the midwife, who probably wasn't doing a job particularly well, said after a few minutes, oh, hang on a second, this baby's alive.

We should keep it going.

Good grave.

And he was very, and for the first few weeks, everyone assumed that he would die.

And he was quite a weakling, I think, when he was younger.

Are you guys any fans of his stuff?

Yeah.

Yeah, I read Tess of the Dovervilles at school.

And it was the first, as it were, literature book that I'd read.

Up until then, I was reading Spinoff Indiana Jones novelisations.

And it blew my mind.

I thought it was fantastic.

And he wrote my favourite poem, sure, The Darkling Thrush.

Amazing poem.

Do you want to read it.

Well, he considered himself a poet more than an author, didn't he?

Despite these like seminal colours, he was much more successful as an author, right?

That's just like...

Yeah.

He was extremely successful as a poet as well.

And the last 30 years of his life, he only wrote poetry, isn't he?

Yeah.

Well, he had success, but this to me is like Ant and Deck considering themselves musicians.

They've been successful in the charts, but you wouldn't say

the famous

repertoire.

Yeah, musicians Ant and Deck have died is not what's going to be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But he's just, this to me is just like, like, you know, his Twitter bio would just be one of those ones that's just like a list.

Poet, author, son, father, husband, twice.

For anyone who's listening who's not a fan, basically the books are amazing, but they're also incredibly gloomy.

As in,

they feature all sorts of, you know, terribly unhappy people

making poor decisions

and getting on badly with each other.

Although I think that he had a reputation.

Far from the Radding Crowd is not a gloomy book.

Everyone always says, such sad books.

But yeah, don't read Jude the Obscure if you're.

So Jude the Obscure, The Guardian, a few years ago, then produced this fantastic infographic on what each book contains in terms of various traumas.

Right, so Jude the Obscure was by a long shot the winner, but it features, they just listed like in little bullet points what it features.

An unhappy relationship, a death, another unhappy relationship, another unhappy relationship, grinding poverty, suicide, murder, murder.

That's one child who kills two others and then himself.

Miscarriage, alcoholism, another death, and animal genitalia-related injury, which I had forgotten about, but which does feature in Do the Obscure.

Does it?

What happens?

Which bit's that?

Jude, who meets his wife Arabella when she throws a pig's pizzle, a pig's penis, at him.

And it wallops him on the bonce.

When you said animal-related genital injury, I would never have guessed that.

I was going to something biting.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

I never would have thought it was the animal's genital that was in that

causing the injury to a different part of his body.

Yeah.

Dismembered pig dick was not

my bingo camp for 1894.

So got the train in today to King's Cross and I had a bit of time on my hands and I went to see something pretty incredible.

The tree.

Yeah.

I went to see the Hardy tree.

What's that?

The Hardy Tree is old St.

Pancras Church, which is just up the road from St.

Pancras Station International.

And it's a church where you have a graveyard there.

And when Hardy, prior to becoming a full-time writer, I think maybe he was dabbling in writing at that point, but he was an architect beforehand.

And he used to work in London.

And he worked for a company which was called Blumfield.

And one of the things that Blumfield needed to do was they needed to move a lot of the graves that were in the area to make room for a new rail track.

It was the mainland, Midland Grand Railway.

And so they had to exhume bodies.

And it was something like it was thousands of bodies that they had to exhume.

And they had all these leftover tombstones.

And Hardy did this thing where there's about a hundred of them of these tombstones.

They are all sort of layered in towards the tree.

It's so hard to describe.

They're like so good.

It's the tree, because the tree fell down this year.

The tree fell down in 2022.

Oh, has it fallen?

I saw it years ago, but it was like when it was like the roots were like growing over the tombstones.

It's almost like give the illusion that the tombstones were sinking because like roots were starting to grow over the top of there.

They were getting shorter and shorter.

Yeah, so what's I didn't know it fell down.

So, what is it?

A storm took it out, but they've left

there's a big fence around it at the moment.

They're working out what to do and which way to restore it.

But, yeah, that is a that is literally a bit of art/slash architecture by Thomas Hardy.

As you say, you saw it when it's full, yeah, full place.

And God, just generally, by the way, what an extraordinary cemetery that is with such notable people.

Mary Wollstonecraft is buried there, who was the mother of Mary Shelley.

And there's this story which all academics think is almost definitely true.

It's one of those ones where it's like, there might be a tiny grain of untruth.

It's where she used to go and sit and read her mother's books against the tombstone, and it's where her and Percy Shelley first had sex on the tombstone.

That's the kind of thing they would have done.

Yeah, but so

I highly recommend it though.

Of course, you would, don't, you recommend all sorts of stuff.

I mean, going to

the cemetery.

Dance sex advice podcast.

It's like you're going to go down like a lead balloon.

But also, incidentally, one of the people who were buried underneath supposedly all those tombstones is the writer who wrote The Vampire, who was part of that weekend with Mary Chanel.

Polidori.

Polidori.

Can I shatter your illusions, though, about that lovely concentric circle, Gravestones and Tree?

The tree has nothing to do with him.

What?

Yeah, everyone calls it the Hardy Tree.

There's no evidence it was planted in his life, like, by him, when he was an architect.

There's no evidence it was, they think it was was planted about 50 years after he died.

It only started being referenced in the case of the current.

He just made the circle.

He made the circle.

He, all we know, I'm pretty sure, is that he was indeed employed because he was low down in the architect's firm.

So the architect said, Could you dig up all these bodies?

So he did dig up the bodies.

And he, in fact, he remembered later in his life when they were digging up the bodies, opening one grave that had two heads and one body.

And that was a fun memory for him.

And he said some of them were just skeletons loose in the ground, some of them like crumpled apart.

personally, he was there overseeing it, and other people under him were digging them up.

Two heads, one body.

Yeah, we don't know he made the stone circle.

We just know he does that.

It sounds like he just littered some gravestones.

He just did.

His story is lucrative.

It's like genuinely like a natural phenomenon.

Some poor person,

probably a woman, came after us and said, Hey, it would look nice if we did this, and then everyone's gone.

Oh, it was Thomas Hardy, did it?

That's classic.

Yeah.

Okay, I goes, oh, how interesting.

Can I give you guys a quiz?

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

Okay, so we all know Tom's Hardy, and we all know about

Kiss Me Hardy.

Yeah.

And we all know about Tom Hardy, the actor.

Yeah.

So, which Tom Hardy...

I've renamed these headlines so they all say Tom Hardy.

So that's not a clip, right?

Which Tom Hardy are these about?

Yeah.

Okay.

Goldfish removed from Tom Hardy Pond to protect newts.

Which Hardy is that about?

The actor.

Author.

Author.

Author.

You're both right.

Sorry, Dan.

It's a bit loose calling him Tom.

I've changed the headlines.

I've changed the headlines, so they all say Tom Hardy.

So that's not to avoid being a clip.

I see.

Because people only say Thomas or Tom.

Tom Hardy fuels James Bond rumours.

Well, no, that's be it.

Let's go back to when the first James Bond was written.

Let's do the dates alive.

Fleming was a portbearer at the author's show, so I'm locking that in.

Okay.

No, I'm so sorry, Dan.

That's about the actor, Tom Hardy.

Last one, Tom Hardy wins Jiu-Jitsu contest in Milton Keynes.

I don't think it's any of them.

That's just a different bloke.

No, it's the actor.

Last year, he just turned up in Milton Keynes.

The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Open Championship held at a school in Milton Keynes and kicked everyone's ass.

He won.

He was champion in his school.

Held at school, but it was adults.

He absolutely went through year eight like a dose of salt.

No, he has a blue belt in Jiu-Jitsu and

just destroyed everyone.

That's quite intimidating if you turn up and see Tom Hardy, you know, Ben

Mad Max.

But you're allowed to just wander in.

Surely you have to have entered in advance.

He did enter in advance.

He registered.

Oh, he registered.

He just registered like

a normal person, you know.

And I met someone

who worked at that school, who was organising the whole thing, read it and went, it won't be that topic.

He walked in like a fucking arm.

Absolutely terrifying.

Do you know?

I just want to bring up the second wife very quickly, Florence Dugdale.

So that was her name.

She was an author herself, published author.

And

there was, as you say, a huge age gap.

Apparently they got on really well though, according to friends who also said that the first wife and Thomas didn't get on.

She wrote a biography of him

and he didn't burn it.

It was called The Early Life.

Is that because he died?

No, it's because it turns out he actually wrote it mostly himself.

No.

And it was published under her name.

Oh my gosh.

That's the sort of thing you do if your first wife released a book, saying, You're a piece of shit.

Suddenly you go, hmm, how can I protect my reputation here?

Isn't that astonishing?

Yeah, that's really and has that survived?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because a lot of stuff didn't.

A lot of stuff was burnt.

A lot of his correspondence was burned almost immediately after his death, which has really vexed a lot of biographers, obviously.

Yeah, right.

So much burning of books went on back in the day, didn't it?

Like, they were constantly burning books.

So he burned most of his own diaries, I think, as well as burning his wife's diaries.

She burned, like, his second wife burned the courtship letters between him and his first.

Or I think maybe his first one.

Everyone was burning letters and books left, right, and centre.

Why don't we do this anymore?

I do.

I've so fired on so many laptops.

It's a nightmare.

All of your wife's diaries.

There you were criticising my car

and burning every book he's ever read.

Paul Bearers, obviously, Celeb Paul Bearer is very cool.

Oh, yeah.

There's modern...

There's a modern version of it, I'd say, of like having lots of...

Well, not famous people being Paul Bearers, but like something cool to do, which is Tupac.

You know this about Tupac?

If Tupac's dead,

then Tupac's gang members smoked his ashes.

Oh, no way!

As was requested in a Tupac lyric, he said in the lyric, when I die, I smoke my ashes, basically, in slightly different words that I won't use.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I've got a question.

Yeah.

How can you smoke them if they're already ashes?

Well, exactly.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, he wasn't made of tobacco.

Well, I did say smoke his remains, but I'm doubting there's like an arm.

You'd need a very big buyer pipe to get an arm into,

I don't know.

I guess they just

might mix it in with

it.

Yeah, I don't think it was like

okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the UK literally have fashion police

quite literally.

So speaks a guy who's just been arrested for that

choice of hoodie

so it turns out that one of the things there's a lot of things that happen within police work that with forensics and a very important bit of it is trying to identify when a body might you know if you find a body how long has it been there diagnosing all that stuff and one of the things that might help you with that is the clothing that the person is wearing and so there's this fashion historian called Amber Bashar and she basically goes around and she she worked for Beyond Retro and she was a fashion historian she liked to find where products were coming from at what point they were using certain materials and so on and there was a police forensic investigator who saw what she was doing after hearing her on a radio 4 show and thought i wonder if that's going to be interesting for me in terms of trying to diagnose how old a body is or just give us a bit more detail so that's what she does she goes around for the uk police she'll go to a murder scene and she'll look at the exact fabric that they're wearing and obviously as we know like you know if you were going to die today you might be wearing old clothes from...

I was going to say, me and Andy are going to look like we're from the 50s because we just have never bought new clothes for ourselves.

Yeah, that's the issue, right?

But I suppose it just plays into a bigger picture of what they're doing.

So there's one story which is a bit upsetting, but an old lady passed away and they found a body that was wrapped up in a bra.

And she was able to look at the bra and work out exactly when the bra was from to be able to say, so it must have been this year that the body was in there.

And she does it, by the way.

There's a lot of amazing archives of clothing.

And one big one is MS have a massive archive of clothing that she can look through and find the history of items because a lot of Brits are going to be, you know, dying in MNS clothing.

Sorry.

I hope to.

I hope to one day.

I hope to.

Actually, I don't mind when the day comes, as long as I'm in my trusty MNS.

That's what people say, isn't it?

Yeah, it's like people often, you know, how they want to die, they often say, in my sleep or in my MNS cocoon.

Either's fine with me.

Yeah, and we should add that this is also not a sponsor that we're doing right now.

I reckon there's certain items of clothing where I could tell you when that person died.

Oh, yeah.

Buried in a von Dutch cap.

I'm going 2001.

Straight away.

Livstrong band.

Come on.

You're getting a five-year period.

Yeah, okay.

What about the cycles of fashion, though, every 30 years?

It could always either be like, you know, it was last year or 31 years.

So it has to be so, yeah, so it has to be something that hasn't yet come back.

Okay.

That's right.

There's not retrospective.

It's like white guy dead in a Wu-Tang 36 chambers top.

Sure.

97, 98.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

So I've always worn flairs Sometimes that would have confused the hell out of police.

At other times, it's perfectly acceptable.

I don't know what phase we're at now.

Are we in a flares phase?

Yeah, we are, actually.

We are.

Oh, there we go.

I think often she just goes, Well, what we have here is a time traveler.

Um, I recruited a bit of uh help about this.

I wrote to an expert, uh, Val McDermott, the author,

aka Queen of Crime.

Holy shit, that's a clang.

We thought the old curling team was a clang earlier.

Unnamed curling team.

Um, no, I just

uh know her very slightly, and I just asked her about this kind of stuff.

She's written a book, as well as all her novels, she's written a book about forensics.

Oh, nice.

And she said that natural fabrics decay when you're buried, as in buried in the woods, you know, that kind of thing if you've been killed.

But labels are usually man-made fibers, so they survive, right?

So they can provide a clue if it's foreign label or a designer label or whatever.

So she says, if you're planning a murder, go for mass-produced cotton and snip those labels when it comes to dressing your corpse.

Oh,

that's very helpful.

Nice.

Thank you, Val.

Yeah, that's good because you can tell how big the person was, even if the whole body disintegrated, right?

You can still be like, size eight,

size 14.

This does feel like, this story feels most like, you know, Netflix are on the phone buying the rights to this series, surely, of like the person who solves crimes based on labels that you're wearing.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, I thought you meant buying the rights to this podcast, which is so far.

They are available.

And she's cool.

Amber, if you see a photo of her, she dresses like she's like someone from beyond retro wood, right?

Like she's got got like old school clothing.

She looks like she could be in a sort of Agatha Christian.

She'd be a vintage detective.

What can we call it?

What, the series?

Yeah, series called Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Dressed to kill.

Brilliant.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

All right, we've got two films.

Have you heard about this thing of the principle of interchange or the principle of transference?

So one of the fathers of forensics was a Frenchman called Edmond Lockard in Lyon, and his basic theory is that any two objects interacting will leave a trace.

So when you commit a crime,

you will leave something behind that wasn't there before, like a bullet in a person, and you will take away something that was there originally, right?

So that's just like the founding principles.

All you have to do is work hard to find those.

Well, you'll take away like a bit of dust or something.

It's not like you're.

Yeah, or a fiber on your shirt.

No, a souvenir.

Yeah, no, always cut off a finger.

Yeah, yeah.

But this now we are so good that that sometimes makes things difficult for forensics people.

So for example, if I hug Rhys and then I am murdered, Rhys will have my DNA, or sorry, my body's tested, it'll have DNA from Rhys's clothes on it.

Yes.

Despite the fact he had nothing to do with it.

So that suddenly means that he might have to be questioned or involved or whatever it is.

So that's the extent to which forensics is advanced these days.

It's so good now.

You can recreate so much stuff.

Yeah, so surely it's got to the point where it's so good.

Now the list of suspects is way too big and makes this way harder.

So it's defeated.

It's sort of eating itself.

It's sort of, yeah, like those detective closed room things.

It's suddenly like there's 5,000 people.

You're probably all wondering why I got you here.

Yeah.

Because obviously they've got good methods to winnow it down.

And you'd probably be released without a charge after a day or two, Rhys.

But I don't know.

I give off a vibe.

I've got those sort of eyes.

The motive's there.

You've spent two hours with him now, so we'd all understand.

I would be caught.

I mean,

I've read about how cat hair is like one of the main things, right?

Like murderers who have cats get caught quite quickly because if anyone, if any of you have got a cat, you know that you basically constantly have cat hair on you.

Right.

And so everywhere you go,

you're molting like a cat, and cat hair is coming off.

But then someone.

And I have a ginger cat, so you know, that's just the most visible one, basically.

But do police now go around, if someone's murdered, are they now going around everyone's house testing not only other people in the house, but their cats as well?

You'll get a knock on the door.

Maybe, maybe that's a double match.

You've got you and your cat.

Right.

We're looking for a British short hair.

Yeah.

Do you know you can catch people by different prints that aren't fingerprints, various other prints?

So,

tongue prints, I think you could, because that's individual, although I'm not sure how many people lick the murder scene before leaving.

Oh, you said tongue.

I thought I heard time, which time prints would be as well.

Time print.

Time print, do you leave a time print?

Yeah, if you're

your mobile phone leaves a signal.

Oh, yeah.

That's a lot of modern...

detective.

Does he have a time print?

Did he leave a time print?

I thought that's what Rhyth said, and I was just trying to help.

It's cool.

I like the sound of...

And And if you punch in and out like you would at a work factory for every murder, you've got to put a time stand.

No sounds you have to check into a building for fire records.

There's the comments book on the way out.

Died lovely.

Really easy to kill.

You like the two-star review?

That's terrible.

That's a real crime.

Crime against this lovely hotel.

None of this is what I said.

Prince.

Prince.

Glove Prince.

So

wow, what?

That's the whole point of gloves, isn't it?

In this context.

I know, right?

First of all, you hugged Andy on the way in and you're wearing gloves.

None of it's going to work, Rhys.

So, yeah, people can take glove prints.

And because people think what you guys think, which is that wearing gloves, I'm safe, they leave a lot more.

They're much more cavalier than they are with fingerprints.

But now there are various police forces that have made databases of glove prints.

So if they can match it to another glove print found at a different place, then they'll know that it's the same person.

Fibers that come off the gloves or?

Yeah, from the fibers that come off the glove and the pattern that the glove makes, you know, it'll make an imprint.

And even.

So clever.

And it's even like, it doesn't matter if it's the same brand of glove that I'm wearing compared to you, Andy, because I'll be doing different things with my glove to what you're doing with your glove, and so it'll wear in a different way.

Stop it.

Yeah, it's nuts.

It's absolutely nuts what can be done.

Earprints.

Someone was caught in France by their ear prints because they'd

been listening up against the keyholes of lots of student halls' doors.

Oh my god, that's incredible.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah, footprint or shoe print, I imagine, as well, would be a thing.

You would see a size 12 Adidas.

You might have certain muds and stuff that you can.

Yeah.

But earprint, that's like, yeah, eyebrow print.

That's so neat.

You can get a bumprint.

What do you mean, get a butt?

What, if you sit on the photocopier?

You have a bumpr.

I mean, I just wonder if that's ever been used.

Sorry, everyone's used to it.

You mean if the murderer were to put their bare arm onto something at the scene, they could go, oh, we know whose bomb that is.

It's a classic calling card.

The police line up for those.

Yeah, turn around.

That's an amazing sight.

Can bum number two move around, please.

Have you, this is a very cool thing.

Have you heard of forensic ecology?

Forensic ecology.

This is, I read an interview with a woman called Rosie Everett.

She uses materials found in the natural world to solve crimes, right?

So specifically micro fossils.

Oh.

There are these things called diatoms.

We've spoken about them, I think, ages ago.

Basically, they're microscopic single-cell algae, and she can use these, the presence of these, to come up with a profile of the soil in an area, which can then solve a crime.

So

there's a castle in Cheshire called Beast and Castle, right?

Which is a protected area.

And there were some metal detectorists,

night hawks, dirt sharks, who'd gone and nicked

arrow, like Bronze Age artifacts from the soil around there.

And when they're caught, they just say, Oh, we found them somewhere else.

Can't prove anything, you know.

Except for Rosie Everett, who came up with a profile of the soil based on the microscopic algae found there and proved that's the soil they've been taken from.

Wow.

Well,

looked at the objects and went, hey, this soil's the same.

Yeah, there was a bit of soil found on the Bronze Age artifacts they'd nicked from there, and there was a bit of soil around the castle.

Like, just soil.

It wasn't one of the ways they caught Ian Huntley from nettle disturbance.

Really?

So, nettles.

he trampled nettles that meant that they were now growing outwards in a way they don't naturally, that sort of proved that he was there in the woods at that time or something.

Well, so it's next generation nettles still affected by the previous scene.

Yeah, yeah, it's like months later, they had grown in a certain like, because they would been, and then they went outwards instead of up, or something like that.

That it was like, yeah, that's incredible.

That's mad.

And slightly less, it'll just quickly tell you a slightly less technologically advanced one of this guy I read about who got caught doing a crime after he got the crime scene scene very in a lot of detail tattooed on his chest.

So he literally it was like he'd like murdered someone outside a liquor store or something and so he got the liquor store like a painting on his chest with him doing the murder.

And above it he says the name of his gang which was Rivera.

It said Rivera kills above it and it was like a revenge killing and he had that on his chest and one day the police were just like flicking through a book of gang tattoos apparently and they were like wait that's that liquor store we've been trying to figure out where that guy who killed that guy that's that guy killing that guy and then he was just tried and then that's brilliant we've we've spoken about in the past how the yakuza would be busted because they all have very individualistic tattoos and if they're on the run they might show up on instagram sort of like you know topless yeah i mean if you follow the accounts i do

and they'll be like hey that that's him that's the guy like tattoo spotting is a is a big way of busting criminals yeah did you say your one andy happened in beeston yeah well that was when we did our first book of the year there was a crime there committed, which was thousands of bees were stolen from Beeston.

I wonder if she can solve that crime now using this new technology.

Maybe.

Wow.

I just, I'd sort of forgotten that, but as soon as you said we'd had it in our book, I thought, it'll have been a story about bees, won't it?

Because I have a level we operate.

We put it out on the back.

See, it was our bird.

That was our leading fact.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that parents of newborn penguins take thousands of naps per day.

Absolute slackers.

Yeah, to be fair to them, they're taking very short naps.

These are chin-strapped penguins, so they live in the Antarctic and around the South Pacific.

And

there were scientists studying them recently on King George Island, and they found that they nap over 10,000 times a day, but they only nap for about four seconds at a time on average.

But still, it gets them something.

And I mean, they managed to tot up 11 hours of sleep a day.

That's insane.

Amazing.

It's basically blinking.

Basically, every time they blink, they do it four seconds and fall asleep.

It's like when you fall asleep at the cinema or the theatre, you know, and you have that kind of

train that jolt.

I've never left one of those occasions feeling noticeably rested.

No.

Despite doing that kind of semi-sleep thing.

But I wonder if you had a thousand of them.

Yeah, true.

Yeah.

You just have them a long enough play.

You know how you get those sort of rise and grind influencers these days who are all about, you know, getting up at 5 a.m., doing a gratitude journal.

You've got a like circadian rhythm and all that sort of stuff.

You know, you've got to get sunlight before coffee and all this.

I mean, do you think if they read this pretty soon, everyone would be like, no, no, no, don't go to bed.

Just stand there

for four seconds at a time.

You just feel perfect.

You'd say you're never asleep.

Hustle never sleeps.

It'll become a thing.

And so, yeah, and they go into deep sleep, which I'm not sure we're very good at doing within four seconds, but they looked at their brain waves.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so it was

like a real, it's like a bungee jump into sleep and then back.

Yeah.

It just feels so rapid to get

deep sleep.

But yeah, they go into

slow wave sleep.

They really rigged them up, these penguins.

It's amazing they could sleep at all.

There was this researcher, Wong Young Lee, who I think was leading the research, who said it was exhausting for them because they had to catch 14 penguins and they had to get equipment on their brains to measure their brain activity and then they had to get accelerometers to see how fast to like record their muscle movements see how fast their muscles are moving and their positions and then they film like whether their heads start nodding and so is it possible that the penguins actually sleep completely normally but when they're manipulated by scientists they can't sleep at all I think so

they did say this is probably serving the purpose of meaning that they can guard their young so it's when they guard their newborn children because one parent will be off getting food the other parent has to look after the kid.

So it's like you never sleep for so long that the kid can get in trouble.

It's like having a baby monitor.

And they said it's probably because of that, but it could also be because you know, penguins, when they're looking after their young, they hang out in these massive groups of just thousands of them, and it's really loud and busy.

Like these researchers said we couldn't sleep because it was just so hexic there because so many penguins.

These researchers are complaining a lot about their own sleep, I have to say.

For someone else's study about something else.

Four seconds, i wish

um but they said it could just be that the penguins can't sleep for longer than that they they might be able to sleep for eight hours in a row but it's just that they're being woken up every four seconds because it's so noisy and bustling yeah right

it is crazy there are lots of animals in the in the um world that do when they've had a baby are forced into a position of just being awake like dolphins for example are awake for like a month, a full month.

They just can't go to sleep because their baby dolphins can't sleep.

So they're just awake the whole time.

So they just following for a month.

And they basically,

they just have to be awake.

And with them, part of the dolphin not being asleep as a baby is as they keep movement, they're building up blubber, they're building up all the things that they need to make them into a bigger dolphin.

That's like, and then after like a month or so, they all start sleeping again.

But the mum is just solidly awake.

But don't they do the half of their brains at a time thing?

So I'm not sure that that's what I tried to find out, but I couldn't find anything that said they go to half asleep.

Because yes, dolphins shut half their brain asleep.

Yeah.

As far as as I could see, that wasn't part of it.

They don't asleep at all.

Not either half.

Yeah.

But, you know.

I don't know about all bears, but don't polar bears do a similar thing where they basically just attach the children to them for the whole time.

So the children don't really walk around following them.

Like you see, like elephants, you see them following and stuff like that.

But polar bears is just like, you see a picture of a new mum in the polar bear community.

There's just kids just like strapped.

And then do they have

to do anything?

I think they, yeah, I don't think they have papoose.

But they're just like grabbing hold of them and they just have to walk around with that and then just do everything from there until they sit down again because they just don't walk.

Like tussels.

Just got a lot of tussles.

You know elephant seals?

Yes.

Which is a huge, great,

massive.

Big things.

We got sent effect, actually, by Victoria Piadati, so thank you for that, Victoria.

Which is that sleeping elephant seals, they fall through the sea as they nap.

So they are mammals.

They do not have gills.

They can last up to about half an hour underwater, but sometimes they will just nap.

And it seems like they just spiral downwards through the water and sleep.

Wow.

That happens in my brain quite a lot when you're trying to get to sleep.

You know, you jolt awake because you felt like you were falling.

Yeah.

Well, imagine if you woke up and you had absolutely.

Because it is fast.

They drop 400 meters in 10 minutes, which if you that was like we're talking the highest buildings in the world.

That's like the full height of them almost.

Yeah.

And it takes quite a long time.

You know, if you go to one of those skyscrapers, the lift takes about that long.

Yeah.

Sometimes.

Yeah, yeah.

So they're going that fast.

If you wake up when you've only got three minutes of oxygen left, that's presumably quite stressful.

That was also, yeah.

What's the protocol?

What do they do?

You can't really do that dad thing of faking that you weren't asleep on the sofa during a Sunday afternoon movie.

You know, dads will always be like, I wasn't asleep by watching him.

I'm resting my eyes.

Dad, you're at the bottom of the ocean.

Has anyone have you ever met a penguin?

Because I've got another clang.

Here we go, here we go.

Which of your winter sports were you taking part in with the Olympic team?

Well, I did do the skeleton, which is basically how penguins travel.

Oh, yes.

Did you?

They go, you know, it's like the head first one where you're

piling through the air.

Well, I did it.

They train on just on a track.

So just on wheels on a track rather than on ice.

Right.

And this is the context where...

So there were penguins in the middle of the street.

I did meet penguins, actually.

Well, this is just a bracketed outcome.

I did.

Yeah, yeah, because you mentioned the Winter Olympic, and that was Penguin Jason.

I met a penguin in Australia, actually.

Okay, right.

And I can't.

I was a child.

There are photos of it, but I'm trying to get my head around what it was because from memory, it was like in our hotel,

where the various pools were.

There was different pools, but it was presented in a sort of like, go over to this section.

It was like a quite kid-friendly hotel.

It was like, this section is meant to be the Arctic or whatever.

And then in between two of these pools or the walkway, we just like this bit where these penguins were.

And they would do like feedings at a certain time every day and you could go and hang out and then I was a penguin's my favourite animal I was obsessed with penguins as a kid

penguin is actually one of the many nicknames I tried to start for myself as a child

well you could be honest you were 23 weren't you yeah

that's a child in some communities

and then like I got picked as the volunteer for this sort of penguin feeding And so I was like doing the whole, you know, I was chucking the fish.

Yeah.

And then I shook his head shook his fin.

Shook the penguin fin?

What do they have?

Wing?

Wing?

Wing?

Yeah, wing.

Shook his wing, fin.

Shook his fin, yeah.

Fuck off, mate.

Shook his wing.

Yeah.

That's lovely.

That's very cool.

And now your DNA is on that penguin, of course.

And if it's murdered.

If that penguin goes missing, I'm absolutely shocked.

Yeah.

My cat's also a suspect because there's definitely cat hair on that penguin now.

Have you seen the penguins at the zoo, the London zoo?

No.

Oh, well, I recommend them.

You make them to us geographically.

I don't think you can meet them as far as I'm aware.

There was something about them, wasn't there, though?

There was something.

Isn't there that isn't there enclosure?

It's the only grade two listed.

Oh, yes, that's got that amazing.

Hey, he's in a Harry Star's video.

I think that rings a bell.

And that enclosure that is grade two listed with that spiral thing in the middle, yeah.

Is where the as-it-was video is filmed.

He's like stood on that thing, and all these women are sort of circling him.

Right.

Are they dressed as penguins?

Well, they were wearing tuxedos.

I wonder what they did with the penguins when they were filming that video.

I know, right?

I think a lot of people on the internet are wondering that as well.

I mean, supposedly, it's just a time when they weren't using it.

How can they not be using their main home and enclosure in it?

The elevator's called Harry's house, so it does feel like you marched in and went, This is Harry's house, this is Harry's house.

Head out, yeah.

Um,

something that sleeps quite weirdly is spiders,

and they actually are unique in the animal world, I think, in that they don't have the right body clock.

And

they're the only things we know about that don't have the right body clock.

So, you know, we're on the basically 24-hour body clock, although sometimes when people go and live in caves, they sort of stretch to 25 hours or 23 or whatever.

But mostly,

that was such a dismissive roll of the airline.

That's the thing that's personally inconvenient to you on more than one occasion.

Those caving are always late.

Anna's waiting outside the cave at the table for two.

God's sake.

Time.

Circadian rhythm, my ass.

Yeah.

So, mostly, even bacteria, operate on a 24-hour body clock, but spiders don't.

And we don't really know why, except that they're fucked up.

So, they have the shortest body clocks ever known.

Some spiders have been found to have 17-hour body clocks, but this should really mess with them because so spiders left their own devices, and these are specifically trash line orb weavers, which sounds

slam.

Yeah, I mean, rosy or what?

They're actually called that because they hide in in their webs in a pile of crap.

So they like will put dead bodies and feces and dirt in their web and then they hide amongst it.

Wow.

It's not dissimilar to my room.

And that's how you catch flies.

Anyway, they need to wake up at night and get super, super active in the dark.

And they spin their webs at night time and they erect this big pile of trash to live in.

And then in the daytime, spiders fall asleep still, which is why when you see them in daylight, they're usually just motionless.

And then they go nuts at night in the dark.

um but it turns out if you subject a spider to full darkness it starts waking up and weaving its web web many hours before night would actually fall

so it wakes up like on the 17 hour mark rather than on the 24 hour mark so that means they're constantly kind of jet-lagged right because they're they're constantly their bodies are going hey we've got to wake up now and then it's like no no you've got to stay asleep because it's not night yet and then night comes and then they have to go to sleep and they're wide awake but they manage to just reset themselves every every day do they get cranky well maybe that's why they're such bastards and they're always eating each other and hanging out in the corner of the room deliberately scaring people off i feel i feel for them that's that sounds very rough doesn't it but apparently you can't catch up on sleep anyway right you so there's no there's a myth the whole idea of like i only got six hours sleep last night so i'm gonna now have ten hours sleep or whatever it's a it's a myth you're better off just having seven or eight every time

so you can't it's impossible to catch up on sleep what you'll always be a bit more tired in London.

No, no, you just can't.

You'll just keep.

Yeah, so I don't mean it's impossible to.

In this economy, it's bloody impossible to catch up on sleep.

I just mean that it actually makes it worse.

So it's like it's not a constant tally for the week where you're trying to get, it's like, no, just every day try and get seven or eight.

I did not know that.

And I'd always try and improve it with the way you put it.

Because the way to avoid being underslept is then just have seven or eight hours rather than

I assumed it was the other thing

that there's a ratchet and it only gets worse for your life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly, but it's not like there's a certain amount of hours you must sleep in your life and not getting to the total.

Like you're filling it in like one of those thermometers and at school when you're trying to get donations.

Well, you can actually trick yourself into thinking you've had more sleep, can't you?

Remember, we did that thing about the placebo sleep experiment that was done in America where they told people that they'd had more sleep than they actually had and they performed better in tasks.

I always use this as the life act to try and tell myself every morning I've had loads of sleep if I haven't.

Do you?

It hasn't worked yet.

You need someone else to tell you that in order for you to actually believe it, right?

Yeah.

Because you were to work.

Because you know what if you're.

But how can you ever do that?

Because if you're employing someone to do that, you would also know.

Exactly.

If your phone told you,

I'd believe it.

Yeah, those apps, sleep apps, should just lie.

They should just lie.

Everyone would get so much more dark.

Maybe they are lying.

Because they wouldn't tell us, would they?

Because that defeats the object.

So perhaps that's what they're.

I bet if you have it and you work for the app, it always tells you that you've got loads of sleep.

Yeah.

Just so that you're more productive in the day.

But everyone else, I think, is what you want.

If they know from your your phone that you work for a rival app.

Yeah, if you want to sound

like they just go, sorry, mate, that was terrible.

You're knackered.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media sites.

I'm on Instagram, on at Schreiberland, Andy.

On Twitter at Andrew Hunter M.

Penguin?

At Penguin and all the forums and at Reese Jamesy on Instagram.

Yep, or if you want to get through to us as a group, where can they go, Anna?

You can go to at no such thing on Twitter or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our website, which is no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to club fish and various other bits of merch.

Do check it out.

Otherwise, just come back again next week, and we'll be here with another episode.

And we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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