450: No Such Thing As A Deep Drawer

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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 James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1910, the World's Health Organization tried to ban kissing.

Wow.

I'd think that'd be a bigger story, given such a huge organization, right?

Especially as it happened 30 years before they existed.

Yes.

You would think so, wouldn't you?

What's going on here?

If you listen very carefully, you will have heard heard me say the world's health organization, as opposed to the more commonly known world health organization.

And this was an organization.

Now, when I say an organization, I mean really one woman in America called Imogene Rectin.

And she decided that everyone should stop kissing.

And she got in all the newspapers and invented a load of badges and pledges and stuff like that and really thought that if people stopped kissing, then maybe we could stop the spread of disease, things like consumption, typhus, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah,

she kind of been completely wrong.

If everyone stopped kissing everyone else, we'd have fewer diseases.

Yeah.

Well, we did try it for half a year in 2020, if you remember.

No one got a cold.

So, you know,

I'm just saying maybe the cost is greater than the benefit.

Yeah, but she was, I feel like she was almost ahead of her time understanding then about the exchange of possible germs.

I mean, our mouths are rank.

We've got like billions of bacteria in them.

I know a lot of of them are probably good bacteria.

But I think there was a study done that had people drink like a yakkel or a probiotic drink and then had them snog their partner and they found that 80 million bacteria transferred from one face to the other.

Bacteria is tiny though.

Yeah, 80 million.

80 million.

We don't know how much that is.

Is there ever a thing where it's like, oh, three bacteria transfer is not

like it's going to be big, right?

Such a good point.

Even if three bacteria transferred before long, there's going to be more than there's going to be four, five.

There you go.

that's true.

Yeah, you go.

They are rampant.

She does sound amazing.

Imogene as well.

Imogene.

Imogene.

Weirdly, some newspapers call her Imogen, but I think they might be misprints because most of them say Imogene.

She got a lot of, not a lot of support.

She got some support.

She got a thousand acolytes, which I think is a good...

hit rate for this slightly diminished number of acolytes.

Yeah.

Well, including 70 brides who declined to be kissed at their own weddings.

Really?

Which I think.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

You may now kiss a bride.

No, you may not.

Yeah.

So in the article that you sent over, James, when you found this, there was a nice little thing that she, it starts off by saying that she'd convinced her husband of the risks associated with promiscuous kissing, which sounds like she had a bit of a dog in the race to begin with.

Yeah, she had a husband.

So he was a big kisser, right?

Well, I think what it sounds like, reading further into the article, is that kissing on the lips and kissing generally was much more what you just did.

If you had parties at the house, everyone would kiss each other on the lips, women would kiss each other, men would kiss men.

That's my party.

That's what her husband was telling her.

Anyway,

first of all, the keys go in the bowl, then we start kissing, and then we'll see what happens.

Yeah, I don't think men were snogging each other that much by 1910.

There have been phases when this has been in, but I think that's

spinning out.

I did just throw that in, I have to admit.

They definitely said women were kissing women.

I thought, well, men should be kissing men though.

I was in France recently.

I saw, I was in the south of France, and I was in a particularly kissy region.

It was a various region or regional france.

I saw some people kissing four times.

Yeah, but there's more.

I have way more.

I think you do get...

There are fives, definitely.

I've had way more fives.

Tell me where there's a way more.

You've had a six.

Yeah,

I lived in France for three months with my grandmother in 2003.

I've had a six.

You start counting when it's six.

Six.

I've had a six.

Maybe she wanted to give me a six.

I've seen a grandmother far.

No, her old E-mates.

All the grandmothers.

About the retirement.

Maybe they forget.

Maybe they forgot.

Halfway through, they're like, ah, whatever.

When I start again.

You can be stuck in the old people's name for hours, can't you?

Think about older people kissing.

This was actually one of Imogene's theories.

And she thought that if she could stop older people from kissing each other, and actually more like stopping them from kissing children, then eventually when the older generation died out, so kissing would die out because the children wouldn't have got it into their system that it's a thing that you do.

That was her plan.

That's interesting.

Probably would have worked if she'd again, if

she'd got more than a thousand acolytes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a cultural thing, you know, it's a learned learned thing.

We assume it is, yeah.

I think there's some debate, isn't there, but I think we assume it's a learned thing largely because about just over half of societies don't do it.

Yeah.

So the number is 46% do do it of cultures that were looked at to see whether lip-to-lip kissing was a thing.

Well, what's a culture?

As in, is Britain one culture?

No, no, no, it's not like Britain.

So it's obviously tiny minorities of people because the vast majority of people on Earth do kiss now because we're globalized society.

But if you go to an Amazonian tribe or, you know, Papua New Guinea or something,

I think it's particularly uncommon in parts of China and parts of Mongolia.

That area is quite uncommon.

So it was 168 cultures from around the world.

And this was a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which I assume is a serious university.

I just associate it with gambling.

I don't know why.

Las Vegas, it does do on the star.

That university is a very wealthy one, actually, because one year, a few decades ago, they put everything on red.

And

it's got a huge endowment now.

The first first person who kind of observed that a lot of these cultures don't do mouse to mouse kissing was a guy called Paul Denjoy

so it's de apostrophe and then enjoy don't enjoy

such a good name

he said that some people considered it an abomination and a form of cannibalism come on that's that's someone kissing too hard

on the road is a step on the road to cannibalism it's a slippery slope so just back to imogene uh very quickly i read a lot of newspaper articles about her because in 1910 and 1911 she was everywhere.

Obviously, the newspapers saw this story that they're trying to ban kissing and they loved it.

She was known as the foe of oculation in the press,

oculation being another word for kissing.

And in August of 1910, she tried to organise a no-kiss August, which, you know, it's like, you know, no drink January or whatever they call this in November.

I reckon this might be the first of those.

Yeah.

You know, 1910, it must be.

Yeah, that's very early.

But then by 1912, there were no more mentions of her on newspapers.com.

So after two years, the press weren't interested anymore.

And do we know any more about her story at all?

Like, do we know when she died?

I know when someone with her name died,

but I couldn't tell if it was definitely her.

So I'm not really sure.

She kind of went away after.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

13% of people say they've been

accidentally kissed on the mouth at work.

Oh, yeah.

How does that

dad say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dad goes around and kisses kisses people on the mouth all the time.

You know, but sometimes the turn

comes too sharply.

One air kiss to another air kiss.

Especially when you're doing seven.

I found someone else who has an anti-kissing rule.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

And it's

champion whistlers.

Specifically one champion whistler who's a guy called Christopher Ullman who I think has won at the International Whistlers Convention.

And there are, you know, lots of different kinds of whistling.

And he says he has a no-kissing rule for 24 hours before a performance.

Interesting.

Well, he must have a lot of groupies, you know, whistling groupies.

Yeah.

He sounds great.

He says it makes your lips mushy kissing before a performance.

So he doesn't lick his lips, which I'm very impressed by.

God, that's amazing.

They must be parched and dry by the time he's whistling.

But then they must be like a solid whistle, right?

If you've got dry lips, I think it's very hard to whistle, isn't it?

Is it?

What does he say, Andy?

I don't actually know how he moistens them.

I've only got other details like he can do Mozart's oboe concerto, the oboe part, but whistling.

Okay, which is hard to do.

I think most people can do any part, right?

Yeah, most people can whistle any tune.

If it's a tune, it's whistleable.

The problem is, none of us knows Mozart's LP.

That's a good point.

That's a very good point.

So when his stooge and the crowd goes, I bet no one here can do that.

And then he does it, and everyone's like, Is that that?

Is that the same thing?

Better to do a plane engine, though, or a drill, or

you know,

something that doesn't sound like a whistle.

Yeah, exactly.

What would the point?

What was that?

It was a drill.

That was Beethoven's.

All right.

Well, we've just casually driven by this guy's whole career.

No, but it's interesting because I, you know,

sorry, it can't be his career.

It's unclear.

It's unclear.

I know he's got all these creepies, but really, you're making a living out of it.

They asked him in this interview if his family gets sick of the whistling.

And he said, I actually don't whistle around the house very much.

Random idle whistling is very annoying.

Wow, someone's told him that a lot of times.

In 1921, in the newspapers, there was a worry about people kissing freckled girls on the cheeks.

Can you guess why that might be dangerous?

This was in the newspapers.

Freckles come off, they go on your lips.

You get lip covered in freckles, can't eat you stuff.

Yeah, were they thought to be contagious, I guess, is the...

Freckles.

Yeah.

In the 1920s.

Was this a justified thing, or was it a crazy...

Okay, so it's justified.

Freckled girls.

Because, because, because they are out in the sun, so they are wearing what back in the 1920s was radioactive sunscreen.

You're so close.

Yeah, so the sunscreen had chemicals in it.

No, no, don't carry on with the wrong answer.

Okay, just try it.

Radioactive sunscreen, which meant that to kiss them would give radiation and you'd become a clear.

It has a radioactive part.

Oh, okay.

It's the being outside part.

No.

Poisonous makeup.

Almost.

Basically, there was an anti-freckle medication that people were using to try and get rid of their freckles, and it was was toxic if ingested.

And so, there was a danger, according to the newspapers, if you kissed a freckled girl on the cheek, you might get sick.

Wow.

God, that's awful because the girls are going to think that their medication isn't working at all because still no one's kissing them.

Yeah.

On alternatives to kissing, which people have had to come up with, these poor societies that don't have kissing.

Darwin,

who met a lot of people in his life, different peoples, listed a bunch of alternatives to kissing in cultures.

And he listed rubbing of noses, with like which Laplanders and museumers do,

rubbing or patting of the arms, breasts, or stomachs, or one man striking his own face with the hands or feet of another.

Like a slap, proper slap.

It's like, why are you hitting yourself?

Why are you hitting yourself?

Oh, right.

Oh, actually, it's not you hitting yourself.

It's me grabbing your hand and then hitting me in the face with your hand.

You are actually hitting yourself, yeah.

Why are you hitting me?

Why are you hitting me?

Yeah, why are you hitting me?

Was that a game?

Why are you hitting me?

It was a catchphrase.

Can I talk about very quickly some other public health stuff?

Yeah.

Especially done by American women.

So this is a group of middle-class women from Manhattan called the Ladies' Health Protective Association.

And they...

Basically, there was a huge pile of manure in the middle of New York.

Okay.

It covered two blocks and stood 30 feet tall.

I was picturing much smaller when you said there was a pile.

Like the Godzilla, right?

So what they would do is obviously a lot of horses in those days, right?

They would collect the manure from stables and they would sell it as fertilizer to farmers who were just outside the city, but they needed someone to keep it.

And so they just kept it in the middle of the street.

It was this guy called, weirdly enough, he was called Michael Kane.

But Kane, as in Harry Kane, with a K.

But anyway, Michael Kane had this huge manure pile and he was making loads of money.

He was making $300,000 a year, which today is about $8 million from this manure pile.

And his brother-in-law was a New York state senator, so everyone thought there was nothing they could do about it.

Anyway, this Ladies' Health Protective Association came along and did a court case, and amazingly, they won it.

They basically called it a nuisance, and by the law, there was no way that he could get around it because of this technical thing they called it.

And not only that, the Board of Health denied any permits for any manure dumps in the whole city.

So that's why, if you go to New York now, there's not a 30-foot pile.

I mean, you guys wondered why there's got anything

And this group then turned to spitting.

Sorry, they turned to stop spitting.

Oh, yeah.

And that was when New York became the first city in the world that banned spitting.

Isn't it true that in the middle of Central Park, there was a massive reservoir of spit.

Disgusting.

Okay, on with the podcast.

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

My fact is that after King Charles I was decapitated, he was recapitated.

You just made that word up.

Yeah, so King Charles I, only king who's ever been

executed.

I guess loads of them have been killed in battles and things like that.

But it was in 1649 and it was just after the English Civil War and obviously huge move, you know, big odd move.

Big deal.

Political chaos, yeah.

But the king's body basically had to be seen and the, you know, the

authorities, the sort of Republican authorities, wanted to say, look, he's definitely dead and he's not coming back.

So they employed a surgeon after the execution to stitch the head back on.

I would have thought that if I'd have seen his body without the head, that would be even more proof that he wasn't alive.

What a good point.

It sort of looks like he was kind of coming back if the head that's meant to be off was suddenly back on.

Anyway, I should say quickly where I got this from.

I've been reading a book.

It's actually from a novel.

It's called Act of Oblivion.

And it's all about the hunt for the regicides.

Is it by Thomas Harris?

It's by Robert Harris.

Robert Harris.

Yeah.

And so, basically, and it describes in incredibly gory detail the death of the king and also the death of the regicides, who are the people who signed the death warrant and all this, and who really they really put through the ringer.

Yeah, this is, we should say, for international listeners, they didn't put them through the ringer as soon as they'd killed the king.

It wasn't like you've executed the king and now we're going to execute you.

It was when the restoration happened.

So there was a brief period where everyone was pro-killing the monarchy.

And then, sadly, yeah, after a decade, monarchy came back, and then all the registries got hunted down.

Sadly, Anna says, Sadly, monarchy came back.

Perspective of a roundhead, I was adopting the character

of Oliver Cromwell.

So I don't know anything about Charles I, having not grown up in this country.

So I am one of these foreign listeners, as it were, that you mentioned, Anna.

And it struck me that what a big deal it was to kill the king off the back of a trial, because there's all this stuff.

And Oliver Cromwell is a name that is very much part of the decision to bring him to trial and have him executed.

A key player.

Yeah, and the story gets quite gruesome when we talk about what happened to him and the others some 30 years later after the death.

Only 10 years later.

Oh, sorry, 10 years later.

Okay, so 1649, Charles was killed.

Yeah.

And then recapitated, right?

1650, I think it's eight, Oliver Cromwell died after less than 10 years in office.

And then two years later, the monarchy is restored, 1660.

Then, at that point, Oliver Cromwell is dug up and decapitated.

So both Charles and Cromwell had

a head-altering situation.

They should have switched them out.

It's Freaky Friday.

Freaky Friday.

It was his son, was it?

King Charles II, who was a direct son of Charles I, who then was the person in charge of the monarchy once, yeah, wasn't it?

The person in charge of the monarchy?

Or the king.

Well, it's surprising that it disappeared for 11 years.

I mean, that is a pretty big deal.

It wasn't just overthrowing the monarchy, it was overthrowing all of the monarchy.

It was one of the biggest things that's ever happened in England England's history.

What are you saying as a foreigner?

You don't follow.

Sorry, we're not up to date on Charles III.

You've been living here for about 20 years now.

I feel like you should have some.

Yeah, it should have been as I was coming into immigration.

You now have to do an exam to get into the UK.

No, a British.

Well, do you want to know something really interesting?

It's not in a lot of the citizenship tests.

Or at least a couple of years ago, there was a really good article on.

Should it be question number one?

There was a really good article on History Today about how

it wasn't in the test for new immigrants.

There was nothing about the Civil War, anything like that, and missed that whole period.

And someone asked immigration why isn't this included?

And they said the wounds are still too fresh.

A spokesperson said, the assumption is that we are all anti-Cromwell.

Obviously, parliamentarian, didn't believe in the divine right of kings.

The reason that Charles I was overthrown was because he really went hard on the divine right of kings as well.

He loved it, didn't he?

Like, he prorogued parliament for 11 years, didn't want to ask them anything, and then told them to give him loads of money.

He was into absolutist monarchy.

And when they put him on trial, he was like, well, you can't put me on trial because God put me here.

Yeah.

And now I think Cromwell is a bit of a villain to almost everyone.

But in another country, he would be a hero.

And in fact, in America, he's remembered quite heroically.

He's still got a statue outside of parliament.

Yeah,

which is surprising.

So he's not.

Yeah, and that wasn't toppled in the old...

topples of statues period that we went through quite recently.

No, it wouldn't be.

After he died, his or rather after he died, was dug up and then posthumously re-executed,

His body and a couple of comrades, they were hanged, beheaded, and then the heads were placed on spikes.

His head stayed on a spike for 25 years.

That is the most amazing, for me, the most amazing thing about this whole thing.

For 25 years, whenever you came to London, you could go and look at a head on the spike.

And if you came back 25 years later, it would still be there.

That's amazing.

It's amazing.

I think about all the shops near my house.

Most of them, most of them are less than five years old because they just all got the turnover.

It was much less in those days.

You got a lot of of costume in the same place for a head.

Amazing.

But one person who lived through the whole thing was Oliver Cromwell's son, Richard.

So when Cromwell died, he it happens so often with rulers, tyrants, newly established reigns.

Anyway, they try and hand over to their kids.

Let's get rid of the monarchy.

It's ridiculous that someone could have the divine right to rule, but when I die, I want my kids to have rule.

I actually do think Napoleon 2 is a good name for an emperor.

And anyway, so Richard Cromwell resigned.

He was not up to the job.

I mean, he was not

as zealous as his father, and he didn't have the authority.

So he was kicked out in 1659, one year later, and he just lived out his life.

He died in 1712.

I think he moved overseas.

I think if your dad's head was on a spike in London, you probably would move out of town.

You wouldn't stay in London, would you?

But get this.

He died in 1712.

He lived an incredibly long time.

So he saw the whole thing, and he was the longest-lived British head of state until the year year 2012 when he was overtaken by Queen Elizabeth.

No way!

Only when she was 85.

So that's the age he lived to.

Okay.

So for a long time the longest lived head of state was Richard Cromwell.

Do you know where Oliver Cromwell's head is now?

Oh, was it reburied with the rest of him?

This is interesting.

It was buried in Cambridge University now.

Okay, so I read this in a Giles Brandreth book and I tweeted him to ask him if this was true and he tweeted me back.

So I said, my memory of it goes like this.

There is a relic of Oliver Oliver Cromwell kept by the chief whip or prime minister.

Have I made that up?

I probably have.

He wrote back, it's in the drawers at Checkers.

So my memory is that the skull of

Oliver Cromwell is in Checkers.

It's in a drawer.

In a drawer.

And it's, and

I think I read it in

Brandreth's autobiography, his diaries of his time as a politician.

And in it, he says he goes to Checkers and the drawers open and they let you see and stroke the skull.

Stroke the skull.

So what I have in my notes is that one one day there was a storm and the head blew off the spike.

And they thought, you know what, it's been here for 25 years.

We probably don't need to put it back up again.

Everyone's seen it now.

They get the idea.

Yeah, they're good.

Again,

and then the skull was sort of taken away and it was just kind of sold in auction after auction and went through a load of families.

But then it was buried at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960.

Interesting.

That's what I've got.

But I mean, probably like with these things, there's probably 20 of those skulls around that, though.

Yeah, and I don't specify what relic I mean, he could have thought it might have been a finger or something.

In my head, it's his head.

Oh, right.

Well, maybe it's not the head.

That's more normal if it's a finger.

Because I can't think of a drawer that could even fit a skull.

Oh, I think you can't think of a drawer that could.

Are you going to pull out of that?

I should pull out of that.

I suppose I'm imagining a desk drawer and all those old desks and tiny drawers.

The bottom drawer, even of a standard wooden desk, will be a bit bigger.

But even if that didn't exist, it doesn't take much imagination to take a drawer and make it slightly deeper.

My head, ironically, my head is not big enough to get around this concept.

Have you ever seen a filing cabinet?

Because...

Oh, no, Darling.

It's too much.

It's too much.

I can't take it.

So, Anna's amazing Freaky Friday idea, which I actually think is a brilliant idea.

Thank you.

Maybe could have been true-ish because when Cromwell's head got put on the spike, there was a big rumor around that actually it wasn't his head and that they'd mistakenly gotten the wrong one and it was probably some old king of England.

They didn't specify which one it was because he was originally buried.

Was it in Westminster Abbey I think?

So there was loads of other kings there and they thought that they dug up the wrong thing and just put an old king's head there.

Surely you just pick the roundest head.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

Round head jokes.

It's a round head jokes.

I love it.

They did used to toss them in altogether a bit.

Like actually there was obviously a conundrum after Charles was decapitated because they don't want to create a martyr of him by having it either be a big thing burying him or not burying him at all.

So I think they took him away to Windsor and they interred him in Henry VIII's tomb, weirdly.

Wow.

And

then in 1813, they decided to dig him up again.

I think this was to check.

Again, again.

He was there again.

Just the first time again.

This is Charles I.

And it was George III's physician, Henry Halford, who was kind of leading the exhumation.

And he ended up with Charles's vertebra and some beard and some of his teeth.

which is, yeah, some beard.

I'm surprised a beard is still extant after all that time.

Yeah, that seems weird, doesn't it?

200 years, are we saying?

Yeah, well, this was 1813, so it's 160 years.

160 years, yeah.

So he says that they went, oh, it's not worth opening the coffin again.

Do you mind just keeping these?

And he kept them.

Other people who were there say that he went in and nicked all the stuff and hung onto it.

But then his grandson returned it.

It was the 1890s, and he went to the Prince of Wales and said, Look, we've got these bits of Charles I.

Do you want them?

The story, the QI facts that we always say about this is that they used the vertebrae as a salt holder.

Oh,

really?

Yeah, so if you ever went for dinner at Sir Henry Holford's house and you wanted some salt, it would be a little dish, but when you looked at it closely, it would be part of his backbone.

Wow.

No, you can fit that in a cupboard.

The eventual outcomes for the regicides, who were the people who'd signed the death warrant, basically, were bad.

So, I think a lot of them were disemboweled.

They were not drawn and quartered.

They were hanged until not quite dead, and then had their genitals removed, and then were disemboweled.

Still alive, still alive.

While still alive, got to fly.

But if you got away, then it could be okay.

And interestingly, if you live in Connecticut,

near, I think in New Haven, then there are three streets called Dixwell Avenue, Wally Avenue, and Gough Street.

Dixwell.

Dixwell and Wally.

Wally.

And what was the other one?

Dixwell, Wally, and Gough.

They were the worst surveyors that I ever had for my eyes.

But Wally and Gough are the two that are in this book, Act of Oblivion.

Dixwell was left out, apparently.

Well, they all ended up in this place, and they liked them so much in America, obviously, because America aren't that pro-monarchy, that they named these streets after them.

Yeah,

they were in very, very religious, puritanical communities, which were already very uncertain about monarchy and wanted to vote.

It was kind of the place where they could go, wasn't it, when they were safe?

There was another place in North America named after someone connected to this story.

So the wife of Charles I was Henrietta Marie.

She was a French Catholic princess.

She got married by proxy,

which is quite cool.

So Charles I wasn't there when she got married.

So he had a proxy who was George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

But George Villiers wasn't available either.

So they got another proxy and he was Charles de Lorraine, who was the Duke of Chavreuse.

And basically, they got married with this guy pretending to be the king.

And in those days, you could do that.

I think we've said before, haven't we, there were various rituals.

If you're married by proxy, like you, as the proxy, would maybe have to touch the person's thigh.

I think that happened.

You have to lie in bed and touch their thighs.

Lie in bed and be witness with them.

Yeah.

So the king only met his wife three months later at Dover.

Three months.

They'd been married for three months when he met her.

Wow, so far.

And one of these areas in North America America where Catholics felt safe where they could go was named after Henrietta Marie.

And it was Maryland or Maryland or Maryland.

And we always say this name and we always pronounce it wrong on this podcast.

And the people of Maryland always write to us,

but now I actually think that because it's named after Henrietta Marie, it should be called Mariland.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

So that's what I will be calling it for now.

That's a very nice thing.

Especially because she didn't like Mary, actually.

She was, because she was French, and she was very French.

And she was big in English.

She didn't like being called Mary.

English used to call her Mary as like a mixture.

And she said, no, I'm French.

Mary's not my name.

Don't even like the name Mary.

Fair enough.

Marie is a better name than Mary.

I-M-O.

Can we talk a bit about the execution itself?

Why?

Because it was such an interesting...

I mean, what an extraordinary day.

I mean, one of the weirdest days ever to happen in English history, you know, it was on Whitehall.

It was not far from here.

So...

When it happened, the executioner had to wear a disguise.

Yeah.

Because the executioner has never been identified.

You don't just mean like a HUD.

No, I don't.

I mean a wig, a fake beard, a sailor's costume.

Yeah, confusing details.

Clear as to why, and fishnets over the face.

Okay.

Afterwards, after the restoration, there was a big manhunt for who was the exact executioner, because we're going to kill him.

There must have been a lot of sailors getting rid of their fishnets just in case they got.

Well,

the executioner was never properly identified.

One guy was sentenced to death for it, but then the sentence was overturned.

One guy claimed to be and then wrote that they

can't remember about that.

There's a museum in London that has a few of these relics from the execution, including a shirt that belonged to Charles I.

That they believe, you know, they can't actually work out properly, but all his bits of clothing was sort of torn off him and handed round.

That's the Museum of London, isn't it?

The Museum of London, yeah.

And among those items, they have a patched leather shoe of a man called John Big, and they believe that Big was the executioner.

At least that's one of the theories.

Mr.

Big.

Mr.

Big.

Yeah.

That's what that whole thing.

It was an analogy.

The sex in the city.

The sex in the city.

It was an analogy for the English Civil War.

That's very interesting.

I can't believe you didn't see that.

So I guess, what's her name?

Is it Carrie?

Guess.

Carrie Fisher.

Carrie Fishnet.

But they thought that would be too obvious.

Oh, my God.

I don't think it's Carrie Fisher.

Is she called Carrie Bradshaw?

She's a different person to see.

She called Carrie Bradshaw.

Well, interestingly,

John Bradshaw was the parliamentary commissioner who tried Charles I in Westminster.

You are joking.

No.

I can't believe we're actually blowing this shit while I'm talking about this.

This is huge.

Bradshaw and Pitt.

I don't think any of us had ever probably watched Sex TV.

I'm all over it right now.

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

My fact this week is that in World War II, a Finnish soldier got tired in the Arctic, so took the entire platoon's rations of methamphetamine and subsequently skied 400 kilometers to safety.

Extraordinary.

It's the power of uppers.

It's insane, the story.

It's a really insane story.

So, this is a chap called Aimo Koivanen, and it was a time when Finland was at war with the Soviet Union.

It was mid-Second World War.

Finland was sort of on Germany's side, war with the Soviet Union, and he's fighting

in this very cold area with his platoon.

And he had been tasked with keeping his entire group supply of purvitin, which is meth.

And it was so crucial in the Second World War.

Everyone was bloody taking it.

And he was really, really tired.

And I think the Soviets were coming and chasing them.

And he was told to lead them, to make tracks and lead them away so they could escape.

And he was at the front.

And he said in his memory of it that, which is so implausible.

He said, especially because first of all, he said, I didn't want to take them because I was kind kind of against that.

I disapproved of drugs.

So I tried not to, but then I got so knackered that, look, I just tipped a pill into my hand, what I hoped was a pill, but I was wearing mittens.

And so quite a few came out.

Turns out all 30 of the pills came out.

And then because he wanted to hide what he was doing from his comrades, he just ate them all.

You're being shot at.

It's stressful.

I'm just

eaten all.

Have all the tic-tacs, basically.

You know what I mean?

If you par a lot of tic-tacs in your hand, let's say you only want two, but accidentally five come out, you're not going to put them back in the tic-to-shoot.

Exactly.

No.

Especially if you're being shot at.

You're being shot at.

As I usually am when I eat some tic-tacs.

Just drop them in the snow.

Anything.

And then it goes Sonic the Hedgehog because suddenly

he just eats this.

I was thinking of Popeye.

When Popeye just finished.

Suddenly.

It turns into a mutant, absolute like.

Yeah.

He basically, as it goes, he received the hit in one swoop.

And the hit, by the way, lasts for a very long time.

When you take a normal amount of meth, it can last a few minutes.

But you figure

he took an OD level of it, is what they say, right?

And I figure that the OD level would come to you in one hit.

This kind of just plays out over a number of days.

And he goes speeding away.

And

they're trying to chase him.

And they eventually...

And he collects all these rings.

And they can't keep up.

And the music goes really fast.

And they're chasing him still.

And he's just going off.

And then this is the craziest bit, which presumably you've got more on, on Anna because I just couldn't believe it so I stopped reading he blacks out

he blacks out and keeps going basically a few days later he kind of was like oh where am I and it turned out they'd been doing that and he still did the

he may have collapsed multiple times on the way basically one of the things I found surprising in his um account is that he said he felt amazing for a bit quite a short time I think where he skewed like Sonic the Hedgehog and then he said something very unexpected happened I completely lost the plot and started hallucinating and collapsing I would say that's not unexpected if you have taken 30 pills of birth but then the mystery is what happened to the people with him and I think because what had preceded this was actually an argument between him and his men and he blacks out and the next thing he remembers he wakes up and he's completely on his own so one sort of suspects they had a chat and said this guy's being so annoying right now he's a massive liability post meth post him taking post meth yeah well they took all his ammunition off him, didn't they?

Yeah, yeah.

And his food supplies.

So he woke up and had nothing.

Well, then he started skiing towards some.

He saw some allies in the distance and started skiing towards them.

Much too late, realizes they're Russians.

But he's still got the drugs in him.

He skis through them and past them.

He keeps going.

He said they were so confused, they just moved their...

They should have shot him and they just moved their legs out the way to let him get past.

Excuse me.

He spent all night trying to get to a distant farm window, which turned out to be the North Star.

And then didn't he, he survived, didn't he, by like chewing on some

tree, like a cactus style.

He boiled pine needles at one point.

So he still had

delicious pine tea, had some pine tea, but he was really starving.

It was only at the very end where he somehow had found a hut.

Finally, this cabin in the woods.

And first of all, it's so funny.

He says, I lit a fire in the middle of the cabin.

It's still clearly high.

So he didn't know what he was doing.

He lit a fire in the middle of a wooden cabin and it just set fire to the cabin.

And he said, I just sat next to the fire and followed it around as it burned the cabin down gradually.

The whole cabin collapsed around him.

How many days into

that was the trip?

And I mean, the trip.

Well, he just doesn't know.

I think about five days, but he has no idea.

He only realized when he came out of it, it had been two weeks.

And yeah, on his like last day, he was about to starve to death, and a jay flew past, and he whacked it with his ski pole and ate a raw jay.

Again,

not the actions of someone who's completely with it.

I mean, the ability to beat beat a bird out of the sky is

how

the stick.

It's really.

Ski poles are quite thin.

People don't go on pheasant shoots with just a ski pole, do they?

And there is the reason.

They're pros, yeah, yeah.

Was this before or after he got blown up?

Sorry.

That was after.

Because he

did.

So he was set on fire and then he was blown up and then he at the J, right?

Yeah, but yeah, yeah, because he found another little building.

I said it was a German post, but the Germans had retreated from it and they had attached mines to it yeah yeah so he blew basically shredded his entire foot in the first explosion and then he sort of hopped around and he opened a door and then that's it that was also mined and supposedly he came to about you know many meters away he'd been blasted across but he was still holding the doorknob like in a cartoon

yeah it's the most extraordinary story do we think true i can't imagine any of it's true i think he was

because we knew he was anti-drugs right maybe he's come up with all this as a don't-do drugs story.

Yeah, big bit of propaganda.

It's like a finished 40s talk to Frank thing.

Yes.

I think we know, because we know from his associates that the first bit happened and the last bit happened.

But I suppose the only account we have of the in-between bit is his.

With a guy with a lot of drugs in his body, that's all we've got.

But he must have had a shredded foot, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He must have been holding a doorknob.

Must have had a bloody ski pole with him.

Oh, Denjan.

He just kind of looked at all these things and like, right, I'm going to have to make a story up about these.

But anyway, somehow he made it.

I mean, eventually he was found by his allies, who were the Germans or the Finnish, and taken to hospital.

And

apparently his heart rate was still 200 beats per minute at that stage.

It's a lot.

It's a lot.

It's incredible he lived.

He lived through a sort of ripe old age, you know, he just sort of wore ended in the 70s.

Anyway, it was mad.

But the use of meth was...

It was big, wasn't it?

The Germans were particularly into it.

Yeah.

But everyone did it.

Well, I was reading, you could get these pills called Forced March, which were quite common, even like at the start of the 20th century.

So they

were a blend of cocaine and caffeine.

I mean, I don't know why you need a caffeine at the point where you've had all the cocaine, but it was basically

sold publicly.

It was sold by the Wellcome, actually, or by Burroughs Wellcome, who was one of the Wellcome family.

Oh, really?

It was a pharmaceutical family there.

Yeah.

Yeah, they took them on the Antarctic expeditions, the Forced March, Scott and Shackleton, but they took specifically Forced March, which I think they've got to market it in a gentler way.

Or maybe that's what you want.

I think that's what you need in motivation, right?

Yeah.

It's like, I can't march anymore.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Some forced march.

And did they use that?

Because they use that, the Germans use that in the war.

Did the Brits use that as well, and the Allies generally?

I don't know.

I think the Allies, I think there was meth use all around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The meth pills that were synthesized in the 30s.

But maybe not for everybody, for people who...

I mean, obviously not for everybody, but you know, then maybe it would be for pilots rather than for

standard influence.

I think it was pilots to stay awake.

I think that's why the Allies use it for sure.

That's so interesting.

So off the back of this, I was just looking into s supplies that you take in the Arctic and what what you know, what you have to keep you going.

And I mean, it was e it seems like it was either cocaine or uh biscuits.

As in there were like

it sounds like a student's fantasy, doesn't it?

Yeah, you're right.

Same.

So like get this.

Captain Scott, right?

Scott of the Antarctic.

Yeah.

He did loads of expeditions there.

He took some

specially made biscuits, which were glucose enriched, and they're made by a firm called Huntley and Palmer.

But he set off with digestive, rich tea, petit bur, fancy lunch, ginger nuts.

as well as emergency Antarctic and small captain biscuits.

And later in his trip, he got resupplied with more biscuits.

I actually think that they're some of the worst biscuits you've just named, like digestives and rich tea.

Where's the top knobs and the

Jammy Dodger.

Well, tragically, this was a pre-Jammy Dodger world.

I mean, maybe he would have made it back if he had some Jammy Dodger girl.

On the first all-female expedition to the North Pole,

every woman involved ate four penguins per day.

Wow.

They don't have penguins in the Arctic.

They brought penguins from the Antarctic to the Arctic solely to mince them up and eat them.

Yeah, they're cruel, and that's why they haven't sent women back to the North Pole.

This is, of course, biscuit penguins.

They were sponsored by McVitie's, and so McVitie's provided them with hard to nail down the number, maybe, but thousands of penguins, I believe.

And one of the women said they were told to eat four penguins a day.

Interesting.

According to the biography, Frigid Women by Sue Riches and Victoria Richards.

So this was two of the women who went on it.

They were given six biscuits per person per day for the expedition.

Oh, really?

Maybe the person who I read, they got their biscuits nicked before they gave them to her.

Yeah, that could have been.

It's interesting, because that many, it must have been loads of days they were travelling.

It was.

It was a relay, so it meant that four women at a time were going and then they would be airlifted out and the next lot would be airlifted into wherever they were that's cool yeah yeah i was thinking you could wear the biscuits as a kind of extra layer of warmth but maybe wear the biscuits well it's like a like you could make it because they're quite flat aren't they they're you can kind of make you could have a waistcoat that was lined with penguins and actually they're two biscuits and in between there's like a little bit of chocolate or something right what insulation you're thinking yeah exactly where the biscuit it just sounds like you're one of the members on the trip who misheard where are the biscuits

emerged covered in penguins what What year was this, by the way?

It was 1997.

And so I've got a question for you.

Remembering that it's 1997 and they're British and thinking what was happening in 1997 at the time, what do you think the newspapers nickname them?

Something like Tony Blair.

Blair's frozen women.

Go away from politics.

Oh, away.

Go to culture.

The spice girls were big.

And they were in the Arctic.

Yeah, so

frozen the spices?

No, no, no.

Wait, wait, say it again.

Say the ingredients.

The spice girls were big.

Yep.

They're going to the north pole.

What nickname is it?

Girl polar!

Girl polar!

Ziggy Zig Arctic.

Jesus Christ.

Girlpool want to be the North Poles.

Two become

16 become

literally everyone listening has got this.

Hold on, everyone.

What do you get of the Arctic?

Snow.

As well as snow.

Ice.

Ice.

Icy spice girls.

Ice girls.

The ice girls.

Pew, pew, pew.

Nice one, Dan.

Wow, straight away.

Straight in there.

Sonic Shriver.

And one of the patrons of the Ice Girls was Dawn French, the comedian.

She.

And she told the press that she'd actually made the cuts to be on the expedition, but she decided to stay at home and comfort all the husbands.

That was so good.

Very nice.

One of the husbands dumped his wife while she was out there.

Oh, while she was out there?

Yeah.

She's married to Dawn French now.

What?

Was it Lenny Henry?

It was, yeah.

No, this is Anne who had triplets and she'd never had any experience before.

She's this amazing explorer now.

Anne Daniels, yeah.

Anne Daniels, never done anything before.

But she, when they finished the expedition, all the other women had letters from home and she didn't have one and it was a sign that her husband had decided.

Of course.

The chapter about Rosie Stancer.

Is she one of the...

She's one of the Arctic,

one of the frigid women, as the book has it.

So she was on it.

So get this.

I think she's quite

posh.

Like, her grandfather.

Posh ice.

Posh ice.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

So, and she, like, like Hand Daniels, she went on to do a load of other expeditions.

She did one, the Snickers South Pole Solo and the Mars North Pole Solo.

So these are all chocolate and biscuit sponsored.

But her grandfather was also a wannabe, thank you, explorer.

He was the fourth Earl of Granville, right?

And he wanted to be a polar explorer, but he was thwarted.

Can you guess why?

It was something about his body.

He had a weird sort of inner ear thing that whenever he wanted to go north, he always went south.

That's a very creative one.

Better than what I've got.

Shall I tell you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was too tall

on the earth.

Because you hit your head on the top of the earth.

Because he wouldn't fit in the tent.

He was too tall for the tent.

So his feet would be sticking out.

Yeah, and that would obviously kill all the men in the tent because it was cold.

Could he not do the kind of the embryo position?

Yeah, yeah.

He was, I mean, maybe this was an excuse and it was his personality, but he was told he was too tall to fit in the expedition's tail.

I looked at five foot eight.

No, no, too tall.

Could you get a bigger tail?

No, they don't exist.

My gob nods.

Can't bring something that doesn't exist, mate.

I can't believe you just got the fetal position the embryo.

I know, I can do the embryos.

We've got a phrase for that chance.

So I read a story which is that Anne Daniels, mother of triplets, one of her things to keep her going was to just say her kids' names over and over again again out loud.

The triplets just repeat their names.

Baby ice.

But they had very near-death experiences.

It was so hairy.

Scary ice.

Okay, now we just crossed off through.

We've got two more to get.

Done posh, we've done scary, and we've done baby.

So that leaves sporty and ginger.

Wait, oh, they didn't take ginger nuts, they took the penguins.

Yeah.

Damn it.

They're all sporty.

Okay.

But yeah, the mother-daughter, the daughter wrung her mum to say, hey, I'm doing this Arctic expedition.

And the mum says her daughter invited her.

The daughter says she definitely didn't invite her mum, but her mum decided to go.

But they both fell through the ice at one point.

So the Arctic moves.

I didn't quite realise how much when you're exploring, it shifts and moves, and the ice was creaking.

And they're wearing skis, and they both fell through the ice and had to like swim in skis.

And she said she just remembered while also towing these supply wagons.

They all had a supply wagon they had to tow behind them.

Somehow they survived.

Yeah, they somehow survived incredibly.

But then, it sounds like God was watching because they ended up, two of them ended up managing to climb out onto one side of the ice, but their group was on the other.

So, they were on either side of a river, and they just walked either side of this river, and they were getting more and more divergent.

And they realized they were not going to be able to get back to each other.

And then suddenly, the ice started moving, and the river closed up

and the ice joined together.

Wow, but it would have been very precarious.

As in, to walk across that is quite nerve-wracking.

You would have had to tread, you would have had to walk quite gingerly.

Spice.

Ice.

Ice.

Jones saw that coming from such a distance.

What's that on the horizon?

Is it the North Pole?

No, it's Andy's junk.

Oh, it doesn't feel as good when you get there.

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

My fact this week is that the crowd science expert who designed and mapped out the queue is called professor keith still

did you try and say keith it sounds like keep

so his name's keith still it looks like keep still when you say it in a weird way yeah

what the queues do they they move don't they yeah but this one famously was a very long one that required you to keep still

actually required you to keep walking for about five minutes it did but what were you doing when you weren't walking i suppose you would keep still.

That's right.

They always say keep still.

This is the queue for Elizabeth II.

This is the passing of the queen.

There was this extraordinary queue that lasted somewhere between five miles onwards.

And if you were in it, if you were someone who came to London to be part of it, you could be waiting between nine and 24 hours to eventually get to the front of the queue.

Professor Keith Still is

someone who helps.

I don't say his name normally now.

We've done the facts.

It's okay.

We've explained the joke, which always works.

Now let's let's just call him by his name.

So he is from Burton and Kendall in Cumbria, and his job is a crowd scientist.

So for the last 30 years, he's been doing this as a job.

And he was the person who was in charge of creating a line that was going to be one that meant that people felt safe and that they had toilet stops along the way.

And

he had to, and, you know, medical assistance.

And he had to devise it for something that was twice the length.

Where would it have gone?

I don't know.

I'm not sure if we would.

When you drop into the English channel.

Well, because they did stop it at one point.

They say we're at capacity.

So they didn't use the proposed route.

But then what they had was a pen where a sort of secondary queue started where you could then go from that secondary queue.

Queen for the queue.

God, yeah, I remember that happened.

I didn't go clubbing very much as a student.

Astonish,

no, no, no, it's true.

But there was, I think, partly because one of the first times I went.

Your friends said you were too tall, didn't they?

Yeah, apparently the club had a very low ceiling.

They always do.

Yeah, I would have hated it.

No, there was a club called the Bridge, which was uh, you'd go to, yeah, and um, there was a pre you'd queue up for ages, and I did queue up for ages, and then you get in.

I got in, and it turned out that the club I got into was actually a queue for the actual club.

No, that was it, yeah, there was this, there was this whole and it had a bar and everything, but it was basically the queue for the bridge.

As in, you'd get given a ticket, and when they called out certain tickets, you could go into the actual club.

But I'd queue for about 40 minutes to get into the queue club, which is like an absolute chump.

I've been to the bridge multiple times.

I don't remember the old double queue.

Anna probably walks up to the front and says, I'm Anna Shrzhinski.

Milani in the back of the city.

And you're DJing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is actually quite impressive,

the level of standing.

So I hadn't really thought about the fact that you would be actually standing up because you are constantly moving, so you can't really sit down.

You were standing up for 24 hours.

And lots of people needed medical treatment.

291 people needed medical assistance just on one day with 17 having having to go to hospital.

From

dehydrating and fainting, it is quite a lot.

Of course, they could have just not had a queue.

I mean, these days, we do have systems to stop people from having to queue for miles and miles and miles.

What, like booking in?

Yeah, you could have just gone on the website, said, I'm going to come between one o'clock and two o'clock, and then the queue would never have gotten longer than an hour.

What was the fun in that?

What would the news have done for a week?

That's the point, isn't it?

The point is that it's like this ceremonial thing that they wanted to show how much, how important it was and stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Professor Still,

Keith Still,

got into Keith.

Um, he got into queuing, first of all, several decades ago.

He was at a Freddie Mercury gig.

It was an AIDS awareness gig, and it was at Wembley.

And he and his friends, they were stuck in the queue for hours, and his friends were all quite annoyed.

And he was quite mathematically minded and thought, God, this is really interesting, actually.

And so he got into queuing, and he then, his sort of interestingly, queuing for the queen.

Yeah.

And queuing for Queen.

Oh my god.

We've blown the the shit wide open.

His next thing he did, he went to Wembley

Stadium and

he got special permission from whoever's running the grounds and he would spend his weekends for ages sitting above the players' tunnel watching the crowds.

Oh, the match was going on, but he's not watching it.

I think he wouldn't have been paying any attention to the match, yeah.

You would just have seen this guy sitting above the...

Yeah.

He can't.

He said of the queue,

the recent queue, he would not have been able to withstand the length of time it required to get to the front.

So he himself can no longer queue.

Even cue.

The queues he decides.

Yeah, because he's old.

He's got an arthritic hip.

Yeah, that must require him to keep still

more often than he'd like.

Absolutely.

It's funny because

he's got a lovely website and he lists his hobbies on it.

Does he?

Oh, I didn't see his website.

Oh, he has a great website.

Yeah, he owns multiple motorbikes

and he plays bowls.

Does he?

That's quite a rare combo, I think, like having a Harley Davidson and then playing crown green bowls.

Is it?

Well, one seems to be a good thing.

Oh, you're right.

Hell's Angels.

They were famous for their bowls matches, weren't they?

Sorry, they're the only people that motorbike.

I forgot that as well.

He's going to be a Harley Davidson.

He's got a...

I associate both with real ale pubs.

I bet he bloody loves a real ale.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some other animals.

Q.

I didn't know this.

Okay.

Yeah, so.

Probably, I reckon.

Yeah, must do.

Yeah.

Fish cue.

Do they?

There There are fish which get.

Yeah, there are

small goby fish, right?

They have this thing where they have a mating queue.

Okay, this is really, this is a bit sexy, actually.

So only the top male and female mate, right?

And all the other females have to wait in a queue before they're going to have sex.

I think with the top male, but maybe it's actually

a sort of queue of males.

I don't know.

But basically, to organize the queue, they do it by a pecking order of like sexiness.

And sexiness is body mass for them.

So the biggest female is the sexiest one and gets to have sex first, right?

And then the next biggest and so on.

And they can measure.

You know how in school you had to line up for fire drills and things with a height order?

Did you?

Okay.

Well, we did, yeah.

I mean, not too tall for that.

I was always left to burn, weirdly.

But the fish can tell their body mass, right?

So if the difference is

five percent, more than five percent of their body mass, like between one female and the next, they will queue neatly, right?

And they, because they know who's bigger, they can see.

Well, because they've all got scales, haven't they?

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

but if the difference is smaller than five percent between two females in the queue the smaller one will try and cue jump and will sort of say this is there's enough there's it's small a small enough difference i think i could do it yeah and then the bigger one will drive it out of the group will sort of force it out of the queue they'll have a fight right well if in during that fight they both lose weight

this is what they okay

it's similar to that smaller fish will sometimes adjust their own size they will lose weight to avoid presenting a challenge to the fish that's bigger than them so they don't get in a fight and they don't queue jump they say right, I'll just shrink my own body so that I'm.

I don't,

I guess they don't eat for a while.

Oh, in the lead-up to the queue.

Not as in.

Okay.

Yeah.

Not on the spot.

They can't do it.

Like a shit.

They can't do it.

They can't shit everything else.

No.

Famous queue.

When McDonald's opened in Moscow

in 1990, people queued for six hours to get a McDonald's.

And they served 30,000 people on the first day.

And one Big Mac cost 3.75 rubles.

and a monthly wage was 150 rubles.

So that is the equivalent today of a Big Mac costing £52.78.

That's it.

Wow.

Yeah.

And people queued for six hours to get that.

Jeez.

That's because if someone tells you it's that expensive, you think it must be worth it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

There was 700 seats inside and 200 outside of this

McDonald's in Pushkin Sky Square.

And so 900 people, that's about the same as the Globe Theatre.

It was the largest McDonald's in the the world until McDonald's left Russia.

Wow.

But in a sense, isn't McDonald's really the

theatre

sort of space for...

Keep going, you're going to go.

I've got no idea where you're going.

I'm wondering where you're going.

I believe in him.

I believe in him.

He can do this.

What do you see at McDonald's late night?

You see drama.

Yeah.

You go to a McDonald's.

All human life is there.

Kind of like a theater.

Macbeth is a...

Macbeth.

I'm going to Macbeth.

so much there for you, Andy.

That was what you were going for.

I feel like I did a lot of work in the midfield there.

So I've just slotted it home.

The shearer of your jokes.

We did on QI once that the way we load planes, aeroplanes, is totally wrong.

So, you know, when you get, you're waiting for a plane and they say, if you're in rows 50 to 70, please come forward now.

And they load from the back first, which seems to make sense.

Well, actually, that's the least efficient way to do it.

It's way more efficient just to say, everyone randomly get on the plane.

Go, go, go, run, be alive.

Close the door in four minutes, go!

You mean the easy jet system?

Leave the kids, go!

Well the great thing is if you have kids you get to the front of the queue.

Yeah, although that is one of the best ways to do it is to make sure the slow loaders, i.e.

people with kids,

do get on first.

That's why they do it, I guess.

But yeah, someone studied it mathematically and realised that loading from the back is actually slower than doing it randomly because people bunch up and they block each other, but you're not loading the empty spaces.

and actually one really good way to do it is do window seats then aisle seats then middle seats oh cool vice versa

it's mad

I mean it is an insane way of doing it's insane you're with let's say you're three people going on a plane a family yeah all right just dad first yeah now the four-year-old on their own

families aside i do think that is a cool way of doing it because then everyone's slotted everyone goes to the end of their row where the windows are and no one's faffing about in the corridor bit of the plane they're not doing on purpose andy they just just need to get their bags into the

I'm not sure the window seat knocks that out because you still need to get your bag into the top bit.

Well, I think the key thing to do is everyone just carries the bag with them and just holds it in their arms until the plane's taken off.

Then you can put it up in the racks above.

I don't think you're allowed to hold the bags in your arms, especially if you're on a like emergency exit seat.

You've got to put that under your feet, I'm afraid.

Anyway.

Oh, well, don't fly.

I was reading a website called Line Logic, and they specialise in looking at public guidances and line management solutions and so they go into businesses and try and sort out how they can best manage their crowds and stuff and they say that the word faffing directly relates to the idea of getting to the front of a queue and then waiting for that person who's just in front of you who's paid to sort of gather their things together.

The faffing that they do of sort of like putting their wallet back and so on.

Well like that's the first instance of the word faffing.

It's what this website.

What is this website?

Who are these people?

Line logic.

What are their credentials?

I'm Beckham.

That's when they say that faffing time takes roughly 3.17 seconds.

That's the average faff that you'll have.

That's plausible.

Yeah.

Because you can pride yourself on being a non-faffer once you're at the front of a queue.

Like, right now I've got my wallet.

I'm ready.

I'm ready to put the card away.

I'm ready to grab the thing and go.

Yes.

Or you can faff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder what you are, Anding.

I pride myself on my non-faff.

You really are laser.

Really?

Oh, you guys were expecting that.

I see.

It felt like a weighted survey when you explained the difference between the two.

Because they do say some people are absolutely awesome and they always know exactly how to leave a checkout.

And you get these complete arseholes.

I panic, I'm annoying the people behind me, basically.

So I think time when you've finished your transaction feels

longer to you.

I agree.

I often rush off without my shopping.

I'm scared.

But I feel you're the type of personality that would want to make sure that was acknowledged.

And then so you would somehow waste the person behind you's time going

no worries getting out of your way there so quickly.

Oh, just don't worry.

Just another day being a hero.

I reckon you just go, beep,

three seconds, 24.

Very good.

Enjoy that extra second I've saved you.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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 all be found on our Twitter Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast.qi.com.

Yep, or go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Check out all the previous episodes up there.

Also, check out Club Fish, the exciting, hidden behind-the-scenes membership club, where we put extra content, extra fun shows, and you'll also get ad-free episodes.

Check it out now and join today.

Otherwise, come back next week.

We're going to be back with another episode, and we will see you then.

A goodbye.

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