502: No Such Thing As The Opposite Of February

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Hi, everybody.

Andy here.

Just before we start this week's show, I wanted to announce our special guest.

This one is really exciting, guys.

Our special guest this week is none other than David Mitchell.

That's right.

If you haven't heard of David Mitchell, you haven't seen any British comedy recently because he's been in absolutely everything.

Of course, Peep Show, Upstart Crow, Would I Lie to You?

The Unbelievable Truth, every single panel show going.

And he's here.

He's on Fish this week.

David is here partly because he has as you are about to hear in the show a new book out and it is a fantastic book i genuinely finished it this morning and i loved it it's called unruly it's a history book it's a history of england's kings and queens it goes all the way from king arthur fictional to queen elizabeth i not fictional and it is so funny and yet you also are being educated all the way along the way it's been described as horrible histories for grown-ups and that's exactly what it's like.

You'll laugh, you'll learn.

It's got that classic Mitchell wit all the way through.

It's absolutely fantastic.

There are lengthy digressions about things like where you can get a nice coffee in Oxford or the James Bond films, all of that.

It's so good.

And it's not even just me saying this.

It has already been a number one Sunday Times bestseller.

So if you have a history fan in your life who you think would like a laugh as well, this is a perfect present.

Also, if you'd like even more David Mitchell in your life after this episode, his new show Outsiders has just started its third series.

That's on Dave.

It's a kind of outdoor challenge challenge survival show hosted by David.

And the guests this series include Alan Davis of QI and of course former fish guest.

So that's it from me.

I'll stop wanging on now.

Hope you enjoyed this episode.

We really enjoyed recording it.

On with the podcast.

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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and David Mitchell.

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 David.

Well, my fact is that King Stephen owed his throne to food poisoning.

Or,

you know, the shits.

Right?

I haven't asked about swearing.

How much swearing?

You're allowed to.

That's fucking great.

Yes, so.

To diarrhea.

Okay.

Caused by food poisoning.

Okay.

Previous king's diarrhea,

not his own.

His own.

His own.

Wait.

Not a previous king's diarrhea.

What?

And so people saw him shit himself and thought this man must be king?

No.

No, it didn't go like that.

I mean, obviously, there was a lot of diarrhea back then.

It was, you know, there's a lot now.

It's one of the ways you can empathize for people in the past.

They too had liquid shits, but more often died of them.

You know, King John shat himself to death.

Henry V shat himself to death.

So you've got a good king and a bad king there, both dying of dysentery.

But King Stephen didn't have dysentery, it was more of a short-term thing.

I don't know if it was a bug or something yet, and he certainly didn't know.

But because he got diarrhea, he got off a ship.

And the ship he got off was the white ship.

It was state-of-the-art, lovely craft in Barfleur Harbour.

And all of the most important young people of the reign, the inn crowd, were on this ship.

And they were about to sail to England.

But

the not-yet King Stephen, Stephen of Blois, was on it.

And he got diarrhea.

And he got off it to go into Barfleur and relax on a privy.

And the ship sailed without him and sank.

And everyone on board died

apart from a butcher.

Then he survived, but that's that's the last.

Then he's lost.

He went on claiming being a butcher

and then died.

He had a good anecdote throughout his life.

He absolutely had a good anecdote.

Did he survive because of the butchery?

Was that but as in does history relate whether he clung to some some of the meat?

No,

it wasn't the buoyancy of pork chops that saved him.

Was it him who provided the meal that provided the diarrhea for the future king?

I don't think so.

I'm not clear as to why there was a butcher on board, but ships have, like, they have.

You know, they have livestock.

Well, you get on a cruise ship, they've got, you know, a swimming pool and a casino.

So, no, I don't think this ship had that.

But, you know, they had some,

they might not have had livestock because they're only going across the channel, but they would have had food.

Yeah.

I don't think there's any connection.

There's no suggestion that it was his meat that he retailed that caused King Stephen's.

not yet King Stephen.

So I can't help calling him King Stephen.

He's not King Stephen yet.

It's like Prince Charles calling him King Charles.

It's impossible to get into your head.

Or it is for me anyway.

Yeah, I've managed to, I'm now saying King Prince Charles,

which is a way of easing myself into it, and eventually I'd be able to drop the prince.

I was saying it two years previous, just

to make sure I was running with it.

This ship, though, it sounds amazing.

As in it was obviously state of the art, but I mean, everyone who was anyone was on one ship at one time, which I presume was thought of as being fine.

I mean it clearly wasn't fine.

Yeah, because like is it like the royal family aren't really supposed to be on the same airplane or something like that?

Is that right?

Yeah.

Oh wow.

But the heir, the real heir to the throne was on that ship.

That's the key thing.

Yes, that the real heir to the throne was on it.

The king at the time, King Henry I, he wasn't on it.

He was on a less snazzy ship with older important people.

But the younger, cool important people, including William Atheling, the heir to the throne, they were all on the white ship and they all died.

Because obviously the butcher wasn't part of that team.

He was staff.

And so the only survivor was one of the staff, which I'm sure at the time they thought was absolutely the wrong way round.

Well, one of the other staff, I read that one of the other staff, the ship's captain, also survived the initial shipwreck.

came to the surface, heard that the heir to the throne, William Atheling, had drowned, and then just decided to drown himself.

The only person who could possibly have told us that story is the butcher.

That was derived.

It feels like, as the anecdote's gone on, he's kind of added little bits to it.

Obviously, that's, you'd be, if you were the captain's fact, that's a very positive anecdote for the butcher to say.

And the thing is, obviously, the butcher, we don't know what happened to him other than he didn't die in that shipwreck.

He probably murdered the captain, is what I would think of.

Possibly.

And maybe he made a hole in the ship.

But the thing is, he didn't even get a book deal out of it, which just shows you what primitive times these were.

Because nowadays, that would have been, you would have been on the gravy train for life.

Yeah, what a ship show, something like that.

Yeah, lovely.

So what year are we talking here?

1120.

1120, okay.

So that's ages ago.

Genuinely didn't even know we had proper ships crossing the channel at that point.

Like commercial

ships, because 1066, quite famously.

How do you think they got there?

How do you not get across the channel?

Not a swimming operation.

I'm sorry, I had the whole lifeguard swimming pool casino thing in my head.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't think they hadn't bought tickets.

it wasn't a scheduled cross i think it was absolutely just it was commissioned for the right for the just for the posh people to go across because they were having a very nice time at the point henry i had just won a small war against the king of france william athling had been confirmed as the heir to the dukedom of normandy at that point the king of england was also duke of normandy and he was running this cross-channel regime and so they've shored up their position on the continent in this sort of weird situation where the king of France is king in Normandy but not in control of it.

And the Duke of Normandy runs Normandy but has to sort of pay lip service to the feudal seniority of the King of France.

But that's all been lined up for William Atheling.

The King of France is back in his box.

He didn't live in a box.

There will have been French kings who lived in boxes.

There was a French king who thought he was made out of glass.

But this one I think is sort of comparatively normal.

So Henry I, very happy.

Let's all go back to England, this other country we own, and hang out there for a bit.

So it was a happy day.

Very successful period of Henry I's reign.

And then it was a bit like a sort of mega-somme in that the heirs to the whole ruling class just died in one go.

Is it true that they were all drunk as well?

I read that.

Yes.

Basically, they decided to get the boat across at night time.

Yeah.

We're not sure why, but it might have been just so they could get pissed in the meantime.

Right.

And apparently everyone on board was absolutely shit-faced.

And that could have been one of the reasons that crashed.

That's interesting.

It seems quite likely to be one of the reasons, doesn't it?

Because they were obviously quite-I mean, those days there were more shipwrecks than there are now.

You know, it wasn't a done deal crossing the channel, but I don't think the weather was bad.

People were nipping back and forth all the time.

But yeah, William Athlink essentially declared it a party boat and said, We're all gonna have a drink.

And he, you know, not to be a snob, he very much included the staff, the crew, the butcher, and crucially, the people driving the ship, as they didn't call it then.

So, one set of people they didn't include was the priests.

So, usually, the priests would bless the ship before it set off.

But because it was a party boat, they decided to dismiss the priests, and so they didn't get blessed.

And so, later on, some people said that may have been the reason that they crashed.

Yeah, that's do you think that's the reason they crashed?

I'm only reporting what some people said.

I mean, that sounds tremendously convenient for the prevailing religious ethos of the time because they blamed everything on religion because obviously they lived in baffling times where they didn't understand much of what was happening to them.

So they were very keen in the Middle Ages to save.

It's not that we're, you know, tiny little creatures in a universe of which we have no comprehension, it's that we didn't pray enough.

So there was something we could have done.

Yes.

And

I think it probably made living in the Middle Ages a little bit more relaxing than it otherwise would have been.

Anyway, the white ship, yeah, Sanks and the future King Stephen is probably equally uncomfortable, but in a way with fewer long-term consequences to his survival.

Was he seen as someone who was, you know, useful?

Did they look at him and go, okay, at least we've got someone who might be a good king?

Or was he a sort of, oh dear, with Stephen, just Stephen?

No, no, it was Henry I, who they say after the white ship disaster, he never smiled again.

And I don't know how they know, but I'm not going to call them liars.

But he was very, very upset.

And he was upset in two ways.

Obviously, his beloved son was dead.

Lots of other people's beloved sons were dead.

But crucially, his plan for the succession of the English crown is in absolute ruins.

Because he's had lots of children, Henry I, but only two of them with his wife.

And the two with his wife are William Atheling, who drowns, and Matilda, who goes to the world.

He told dreadful lies.

No.

She is she is the former wife of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, as it wasn't then called, but the Emperor would be the expression.

So she went around calling herself Empress Matilda with some justification.

And he quickly marries someone else to try and get a new son going, because they didn't like the idea of women ruling then.

Totally fails to beget any children with his new wife, even though he's begat children all over the place.

And she begets a load after he's dead.

So I don't know, whatever.

His sperm and her eggs, they don't make a good team.

Probably because he's so desperately trying to beget an heir.

And it's just the whole begetting vibe is so unromantic, isn't it?

It's just,

so anyway, so he doesn't get any more legitimate children before he dies.

So he's stuck with only Matilda.

And he says, okay, well, the only way my bloodline can continue, which is the main thing.

So he makes everyone say, look, I know I've only got a daughter and everyone thinks women shouldn't be in charge of things because this is the past and it's sexist.

I'm quoting him directly.

But please come on so that my DNA can carry on.

Please say that she can be the next king, effectively, ruler, queen.

And everyone goes, Your Majesty, of course.

For you, anything.

And twice, all of the big shots of the reign, all of the men, they didn't ask the women, which is perhaps a sign that this is a problematic strategy for the age.

But nevertheless, all of the men go, we absolutely, as soon as you're dead, Your Majesty, she's in charge and we'll absolutely do everything she says like we did to you.

And they all swear, including Stephen of Blois.

And Henry goes to his grave thinking, maybe this will be okay.

But as soon as he dies, everyone's more thinking, well, you can't have a...

woman in charge.

That's either because they themselves think a woman couldn't be in charge or because they think, well, I'm quite woke.

I think it'd be fine for a woman to be in charge, but other people won't accept it.

But yeah, so then, please, can Matilda be the next queen?

Yes, of course, Your Majesty.

Boom, he dies.

No, she can't.

Stephen runs to London, gets himself crowned, and he's King Stephen.

Well, the other thing is that Henry I's death was also due to food poisoning, we think, right?

Oh, yeah.

So it's like a double food poisoning thing because he famously died of a surfit of lampreys, I think.

That's what we're always taught in school.

But there's been a few recent studies, one by Matthew D.

Turner in 2023, who reckons that he died of listeria, possibly from the lampreys or possibly from something else yet with the lampreys.

But also perhaps it would have made him confused just as he was about to die because that's what happens with this illness.

And there is a story that on his deathbed, he actually told some of these lords, oh no, Matilda, I've changed my mind.

I don't think Matilda should be queen after all.

I think Stephen should be king.

Right.

And yeah.

My feeling is that that's not so much the effect of the Listeria, but the effect of those people who are in Stephen's camp lying about what the people said.

So that's awesome.

Who can say?

Yeah.

But yes, no, I'd heard that it was, yes, it wasn't like surfeit of Lampreys, rather unfair of him, right?

If he'd have could have too fewer Lampreys, it would have been fine eventually.

No, it's just that the Lampreys he had, or as you say, something that went with them, the the chips or something, that that yes, they'd been badly prepared apparently it's quite difficult to prepare lampreys in a way that that doesn't kill you so

on this occasion they hadn't bothered they're kind of like the blowfish of the of the day they call that they can they can be they can really do a number on you i mean you never see them on menus anymore no that's why it's so risky i went to a restaurant once that only did uh blowfish oh yeah only yeah oh my wife thank you look at it

ossica i think or somewhere like that and my wife wanted to try blowfish and i was i'd had a bit of food poisoning didn't really want it.

So we went to this place that sold blowfish, and the menu, it was like pictures on the menu.

Yeah.

And so we looked at them all, and it was like blowfish, blowfish, blowfish, blowfish.

And then there were some chicken nuggets.

And I'm like, oh thank God, I'll have the chicken nuggets, you can have the blowfish.

And then we went in, they sat us down, we ordered our sake or whatever.

And I said, in English, hoping that they'd speak it, I said, I'll have the chicken.

And they said, oh, no, that's blowfish godads.

And it was deep-fried blowfish gonads.

We laughed.

I'm not sure if I was going to eat blowfish, which I'm not, I'm not sure I'd want to eat it in the sort of place where they show pictures of the food.

The ones where they show a photo almost to prove that they can cook at all and not learn.

A lot of the places, as they go for their Michelin star, they decide that the photos need to be excised.

Henry, King Henry, he has, I think, the most baroque afterlife of any English king I've read about.

I mean, so he dies in...

He's in France, isn't he?

At the Hunting Lodge, where he has the lampreys and then dies.

And he instructed he'd be taken to Reading just before he died, because he'd founded an abbey there.

He'd always wanted to go to Reading, having

loves the spiscuits.

It was near-ish Legoland, or the site of the future Lego.

So he wanted.

He'd founded a big abbey in Reading, so he thought, right, I'll go there.

But he was taken to Rouen, his body.

So after he dies, dies he was taken to Rouen and embalmed there.

But not all of him because his heart, his bowels, his brains, his eyes and his tongue were removed and buried in Normandy at a different monastery or abbey or whatever it was.

And then he was embalmed and he was rubbed with salt and then he was put in a bag made of ox hides for the journey.

So he's, you know, he'll hopefully get to Reading in a decent state.

But you've removed his heart, his eyes, whatever.

I mean, he's not going to look lovely.

No, no.

Well, he's in a bag, so that's fine.

He's in a bag made of oxygen.

Open the bag.

That's the thing.

They get to the coast.

They get to the coast, and the boat is then delayed by four weeks due to bad weather.

And everyone's looking at the bag and thinking, oh, no.

And the bag, I think, starts to leak sort of very

body juice.

I've heard about this.

Very, very pungent

stuff.

There is, I think, a story, I think this is about him, that the man who was ordered to remove his brain, there was such a bad aroma about the brain because of how he died, that the man ordered to remove the brain also died.

Of smell.

Of smell.

Died of smell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I read that

albeit 40 years later.

They associate.

And in a carriage accident.

Yeah, but it was.

He was definitely that smell.

He was never the same again.

Yeah.

So, I mean,

what an afterlife.

What a shame that the Elizabeth line wasn't named after him because that terminates in Reading.

That would have been a beautiful tribute for King Elizabeth.

And it's subterranean as well, so maybe it literally comes up against his skull and that's that's used to save money, keep it under 50 billion.

She used some of the

heft of former King Henry to slow the trains down.

Oxide buffers, yeah.

But what I should say, though, the consequence of Stephen's food poisoning and then him being declared king and then him being not very good at being king and Matilda, Henry's daughter, being extremely pissed off to have been passed over is that she doesn't take it lying down and she tries with all her might to wrest the throne from Stephen and there is a huge civil war called the anarchy in a way that historians now say shouldn't be called the anarchy because that in some way reduces it.

What you should just do is spend thousands and thousands of words.

words describing it minutely rather than giving it a label.

These are obviously historians who are familiar with the concept of language.

But anyway, I'm going to call it the anarchy.

It does sound quite an anarchic, like an 18-year civil war.

It was quite anarchy.

It was quite anarchy, yes, but also equally, you could take a little bit of it, and it was quite calm, awful at night time, for example.

So it's very, very reductive of you to use that word.

So, you know, for example, I think it's very bad to call an apple an apple.

What you want is a printout of every individual cell.

And that's actually a better way of describing it.

Anyway, this anarchy happened and was awful.

and Matilda nearly got to be the queen.

At one point she was about to be crowned but then the people in London got cross and she had to run away and then at another point she was under siege in Oxford Castle and she ran away through the snow.

It's quite exciting but eventually she gave up and went back to Normandy which by then her husband Geoffrey of Anjou had wrested from Stephen.

But then her son does inherit the throne because Stephen's regime essentially

Peters out.

So they do a deal.

Matilda's son Henry becomes Henry II.

Plantagenet, named after his father, Geoffrey.

And then you have quite ordered succession for quite a long time.

It's all in the first four.

You know the rhyme of all the kings and queens of England.

It's Willy, Willy, Harry Stee.

This is all the Harry Stee bit.

Right.

It's just that bit.

This is Harry Stee.

I was just jumping a few Henrys ahead, Henry VIII.

I was looking up food because I thought royal meals sound a bit odd.

And I discovered that he used to serve this meal called cockentreis or cockentrese.

Okay.

Have you heard of this?

No.

So it was a pig sewn to another animal and he pitched it as a mythical beast and he would say this is a this is a mythical beast

wings of a bird is it

I think it came in a few different permutations.

I think it always usually had a pig on the front.

It's a chicken but with the testicles of a blowfish

to wear.

Yeah.

But yeah, so I just love that that Henry VIII would just present, you know, know, what was effectively the old version of a Yeti at the table for a second.

So he's sort of saying, not only have I discovered a mythical beast, I've killed it and we're going to eat it.

And it's the last one, sadly.

But there it is.

Look at it now, and then what do you fancy?

A bit of wings?

And they're like, oh, it tastes a bit like chicken.

It's weird how everything tastes a bit like chicken.

My bit tastes like pork.

Well, that's the thing about the coffee trice.

It's so full of flavours.

But yeah, the bottom's got chocolate in it.

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On with the podcast, on with the show.

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

My fact is that sea turtles have been going to the same restaurant for 3,000 years.

Blowfish served?

Yeah, it's only blowfish.

Yeah, that's nice.

You find a thing you like.

Yeah, just eat that forever.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is about green sea turtles.

It's a new study from the universities of Groningen, Exeter, York, Copenhagen, and the Society for the Protection of Turtles.

They've all teamed up.

So they're quite pro-turtles.

Very pro-turtles.

The Society for the Eradication of Turtles didn't get a look up.

Absolutely.

That's quite, I'm not sure if that's appropriate balance.

If this was on the BBC, you'd have to have one person on the show going, I fucking hate turtles.

They're a right-page and easy way.

People, you know,

Americans use the same words they do for tortoises.

I mean, it's just confusing.

Let's just have one.

We don't need the aquatic version of those shell people.

I've been trying to book a table at that restaurant for months.

Always by the window, party of eight turtles.

Restaurant is such a way of putting it.

But basically, it's a huge meadow of seagrass off North Africa.

And sea turtles go there to eat.

They spend the first few years of their life drifting around because they don't have the control to swim and

live in these meadows.

And then when they do get the control, they head to the meadows.

They swim miles and miles and miles to get there.

And they've used archaeology and ancient samples to work out these are the same habitats in use that sea turtles 3,000 years ago have been heading to.

And it's kind of just amazing.

And the meadows all have their own chemical signatures which end up in the bodies of the sea turtles.

So because they're kind of made of these meadows.

So yeah,

sometimes turtles will visit the same 50 meters squared.

They have the very specific.

It is like having a table in a particular meadow that they return to.

It's pretty amazing.

Sea turtles, you know, conservationists have always been trying to monitor if they're declining, you know, what's going on.

And in 2023, there was an amazing count that happened.

Volunteers went around, they found 74,000 nests, a bit over that.

But there's a huge problem that's happening, which is that the sex, the gender is determined by the climate.

And as it's getting hotter, they tend to be born as female.

And so we're slowly losing all male sea turtles.

There's a genuine worry that we're going to just, we've got all these women now and no men to sort of...

And you need enough diversity in the population.

It is a big problem.

It's to do with the temperature of the sand, I think.

So if the eggs are laid in sand that's above 31, then they're all female, you know, 31 Celsius.

And if it's below 27, they're all male.

And the species relies on the sand being a range of temperatures in between the...

Yeah, and historically, it's been, well, it'll be colder years and hotter years, so you'll get a reasonable number of both.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the problem.

Yeah.

So, no, it is a huge problem.

So, we're hoping for an hour,

maybe if you get above like 32, it goes male again.

So, actually, now we'd be rooting for further global warming in order to push through to the

really the hot guys, let's call them,

that start coming through again.

Well, the other problem is that the seagrass meadows are also hugely under threat.

So,

just everyone in every, like lots of sea turtles.

Some sea turtles are doing alright.

There are, I think, seven different species of sea turtles, and I think several are endangered.

But there are a couple of doing okay, but several are endangered.

And the meadows, lots of them are off North Africa where there isn't much environmental protection, and lots of the countries nearest are undergoing quite chaotic times at the moment.

And so, yeah, there is a risk that we're going to be.

Apparently, we lose a football pitch's worth of seagrass every 30 minutes.

Jesus.

Every 30 minutes?

Yeah.

I ever have to say that, whatever's mowing that seagrass, we want to use that on land because that's really quick.

I think it takes more than half an hour to cut the grass on a football pitch.

And this is just literally the use of, I mean, using global warming as a force for gardening.

Yeah.

gardening.

I kind of like climate change now.

I'm not the author now in favour of climate change.

Because the seagrass buries carbon 35 times faster than a tropical rainforest, another fact that.

It's amazing.

Yeah, because they just...

Seagrass, they take carbon from the water to build their leaves.

The leaves eventually die.

That sediment stays on the ocean floor for...

hundreds of years and so that's how they sequester so that's essentially carbon capture it's captured in the

middle.

Yeah, it's really functional carbon capture.

And I think 10% of the carbon in the ocean is buried by seagrasses or sequestered by seagrasses, despite them being 0.1% of the ocean floor.

So it's really

impressive stuff.

Yeah, we need loads more of it.

And we plant it?

There are a few plans to plant 18 hectares around the UK by 2026, which is not...

It doesn't sound like that's I don't know how many hectares in a football pitch, but it sounds like a few hours and that's done no good at all.

It's not, yes.

I think there might be more like pilot schemes, but they are trying to get more going.

And of course, if you protect bits of sea floor, then you can.

Do the turtles, Andy, do they eat seagrass?

They eat the tips of it.

I think that stimulates growth.

Oh, okay, so

there's no cause to eradicate the turtles.

The sea turtle society is not going to be a thing.

Let's just check.

You've got to be open-minded.

Maybe the turtles are the villains of the piece.

We're blaming ourselves for all our factories, but maybe those turtles

are cleverer than they look.

David's wearing a t-shirt which is saying stop sea turtles.

It's really

upsetting.

Outside of seagrass, they're quite fussy eaters, sea turtles.

They're given a bigger menu to play with.

So one of the other problems of the climate at the moment is sometimes they're going off course, they're going into colder oceans, and they get hypothermia.

So there's a lot of turtles that wash up onto shore and either they're dead or they get rescued and taken to turtle hospital, where they then get this brilliant menu of different things.

And so, each individual turtle has just a different kind of taste.

Like, number seven doesn't like the squid, for example.

A few of them don't like tails, don't give them any fishy tails or anything like that.

Um, yeah, and also it's creating chaos because turtles are very they're very solitary, but they're in tanks together to be fed.

And so, there's there's turtle bullies that they have to sort of reprimand and tell off and so on because they're eating the you know the tails and the so on.

Yeah, you can give turtles if they're not very well, you can give them mayonnaise.

Sweet.

Did you see this?

So, this is if there's been an oil spill and the turtles have eaten a lot of oil.

If you give them mayonnaise, it helps them to shit it out.

And the reason is because, obviously, mayonnaise is what?

It's oil and what is it?

Whatever it is.

Eggs?

Yeah.

It's an emulsion.

You need an emulsion.

We're revealing our ignorance here, aren't we?

It's really base food stuff as well.

It's not complicated, though.

This isn't off-menu.

We don't need to know anything about food.

It comes out of a jar, let's be honest.

Yeah, but it has an emulsifier in it, which mixes water and oil.

So, if you've got oil inside you, the emulsifier inside mayonnaise can help the oil to mix with the water already inside the stomach of the turtle and then just makes it easier to excrete.

That's so interesting.

That sounds amazing.

Yeah.

So, all these oil slicks are basically they're just a conspiracy by Big Mayo.

That

causes massive spikes in the Hellman's share price.

Whenever BP has a little mistake,

it's suddenly cut-ching.

I've got a link to the previous fact, weirdly.

Oh, yeah.

To David's fact, headline fact.

So seagrasses stop people getting gastroenteritis.

Oh.

Isn't that good?

Yeah.

So

if you have gastroenteritis because you've drunk some water normally, which has the pathogens in it which cause it, seagrass meadows have way, way, way fewer of those pathogens in and around and among them.

So that water is just cleaner.

You're less likely to get gastroenteritis from there.

And they've tried to calculate it.

It's between 8 and 24 million cases of gastroenteritis prevented every year.

Wow.

Thanks to that.

And I think it's because the seagrass kind of uses it almost like a fertilizer and takes it into its body.

So

it takes the gastroenteritis pathogens out of water.

Yeah.

But can it grow in non-salty water?

Almost none of it.

No, I think there's only one one fresh water, but not much.

And there's a problem there in terms of how useful it is.

Well, if you only drink seawater like me, it's actually

sparkling nor salty, I think.

I've just worked out a mnemonic.

So how many cases did I say prevented every year?

A little quiz, instant recall quiz.

How many million cases?

I think it was a football pitcher.

It was between 8 and 24 million cases.

Okay.

Now, if you need a mnemonic to remember that, those are the ages ages of Matilda and the Holy Roman Emperor when they were betrothed to each other.

And if you need a mnemonic the other way around, you're like, how was Matilda?

It was like, oh, what's the lower range of cases of gastroenteritis prevented each year by seagrasses?

You're welcome.

No, I don't want to.

So 8 and 24 when they were betrothed, but 12 and 28 when they were married.

So not that.

No, no.

That would be to massively overstate the beneficial effect of seagrass on gastroenteritis.

So that's...

I have a thing which I I want to link back to the previous fact as well.

So we have a mystery butcher of the previous fact.

I found a mystery turtle that I don't know much more about that I want to find out about.

And it's the first turtle to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive.

This was a

so I'm now punging out an image of people glumly looking at a huge pile of dead turtles at the bottom of Niagara Falls and go, I don't know, maybe try taping the next one to the inside of the barrel.

Well there was this is 1930, there was a guy called George Stathakis, and he had this idea of going over Niagara in a barrel.

And the barrel goes down, it doesn't break up, but it gets caught in a sort of

a tide that's underneath the...

I don't know what you call it, but he can't escape.

And he's there for 18 hours in this barrel.

So when they find him, he's suffocated.

He's dead.

And Sonny is...

Oh, sorry, yeah, there's a dead man in the story.

Do we suspect the turtle in this story?

Oh, I haven't thought of it.

Only one of us can survive this.

Yeah.

Well, the turtle might have been feeling quite negatively towards him,

to be honest.

This guy, you know, I'm not, wouldn't blame the turtle for not giving him mouth to mouth.

This is a guy that's, what are we doing now, sir?

A hundred years old as well.

Exactly.

It's a very old turtle.

It's a really old turtle.

And the barrel is in a museum now.

It's held as a kind of piece of Niagara Falls history.

But where did Sonny go?

No idea.

Like the butcher, you know?

Oh, we don't know what happened to the turtle after that.

Someone might know, but I couldn't find it.

Because they can live a lot longer than 100 years, can't they?

Because wasn't there a turtle?

I think I heard this on QI, but there was a turtle.

Wasn't Clive of India's turtle.

I think it was a tortoise.

Oh, no, that's a tortoise.

Is it lonesome?

If I was American, if you were American.

That would be a turtle.

Unfortunately, you don't know the least American person on the planet.

Is that a scientific fact?

Yeah,

the least American person.

Let's go another poster.

Yeah, yeah.

The Dalai Lama is slightly more American than me.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1861, there was one street musician for every 10 streets in London.

That's what a time to be alive.

What a time.

Noisy, noisy time.

Sounds like it was a bit of a bad time for quite a lot of Londoners.

Yeah, so this is according to journalist Henry Mayhew, whose article admittedly was relatively negative towards the street musicians, but he estimated there are approximately a thousand street musicians, 10,500 streets.

Okay.

And it was a real problem.

We've said before, I think that Babbage really hated them.

He really got frustrated with them.

And he was actually him and a guy called Michael Bass, who ran the Bass Brewery.

They managed to get it regulated in 1864.

But for probably the decade up until 1864, London was just an unbelievably loud place to live, largely thanks to these.

And what was their what genre of music did they favour?

Oh, it was all sorts.

So Mayhew said there were English violinists, Scottish pipers, German brass bandsmen, Italian grinders, so that's be like

organs.

Auto grinding, yeah.

And one French hurdy-gurdy player.

One out of all the th thousand.

Yeah.

She said.

Ah, here he comes.

It was a sheandy, women come.

Sorry, that's my prejudice there.

She had an instrument that, according to Mayhew, had a battered, heavy look about it and was grievously harsh and out of tune.

And for 43 years, she had her regular rounds.

43.

Yeah, so she went to Marleybone on a Monday, Kentish Town on a Tuesday.

So you knew how to avoid it.

Yeah, exactly.

You still go.

I saw a hurdy-gurdy player recently.

I was in Canterbury, and it's a very very hurdy-gurdy.

It was the very old, old, old bit of Canterbury, you know, the cathedral.

So you think he was a ghost?

No, he ran through a wall as soon as I started asking a question, but he wasn't a ghost.

Can you remind me what are you...

There's a handle, you wind, and he was doing something with his other hand as well.

And it looks like a small violin with a handle.

Oh, okay.

How interesting.

This is a really bad instrument.

Is it a stringed instrument?

It is stringed.

Okay, so the fingers are kind of on the frets, like a guitar.

This is sounding like the car that Homer Simpson designed.

It has some strings, but also handle, little keyboard on the bottom, and then you blow in the air.

I can't remember whether there were strings and frets or whether there were keys to play.

I think it might have been keys and a handle.

But

it's very much a combo thing.

It was really.

I only know it as like a comedy word, really.

I know, I was staggered.

That's why I said, what's that to this guy?

And he just went, woo,

sweet.

That was the hurdy girdie making the nice, yeah.

There was one other person, just while we're on it, described by Mayhew, who was an Italian fiddler who would go around imitating all the farmyard animals with his fiddle.

He said he'd been doing it for 12 years, and he could imitate the bull, the calf, the dog, the cock, the peacock, the ass, and the hen when she's laid an egg.

Funny crazy do all that with his fiddle.

What he couldn't do is play a tune.

What he found is that if you just bash at a fiddle, it makes this.

That is exactly the noise a hen makes when it's just later.

You might not be familiar that you live in central London, but if you head out to the countryside and listen to it, it's exactly like that.

So isn't that worth a bottle or two, isn't it?

How come there was money to support them?

People must have been paying for it.

Yeah, but it was like just pennies here and there.

But they were doing it day in, day out.

And these people, they had their regulars, so they would go to Marley Bone or to Kentish Town because they knew there was someone there who would give them, you know, a few halfpennies here and there, and that's all they needed to live, really.

Nice.

So, these

like grinders, as they were called, and the particular thing that people got annoyed by was people with barrel organs because there was a bit of racism in it because they were mostly from Italy and quite poor.

And the other thing that annoyed people was you just turn a handle.

There's no skill involved.

There's no skill involved.

There's no skill of making a violin sound.

No, it's just screeching.

Like a goat that's been surprised, but not badly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So like you just buy a barrel, slot it into the organ, turn the handle, the same tunes come out every time.

So it's like that was a frustrating thing for a lot of people.

So Charles Dickens's illustrator called John Leach claimed that he died early because

you saw it because

he said this is killing me and then he died and he said it's because of this.

His final words to fellow artist William Frith were rather Frith to be tormented in this way, I would prefer to go to the grave where there is no noise.

There we go.

There we go.

Really caught on his nerves.

They buried him under the bound stand at Clapham Commons.

I was looking into

what was going on in 1861, London, at the time.

Just curious.

No, as in, I've got the answer.

The invention of the toast sandwich.

Because Mrs.

Beaton's book of Household Management was first published in 1861, and one of the recipes in there was toast sandwich.

Get two bits of bread, put your bit of toast in the sandwich.

I've eaten that actually, tried it.

Have you?

Well, we did it mentioned it on QI once, and I thought I'll see what it's like.

Yeah.

And it's not as bad as you might think, I would say, because it gives you a little bit of texture to what otherwise is quite boring piece of bread.

Because bread, toast, bread.

Yeah.

Well, people put crisps in sandwiches, don't they?

For a bit of crunch.

But there's usually something else.

Although I think actually a sandwich of just butter and crisps.

I mean, flavour of choice.

Oh, I'm ready, salted.

Oh, ready, salty.

I think that's probably right with that combo, I think.

Yeah, salt and vinegar wouldn't quite miss it.

It's a lot more about texture than taste.

Yeah.

But you still think you might have a little bit of something else.

I think there was butter on it.

Mrs.

Beaton's version, wasn't it?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

So that was invented.

That was, well, the book was published, and that was a very

notable, very odd bit of recipe.

Black velvet.

You might have seen people walking around the streets, 1861, drinking black velvet.

Oh, oh.

Now, this is

a Guinness with a glass of champagne.

That's right.

Exactly.

And that's from then.

Yes, to commemorate a very big death of 1861.

Albert?

That's right.

Albert died December 1861.

Albert invented a cocktail.

Just before.

No, no, no.

He said, this cocktail's going to kill me.

And then he died.

And then he said, he said, I told you.

Can you think why they might have invented the cocktail?

I mean, to try and monetise it, I suppose.

Yeah, in general.

Is it black for mourning?

Yep.

And then champagne for a royal celebration.

So the Guinness would sit like a black band like mourners were wearing around their arms.

The idea was that it was a...

It's like getting a top on your beer.

Is that a lager top?

Is that what...

What is a lager top?

It's a normal pint of lager, but they pour out the tiniest bit of the top and they give you a little dash of lemonade just to take the edge off.

So it's like a very, very strong shandy.

That's exactly it.

When your shandies become a lager top, you know,

you're just telling yourself, that's just beer, mate.

And particularly when you're saying, instead of the beer, use whiskey.

Just two more things, because it's quite fun to know.

It was the publication of Great Expectations.

So Dickens obviously had been printing the stories in serials, but it was the first full book bringing the chapters together.

And then the last one that I found was it was the introduction of Widow Twenkie into pantomime.

Wow.

Yeah.

1861, the first ever

time to be alive.

Hello, that's great.

Yeah.

Have you guys heard, just on people being loud and other people being annoyed about that, have you heard of the New York Society for the suppression of unnecessary noise?

No.

This is my kind of organization, basically.

And yet you said David Mitchell is not very American.

So this was a doctor called Julia Barnett Rice.

Okay, she was, she qualified in 1885, got a medical degree, but didn't practice.

I think, don't know if women were allowed to practice in the 1880s, 90s.

I'm not sure.

But she...

She really wanted that street vendors not be allowed to shout.

And

she made it her life's course.

And she and her husband, he was called Isaac Rice.

He was an interesting guy in various ways.

He invented a chess opening that was called the Rice Gambit.

Just so you know.

And then spent about, apparently, the next 20 years of his life researching, analyzing, and testing the soundness of his gambit.

So that's great.

What a thing to spend your life doing.

But the thing is that I've never heard of that and I follow chess a little bit.

So presumably it wasn't very useful after all this 20 years.

No, you got to the end of the 20 years.

Like, oh, it's not allowed to move that way.

Oh.

Transform that was.

I have never in my life met a bishop that could only move diagonally.

It's just not realistic.

Whereas castles can't move at all without an earthquake.

And they just, they had a house on Broadway, way too noisy.

So they moved up to by the river, right, on Riverside Drive.

They built their own house, had a basement vault dug so that they could have somewhere quiet,

partly because they had six children so the house was quite noisy yeah so he stayed in the basement a lot of the time doing his gambit

as he called it

that's actually what the rice gambit is

and because they were by the river the river boats made so much noise blowing their horns all day so she uh julia she hired students to count the number of toots per day and it was about a thousand toots per day but if it was foggy it was three thousand so she started a campaign saying look this is very bad for people's health particularly and it it was mostly because she didn't like it, as far as I can tell.

Yeah.

And but the tugboat captains found out about this campaign of hers, and they found out where she lived, and they would gather outside on the river at night and all blast their horns.

Oh no.

But she genuinely got the law changed.

And she got Mark Twain involved.

And she like she established quiet zones around hospitals.

How many boats sank then?

Countless shipwrecks.

Tragically, very quiet ones.

That was the key.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Another person who hated it was Thomas Carlyle.

Just go back to the 1850s in London and the 1850s and 1860s in London.

He once wrote that he was considering to assassinate a vile Italian organ grinder who worked near his house.

But I think he might have built the first ever soundproof room

in his house in London.

This was in 1853.

It had double walls and it had a slated roof with a gap in between where he could get like muffling chambers full of air so that the sound couldn't get in.

And it cost him £170, which according to one online calculator I found, said it was about £30,000 today.

It cost him for a house extension.

That's, you know.

Yeah, in those days, and I think, yeah.

Why didn't they pay the annoying organ grinder to go away?

Oh, you could.

I think you could do that.

I think that is how they earned quite a bit of their money, just extorting it from people.

That must be a glum profession, though.

You know, ostensibly, you're there to, you know, here to entertain with our violin that sounds like a cow.

And then you go, you know,

the real money is for people who desperately want you to go.

It would be if we went doing live shows like we do and we got on the stage and everyone had done a whip round for us not to do the show.

I'm going to give you one last set of buskers.

This is in 2009 in Birmingham.

Two buskers who only knew two songs and have been playing them in the same part of Birmingham for 18 months on end were given Asbos.

They knew Wonder Wall and dropped the worst review.

Five star, four star, three star, one star, and then there is Aspos.

It was Wonder Wall and Faith.

They had a guitar and they had a bin lid.

And yeah, but they were playing it till like four or five or six in the morning sometimes.

One person said, to be fair, they didn't do a bad rendition of the songs.

But then they would, if you lived in the area, that would become the main version of the song to you.

And then you listen to Oasis going and go, no, they've got that bit wrong.

There's a few classic London ones I think most tourists will probably remember if they've got the tube, like the Henry the Hoover.

Was there a a person in a Henry the The Hoover?

Yeah, there was a guy I think next to it on a keyboard, but then he had accompanied by this Henry the Hoover that had the saxophone that would shoot bubbles outside.

Yeah, yeah.

So sorry, is the.

Where's the saxophone?

In the nozzle, I guess?

Of the Hoover.

Yeah, wait, the far end of the nozzle, like the bit that does the Hoovering, or is it right.

Have you removed the Hoover's trunk?

I can't believe you have the saxophone in there.

Quickly, what I thought was a solid image in my head has collapsed immediately.

It sounds great.

I just want a bit of doctrinal reiteration.

Yeah, if you suck a saxophone, does it make the same noise as if you blow a saxophone?

Wow, great question.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I'm assuming not.

You would think that.

Because you're sucking it into the.

Is it the horn, the mouth of the saxophone?

The bell end, actually.

Is it called the bell end?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so it presumably will make the opposite.

The opposite noise.

It doesn't always have an opposite.

Well,

we're now into quite the same.

It's a topical noise to February.

Yeah,

I mean,

no, I like this.

Yeah.

I think the big, we're finally getting to the big questions, and that's 500 X in, finally.

Doesn't noise have an opposite?

Doesn't always have an answer.

You can have an opposite wave function.

Well, they can do things, can't they, sometimes when if there's a noise of air conditioning when you're recording something, they can record that and in some way

invert it.

And then so

it sucks that noise out.

So if you're at home and you know what the opposite of the word February is, send it in.

The noise that you would play over the word February in order to induce silence.

And all these irritable Victorians needed was to have that on their own barrel and turn the handle and it would go quiet.

That would be amazing.

The opposite of Wonderwolf.

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Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating initiating force, and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact is that in 1993, a man in Brazil who robbed a factory of its glue was arrested 36 hours later, still in the factory he was robbing, because he was stuck to the glue he was stealing.

Didn't he think to steal the glue in its containers?

I think what happened?

So this is a guy called Edelbert.

He was just putting it in his pockets.

I'll just take the glue loose.

It's so heavy, these cans.

The police will be looking for tubes of glue.

They won't be looking for raw glue.

So this is a it was a 19-year-old.

He was called Edilber Guamaris.

We don't have to name him.

Yeah.

For the pronunciation of the story.

Oh, what's the opposite of that noise?

I actually think he was probably called Edilberto because I googled it and I can't find anyone else called Edilbert, but there's a lot of people called Edilberto where it runs over two lines and there's a hyphen around it.

That's interesting.

So yeah, so I saw this story in the Washington Post.

It was part of the yearly roundup.

And it was a 19-year-old, and he did take two large cans, and since something must have happened, they tipped over as he was trying to get out of the factory.

Glue spilled everywhere.

He obviously tried to pick up the glue, put it back in, I don't know,

and then got stuck to where he was.

It is very easy to...

I had to do a minor glue job the other day, and the amount of glue on my hands at the end of it was...

When you say glue job, is that like a bank job?

Were you also stealing glue?

No, yeah, it's just very easy, even with...

Does it dry that quickly?

Oh, God, it dries so fast

yeah, this is sorry.

This is now my personal glue is very very annoying because it either doesn't work like you know essentially prick stick.

Yeah, there are other brands of glue that don't work

You know, they sort of go and that's okay.

It sort of sticks it a bit, but you know, so does snot

or it's just so incredibly effective you can't be angry with it can you?

Because you know, yes, it's doing exactly what's small and yes I wanted it to stick things together and yeah I didn't say my fingers but yes I did apply my two fingers to each other while there was glue on one and now you know but it's like the glue is being facetious you know I didn't want to stick my fingers whenever has anyone wanted to stick their fingers together yeah yeah I didn't I it was through researching this fact that I didn't realize how important super glue is to the world of live music oh for live shows so take a band like the red hot chili peppers flea on the bass very aggressive with his playing, slapping and popping and all sorts, and he'll get huge calluses during the gig.

And sometimes with old wounds that he's got, they'll be ripped open.

So, he's got missing bits of his hand.

So, he'll run off stage, grab super glue, fill in the hole.

Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah, and come back on.

John Frashanti does it, the guitarist of the Red Hat Chili Peppers, Stevie Rayvon does it.

There's so many musicians that talk about it.

You've got to give it a minute, or they're going to stick to their instruments.

I know, I have someone else who glued them, glued their fingers together, actually, for a specific use in film.

Is this something we can guess?

It's something you can guess.

Oh,

no, I know it, so I won't say it.

Oh, great shout out.

Here's the only thing I'd say is like an additional clue.

I can't do this.

So if I was in the movie as this character, I would require the superglue as well.

I'm thinking of one of two things.

Is it E.T.

Weird Fingers?

That's good.

Or

Spock.

It's Spock.

It's Spock.

Well, he couldn't do it without glue.

Mr.

Spock.

Zachary Quinto in the new Star Trek film couldn't do the Vulcan salute.

So they glued his fingers on the screen.

Which I can't do.

I can't do it.

I can do it with one hand, but not with the other.

Would you feel if for that reason you weren't cast as Spock in Star Trek, would you feel that that was okay?

I think so.

Or would you feel you would be discriminated against?

Well, he wasn't discriminated against.

No.

I don't know if he showed up to the audition pre-glued.

I would say if I was auditioning for Spock, first thing, can you do that with your hand?

If so, okay, let's look at the script.

In fairness, they don't only cast people with pointy ears, so they do add some kind of.

Having said that, though, if some people had pointy ears, they would have a legitimate grievance.

I mean, talk about if there were real Vulcans among us, and then suddenly we're getting people to Vulcan up.

Yeah,

that's not appropriate, is it?

But because Vulcans don't happen to exist, it's okay to pointy ear up non-Vulcans.

But similarly, the hand thing.

I do feel like Zachary Quinto is taking jobs away from people like me who can do this.

Yeah, you can do it really dead easy with both.

You can do it.

You two can't.

I I can do it with one and just about with the other, and you can't do it at all.

I can't do it at all.

No.

Well, you can play Kirk.

That's fine.

There's plenty of parts.

Was William Shatner Kirk?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he couldn't do it either.

And they tied his...

No, no, but apparently he has to do it at one point.

They tied his fingers together with fishing line.

Oh my god.

That makes sense.

That's very cool.

Very

lovely you say I'm the least American person, but you have was William Shackner.

I mean, I have to say, I really knew that.

That's a piece of popular culture.

Got through to me.

Was Elvis Presley a sink?

Speaking of body parts and glue, do you know what butt glue is?

Butt glue.

I have a product at home called Butt Clean, but

it's for my water.

I have a water butt.

So you must have been disappointed when you bought that off the internet.

The amount of capsules I wasted before realising they had to be just dropped in the water butt.

So that's so it cleans a water butt there.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You just pop it in and it fizzes a bit.

All the turtles just float to the surface.

This is actually more to do with the Americans.

So what's it called?

Butt fingers?

Butt glue.

Is it for remote fingers?

That's a terrible bug remake.

Butt fingers.

And butt glue.

But

It's not for repairing water buttons.

No, it's not.

It's for the bottoms and it's for people who compete in pageants.

If you're wearing a very tight bikini, you want it to be exactly straight on your cheeks.

You don't want it to ride up or anything like that.

You put it between the bikini and the bottom.

So it sort of goes on the bikini to get it positioned.

I was thinking it goes on the bum, but it sort of lifts the bum.

Well, Andrew,

you would be good in the pageant world.

According to the Bravo show,

I'm amazed that is his line of work.

You would be an innovator because, according to the Bravo show Game of Crowns, which is quite recent, some people are using butt glue to actually hold the butt cheeks together to kind of make them seem very pert because it's not very strongly, but it's water-soluble, so you can put some water down there and it'll open them up again.

So, you just need a

thank goodness So do not use super glue instead of butt glue.

You're doing your air fix with butt glue, it's not it.

Oh my god.

Is that a common complaint in beauty pageant terms that the buttocks are too

far apart?

Possibly.

That's a sign of a criminal disposition.

I don't think they all do this.

Just to say if you're a beauty pageant, of course not.

No, no, no, of course not.

But just some people do it too.

But I thought there was glue.

There's all sorts of bits of glue for sticking bits of makeup to people's faces.

Surely this is the same as butt glue.

There's no need to say that this glue is

skin glue.

It doesn't need to be specifically for the butt.

I think there might be some marketing going on there.

Like I have something called nerdwax, which you use to keep your sunglasses on.

Right.

Because my nose is quite small, so my sunglasses slip down my nose.

And you can kind of put it on your nose and it kind of keeps it there.

But really, it's just wax.

But they put it in a nice tube that says nerd wax on and it made me want to buy it.

So I think it's a bit of that.

Yeah, so but glue you could use it wherever you want.

Booger glue.

Anyone heard of booger glue?

Okay, booger as in the American snow.

Yeah, sorry, I should explain what booger is to the non-American here.

No, I've heard the expression, despite being so un-American, as in

for a unit of snot, isn't it?

A unit of dry.

Oh, yeah.

Like a bogey.

Like a boogie.

Oh, yeah.

It's used in beauty pageants to hold the nostrils together because they are considered to be beautiful.

Two far-apart nostrils.

It's the...

Remember when you used to get a card, bank card, through the post, and when you would take it off, there would be a little bit of glue underneath.

Yeah, yeah.

It had a very snotty glue.

That's booger glue.

And that's right.

That's satisfying, though, because when that comes away, it's gone completely, which is actually not the case for snot.

I'd say snot leaves more of a sort of residue.

Better than snot.

Better than snot.

We've invented a better snot.

Now all we need to do is get it to somehow come out of our noses.

Because at the moment it only manifests on credit cards rather than in handkerchiefs when you've got a cold.

Come on, AI.

I need to wrap us up in a sec.

Oh, shall we do some bungling criminals?

Yeah, we know a couple of bungling criminals.

There was a man who stole a parcel from Reading.

Contained Henry I.

This is in 1994.

It was in the Philly 99.

And it turned out to be a bomb.

It turned out to be an IRA bomb.

And he ran down the road, pointing to the suitcase that he'd stolen, shouting, it's a bomb, it's a bomb.

And passers-by thought that he was high on drugs, but he dumped the suitcase outside a shop.

And 200 homes in Reading had to be evacuated while the bomb squad made it safe.

What were you going to say, blew up?

Right, I don't know.

I'll tell you what, I'll safely put it outside a shop.

I'll be honest, I think he was panicking.

How did he re-cause there must have been a there's a moment of realization of that stuff?

He's stolen the suitcase.

He stole the suitcase.

It's labelled IRE on.

It's ticking or there's a fuse or something.

The truth is, like, you would think it probably wasn't a bomb, right?

But they did, you know, they did make it safe.

So the newspaper report did say that it was a bomb.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it could have been.

A hero butcher.

You want to hear about a hero butcher?

Butcher, we wrote the

one, yeah.

This was a man who stole six pounds from a butcher, but the butcher was also an amateur magician.

And rather rather than raising the alarm because he thought the guy would run away if he said stop thief he decided to do a trick where he pretended that 50p had gone missing and he said oh let me find it it might be about your person and he searched the person then found the six pounds that he'd stolen uh and yeah that's brilliant yeah

this is in 1976 how did he yeah people were more willing to stand still then yeah exactly when the butcher suddenly are you know i have just stolen six pounds and now the butcher is coming round the counter and doing a bit of a trick about coins.

This is an eerie.

And how can the butcher prove, unless the butcher has already written his initials on the six pounds, which he might have done as part of the magic trick,

just saying that's my six pounds.

What are you going to do?

Maybe it was a coincidence that the butcher always basically stole all the money of the people who came in.

But on this occasion, it was just money that he was nicking back.

The reason we know about it is because actually the butcher let the guy go and even gave him some sausages for his tea because he could see that he was in need of this stuff.

That's really good.

But that when the guy was caught for a different robbery, he was in court in Newcastle and he asked for this and a few other crimes to be taken into account.

And then they brought the butcher in to corroborate it.

So that's how we know it happened.

Why did he mention that when he was being done for something else?

We're not sure.

He wasn't taking it any further.

And it said, fine, have some sausages.

That's how I got these.

It's a funny story, actually.

I'll tell you what I should tell you.

You know what?

I did think that, but it is a thing that they asked for other things to be taken into account, don't they?

But that, I think, is what they're saying: it precludes future prosecution.

I think that might be it, yes.

But I think on this, so I suppose maybe, but on this, there's no way the butcher's going to go, actually, I've thought about it.

That was out of order, and I want the sausages back.

Do you think it might make the judge look more kindly on you to say, all right, I've turned over a new leaf, by the way, here are some other things wrong?

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe.

I think if you said to the judge, I've never done anything wrong before, that's fine.

But the difference between saying talking about five previous robberies rather than four, I don't think that's going to meaningfully change the judge's view on it.

I think because it's such a funny story.

The judge must get a lot of quite grim cases of theft and burglary and stuff.

And actually, this funny thing that happened in a butcher's shop would make me look more kindly on a crook.

Now I know you're a bungling crook.

And then the butcher, anyway, the butcher saw the funny side, gave us a sausage.

Yeah, and then I mugged an old blue.

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And David.

At RealD Mitchell.

Nice.

But I don't actually look at any of the replies because it's so poisonous on there.

So, you know, you won't be hearing back from me tweeting you abuse for years.

You mean you haven't been to me?

I'm well aware.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, so do check them out.

But most importantly of all, get David's new book.

It's called Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens.

It's out now in all shops and online.

That's it for us.

We'll be back again next week, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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