431: No Such Thing As A Vampire From Devon

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Your ring your way.

Hi everybody, Andy here.

Just before we start this week's show, I wanted to let you know we have a very special guest on.

This week Anna is away very sadly.

She's on her holidays, but the great news is that in her place we have the absolutely magnificent Rachel Parris.

Now, I'm sure you may have heard of Rachel.

If you haven't, frankly, where have you been, guys?

She's a comedian, she's a musician, she's an actor, an improviser, she does it all.

She has been on so many brilliant shows, and she is a musical comedian as well.

She tours the country with a grand piano, performing magnificently funny solo shows.

She's basically the heir to Tom Lira and Tim Minchin put together.

And on top of it all, she has just published her first book.

It's called Advice from Strangers, and it's a kind of comedy book/slash memoir/slash feminist manifesto, all centered around the time that she traveled around the country, asking her audiences to give her pieces of advice.

It's funny, it's serious, it's hilarious, it's uplifting, and and we're so glad that she could come on the show because, as you're about to hear, she was absolutely great.

So that's it.

Without further ado, on with the show.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and it's our very special guest, Rachel Paris.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Rachel.

My fact is that List, the composer, played the piano so hard in his concerts that he regularly broke piano strings.

And super fans would nick those strings and make make bracelets out of them.

Oh, so cool.

So cool.

So I don't play the piano, but it feels like that's quite a hard thing to do to break a string.

It's easy to break a guitar string, right?

That's right.

But piano string.

It's rare.

Piano is rare.

He's not the only person to ever do that, but I think that

it happened to him all the time.

That was like his thing, is I'm going to break these strings.

Why is he so angry?

I don't know.

Maybe he just had like really heavy hands or something.

There were comments that he had massive hands, which allowed for him to stretch.

A lot of piano players say that that's not actually a thing.

There were certain patterns that he would play that a big hand doesn't necessarily make.

We actually have plaster casts of his hands, so we know exactly how big they were.

When you say we, do you mean in your home?

Yeah,

my wife.

And here they are.

They're here tonight.

We find that his fingers were slender and long, but they weren't like massively long.

Like, I think Rat Maninoff had really big hands.

Rat Maninoff had 12 inches.

And his hands?

I measured mine.

Mine's a nine-inch span because I've got

small hands but a big stretch

on.

But yeah, when you measure 12 inches out on a ruler, that's insane.

So Rat Maninoff was known for having like absurdly big hands.

And you can only play Rat Maninoff pieces if you've got those.

You can fake it a bit, but you have to do some very clever manoeuvring.

If Rachmaninoff was alive today,

and if he...

If he did that in mime, you know, when you mime a phone,

you're two opposite, your thumb and your little finger.

Yeah, he would hitch the top of his head with his thumb couldn't.

Knock his hat off.

He could only mime a car phone from the 80s.

So this whole thing of him banging on the piano, he was a passionate, amazing player, and that was kind of his thing.

He was like a rock and roll.

List.

He was like rock and roll, wasn't he?

List.

But fortunately, if he did smash up a piano, he always had two pianos on stage with him.

Yes.

That's such a cool idea.

And I'm not sure if it was necessarily because he knew he was going to smash up a piano.

It's because he was such a showman that he wanted to give both sides of his face, basically, to the audience.

So he didn't have a roadie bringing on the piano when he broke his, like dragging it along.

I think he would drag it out.

Really?

Yeah.

I've read an account of a gig where

he dragged the second piano out.

And I think if you're an audience member and there was a second piano, you would be slightly disappointed if it didn't come into play.

Yeah.

You'd think he hadn't given it his all.

It's like Chekhov's piano, isn't it?

And he had these like beautiful flowing locks of hair, which made him very popular.

He really had the whole like Elvis, you know, someone coined the term Lister mania.

Yeah.

That people were absolutely obsessed with him the way they are sort of today about pop stars.

But he actually had the talent to earn it.

But yeah, people would ask for locks of his hair.

Yes, and they would collect his cigarette butts and they would wear them in the chains on their necklaces with his initials.

There's an account of one lady doing that.

I don't know how widespread it was.

But there is it, like it's uh, it did happen.

And apparently, everyone hated it because she was carrying another stinky old cigar end, basically.

They were like,

Susan, can you hit that in the book?

Because that's really good.

Not in the butt.

Oh, yeah, very good.

That's true.

Apparently,

I was reading Listomania.

It does sound like it was a bit of a just like beetle mania, you know, where it was just screaming girls and stuff like that.

But apparently, the original term, the mania, was used in terms medically.

It wasn't just that people were just getting too excited.

They genuinely thought that this might be leading to medical conditions.

So if List came into town, they'd be like, you know, we've got to get doctors ready.

I mean, I'm making that up, but

to effect, that's what the mania meant.

Right, people actually got ill.

Yeah, exactly.

I was thinking that his performance is a bit like YouTube, Andy, and Rachel, you do ostentatious, right?

Which is an improvised Jane Austen play.

And his concerts were quite a bit like that.

I was reading.

It's a while since I've seen you two live.

Right.

Poorly received.

Well,

he would get a member of his audience to give him a little sort of motif, a little theme, and they might just go, do, do, do,

or something, maybe not like the Nokia theme.

And then he would spend the rest of the concert just like doing the amazing bits that are using.

He had a very interesting life.

So he was a prodigy as a child, and he was hothoused by his dad.

They all were wild.

They all were.

None of these was like doodling around until they were 50.

But it was kind kind of interesting just on that, I'll we'll go back to that, but um like because mass market pianos had just come in and also the French Revolution had just happened, so you had pianos were only played by posh people and they were really really expensive and you could only get them if you were super posh.

But then suddenly just around the time of Mozart and then list after him, suddenly you could get cheap pianos and that meant that children could play it and children could practice it and so you had these children coming up who were as good as the you know posh you know and also all the previous pianos were cheap, if slightly spattered with the blood of aristocrats who had been dragged away secondhand not eBay, yeah,

some somewhere.

Um, but so yeah, so his dad took him around, um, his dad sort of worked him like a dog for years, you know, years.

His father died when Franz was 15, and he took pupils as a 15-year-old prodigy, and then had this incredible performing career until I think his late 30s, maybe,

and then stepped back because he had a lover, a countess lover

who um who encouraged him to compose she said look this performing is all well and good but he's making a lot of money but and he just kind of stepped back he moved to weimar and um and just started composing who was the lover do you know yes she was called countess uh no sorry she was a princess he was married to a countess and traded up uh to princess caroline von sein wittenstein anyway she left her own marriage for him and there was this whole thing about whether they could annul the marriage so they could be her marriage so they could be married And the Pope agreed to it, and then he changed his mind.

It was all a big old thing.

But yes, so he took a really crap job as a Kappelmeister at the court of Weimar, and he had to wear archaic clothes to perform it.

Oh, wow, because he was a rock star, and then he went and

suddenly it's like a music beef eater or something.

I did think of ostentatious a bit, and that you're basically dressing in stuff that was the height of fashion 200 years ago.

And the pay was so bad, it only paid for his cigars.

That was literally all.

But we don't know how quality his cigars were to be fair.

Yeah.

Yeah that's true.

Yeah.

He could have sold them on eBay afterwards as well.

And Caroline de Sein Wittenstein, she was a Catholic princess, wasn't she?

And she got him into Catholicism and then he went on to try and become the Pope's personal...

Try and become the Pope.

Try to become the Pope.

Hey, hi.

Good luck to you.

Take a cigar.

He wanted to be the official composer to the Pope, but he was turned down.

And the alleged story of why he was turned down is that apparently he was playing in the cloisters one day, and all the nuns in the nunnery ran to him and started kissing him and

so.

And the Pope decided, well, if he's like that, if he's going to have that effect on women, we're not going to have him as the appreciation.

How hot was this guy?

Yeah, I'm just going to say he must have been fit as.

I think he was.

I think he was six foot two.

We've established he had big old hands, like great,

lovely locks.

Yeah.

Oh, I think he's a body Yeah.

And he had a lot of mistresses in his life.

He did.

He did in later life take holy orders, but minor holy orders.

He didn't become a full priest.

I think maybe because it would have involved a vowel celibacy.

And he was just, he wasn't quite ready for it.

He just did it as a hobby, like embroidery.

Meet the nuns, basically, I think.

Well, here's a weird thing.

In 2018, in Spain's Got Talent,

he didn't.

There was the show.

He showed up.

Just one very big hand comes out and raised

Holding a cigar.

Smashing pianos left and right.

No, no, he did not show up himself.

However, he kind of did in a way because one of the competitors of that year was a guy called Michael Andreas, who's supposedly the great-great-grandson of Liszt.

Really?

Supposedly, and he's said to be the son of not only List, but of one of his prodigies, List's prodigies, who was called Sophie Mentor.

And Sophie Mentor was supposedly the best, his favourite.

And she did have a kid, but by all the accounts, she had it with someone else.

But this guy is claiming that he is the great.

Descended from both lines.

Yeah, descended from both lines.

So he hasn't even picked like a mother that you can't trace it back to.

So supposedly, we have a descendant who's incredible, by the way.

I've seen him play.

He was a prodigy as well.

He was a child prodigy.

He was winning competitions since he was five years old.

They're all prodigies.

Are you a prodigy, Rachel?

Because you're a classical pianist.

I am.

I don't think I was a prodigy.

I didn't.

I didn't say that, though.

I did like piano competitions when I was small and

I was teaching when I was 15.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Were you teaching?

What I'm saying is you don't have to be a prodigy to teach at 15.

You just have to be willing.

Were you teaching smaller children or were you teaching?

Yeah, smaller children.

So I was like grade eight and I was teaching grade one.

That's really impressive.

That cigar that you're smoking at the moment.

I like that.

I do think if you've got the willingness to practice and basic, like strong musical aptitude, and if you start young then you're going to be a child prodigy.

I'm really fucking glad.

It sounds like I'm really doing down like Bark wasn't that shitheart but like you know that sounds interesting.

Do your hours.

You'll get there.

Do you guys know Lang Lang?

Yeah.

One of the big concerto players, piano players of recent years and he's a global name.

He only got into playing piano.

He was a child prodigy, by the way.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

He only got into it because he...

I want to see Rachel and Britton's got talent.

Little kid comes out of the fuck's snack.

This again.

Go on.

Child prodigy, it says that just means has a piano.

The time.

He was inspired hearing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody number two

by Tom from Tom and Jerry.

And that's how he got into playing the piano.

Oh, I totally grew up watching that.

I can remember.

Yeah, it was called The Cat Concerto.

And it was Tom was playing piano, Jerry's on the inside, gets woken up, and they start having a fight.

It's an amazing piece.

Supposedly, a lot of piano players began their love watching this one cartoon of Tom Jerry.

And then when you get older, the piece, yeah, it's the Hungarian Rhapsody, which is already a phenomenal piece, incredibly difficult to play.

I can play the first few pages, and then it gets to the really hard bit, and I'm like, no.

But in the cartoon, which I had on VHS, so I watched it over and over and over again, they mess with it, they pull it around, and they go into like the can-can and they go into a little jazz bit in in the middle of it and then return to the piece.

So when I got older and I started playing it,

I had be like, oh, oh, the can-can doesn't happen here.

That's so weird.

This bit doesn't turn into jazz.

So confusing.

I've got one other connection that Liszt made in his life.

So we said before List had big old hands, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's someone else you met who also had big hands.

George Elliott.

George Elliott.

George Elliott.

We have a running fact on this podcast that George Elliott had great big hands.

She had one big hand.

One big hand.

She could play Rat Validol, but only the right hand.

She had different size hands.

Yeah, but we don't.

Supposedly,

she was a dairy maid in younger life and she churned the butter and that gave her a hand.

I milked the cows.

I milked the cows, and this gave her one absolutely honking Hulk fist.

Oh, wow.

And if you look at pictures of her, they never show her right hand.

Yeah, they didn't have enough paint.

Didn't have enough paint.

But basically, old Big Ann's herself, George Elliott.

Big hand with herself.

Sorry, Big Anne.

In 1854, she visited

Liszt with her lover, George Lewis.

They were fleeing scandal because he'd left his wife to be with female George Elliott.

And they made friends, they had coffee together.

Imagine the conversations they would have heard.

That's amazing.

Wow.

High five.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the downhill skiing at the Nagano Olympics in 1998 was postponed due to snow.

Too much.

Too much.

Too much.

Too much snow.

If you go on Encyclopædia Britannica about the Nagano Olympics, it says the most memorable aspect of the Nagano Games was arguably the weather.

Oh, wow.

It said it brought heavy snow and periods of freezing rain.

There was even an earthquake.

An earthquake?

Yes, that's incredible.

Where is Nagano?

It's in Japan.

Oh.

Well, that's prone to earthquakes, isn't it?

Yeah.

You want to pick somewhere right in the middle of a tectonic plate if you don't want to.

Yeah, it wasn't like a massive one.

No,

but everyone felt it who was there at the time.

Yeah.

If you were halfway through a ski jump, you'd be the only person who didn't feel it.

And you'd land and everyone else would have fallen over.

Maybe the earth moves to your advantage by about 50 meters until you've broken the world record.

Amazing.

But yeah, the LA Times said

at the time, they said, we are seeing firsthand the fundamental problem of the Winter Olympics.

They are held during the winter.

Yes.

It's like the ski resorts often have not enough snow, don't they?

Or they say, oh, the snow hasn't happened or it's fallen.

Do you ever get the wrong kind of snow?

I feel like that's a...

Yeah, I've been dragged into the world of snow by my husband.

Oh, you walked through that wardrobe, didn't you?

Yeah,

that's it.

Yeah, what a nightmare.

My husband's a huge skier and snowboarder.

I am not, never skied before meeting him, and I get dragged to ski resorts now and keep trying to learn to ski really painfully.

But also, yeah, the cancellations for snow happen at ski resorts all the time.

They're like, yeah, the slopes closed because of snow.

Yeah.

I think that skiing is something that you should be a child prodigy at, right?

Yeah.

Because it's easier to learn when you're a child and you don't have the fear.

I learned when I was in my 30s.

Right.

And I say learned.

Yeah.

I can't learn.

It sounds like we're at some stage.

the chip.

It's the worst thing.

I feel like for me at the moment, skiing is simply trying to stop.

All it is.

It's just, I'm in a deep plout all the way down.

Why aren't I stopping?

A deep plout, what's that?

When you put your ski V-shaped shit before,

I see.

Whenever I've gone skiing, I've mastered the going fast and the spinning and the, you know, not the spinning, sort of the sharp turns.

Yeah,

spinning is not a brag.

I've mastered the roly-poly down the hill as as well.

But I've never mastered the sideways stop.

So no matter how cool I've looked, I've always had to go into the big V plow

angrily

like Spider-Man trying to hold the train from falling off the track.

That's a pretty cool way of describing what you're doing.

No offense, Dan.

I'm sure it looks that good when you're doing it.

Dan's going down doing his pizzas.

He's going Spider-Man,

Spider-Man,

with great power.

Do you think Spider-Man's ever been skiing?

Sorry, never mind.

But would he enjoy it?

Spiders don't like the cold, do they?

He's not a real spider.

He's not a real man.

He's neither.

He's a freak.

He's just a boy.

Apology.

I'm the only one who's never been skiing.

I'm surprised you've never been skiing.

Why?

Not because

you seem like someone who would have been skiing.

Because you're posh.

Yeah.

They're all dancing around.

Like, I think if people were to meet me and you, they'd think I haven't been skiing and you have been skiing.

I see, I see.

It just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

People would look at me and say he must be just eating pies and drinking blue wicked too much to be skiing.

People look at me and see what like polo and croquet.

I'm afraid so.

Sorry.

Oh dear.

Maybe you guys all know this and it's all really common.

So ski jumpers, they have to get as little friction on the bottom of the skis as possible because I guess you get loads of ski.

Yeah, and the plasticky on the bottom and they drip hot wax onto it and then they iron their skis sometimes to get the wax sort of distributed.

Yeah, and all the ski makers are really secretive, like competitive ski teams, really secretive about the ingredients of their wax.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and they have these, you know, like they give the bottles boring looking labels or code names and all this, but the wax wears off, right, as you're going down, so that's a problem.

And in 2007, a pair of chemists who were called Peter Steiring and Alex Ruth, they developed, I love this, skis which wax themselves.

Self-waxing ski.

Wow.

So you pour the liquid wax into a little reservoir which is between your boot.

So the ski you're doing a lot of the work, the skis aren't doing it, but yeah.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, but it's just then it's there.

So you've got it like a nice air, you know,

so you've got a bubble beneath it.

Oh, okay.

And then you're not allowed to have any means of power down there, but the wax feeds into this little tube which runs all the way along the ski's surface.

And as you go into a turn, you put pressure down, don't you?

And it sort of parps a bit of the wax along the bottom of the ski.

That's a free thing on.

Yeah.

That's clever.

I don't know if it was allowed or banned or anything like that.

It feels super off the books.

It does, doesn't it?

The coldness of the Winter Olympics has, it is a problem.

It's like a big problem for a lot of the events.

One of the early day things that happened, 1924 games, is that the guys who were having to use the stopwatches in order to monitor how fast you were crossing the line, their hands just got too cold.

And so they were just getting it wrong all the time.

So there was actually a gold medalist who won, who was called Charles Jutrill, who was an American, who won his event despite being utterly perplexed by the fact that he'd managed it because he'd never ever trained for this event before.

He came in thinking, I'm going to come last of everyone, and he ended up winning it.

He didn't even train for the event.

He sort of just showed up and did it.

And he's telling us that the stopwatch didn't work.

Exactly.

The stopwatch ran a bit too long.

Oh, sorry, a bit too quick.

The guy's hands were freezing and it was a big problem.

So, yeah.

Did you hear about Remy Lindholm in the Beijing Olympics quite recently?

No.

He did the 50K cross-country ski and the third...

Well, it it was 50k, but it got shortened to 30k because the weather was so bad.

And at the very end, he needed a heat pack to treat his frost-bitten penis.

Yeah.

Apparently.

Should have kept it in his trousers, maybe.

He forgot one of his polls, that was a problem.

And the thing is, this is the second time that that happened to him in less than a year.

Does he have an unusually frostbite-prone penis, I wonder?

It feels like he must do.

There must be something there.

Or maybe he's not wearing a crucial thermal pant layer.

None of his mates have told him.

Yeah,

the thermal pants are available.

He's still going on one thin pair of MS briefs.

The article I read didn't presuppose what was going on.

Yeah, I think now it's happened a second time.

I think we are allowed to ask the question.

Yeah,

maybe you're prone to it once it's happened once.

Oh, yeah.

The tip never really recovers.

Yeah, bloody hell.

That's just a guess.

Just waiting.

I'm not an expert.

Yeah.

Anyway, that was a thing that happened.

Poor guy.

Wow.

I found another

quite funny cancellation of a sports event in 2016, the Premier League match between Man Yew and Bournemouth.

Sorry, I said Man Yew, that's Manchester United for people who don't know.

And that's football.

So.

American football.

No, I knew you wouldn't know.

So stick to it.

It doesn't look like a football.

Too busy teeing up for another trucker.

That's polo.

Polo tam.

Well, half of it was.

So they had to cancel the match at the very last minute when a suspicious item was found in the gents' loo at Old Trafford.

But the suspicious item had been put there by the security firm that was monitoring for suspicious items.

So they'd done it as a testing, as a trial test thing.

So this is a suspicious item looks like.

Yeah, like, can you see if you can find it?

What's the drill?

what will you do but they accidentally left it there and the match got cancelled

so funny i wonder what it i wonder what it looked like

wires coming out

big big sort of black cartoon ball yeah with a fuse coming out and bomb written in white on the side yeah yeah

um have you guys heard of the this is an amazing thing it was proposed in 2002 it was a british firm called Snowdonia Gateway Limited.

They wanted to build a revolving ski slope.

Okay.

Okay.

So what it would be, it would be 13 stories high yeah and it would be kind of like a record player but on an angle okay if you can imagine that yeah okay and you would start down the slope as the slope revolved and moved upwards okay now the incline was going to be 300 meters long but the plan was if you skied slowly enough and if it got up to its full revolving speed permanent skiing.

The speed that I ski, which is really, really slope-like, I'm going to be going backwards around the world.

You'd fall off the top.

Yeah, and they would generate permanent fresh snow with snow guns.

That's extremely good.

So it never happened, sadly, as far as I can tell.

Is it because it's completely impossible to build?

Weirdly, no.

Oh, really?

I think it was just too ambitious an example of the thing.

So these days, I think there is at least one rotating disk slope ski simulator in Europe.

I think it's somewhere like the Netherlands, but it's quite small.

It's not 13 stories high and allowing you to sort of ski giant mountain thing.

That's just so cool.

It just sounds so much fun.

Wow, it sounds incredible.

I can see the problem that if you were at a certain speed, you would just be stuck.

Like, you would have to be rescued, right?

No, they can turn it.

They can slow it.

They can turn it.

End of the day.

Like, they're not going to stop at every middle-speed skier, right?

Like, no, yeah, no, you'd have to get down eventually.

It might be like the waltzers that you just have one go and then you have to come off and other people go on.

Imagine the poor guy, poor guy, right?

It's a frost-bitten penis twice.

I'm just going to have one more ski with a nice time.

Oh, no.

I'm never coming off.

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

My fact is that the 18th century health writer William Buchan told his readers that anyone suffering from persistent deafness might benefit from pouring their own urine into their ears each night.

That's really good.

I'm just looking at my notes because I paraphrased what you'd said to us.

And I've written in 1772, William Buchan told people to piss in their own ears.

Wow,

he pretty much wrote.

Shall I just say, it does seem possible that the first person who heard this advice simply misheard.

Oh, yeah.

You know,

they are deaf.

Did they say, you know, I know a guy in Turin?

Or

do you want some tea?

I'm pouring.

Are they a reliable source?

Is right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, William Buchan was this writer.

He wrote the book called Domestic Medicine, which was basically the be-all and end-all of health advice in the 18th century.

He was a proper doctor, and he was, I think it was was actually pretty good, as in he wasn't a quack, he was, you know, he was really trying.

And it had chapters on absolutely everything under the sun.

One of the chapters is on deafness, and he writes, A gentleman on whose veracity I can depend told me that after using many things to no purpose for an obstinate deafness, he was at last advised to put a few drops of his own urine, warm, into his ears every night and morning, from which he received great benefit.

He does say you could also use assault solutions.

Would it work?

Would it work?

Like, let's say you've got wax in your ears.

Would it moisten them, perhaps?

It might do.

You'd need phenomenal aim.

That's the problem.

It's a few drops.

That's a good detail that I didn't know when I tried it earlier this morning.

That would have been very helpful.

But he also had advice in the book for putting onions, onion juice in your ear

in order to help with that.

So is it just a sort of like any liquid that has some kind of, I don't know, acidic property or something?

This is the thought slightly is that earache will eventually go.

and the thought is is that maybe what it was was a sort of pseudo thing where it was just making it feel a bit bearable and then you mistaken the fact that it that it happens because people still parents there's blogs all over on those

people pissing at the shape using onions using onions

Andy

they um that book by the way domestic medicine there is an argument that it might not have been written by William Buchan and might have been written by friend of the show Willie Smelly Willie Smelly yeah

The original midwife.

Midwife.

Not that Willie Smelly.

The other Willie Smelly.

Encyclopedia Encyclopedia first editor.

Yeah, so there were two famous Willie Smellies

from the 19th century and

the 18th century, one of them.

And this one, according to Smelly's son, who's called Kerr Smelly,

he said that Willie Smelly might have entirely rewritten his original draft.

So Buchan handed in his draft, and then Smelly sort of put all of his own bits in.

So it could be that his was normal and then Smelly added the urea stuff.

I wouldn't want Willie Smelly's urine in my ears.

I'm going to say.

Oh my god.

Also, the interesting thing about this book is that it was sort of a sort of equivalent to what I'm trying to say would be a magician releasing all of the trade secrets of how to do tricks because doctors at the time didn't want patients to know this kind of thing.

They actually looked down on this book saying you shouldn't be giving this information out to the patients.

This is what we do.

And so he kind of put it all into a single.

Might you put like just one bit of advice in there that was wrong to try and trick people into

like internet spoiler things.

It's like,

step one is this, but for more, contact your doctor.

Yeah, yeah.

He wrote a lot of medical advice, William Buchan.

He wrote this book called Advice to Mothers, which again, like quite democratizing of becoming a parent.

Oh god, I'm strapping in for this.

He wrote, well, he wrote to mothers that, and I'm quoting here, in all cases of dwarfishness or deformity, 99 out of 100 are owing to the folly, misconduct, or neglect of mothers.

Wow.

Yeah, which was, I'm sure, science at the time.

But

it's just nice for mothers to feel more guilt than they really do.

There isn't enough going around.

Yeah, I think mothers didn't feel bad until he really advanced the form like that.

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was an amazing guy.

Like, he started young.

He was a child prodigy, actually.

He was, when he was going around pissing into other children's ears.

Like, I do, we're joking about this, but I do feel like, as it goes on, this is proving my point.

It's just like anyone who excels at anything probably excelled as a child.

Yeah, it's true, yeah.

No, he supposedly was the amateur doctor to the village when he was still at school.

So he was so

annoying.

No, it's not.

You'd be so annoyed by him, wouldn't you?

Baby doctor.

Not if he was helping you.

No, you would be annoyed.

Really?

Yeah.

Especially if he's helping you.

What doctors have to put up with, particularly baby doctors?

Imagine a 12-year-old boy coming to you when you're pregnant going, oh, it's your fault.

You haven't been behaving right.

You know, one of the things that Buchan suggested that when you, if you'd burnt yourself,

a cure was to hold it back near a fire.

What?

Oh, yeah.

I could read that.

Hold it quite near the fire.

There was a few other things, like you should put salt on it.

Salt?

Yeah.

Just like the old saying goes, rub salt in the water.

In the wound.

And everyone's a winner.

It does sound like he was like a child doctor, but he didn't go on to learn anymore.

Just left the knowledge he had at 12.

One of the earliest records for treating hearing loss is from the Ebus Papyrus, which is an old ancient Egyptian papyrus.

And that's specifically for wax buildup.

And they suggest that you put olive oil, red lead, ant eggs, bat wings, or goat urine into your ears.

Oh, wow.

So they do go for the urine quite early.

And also, olive oil, you use that now.

Olive oil for lots ears.

Yeah.

Do you hang the bat wings out like a...

They're literally flapping out your ears.

Rachel, you've just written a book of advice, effectively,

based on advice from strangers.

Correct.

Is there any honkingly bad advice that you received?

Because I saw some of the gigs where you collected advice.

Correct.

Well, some of it I just really didn't agree with.

Some of it was very, very individual, like acquire as many guinea pigs as possible, happiness is bound to follow, which I really profound, as a previous owner of a guinea pig, I don't think that's true.

I don't think they improve in large numbers.

Yes, we didn't try.

No, that's true.

You only have one.

You didn't pass through the threshold, which is nine.

In Peru, they eat guinea pigs, don't they?

So, if it was a Peruvian person, it might be just a way of stocking up before lockdown.

Give a man a guinea pig, and he'll eat for a day.

Give a man two guinea pigs, as long as one is male and one's female, and they're both of the right age, and the sort of yeah,

and there's consent, yeah, yeah,

and he'll eat for the rest of his life.

I also

enjoyed and really disagree with the advice that we're given: um,

smile whenever possible, which I think is a very old school idea of like, just whack a smile on, no matter what you're feeling.

And it made me think of all those songs of like, smile when your heart is breaking.

Smile when your heart is breaking.

Badanahabu smile, you know.

Like all the wartime songs about smiling through the war, smiling through loss, smiling through tragedy, smiling through heartbreak, which was a very of the 20th century.

It was very keep calm and carry on.

Bottle it in.

Yeah, exactly.

Don't let your smile ruin my day.

Bottle it up.

Pour a few drops into your ears each night and morning.

So, yes, I did not agree with that advice, but it's quite common advice.

It's still given.

Do you know who the first Agony aunt was?

No.

So far as we know?

No, I don't know.

Claire Ana.

Pliny the Elder.

No, okay, so

I would say this is,

James is closer in time, possibly the 1600s.

It's probably

really

in 1691, there was a guy called John Dunnton, and he had an experience where he was having an affair.

He needed some advice anonymously, but there was nowhere to ask.

And so rather than thinking, I'll just leave that, he thought, wow, what if there was a place I could ask?

And so he invented an entire magazine, the Athenian Gazette, which its job was basically to just answer questions.

So members of the public would just send in their questions and everyone on staff would write answers to um and that is sort of like the modern version of the agony art there's probably examples of things like the oracle of delphi and you know all that sort of like the original agony art so he this athenian the athenian gazette athenian mercury it was also called it was supposedly this group of a dozen of the best astrologers and mathematicians and philosophers in the whole of london right and scholars and all this actually it was just him uh and his brother-in-law and two other blokes and they were like they were complete amateurs and they didn't know anything but people loved writing in the questions so um the questions included what is the cause of suction

good question this is uh about love and relationships isn't it yeah that's right

um why do scotchmen hate swine's flesh

good questions

i really like this one if i'm thinking of committing any great and enormous crime and sin as adultery but do not personally and actually commit it am i guilty of the crime and sin That's a great question.

Wow, I mean, that's given to agony ants today.

Yeah, that's true.

Here's a couple more.

Oh, yeah.

Why does love generally turn to coldness and neglect after marriage?

Bloody hell.

I didn't write it, Paulina, if you're listening.

I was just reading it.

It was a bit QIish, actually.

So one of them was: why should the putting of a man's hand in cold water occasion a sudden emission of urine?

Oh, yeah, we have done that.

Yeah, and they said

it's not true.

They said they pointed out it's a vulgar error.

They said it's uh what?

Sorry, I said

it was a coincidence that you pissed yourself out.

We did that to our baby last week.

Wait, wait.

So he had a fever.

We were in hospital doing some checks.

And they said to check for a urine infection, we really need a urine sample.

And obviously, it's a baby.

You can't just make him wee.

And he was a bit dehydrated from the fever, so he was weeing not very often.

So they gave us like a test tube with a funnel, and they said, you've just got to sit here and wait for him to wee and be ready to leap into action.

So bless him, I was just for like a good hour and a half.

He was just sitting there with like my husband holding him up, me like staring at his winky, waiting, waiting to leap for the wee.

And we were, it got to like an hour and a half.

I don't think we should blame parents, but if he does have a complex bedding dress,

me just staring at it, shaking a little tube.

And at the end, we were like, what about that thing of like, if you put your hand or your foot in water, then it will make you we so we tried it.

So we got one of those cardboard bucket things that they have in the hospitals, and we filled it with warm water and we put his feet in it.

And it didn't work initially, but about two minutes after he'd stopped having his feet in water, he did then weep.

But again, it's probably a coincidence, though.

well we don't that's science yeah maybe it's taking your feet out of warm water that makes you do that yeah but people don't normally go to sleep in a swimming pool so we don't know that we don't know yeah uh one other interesting notable name from this period who was into agony aunting um slash uncling was daniel defoe oh yeah author of robinson cruso and yeah he would he would reply to members of the public and interestingly you know a lot of these replies were sometimes really crude so in one in one reply to someone he actually called someone, even though he sort of blanked out the full spelling of it, but he called someone a whore.

You know, he basically disagreed with what she was trying to ask in terms of illicit sexual stuff.

And he said, you're a whore.

I mean, it was really quite crude back then.

Terrible.

Just going back to deafness.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

Because

I got very into this woman called Jaipreet Verdi has written a book about historical cures for deafness.

And it's also about the concept of deafness needing a cure.

It's very interesting.

But she talks about ear trumpets, you know, like do you remember in alo, alo, like the ear trumpet, the sort of comedy item that is the ear trumpet?

But that in Victorian times, they would be

customised.

So a lady, say in mourning, that the example they've got in a museum is it's been painted black and trimmed with lace,

and that's her outfit.

And at first, historians thought, you know, this was a sign of like she had to hide it, you know, to be discreet because it was an embarrassing thing to have.

But actually, this author is making the point that, how cool!

It's really sort of owning your deafness and it's customizing what you need.

It's sort of the equivalent of like, you know, pimping out your walking stick or signing a cast in a way.

Surely it's pimping up, isn't it?

Not pimping out.

Yeah.

Pimping out your walking stick, you sort of put it in the street with a little sign.

And Daniel Defoe calls it horn.

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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 a tourist guide in Whitby got so tired of being asked where Dracula was buried that he commissioned a headstone just so that he could point at it instead of explaining that Dracula wasn't real.

So, this is apparently a big problem in Whitby.

Whitby is one of the great scenes of Dracula when Dracula makes his way over to England, and it is where Bram Stoker spent a few months where he went looking around and he incorporated a lot of the landscapes, a lot of the churches, even some of the names from the gravestones into the story.

And the issue is that when visitors come, a lot of them don't actually realize that Dracula doesn't exist.

So, one particular guy, Harry Collett, who's a tour guide and he does tours around Whitby about Dracula, so sick of being asked this question, he did get one commission to Headstoned, which he can just point to as they're on the track and say, Look, that's where he's buried.

Do you think maybe he should give up his job as a tour guide if if he's sick of people asking him questions about Dracula?

Yeah, well, I guess that is a very, very good point.

Hang on, what does the headstone say?

Does it say Dracula's here or does it say Dracula's not real?

No,

it says Dracula and then I guess the dates of Dracula on it.

That's a great idea for your headstone, isn't it?

When eventually you die, it's like, here lies James Harkin.

Of course, he wasn't real.

Because I thought he was just trying to...

Because the church has put a sign on its door saying Dracula's a fictional character.

So I thought he might be doing that.

Because actually, if someone tries to dig up Dracula, they'll find

there's nobody there.

It's only going to add fuel to the fire.

That's true.

Yeah, this church, this is St.

Mary's Church.

This is the church that appears in the book.

They constantly have people coming to the church who are Dracula fans asking about Dracula.

Apparently, the pews are just quite often filled with goths who are sitting there just enjoying the scene.

Well, it's Gothsville.

Yeah, it is.

Whitby is, they have a twice-annual in fact, they have four goth festivals a year, right?

So they've got the Whitby Goth Weekend, which has been going since the 90s.

And then in 2019, a rival event was set up called Tomorrow's Ghosts.

There was a spooky schism in the Whitby Goth Weekend event.

The founder had set it up, and there was a parting of ways with a venue.

And so now there's a rival festival this year called Tomorrow's Ghosts.

And I read their website about this year's autumn festival.

It says this.

Our headliners for 2022 are Fields of the Nephilim, who take the Friday night headline slot and really need little introduction.

Topping the bill on Saturday night are the Loveless, who need some introduction.

They actually put that.

That's really good.

It's got a cool, quite gothic-y heritage, this whole area, ain't it?

And not just Dracula.

I mean, St Hilda was Whitby, wasn't she?

St.

Hilda was abbess of Whitby.

Did she like drive the snakes out of Whitby or something?

That's a starry.

That's a story.

Well, she turned them to stone.

Is that not...

That's driving them out in a way.

Yeah.

You're making it harder to drive them out.

You're making them heavier if anything.

Yeah, but they're less likely to bite you if they're made of stone.

Is that what the ammonite stones are all about?

That's what they call them, the snake stones of Whitby.

And they're ammonites.

They're ammonites, but some people would carve little heads on to make them stones.

So Ammonite is like a little fossil that looks a bit like a shit snake, right?

Yeah.

Especially if you draw a face on them.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and she was, she started a monastery which is on the spot where this place you were talking about, St.

Mary's,

And yeah,

she

resolved the date of Easter.

Yeah, well, she was part of the team who did that.

Okay.

There was the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD, where they all got together in Whitby and decided when we should have Easter.

Because some people were doing it in the Celtic time and some people were doing it in the Roman time.

And we thought, let's move down to the Roman time.

So she was alive.

She was probably still alive in 666 AD.

She was actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She was like a teacher as well.

She taught Cadmon,

who was the first English poet that we know the name of.

She was his teacher.

The question, though, that we're all asking: was she a child prodigy, James?

I know not.

I went to St Hilda's College.

Did you?

Yes.

And they have a little ammonite on their shield.

Do they?

Nice.

That's cool.

I think that's called, that species is called Hildoceras.

Really?

It was named in honour of her.

It was found in that area.

area.

Yeah, no, it is.

There's a really cool set of stairs in Whitby.

Yeah.

Sound pretty spooky.

As you head up to St.

Mary's Church, it's 199 steps to get to the.

That's in Dracula, isn't it?

That's mentioned in Dracula.

Yeah, yeah.

As you're going up them, there's little rest points, little

benches.

So you sit on this bench and you think you're sitting on a regular bench, but actually, it's not a regular bench.

No, it's not a possessed bench either.

It wasn't built by Yetis.

It was because the graveyard with St.

Mary's Church was at the top,

you had all the pallbearers who were having to carry up all of the dead bodies to get to the church.

And it's a very tiring business.

So, what's now used as seats, these planks of wood, were actually pit stops to put the dead bodies on so that they could get rest.

Spooky.

It is spooky.

Spooky.

Spooky.

A dead men's

benches.

Another thing about Whitby is if you go to Saltwick Nav, which is just south of Whitby, you'll see where the cliffs are.

There's huge chunks taken out of the cliffs.

And that's because they tried to get alum,

which is a thing you get in shale, it's a type of rock.

And it's really useful because you could bind colours to cloth by using it.

But it didn't work on its own.

You needed ammonia as well.

And the way they got their ammonia was from stale urine.

Ah, urine again.

Urine again.

We come back to urine.

And so in Whitby, they used to have barrels where you would go and wee into the barrel, and then they would take the wee to the alum mines, and then they would colour their clothes.

And did they have a little trough of warm water that you could stand in if you were struggling to get yourself going?

At what point does urine go stale?

I've never thought about that.

Well, I would say if you don't drink it straight from the sauce.

You can put it in a cup first.

You're not going to drink it straight from the sauce.

The point is, and I think we mentioned this in a quite recent podcast, is ammonia isn't naturally in urine.

Ammonia is made by bacteria.

Urine is generally more or less sterile.

So you get your urine, the bacteria comes from the air, goes into the urine, makes ammonia, and that's when it becomes stale.

So it takes a couple of hours.

Have you ever forgotten to flush a toilet and then gone on holiday?

And then come back.

No.

That's when it's stale.

Oh, my God.

Climate.

But Dan, if you're bottling it correctly with sterilized bottles, it lasts years.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

She's got to visit Andy's urine distillery.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keep it out of the sunlight,

whack a label on it.

Just bringing them on the plane.

And it for my ears, actually.

So you have to bring so many under 100ml bottles there.

That's the really annoying thing.

Anyway, this urine, they couldn't get enough in Whitby, so they ended up putting barrels in Newcastle and London to get enough urine.

That's a long way away.

It's a lot of piss, isn't it?

Yeah, from a long distance.

Well, there's a lot of people in London, so that was one reason why they went there.

And they always tried to get the urine from poor people, so they would put barrels in the poor areas and they would want poor people's piss.

Why?

Because it was alliterative.

No,

why do you think it was?

Something about poor people's diet or consumption of alcohol?

Because he's got it.

He's really got it, got it.

Did they want it?

They wanted it to be more...

No, they thought that the poor people wouldn't be able to afford alcohol, and so they didn't want alcohol in the urine because they thought it wouldn't set the colours properly with the alcohol.

Do you know where Dracula was from?

He was from Transylvania.

Well, exactly.

But there is a minority theory that he was from Devon.

Is this theory put forward by Devon?

A writer called Andy Struthers who claims that Bram Stoker was inspired by a load of different things, but he claims there was especially an Exeter writer called Sabine Bering Gould, I think I'm saying it right, who'd written a book about werewolves, which Bram Stoker read, and a vampire story called Marjorie of Queether, and was therefore claiming that Dracula was effectively from Devon.

Oh, okay.

Which I think would make him less spooky.

I'm going to drink your blood.

Do you mind?

All right, my lover.

Yeah, but his descendant, Daker Stoker, Bram Stoker's descendant, said there's a mix of sources, actually.

You can't just say he's from Devon.

Well, one of the sources was about Dracul, wasn't it?

Vlad the Impaler, who was from...

Transylvania, was he?

Or Wallachia or somewhere like that.

In Romania, anyway.

And he supposedly read about this guy while he was in Whitby.

So he went down to what was the coffee house end and the public library there.

He found the book there, and that's what gave me inspiration.

You know, as you say, there's a lot of different accounts.

He was already working on a novel, but it was about a character he called Count Vampire.

Sounds like a Count Vampire, isn't it?

Yeah,

I thought that was the original.

Vampire was the original Germanic.

Still sounds stupid, though.

Okay, cool.

Sorry.

I am a vampire.

Or rather, I am a vampire.

I've been to Dracula's Castle.

Have you?

Actually, yeah, in fact, I've been to both of them.

There's one which is real and one of them which is fake.

The one which is fake is called Bran Castle.

And that looks really gothic.

It looks amazing.

It looks like it could be his castle, but it really isn't.

And there's another one which was his actual castle, which is about 100 miles away.

And that is just a, you know, it's a...

Semi-detached house.

As in it was like Vlad the Impalers.

Yeah, but it's just like ruins, really.

And they have a few stakes with dolls on them.

Yeah, they do.

But in the Brancastle, it's way better because they've got a proper, you know, gift shop.

Brancastle, they've really made big on the publicity, haven't they?

So last year,

Brancastle got a bit of publicity because they offered free doses of the COVID-19 jabs.

What?

Yeah.

With doctors wearing fang stickers.

And they put it in your neck.

No, they didn't put it in your neck.

Interesting fact: I was in Bran

on the day of the Brexit referendum.

You're going to have a spooky loss of trade.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin.

And Rachel at Rachel Paris.

And you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All the previous episodes are up there.

Do check it out.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We will see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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