415: No Such Thing As Tiddlywinks In The Wild West

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week, coming to you live from BAAA!

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

And once again, we have gathered round 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, that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the reason you can no longer bathe in the Roman baths at bath is because they contain brain-eating amoeba.

Wow.

So that's like I was, I don't know, doing a D-rate horror film or something.

But yeah, it's true.

There are amoeba in the baths that will eat your brain.

I must say, Anna, since you told us this fact and we got to our travel lodge or Premier Inn or whatever it was today, I was thinking, can I drink the water in bath?

I know.

Oh, yeah.

And we need to address it.

I have a question about this, which is that I have drunk the waters of bath.

and I don't know exactly which ones I drunk.

I imagine that...

Just some random bath water.

Actually, that's the problem with this fact.

When you try and research it, if you Google bath water,

all you get is someone called Belle Delphine,

who is apparently an adult influencer who was selling her bath water for $30 a bottle.

Oh, wow.

Okay, well, you shouldn't be bathing in Bill Delphine's bath water or bath's bathwater, and it's not all the water in bath.

it's just directly from the spring.

So

this was discovered in the 70s.

I hadn't realized that until 1978 you could bathe directly in the spring.

You know, when you're in the

baths in the museum, there's that bath.

How many times can I say the word bath?

And

I hadn't realized that people used to swim in it until 1978.

And then they realized that coming directly from the spring was this amoeba called Nigeleria faolari, which is also known as the brain-eating amoeba.

And you get it in warm, fresh water.

it's very rare and like i said it's just this one spring it's not in any of the rest of the water and it's it burrows into your brain through your nose so it goes up your nose and then burrows straight into your brain and um it's 100 fatal so that's okay that's that means it's fine if you drink water you're not going to get it it doesn't if you drank the water if you jumped into and don't do this but if you did jump into the bath spas and you just took down a lot down your mouth but kept your nose out of the water you'd be fine but then if someone made you laugh halfway through and it accidentally went up into your nose,

it would murder you.

It came out the other way.

What is a great murder mystery, though?

Yeah.

What did I pay 50p to drink in about 2006?

That was just Evian.

They siphoned it into a

horrible.

It tasted sulphurous and it was strong sulfurous.

Sorry, what's the story, Andy?

What's his story?

I went to the bath pump rooms in 2006 and paid 50p to drink a glass of frank.

I'm sorry, guys, horrible water.

Very clever, seeing it's magic.

It was nasty.

I think this is the bit that doesn't have the amoeba in it.

So it's boreholed now.

So basically you still get the really curative, brilliant waters of bath that feed the Roman baths and they feed.

You guys have probably been to that hotel with the swimming pool on the top that's fed direct from the spring, which is very lovely.

And that's just all through boreholes, so it's not coming straight from the spring.

So this amoeba is filtered out.

Why did you drink it?

Where was the thing to do?

Was it?

Yeah.

It's amphetised.

Because you go to the bath, you know, the beautiful, beautiful tea room at the bath spa and you that you they say this is the the water that people have been drinking for hundreds of years for its curative properties and that has this is the water that hasn't cured anyone for the last 2500 years and let it not cure you it did it cured a man called bladdard who was the whole reason for the bath being founded and bladdered he had he had an infection basically he had a bladdard infection and he was he had leprosy he had leprosy yeah he had leprosy he was exiled by his family.

He went to Athens, got leprosy, and then came back to England, was exiled by his family for having leprosy, and became a swineherd.

But then his pigs jumped into the waters of the bath, which were coming up through the borehole, and they frolicked and they got better, and their leprosy was cured.

So he built the city of Bath.

So that's what happened.

And that is a true story.

He's like a semi-mythical, probably actually mythical king, isn't he?

But he was like the father of King Lear, Bladdard.

They first wrote about him.

The first person to write about him was Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century.

And he wrote that Bladdard died when he constructed some wings for himself and flew into a wall.

Nice one, mate.

So good.

Because it sounds like the wings worked, but he just, it was a directional issue.

It was his sat down, yeah.

He was like, he was a necromancer, supposedly, and so he kind of got the you know the devil to make him wings and stuff like that.

Wow, right

so just very quickly because I think a lot of you know we're in bath and so everyone here knows what we're talking about But we do have a lot of overseas listeners and I know it is famous but these these were Roman baths These were these were built by the Romans and they used to go in every single day They used to swim there was and in this city as well There's been festivals It's a big deal that off the back of the 70s no one can swim because of this amoeba because that was it's the city is literally named for it it's called bath for it and apparently the reason that this amoeba came around is because there used to be a roof over it and the roof is gone now and so the sunlight has caused for this amoeba to find itself this is what i read on a tweet um and wow But it's from a tweet from someone who felt like they knew what they were talking about.

You know, there was a solid hashtag next to it.

And it was a historian, but supposedly there was a big roof that was over it.

And

the roof.

Stop the sunlight, and the sunlight is what was attracting the amoeba.

Wow because they well they say that sunlight is the best disinfectant don't they?

Except in this case when it causes a fatal brain-eating amoeba.

There's always a second half of the second half of that's the idea.

It's in the small print of sunlight.

There was a guy who in 1999, a naked man jumped into the baths in Bath claiming he was claiming to be Julius Caesar.

He jumped into the baths and he refused to get out and there was a big standoff because

well he's the emperor you can't just drag him out can you?

Exactly.

and they didn't want to go in maybe because of the amoeba thing but they had to unplug it and then wait for it it takes three hours to drain really drained the whole thing

the whole thing and then mate just drag him out onto the steps and murder him

do it the Roman way

it sounds so fun I don't know if there's anyone listening maybe there is who remembers this but they used to hold things called the Roman rendezvous

and they were held for four nights during the bath festival and this was in the 60s you pay five shillings, and you'd all, it was a huge party, and you'd all just jump around and swim in the baths, and then you'd go and dance the night away in the pump room.

It sounds so funny, 1,400 people will go to this big old bath party.

No one remembers it?

That's a screen that's 40 years too young to remember that.

Oh, the baths are so rejuvenating.

Well, that's the thing, Anna.

You said that no one was cured from it, but I've checked some local newspaper archives.

And apparently, there was a guy called William Toop of Froome who suffered from paralysis after getting into cold water to gather watercress,

and he was cured.

There was someone else who was bottling wine in a cold, damp cellar for several hours, and they were cured of their palsy.

And there was someone who got colic after drinking stale beer in hot weather.

and he got cured as well.

So, you know, that's evidence for you.

Yeah.

I'm not even sure you can get ill from bottling wine in a cellar for seven hours, let alone then get cured by a bath.

But maybe.

It definitely does actually have some curative properties, like things like arthritis.

Sorry, I just said.

Is that how you get watercress?

You have to go into some water to get it.

That's the name.

Ah.

I'm very interested in that.

I'm sorry.

So do you think it just grew naturally on the painted clay heads of those little

fancy makers?

Like cress.

It's just cress doesn't grow in water, does it?

But why do you think they called it all those years ago?

Why do you you think they called it watercress?

I've never given it even a second's thought in my life.

Why it's called watercress.

Well, I'm a busy guy.

Where do you think seaweed's from?

Just out of curiosity.

Okay.

The baths used to be prescribed on the NHS until pretty recently.

Really?

No.

Yeah, yeah.

They actually had a deal.

Bath did this bath.

Buxton, which for overseas listeners is another big spa town in the UK, had deals with the NHS contracts where people would get prescribed water treatments and you'd go in and be sent there for back and joint pain and stuff like that.

And actually, in World War II, there are really cool pictures, if you look it up.

Well, no, sorry, I think it's after World War I.

They decided that sitting soldiers, wounded soldiers, in bars for long periods of time would help them recover more quickly.

And you can see hospital rooms where instead of lying in beds, there are just lines of men who were submerged in bars, which they had to stay in for up to 42 hours.

Wow.

Imagine how wrinkly you get those bruises.

Yeah.

So the I'm sorry, bars to mention a rival spa town, but Harrogate has a spa as well.

I don't know guys it sounds pretty good.

So some of the treatments that you have, these are from the 20s in Harrogate spa.

The sulphur electric bath sounds pretty good.

There was the peat bath.

The old combining electricity with a bath.

Oh, I don't feel quite right.

You took it off a toast, Red William.

There was the peat bath, which used fresh peat from the Yorkshire Moors.

It was in P-E-A-T.

You know, peat that you put on the garden.

Yeah.

I didn't think you meant PET.

Someone called Peter gets thrown.

Hey guys, I'm in the yep.

Fresh peat.

Room for another?

What about a bit of fresh...

But there was also electric peat, where they put you in a bath full of peat.

I just ran a current through the peat.

Every patient got a fresh peat, okay, because you don't want to have someone else's peat.

That would be disgusting.

Imagine some peat that someone else has been in.

Ugh.

So they use 25 tons of peat a week.

25 tons.

That's a lot of peat.

That's so much.

Yeah.

Do you think all the people who are called peat together weigh more than the amount they used in a week?

If it's 20 tons, yeah.

Yeah.

By quite a considerable amount.

Yeah, probably, yeah.

Probably the math doesn't stop.

I've been to a rival spa as well.

I've been to one in Budapest.

Budapest has the most thermal spas in the whole of mainland Europe.

Some more in Reykjavik, but in mainland Europe they have it.

Unfortunately, when I went there, I'd left my swimming costume in the hotel.

And so I thought, well, I'll just buy one when I get there.

But they only rent them.

So I had to rent a swimming costume in Budapest.

But the good news is that the baths are very good for skin diseases.

Right.

So it just balances out, doesn't it?

But can you request size, or is it like a school's lost property box when you forget your swimmers?

I think they just looked at me and went, Pete,

get the extra large.

Have you guys heard of the bath curse tablets?

Oh, no.

Oh, this is very cool.

This is a collection of 130 Roman-era curse tablets, and they were discovered in 1979, 1918.

The idea was if someone stole something from you in Bath, you could go to these tablets which were connected to a goddess and you could say, I want you to take over the investigation, goddess, and you can smite the person.

So the idea was if they went to that, the person who stole the thing might return it because they were freaked out that

suddenly a goddess was on the case.

It was a very low crime-solving rate back then, wasn't it?

That was their method.

But it's amazing because there's one thing, and they're not too sure yet, but

it's written in sort of

Latin is how they wrote wrote on these tablets, but they're also written supposedly in British Celtic.

And if it's the case that it is, and they still don't know, if it is the case that it is, it's the only example of British Celtic that we have that has survived on tablet form.

Yeah, so historians are trying to work out whether or not that is the case.

Because I know some of them are, and this is a really amazing discovery, which goes to show that Bath is the bitchiest place known to man.

Because the only things that were found here when everyone excavated the Roman baths was all these tablets saying, I don't like Semsu, they stole my hair clip.

I want you to kill them.

It was all such disproportionate stuff like

Docimedis has lost two gloves.

So this is Docimedis referring to himself in the third person, so already a bit of a dick.

Docy Medus has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their mind and eyes in the goddess's temple.

Come on.

That's disproportionate.

It is.

Does he meet us?

It's probably thought, no, after he died, everyone's going, no one will ever mention that guy again.

Poor thing, we got to move on, guys, to our next fact.

Oh, I've got one little adventure that someone had in a bath recently.

Great.

Yeah.

Save your personal stories, Andy.

This happened in 2017 in Texas.

This is amazing.

This happened to a woman called Charlesetta Williams.

She was in the bath.

She's 75 years old.

And a tornado hit her house and it ripped the roof off the house and then it ripped the bath out of its moorings.

She was in there, she was in there.

Wow.

She was actually in the bath with her 40-year-old son at the time.

And it was

40.

40.

Well, they were 40, you know.

They were sheltering from the tornado.

They were.

There wasn't.

I presume.

Unless her son was called Pete, in which case it's completely normal.

When they land, the tornado ripped our clothes off, it must have.

How did that happen?

Come on.

This is very upsetting.

They were fine.

He was tossed out of the bath by

the colours.

Okay, come on, come on, come on.

The wind speed was about 130 miles an hour of the tornado.

They didn't end up that far away from the house.

It wasn't like they ended up miles away.

They were in the garden at the end of it.

And were they, I mean, does it have a happy ending?

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It is time for fact number two and that is Andy.

My fact is that there is a Spanish firm which has six official ham sniffers.

Their job is to poke pork loins, sniff them and make sure they're good and at most they smell 800 hams a day.

Well, I have a question.

Don't they all just smell of ham?

Well, that's to you and me, they absolutely would.

But to these amazing experts, so you may have seen this, you know, did the rounds a bit online before Christmas, but it's such an incredible fact.

It's this Spanish firm called Sinto Rotes, and

it's a company that they sell hams and they're 150 years old.

They're a very ancient lineage firm.

They produce very traditional Iberian ham from pigs which have been fed on special acorns, this kind of thing.

And they have trained workers whose specific job exclusively, it's not like they do this for a couple of hours a day, their job is to smell the hams to make sure they're good before they go on sale.

And they have little kind of pipettes or little kind of jabbers to jab the ham in four specific places.

And then they have to smudge it over rye.

It is the most amazing jobs.

And some people will be qualified to sniff some types of ham, but not other types of ham.

Yes.

What?

There is more than one type of ham.

There is a guy who is really good, but he is not qualified to sniff a particular bit of ham.

Wow.

His father is.

He hasn't yet qualified to sniffing that particular bit of the ham.

So they have five seasonal workers at Christmas time, but there is one guy who sniffs year in, year out.

And you have to do each ham in four places.

So he sniffs 3,200 times a day.

Yeah, but that's in the high season.

Like on a usual day, he'll do 200 and going to 800, so 800 loins a day, he'll do 3,200 sniffs.

And he says even that is pushing him to the edge, to the limit.

That's one sniff every nine seconds.

Yeah.

It's insane.

Assuming the standard API working.

Yeah, but if it's only doing nine seconds per sniff, that says to me he's not really doing a very thorough job.

Well,

accusation leveled.

Yeah, he's very proud.

He's called Mr.

Vega, and he says the job that he is doing pushes him at the limit of human possibility.

It's just, it's an amazing, it was in the Wall Street Journal, it's just such a good piece, it's so interesting.

And they do say that if you can't tell straight away, then you're not doing it right.

So they say it's really got to be an immediate instinctive thing.

Okay.

So

they really should be doing more.

Yeah, they do tests where they take a smell and they put it into, so let's say they'll take five milliliters per liter of a smell and pop it into some water and then they'll put that into plastic cups.

Oh, yeah.

And you'll have to then sniff the cup.

And because a plastic cup, the odor of the cup itself will take over, there's a sort of time limit of about an hour or so where that starts taking over.

So the yellow.

I thought it was a couple of minutes.

The smell of plastic.

Oh, wow, really?

It doesn't take us on hours to smell.

Well, no, because some of the smellers, according to the Wall Street Journal article, they take ages sniffing it.

But Mr.

Vega, this guy who pushes himself to the limit of human possibility,

he says, if you doubt yourself, you cannot do the work.

And then, according to the article, he taps himself on the chest and he says, if you doubt one, you have to doubt all of them.

So he's like, you've got to make your decision now.

He's an amazing guy.

Yeah.

So was this also in the article about Christina Sanchez Blanco, who's the first woman to be head ham sniffer?

at Chinco Yotas.

Oh.

Because I read that she has such a good sense of smell that whenever her husband buys her a gift, she knows what it is before she unwraps it.

Wow.

He keeps buying her cow pats, though, doesn't he?

Apparently, if he buys her a perfume, he has to quadruple wrap it so that she won't be able to smell it.

So very good.

Yeah, I wasn't, I didn't realize at first that you were talking about things like perfumers, and I thought she'd be able to say this is an Xbox.

It's a book by George Eliot, I think.

Hang on.

It's one of the earlier ones.

But this, like, the accuracy of the nose depends on their exterior life as well.

So Mr.

Vega, talking of perfume, he says he wishes and hopes that his wife never changes perfume because if she does, that alters his nose sense.

Like, he went through a bit of a chaotic time when he swapped to a new anti-balding shampoo, and that absolutely messed with his nostrils, because he was like, it was so potent, it threw him off, and he couldn't do his job well.

Quite difficult people to be married to, really.

So this poor woman either, you know, A, can't change her perfume, and B, her husband's now bald.

And

then

Sanchez Blanco, Ms.

Sanchez Blanco,

who you mentioned, James, she said that her husband's a policeman and then at the moment he comes home, she tells him every day about the day he's had before he can say a word.

Oh my God.

Because she can smell it on him.

What?

You know, whether it's like gasoline from a car crash, she says, soot from a fire, dander from a rescued pet.

God, you wouldn't risk having an affair, would you?

No.

You just...

Well, you might if you had an affair with like a butcher or something,

then that would be okay, wouldn't it?

Because all they'd get is the smell of the meat and just assume it was off their own clothes and stuff.

Also, he's in this quite small town.

It sounds like he's having a much more action-packed police life than you should.

Are we sure he's not just dousing himself to cover his affair with soot just before he gets home or smothering himself in sausages to catch the sausage bandit?

Do you know that a wafer thin ham has up to 25% water?

They've recently done a study of this and they found that like when they get this wafer thin stuff, most of it is actually water, not most of it, but like a quarter of it can be actually water.

And so that means that if you have a hundred gram pack of wafer thin ham, which costs about 90p, that means, and it's 28% water, say, that means you're paying 25p for just for the water,

which means you're paying the equivalent of like a five pounds for a very small bottle of water.

That's the equivalent.

It's only eight times less expensive than Bell Delphine's bath water.

Gosh.

You know Linda McCartney, who makes

vegetarian meat, which doesn't anymore.

But veggie.

Veggie, yeah.

Veggie stuff.

Someone sent this ages ago, and I just remembered it.

The factory that makes her vegetarian fake meat is in Facenham.

What?

Facing ham.

No.

Yeah.

So, I don't know.

Did she choose it specifically?

Did she

where's Facenham?

Do you know?

I actually, does anyone know where Fakenham is?

Oh, Facingham.

Norfolk.

Norfolk?

Yeah.

Great.

Right.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's why we've never heard of it.

That's really good.

And how many.

Pro

sniffing things.

Oh, yeah.

Professional sniffers.

This is a thing.

And there are lots of different kinds of professional sniffer all the way across the world.

So there are people who sniff armpits for a living.

There's a man called Barry Druitt who genuinely works for a firm called Princeton Consumer Research.

And he's spent 20 years smelling armpits.

You haven't explained why.

Great point.

Cosmetics companies send this firm, Princeton Consumer Research, all their products, which have different active ingredients.

So he smells armpits of volunteers, rates how smelly they are, and then they use the deodorant or whatever it is, and he will rate how well it manages to mask them.

So a firm might have six different kinds of potential new deodorant, and he will, you know, assess which one is best.

But he doesn't like smelling armpits, he said.

He says says he thinks they're disgusting well you know a job's job's a job isn't it exactly

he should have said it in the interview should he

when they said in the interview do you like smelling armpits he should have gone no i don't actually

but you well if you if you liked it that would actually be bad because you wouldn't want a deodorant to mask the smell of an armpit that's a good point he needs someone who hates the work yeah yeah but he doesn't do it uh he doesn't have to do it uh nose nose to pit as it were he has these smell cones that he sniffs through You get specific smell cones which are for sampling smells.

And you put the pad under your armpit, don't you?

I think.

No, no, no, he goes.

He goes into the pit.

He goes into the pit.

But he has got a cone kind of cordon sanitaire of little paper cones, right?

I see.

Because sometimes they do it with an armpit pad, I think, maybe if they've got a bit of extra budget.

And there's a company called Cavincare, which is an Indian cosmetics company.

And they say they have a real problem with women's deodorant, as in they have a shortage of volunteers to donate sweat because women and particularly in India women it's a bit taboo to donate your sweat to be smelled I actually thought that was sort of taboo worldwide but apparently particularly in India

in lighter news

there was a great story today which Andy showed me which a dog that was lost in the forest was taken out of the forest rescued because a drone held off a string a sausage for it to

to sniff and chase and I think it must have been its sense of smell that was helping guide it not just the village

sense of smell you can see a sausage you can see a sausage

they held a barbecue on the beach to lure the dog towards a particular bit of the marshland to keep it safe so it was definitely a sense of smell thing hang on i thought you said they were hanging a sausage from a drone they did a lot of things to find this dog

how special a dog was this it's very likely queen's dog it wasn't the queen's dog it was it was yeah but it was speaking of dogs actually they have obviously you have sniffer dogs in airports quite often and there was a report in 2015 um of the sniffer dogs at Manchester airport and apparently in the previous 12 months they had failed to spot a single person carrying heroin or cocaine over the border but they had found 181 kilograms of illegal meat

small amounts of cheese

but no drugs that's so good there's a there's a Dustin Hoffman quote that I always think about which is to do with dogs as well and it's you know it's attributed to him and I really hope he said it but the line goes, if a lot of dogs are on the beach, the first thing they do is smell each other's ass.

The information that's gotten somehow makes pacifists out of them all.

I've thought, if only we smelt each other's asses, there wouldn't be any war.

And I don't know why, but I think about that all the time.

I actually think that is not one of Dustin's best.

No, it's not up there whether you're trying to seduce me, Mrs.

Robinson.

Yes, you are.

That's a cut scene from the movie.

Dustin, stop sniffing her, please.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that until it was identified by an art dealer in 1975, Donatello's bronze, the Madonna and Child, was being used as an ashtray and a tiddlywink bowl.

So yeah, this was Donatello, one of the maybe the greatest sculpture of of the early Renaissance.

And he made this kind of bronze roundel.

And these days, it's like one of the best things you can see in the V ⁇ A, one of the most expensive things.

But we think, basically, it was given to this family, and then it was taken by a guy called Lord Moulton when he was on the Grand Tour.

He bought it, he brought it back, and then generations and generations and generations of people in his family just kind of saw it as a little bowl.

It's kind of, it's like

a candy bowl.

It's quite small.

You might not know it was from Donatello if you didn't know.

But then one day they brought it to the VNA on like what they call an options day.

It's a bit like Antiques Roadshow where you say, How much is this worth?

And they went, oh, yeah, it looks like a Tiddlywinks bowl.

And then a few weeks, a few years later, sorry, the head of the VNA was seeing this person and said, you know what?

That's a Donatello.

And they brought it back and it's completely priceless.

But they were just using it to play Tiddlywinks.

That's so funny.

That's so weird that you said it looked like a sweet bowl.

Yeah.

Because it sort of was.

It was a thing called a uh desco da pato when Donatello made it, which is called a a a birth tray.

And it's a tray that you fill up with sweets and you bring to a mother when she's just given birth.

Because a birth tray sounds like a tray you would give birth on.

And if someone showed you that tiny little thing, you'd think.

No, actually I just thought we could talk about tiddlywinks.

What do you think?

Yeah.

In all the different countries, got lots of different names.

In France it's called the game of the flea.

In Croatian it's called jumping flea.

In Danish it's called the flea game.

In Dutch it's called the flea game.

In Russia it's called the game of fleas.

In Spanish it's called the game of the flea.

In Ukraine it's called game of fleas.

And we call it tiddlywinks.

And it appears that we got the word tiddlywinks from an unlicensed alcohol shop.

Really?

Yeah.

What?

What do you mean?

As in the word tiddlywink used to mean a place where you could get beer but it wasn't licensed.

And then we kind of stole that name and used it as a game instead.

Should we say what Tiddlywinks is?

Sorry, for the benefit of any listeners who are not familiar with Tiddlywinks.

Okay.

Yeah,

it's a little game where you have plastic counters and you have to sort of flip the plastic counters using other plastic counters into a bowl.

And you can you shoot a wink and

you have a special

plastic which you shoot with which is called a shooter but it's also known as a squidger.

You shoot your wink and if you get it in the target great but you might fail to do that but cover an opponent's wink which is good and if you've done that you've squapped their wink and they then can't wink anymore with that.

Well, this all sounds very clear.

Yeah, I'm glad you cleared this advantage.

It's full of a lot of really silly.

But actually, that thing where

if you tiddle your wink onto someone else's wink and they're not allowed to tiddle that wink, that used to be really, really looked down upon.

And that was really bad form if you did that.

Now it's part of the game, but it used to be, you know, if you did that in the Wild West, you'd get shot.

I'd love to walk into the salute bar where there's a poker game at one table,

blackjack at another one, and then the tiddlywink corner.

And everyone's dead.

You know, you can also perform a boondock, and a boondock is when you free a squapped wink by sending it all the way away.

So that's a boondock.

But how do you send it?

So that's a squapped wink is a wink that's covered by another wink.

Yeah, so you, yeah, so you

free it.

You free it by using your wink to fire at your squapped wink, and you knock the squapp away.

So you free your wink.

However, there's another move then, which is a simultaneous boondock and squap, whereby you boondock someone.

So your wink has been squapped, but you boondock it free.

You boondock it free, but then your wink lands

onto the window.

You squap someone else.

Yes.

Fuck.

And that, for some inexplicable reason, is called the John Lennon Memorial Shot.

There are so many versions of it.

That's what I love.

So it was a bit crazy in the 1890s, and then it fell out of fashion.

But there were all these sort of late Victorian Ebordian versions of it.

So there's Tiddlywink tennis, Tiddlywinks Golf, Winko Baseball, Battle Winks, which is battleships with Tiddlywinks.

It's Pedro, where you have to get in, there's a clown's mouth that you're trying to wink your winks into.

In 1992, there was Whittly Tinks, where you have to, there's a toilet, and that's the target.

Which is clever.

Yeah.

Well, it started as as tiddledy-winks, of course, and then no one knows why the D

fell out.

But as I'm sure you all know here, it was christened Tiddledy Winks by Joseph Asherton Fincher, or As Heaton Fincher,

ASS H.

I don't know.

And he invented it in 1889 and got the patent for Tiddledy Winks.

And I was trying going through the British newspaper archive trying to pinpoint the moment that we definitively lost the D.

And I think it's roughly 1920, in case you're interested.

But it really took off again with Oxford and Cambridge competing against each other in the 60s, didn't it?

And it became a real source of pride for Cambridge and they had this notorious match and it was in 1958 and it was this guy called Peter Downes who was head of the Tiddlewink Society at Cambridge and he wrote to Prince Philip saying, Prince Philip, have you noticed there's been an article written in The Spectator claiming you cheat at Tiddlywings.

There was a satirical article that had been written.

And he said, would you care to defend your honor by playing us?

Cambridge University at Tiddlywinks.

And Prince Philip wrote back saying very politely, I'd absolutely love to, bit busy, but perhaps I could nominate someone in my place.

And he nominated the goons.

So there was this bizarre

show, which was Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Seacomb.

It was the biggest thing on radio at the time for a comedy show.

And the royal family were big fans.

So yeah,

he sent them along to do it.

Yeah, which apparently they tried to get the goons to play them at Tiddlywinks, Cambridge had before, and so it was so great they managed to get to the royal family and they had a royal instruction to go.

So they had to, and they played Cambridge University.

And I was watching the video of the when the umpire kind of launched the big match, and he read out a letter from Prince Philip, which I still don't know if Prince Philip wrote it himself or if it was a bit of satire from the Empire, but I hope he wrote it himself.

And the letter said, Give my best wishes to both teams, but try, if you can, to do it in such a way that you convey that I wish the Cambridge team to lose.

Then, I had hoped to join my champions, but unfortunately, while practising secretly, I pulled an important muscle in the second or tiddly joint of my winking finger.

And then in the end, unfortunately, Cambridge did win, didn't they?

They did.

They did.

120.5 to 50.5

walkover.

Yeah, it really was.

The students were in full evening dress all the way through.

The goons were wearing yellow night shirts with a royal Tiddlywink tie on that.

And the game finished with Harry Seacombe singing a special Tiddlywinks anthem.

And it was a big deal.

Like, this was the big moment for the Tiddlywinks community in the UK.

Not for the goons.

They had bigger moments.

So it was the biggest moment for the Tiddlewick, really.

All for the UK.

All for the University of Cambridge.

Yeah,

But Tiddlywinks got a big moment there.

And interestingly,

so that was on the 1st of March 1958.

On the 10th of March, 1958, Spike Milligan, in the time since the match and the next goon show being recorded and going out, wrote an episode of the Goon Show called Tiddlywinks, in which after the hands of the defeat at Cambridge, Netty Seagoon, who Harry Seacombe played, seeks his gameful revenge.

And the whole episode, so again, broadcasting to millions and millions, Tiddlywinks became this big thing.

And there's a Facebook page, which is the official Tiddlywinks organization in the UK.

They have a Facebook page.

There's only about 400 people who follow it.

Really only?

Only 400.

Who thought it would be in the low hundreds of thousands?

Yeah.

The content is slamming.

And

there's a guy on there called David Lockwood, and he says, this is from his post, he says, Prince Philip did more to expand our noble game of Tiddlywinks than anyone else in the world.

I tell people that his sponsorship of the Goons match of 1958 created extensive publicity, and by the early 1960s, there were more than 200 clubs in the British Isles.

Prince Philip continued to support Tiddlywink through the establishment.

He made a Silver Wink trophy, and he backed the 50th anniversary in 2008.

So he was big.

It's one of those sports that I'm afraid America has trounced Britain at consistently for a couple of decades now.

Yeah, they're much better at Tiddlywinks than British people now, the British players.

I'm really sorry.

There was an article in the LA Times in 2019 about the kind of federer and nadal of Tiddlywinks.

They were called Larry Khan and...

Oh, I think it's David Lockwood as the other one.

Yeah.

Yeah, Khan and Lockwood are the other two.

Anyway, 2019, they reported on this match that Khan was playing in Cambridge.

And I'm quoting directly here.

He'd flown over from Washington, D.C.

on economy.

Nobody asked for an autograph or to pose for a selfie.

Khan's privacy hasn't been invaded by being the most successful Tiddlywinks player of all time.

The man who was officiating the match he played in Cambridge, quoting here, emailed emailed the members of the English Tiddlywinks Association to encourage them to come and watch.

In the following five hours of play, nobody did.

And that's him emailing the English Tiddlywinks Association.

If they're not turning up,

I know.

That's sad.

I think one of the reasons is because it used to be illegal to play Tiddlywinks in the UK in a pub without a license.

What?

No.

In the UK, in a pub without a license.

Wow.

So there was a Tiddlywinks match.

In In fact, it was a marathon, a Tiddlywinks marathon over 15 yards at the York Beer Festival on the 3rd of November 1970.

And this was supposed to take place.

This was an article in the Daily Mirror that I found.

But it was called off because the police rang up and said, no, it's illegal to do that without a license.

Was this a gambling thing, or is it dangerous?

It was

money.

It was for charity they were doing it.

And they said, there's certain games that you're allowed to do in pubs if there's money involved.

And Tiddlywinks wasn't on that list.

And so they weren't allowed to do it.

And so they replaced it with a marathon of blowing peas through a straw.

Hang on.

And that was on the list of things you're allowed to do.

Wasn't counted as a spot.

I see.

Actually, there is a genuine crisis in the world of Tiddlywinks happening now, and it's that there is a massive wink shortage.

And it's a problem because most...

Of the winks that are being used these days were made a long time ago.

There are not firms making tiddlywinks these days.

So even the Cambridge match I just mentioned from 2019, they'd be using 1980s winks.

No,

really.

What are you using with Tiddlywinks?

Aren't my winks weren't from the 1980s when I was using them?

The supplier has gone bust, so this is a problem.

And there are hopes that 3D printing will save the day.

Right.

This will be amazing.

Well, I don't know if it is as young and vibrant as one might want it to be.

Because if you look at the list of Tiddlywinks champions, I think you mentioned Lockwood and Khan.

I would say they are more the Djokovic Nadal, and the Nadal Federer are Khan and Patrick Barry.

That's the guy who doesn't like vaccines.

Look, they're all very well vaccinated, and it's social distance matches.

I have no idea, but basically, Patrick Barry is a British chemical engineering lecturer at Cambridge, and he has been playing Larry Khan on and off since they first met in 1995.

So that's a good 26 years.

Even in 1995, Khan have been going for for 15 years.

So he's basically been going for 40 years, this guy.

They need fresh blood, I think, in the Tiddlywinks game.

Yeah, maybe.

Patrick Barry is sponsored by a type of whiskey, isn't he?

Yeah, basically the whiskey company have decided that they don't want to sponsor Cristiano Ronaldo or Federer or Nadal or anyone like that.

They want a real person who is passionate about their spot.

And so they found Patrick Barry, who is the world's singles champion at Tiddlywinks.

Is it possible they looked at the cost of getting

Federer to be sponsored to sponsor the whiskey?

If you look at this 24-year-old whiskey from Cameron Bridge Grain Distillery, it has a picture of the Tiddlywinks champion on the label.

Amazing.

Awesome.

Apparently it has waves of vanilla, peppery spiciness and the taste of pencil shavings.

I think it's really exciting that this exists and I think there should be.

Like because when you read the Facebook page and if you ever get a chance I encourage everyone listening to go and check out Newswink the newsletter by the official tiddly winks

have you read Winking World that's another one no I haven't even gone there Winking World is another very good one right they recently ran a 12-page biography of Alan Dean

no

how did they confine that to 12 pages

Winking World 101 said most of your comments on WW100 were broadly the same this is all very well but why isn't there a 12-page biography of Alan Dean?

Well, dear reader, I aim to please.

And there was a 12-page biography of Alan Dean.

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It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that there is such a thing as bendy rocks.

But this is, I mean, it sounds bullshit, but it's true.

There are genuine bendy rocks in the world.

So there is a sandstone.

It's called itacolamite, and it's not found in many places in the world.

You get it in Brazil, you get it in North Carolina, you get it in Georgia,

there's a town in India, you get it.

I'm sure it's other places, but they've only been found in sparse areas around the world.

And this is a rock where basically you should watch videos online.

It wobbles when it's held on either side in a way that rocks don't.

And it's because

It's because in the inside of the rock there's quartz and there's these interlinking bits, these interlocking sort of bendy bits inside that hold the quartz together.

And there's voids in them, which means there's bits of space where they just find themselves having a bit of flexibility, but there's enough of them that the whole thing can bend.

So it's not like if you're walking along the mountain, you're like you're on jelly the whole time.

Yeah, it's not like that.

You have to get quite a thin slab and then you can see it wobble.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's, yeah, it's just, it's, you know, if there was one thing we were certain of in life is that rocks don't bend.

So I was fascinated to learn that they actually do.

And actually, interestingly, it turns out all rocks bend.

They just don't do it as quickly as old Bendy may over here.

What they do is, if you see, and you can see rocks all over through,

like even on the side of cliffs, where you notice that they have this kind of bend in them.

Over many, many years.

Exactly, but over millions of years, a pressure, if there's a pressure on the side of a rock, it will slowly bend to the pressure.

Yes, it takes thousands, if not millions of years.

but if you've got the time,

you can bend any rock.

Yeah.

Is there a use for this bendy rock?

I'm sorry to be all practical.

Bouncy castles?

Like actual castles?

What?

Well, you have the bouncy.

Awesome.

I'm not sure we have enough of it or if it's been studied enough to know if it's useful for practical things like building or so on.

So the example that I've got on the screen here for the audience tonight is from Leeds University.

That's in their archive.

So they obviously send it to universities around the world going, look a fucking bendy rock.

So it's obviously a new vertical.

Yeah.

Do you want to hear about another magic rock?

Yes, please.

There are magic rocks around the world which are the opposite of seismometers.

Okay.

So they tell you when there's not an earthquake.

Bingo.

Bingo.

I have a feeling I can do that anyway.

You probably could.

You probably could.

Is it when they're not moving?

That means there's no earthquake.

Yes, yes, but they're even more magical than that.

Imagine they're called PBRs.

They're precariously balanced rocks.

And what?

They're rocks that look like they should fall over any minute now, but they're still standing.

And if you know, you know, how long they've been there, They're reverse seismometers.

They tell you they haven't fallen over.

There hasn't been an earthquake in that set period of time that they've been balanced.

So this is really useful because if you you want to build a nuclear plant, you want to build it somewhere where there hasn't been an earthquake for a very, very long time or a bridge or whatever.

So, you build it right underneath the precariously balanced rock.

And so, these are really useful.

That's amazing, but aren't there that many of them?

No, there aren't that many.

Not that useful, actually.

I can think of one.

This isn't a rock so much as a virus, but there is a thing called a Medusa virus.

And I think it might be useful in bath because it can turn amoebas into rocks.

Oh, really?

Isn't that clever?

Yeah, so when the virus goes into the amoeba, it kind of makes this kind of rocky shell over itself and turns itself into a rock.

That's incredible.

Isn't that cool?

But there's the amoeba still inside.

The amoeba's still living inside, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

What a horrible way to go.

Yeah, that's great, though.

So Barth Pa could become a rock pool, which would be awesome.

Yeah.

That That thing here?

It's in Australia.

Yeah.

Yeah,

we have rock pools in this country.

Yeah.

Thanks.

No, you know, but we've also got watercress.

It doesn't mean we've all thought about these things.

I've got a magic rock to accompany yours.

You can get rock that is soft.

I think we actually mentioned this once on no such thing as a news, the long-lost TV show we once did.

But you can get rock that is as soft as butter, that

you put your finger in it and it bends like clay.

And this happens, it's quite rare, but it happens, for instance, cavers are told to look out for it.

It happens when people are making big quarries, they come across it.

And it essentially happens when rock's being dissolved.

So limestone can be dissolved by very salty waters around it or acidic waters around it.

But sometimes a bit of rock will be dissolved, but then it will be surrounded by other rocks.

So the rock doesn't dissolve and then flow away.

It just gets trapped, this soft, dissolved bit of rock,

inside another rock.

And so, apparently, when you're caving sometimes or when you're quarrying, you'll tap through a bit of rock and then suddenly you'll think it's rock solid and you'll put your finger in, just penetrates all the way through like magic.

Wow, why is that dangerous?

Like, sounds dangerous.

Why is it dangerous?

Why is it?

Yeah, yeah, it's not.

Oh,

I thought you said that people were told to look out for it and stuff.

Oh, no, but look out for it, like you know, look out for that adorable squirrel, you know.

Oh,

right, it's not.

Look out, it's not right sorry look out

look out wow do you want to hear some rock related words and maybe guess what they are yes so these are kind of mining related I would say so

can you guess what a bottom steward is

bottom steward bottom steward is Dustin Hoffman played this role actually

someone who looks after the lifts in the mine pretty close it's someone who looks after the people who work at the bottom of the pit

Back ripper?

Back.

Back ripper.

No, it's someone who removes the old support.

So when you're going away from somewhere, you get all the supports from behind you and then you put them in front of you.

So you're ripping them away from the back.

That's so clever.

Do you know what a glory hole is?

Yes.

Well,

I thought I did.

They've got time for that sort of business down the bottom of a mine, though.

Everyone's got a letter steam at the end of the day.

No, I've no idea.

If you have that rock that you could just put your finger in, then maybe

is it a way of seeing from different mining tunnels to each other?

No, it's just what miners call an extremely impressive excavation on the surface.

They call that a glory hole.

Ah, sure it is.

Can I just quickly tell you something about glory holes?

Oh, yeah, go on.

Finally, we're on that subject, are we?

I remember, so when COVID first kicked off, the EU had a bunch of recommendations for how to avoid getting it.

And there was, and I was on the EU legal side of the website, a recommendation that you take advantage of glory holes to stop yourself from contracting the disease.

That's a whole you have sex through, right?

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's in the EU law.

It feels like there might be other diseases that you're leaving yourself over.

You just saw people walking around with a DAR, didn't you, with a hole in them?

I know that the oldest glory that we're just on glory hole facts now, but the oldest glory hole in Australia is in a museum, I think, in Perth.

And there was a big argument about whether this should be allowed to be in a museum because, you know, it's a glory hole.

But they were saying, well, it's a really important part of the LGBTQ community in Perth and in Western Australia.

Is it like cavemen?

And is it an interactive exhibit?

Have you seen Dan, have you seen those things at the seaside where you put your head through and you get photographed?

It's like that.

I know it's my fault we're on this, but let's go back to your role vocabulary.

No, no, let's move back.

I was going to say, oh, do you know that the word bougie?

Oh, was a particular fast-drying type of cement that you would pump into the bottom of a mine to give you a floor.

Cool.

That was known as bougie.

Yeah, isn't that cool?

Mining is so cool.

Some mines are so deep that the lifts can't go all the way down because the lift cable is so heavy that you have to stop, because the lift would snap under the weight of the cable.

So you have to go down to a certain level, then get into a new lift and go all the way down to the bottom.

Wow.

The technology that they have is just crazy.

So that's taller,

it goes deeper than the Burjal Khalif, for example.

Oh, no, I think you have to have more than one lift as well.

Oh, yeah, there's more than one lift there, right?

Yeah, same issue with skyscrapers.

Oh, wow.

Tracy Emin,

the artist, married a rock a few years ago.

The rock?

No, just a rock, sadly.

Sadly for her.

She found a rock in her garden and she said, I'm marrying this rock.

She was 52.

She wore her father's funeral shroud for the marriage.

And she said, it's not going anywhere.

It will be there waiting for me.

And she said, the stone I married is beautiful and dignified.

It will never let me down.

They divorced two years later.

Do you know what's mad about that?

Is that I'm pretty sure I was reading an interview with Tracy Emmon recently and her mum wanted to call her Pebble.

I'm fairly certain that's right.

And her mum really wanted to call her Pebble and I think the doctors at the hospital said we can't let you call your daughter Pebble.

Because you'll be fucked up if you do.

Why would they say that?

The doctors.

They said it's not a good name.

They said it's not a proper name.

Yeah.

I'll tell that to Fred Flintstone.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

And I just want to say, Bath, thank you so much.

That was so much fun.

We love being here every time.

And we'll come back again.

And everyone else who's at home listening right now, thank you for listening.

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

We'll see you all then.

Goodbye.

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