355: No Such Thing As The Big Bad Virginia Woolf

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tushinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my fact this week.

My fact is that while working as a publisher, the poet T.S.

Eliot liked to sit his visiting authors on a whoopee cushion before offering them an exploding cigar.

Wow.

I mean, did he do this with everybody?

Yeah, I don't know if people were warned about it.

I think most people assumed it wouldn't happen.

He was a very serious guy, according to the writings that he released.

So the idea that you would enter the office of the great poet T.S.

Eliot and have a cigar explode in your face while making a loud fart seems out of place, doesn't it?

Do you think maybe the very grave, serious persona he had throughout his life was all an act so that he could do this jape without people expecting it?

That's a great thing.

Could have been all building up to this.

All the front, yeah.

Yeah.

It wasn't just his authors who came in who he would turn these sort of practical jokes onto.

He once broke up a board meeting as well by setting off a bucket full of firecrackers underneath the chairman's legs.

So he was all over the shop.

He was a nightmare to work with.

Sounds like a maniac.

That sounds dangerous as a 4th of July prank.

Yeah.

You'd be fired.

If you weren't quite senior in the company or you weren't about to become the greatest poet of the 20th century, you would be fired for that.

But wait a minute, wouldn't it be quite cool if you're about to be fired?

And they went, you're fired.

And you went, no, you're fired, mate.

And a lot of firecrackers went off his ass.

That would be amazing.

Stunning.

Maybe that's what happened.

And it was such an event they completely forgot this accent.

So, T.S.

Eliot, he's a famous poet, but also was actually a publisher himself.

So he worked for Faber and Faber.

In fact, he actually worked for it before it was Faber and Faber.

He worked for it when it was Faber and Gwyr.

Very

good.

Can I just say very, very good publishers, Faber and Faber?

They've got one book out this year.

I think it's called Funny You Should Ask by the QIA.

Here we go.

Here we go.

By Rob Marver.

Very good.

Very crafty.

Sorry, Dan, you were saying.

But so, yeah, so he joined them in the 1920s and he became a director and an editor there.

We're saying he was one of the great poets of the 20th century, which I guess he was.

Fine.

But

he did also write cats.

I mean, he is

credited.

I believe that's what we're referring to when we say that.

Oh, I'm sorry.

He is the lyricist, credited as the lyricist on the musical cats, even though he died 20 years before it came out because he wrote this book, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, in 1939.

And it was for his godson.

It was, you you know it wasn't yeah that's that's unfair to say that he wrote cats i say he wrote cats because for example he won a tony award for cats in 1983 18 years after he died and they wheeled him up didn't they onto the stage very dark award ceremony and he went surprise i haven't been dead all this time

huge stick bomb goes off at the back of the room chaos i think in his defense he said about cats in an interview when he was asked about it that one wants to keep one's hand in so you know you just keep trying stuff out.

You just keep writing the practice of writing, even if you're not really writing serious stuff.

But he did really enjoy writing about cats because in this same interview, he basically said, I've thought about writing about dogs, but they don't seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well.

Which I can see that that's true.

A dog on a log does rhyme.

But I think there's more rhyming words for cats than there are for dogs.

Just, I mean, I'm not a poet, as you might be able to tell, but I've just...

No, I think that's really good.

He probably hadn't thought of the log thing.

Frog, the cat.

Frog as well.

It's actually frog.

Yeah, but it's the cat in the hat, isn't it?

Not the dog on the log.

With a frog.

Okay, he wasn't Dr.

Seuss.

Come on.

Is that what poetry is?

I've never read any of his stuff, I must say.

Ezra Pound gave him his nickname, which you mentioned a minute ago, which was Possum.

So it's called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, because that was Elliot's nickname.

And it's related to his serious personality.

So despite all the practical jokes, he was known for being incredibly stiff.

The nickname Possum came came after the fact that possums are known for faking their own deaths.

So, the idea was that whenever he was at a social gathering, it seemed like he was faking being dead.

That's how much life he contributed to the party.

Oh, like playing possum, yeah, exactly.

But so, he liked the name Possum?

Is that what you're saying?

He did like it, yeah, it was affectionate.

And Virginia Woolf said he was so buttoned up, he wore a four-piece suit, and so he liked the name Possum.

He kind of embraced this, and it was based on that's the joke.

I understand.

I I was just trying to work out because I wanted to know if there was a bit of a three-piece suit I was missing all these years.

No, there's a bit of your sense of humor you've been missing all these times out.

But that's interesting because he did have a bit of a lack of a sense of humor about his names generally.

For example, T.S.

Elliott.

Why is the S in there?

Why not T.

Elliott?

Do you guys know?

Well, all I know really about T.S.

Eliot before researching this is that his name is an anagram of toilets.

So is it?

There you go.

Is that it?

If you take the S out, it's toilet backwards.

And he did not want that to be the case.

Yeah.

Kidding.

That's why he put the S in.

This is, a lot of people said it.

I haven't read him saying it himself, but, you know, Samuel Beckett has written about it, saying T.

Elliott is toilet spelt backwards.

Auden mentioned it, that that's what you would get.

I think it was a thing that everyone had noticed.

And so that's why the S was in there.

Wow.

So we know he didn't like dogs.

We know he likes cats.

Do you know what other animals he didn't like?

Spiders, I guess, is the obvious one.

Farmyard animals.

As a group, he famously at, or rather, perhaps not as famous as it should be, while working at Faber turned down George Orwell's animal farm.

It was submitted to them.

Oh,

and he read it and he wrote him a nice long letter saying it's brilliant.

And I'm very upset that we're not going to be publishing it because it means that whoever gets to publish it will probably get to publish your subsequent work, but I just, I can't do it.

It doesn't fit with us.

Because he doesn't like the farmyard animals.

Oh, I see.

And I'll tell you another animal he didn't like, flies, because they also turned down Lord of the Flies, Faber and Faber.

Is every subsequent fact in this show going to have to be linked tangentially to an animal?

Was it because Lord of the Flies has a character called Piggy and you get pigs in farmyards?

Brilliant.

That's exactly it.

Yes.

Well, they didn't specify that.

They turned it down with the notes: rubbish and dull, pointless, reject.

Wow.

Ouch.

Yeah.

God.

Sounds like he was quite a bad publisher.

No wonder he had to write poems to make ends meet, turning down all these absolute stone cold hits.

Unlike Faber of today, of course, who have another Stone Cold hit on their hands with what you should ask?

The new bug by the QILs.

Available now.

Spawn.

I didn't know how fun T.S.

Eliot was.

I appreciate we've just said that he's not fun all the way through this, but I did know he really liked Groucho Marx.

He idolized Groucho Marx.

They had dinner once together, T.S.

Eliot and Groucho Marx, but the dinner was a complete disaster because all Marx wanted to talk about was literature and all Elliott wanted to talk about was Marx Brothers films.

Yeah.

It's really interesting that if Groucho Marx was going to become friends with anyone, you would think it wouldn't be someone who has the big exploding cigar trick up his sleeve.

The worst thing.

Oh, maybe that was his ultimate prey for T.S.

Eliot.

I will get him one day.

Well, that actually makes so much sense.

Sorry, because Elliott once wrote Marx a letter.

So he'd written Groucho Marks a letter saying, can I have a photo of you?

And Marx had sent it.

And T.S.

Elliott put this framed on his table.

But then Elliot wrote another letter to Marx saying, in the photo of you, you're not smoking your cigar.

And it's a bit annoying because all my visitors come, look at it and say, who's that?

No one recognizes you without the cigar.

Can you do one with a cigar?

So maybe that was all part of a ploy to get that exploding cigar into his face.

That is interesting.

I think it's interesting that they were so close because Elliot was quite anti-Semitic, wasn't he?

Do you know what I mean?

Yes, we should mention that, I think.

A lot of his poems that before he became famous do have certain anti-Semitic tropes to them.

And it was before the Second World War.

And then obviously after the Second World War, people realized that, wait a minute, you can't really do this kind of thing.

But he never really properly backtracked on it.

So.

Yeah.

Well, actually, it was quite tense.

I'm not sure they did like each other that much.

If you read the exchanges of letters, they're full of barbs.

So there was one where when Mark sent sent Elliot this photo, Elliot wrote back saying, I've hung that right next to my photos of Yates and Paul Valeri, you know, in the pride of place.

And then Groucho wrote back to him saying, That's so weird because I've just read an essay about you, which named those other two pictures, but there was a conspicuous absence.

I trust this was an oversight on the part of the journalist.

What a weird thing to write to someone saying the article I didn't mention a photo of me in home.

Get a grip, mate.

Then Elliot's excuse wasn't wasn't it?

He said, oh, well, your picture was a photo and the other pictures were drawings or paintings.

So maybe the writer had only noticed the paintings and hadn't noticed photographs and didn't want to talk about photographs.

Good excuse.

Very good excuse.

I mean, it's absolutely mad that in the old days you had to write to someone for a photo of them.

Can we just appreciate that as a really stupid system?

Imagine.

How do you get a photo of someone now again?

Is it easier now?

Yeah.

Google them?

Google image.

And then right click and you go print.

Yeah, but when you've got a picture of Groucho Marx on your wall with all the other people you've met,

you don't want one that you've taken off Google Image, do you?

With Getty images over the top of it.

Come on, Andy.

You should come and see my gallery wall.

It's got a lot of lovely watermarks on it.

So many celebrity friends.

It's Nicol Kidman's up there, Barack Obama.

Shall we talk about his sex life?

Oh,

always up for that.

Okay, sure.

It was very difficult, I think, is the headline there.

He was very awkward around women.

He had a lot of relationships in his life, and until the end, they were pretty much a disaster.

Yeah.

Oh, I was ready for the juicy stuff, James.

I didn't think it was just

he had bad relationships.

Okay, I was just going to set it up for someone else to jump in there, but fine.

We've all got bad relationships, yeah.

His most famous relationship was with Vivian, and he told the wolves that he couldn't imagine shaving in her presence.

That's how awkward the relationship was between those two people.

This is Virginia Wolves.

I mean, we should say, not actual wolves.

It was confusing.

Sorry, I just assumed, yeah.

He didn't like dogs, but he loved wolves.

I thought I pronounced the word wolf with the obvious double O.

It was so obvious that there was a double O in there, guys.

I had the F of wolves, and that's what I was.

But I think wolf, wolves, it's probably probably she Virginia always said I'm Virginia were wolf

wolves say about him they said oh

that's interesting

Well, he was part of that Bloomsbury group wasn't he with the wolves Virginia Wolf and Bertrand Russell as well with whom his wife had an affair.

Wait, so what did Virginia Wolf say?

What were you saying about what did the wolves say?

We need to know what the wolves are saying.

said.

He said it to the wolves.

He said, I can't imagine shaving in my wife's presence.

And then the wolves said, you really need to make this house out of bricks.

He said he couldn't imagine shaving in his wife's presence.

Yeah, because it was so awkward.

They got married really, really quickly.

But then it was really obvious, very, very quickly that they weren't compatible one little bit.

Oh.

They slept in different rooms as well.

That's another.

Well, they tried to sleep in the same room on their honeymoon as is traditional, and it sounds awkward, as is the theme.

So they went on honeymoon in Eastbourne, and she was on her period and had an embarrassing accident when they were trying to have their honeymoon moment.

And they were both so incredibly embarrassed that he went and slept out on a deck chair outside the hotel for the rest of the week.

And she trashed the hotel room because she was in such a frenzy of embarrassment.

And then she took the sheets away with her because she didn't want the hotel staff to see them but then of course they just called their home when they got back and said you've stolen all of our bedding which which sort of is more embarrassing i think oh dear but they did they did also i think at that point of the honeymoon the honeymoon was meant to be the debut sex fest because they hadn't had sex as far as I could tell.

It seems that they got married really quickly because Mickey, I think he told Ezra Pound, he said, I I want to have sex.

And then three months later, he was married to her.

So he obviously...

Sex fest debut sex

yeah they should rebrand honeymoon

where are you going on your um debut sex fest oh we're off to stay with the wolves

actually virginia werewolf said living with vivian who was quite mad living with vivian was like having a bag of ferrets hung around your neck She was very troubled, wasn't she?

And, you know, I think she was, was she sectioned at one point when he was away and she spent the the rest of her life in a hospital?

Yeah, so he went away to America, didn't he?

And then his solicitors sent her a letter saying, I want a separation, rather than him saying it.

And then when he went back to London, she kind of stalked him and would go to his office.

And he would always sneak out of the back door so that she wouldn't see him.

And then she would walk around London with a knife.

It was like a rubber knife.

So it's like a joke.

She was like, I'm trying to find my husband with this rubber knife.

Wait, did she get it from the same shop as the exploding cigars?

Smithies absolutely cleaned up on the Elliotts, didn't they?

And then she joined the British Union of Fascists in the

30s, yeah.

Yes, that's right.

And she liked to wear the uniform in public.

Yeah, because when you hear about the early days of her life, particularly the university years, everyone sort of talked about her as being very flamboyant.

She was a great dancer.

She'd always speak her mind.

She smoked in public, which you wouldn't usually see women doing.

She dressed like an actress.

Aldous Huxley said that he really liked hanging out with her because she was vulgar.

It was just, she was just so different.

She would say what she thought.

And then you get to this fascist period where suddenly it seems like a totally different character.

In fact, the last time she ever saw Elliot was at one of his book talks where she went into the audience, she brought three books with her and she brought her dog and he signed her books for her.

and then went off with someone else.

It's the weirdest thing.

It's the last time they ever saw each other.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

But still, you know, she got her book signed.

She got what she wanted.

Yeah.

She put it at the book sign.

Could she not have just found his signature on the internet, printed it off and then stuck it in her book?

All right.

So you've seen my autograph book too.

She did.

She tried various ways to get him back.

So one of them seemed to be bringing this dog to his book chat, which is a bad idea.

Another one was putting an advert out in the Times, the 1930s.

So she thought there was a a sort of a conspiracy to keep them apart by other people.

And so she put an ad in the Times saying, Will T.

S.

Eliot please return to his home at 68 clarencegate gardens which he abandoned on the september the 17th 1932 wow yeah

um do you know elliot himself was really secretive about his correspondence

In fact, the whole estate has been very secretive since he died, pretty much,

because his widow is called Valerie.

He married again much later.

So Peter Aykroyd was trying to write a biography of him, and he was forbidden to quote from any correspondence or unpublished work, and he was hardly allowed to quote even actual published poems of T.S.

Eliot.

In this biography of the man, Elliott destroyed so much correspondence that between 1905 and 1910, there is just one postcard left by him.

That's it.

That's all there is for those five years.

What does it say?

Dear mom, really sunny here.

Hope you're well.

Having a lovely debut sex fest in youth porn.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 2001 an artist got lost in Los Angeles and decided to make his own sign to stop other people from getting lost in future.

Not only did it remain unnoticed for more than a year, but when the city was tipped off, they found that it met all signage rules and they kept it in place for eight years.

So charming.

What was the sign saying?

It said five.

And the word north.

Five five north.

Yeah.

So this was a sign to get off a highway and get onto another highway.

And basically, the signpost to tell you where to go was really close to the ramp.

And really, there should have been one a lot further back.

So whenever anyone drove down the 110 and wanted to get onto the five, they would only realize at the last second that they needed to be in a certain lane.

And they would kind of swerve in front of the cars.

And he was like, well, it's just really dangerous.

So I'm going to put a five maybe a mile further back or a half mile further back.

And he put it there.

And he did it in broad daylight he just one day he just got a load of ladders and just went up there and did it and it was there and no one noticed and I think he tipped them off in the end this artist named Richard Ankrom he tipped off the city in the end and they just kept it there and then they decided we're making some new signs now and we're gonna have to take this down but actually they put a new five where his five was so they took his down and they put a new one up there so they kind of tacitly admitted that he was right that it should have been there He planned it for ages as well.

Like he didn't just go in broad daylight, just dressed as he was.

He absolutely planned the whole thing.

So he had his haircut.

I'm not sure why, but he had his haircut.

He bought some work clothes.

He had a hard hat.

He got an orange vest.

He even had a hat.

Well, it must have been the haircut must have been to fit inside the hard hat, maybe.

Possibly.

Yeah, he had a jacket of a Mohican before that, didn't he?

And he had his truck.

He did a thing where, as well as making the signage for the actual sign itself, he made signage for the side of his truck to match the Caltrans, which is California Transports, the logos and so on to make it look like he was part of them.

So it was properly planned.

And he's an artist, isn't he?

And you can tell because he clearly doesn't have a nine-to-five job.

He called his piece Guerrilla Public Service.

And I should just say that I got this fact from a book called The 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design by Roman Mars.

And it's a really awesome book based on the 99% Invisible podcast.

And it's full of loads of awesome stuff about the streets.

And you, you know, if you read it, then you walk down the street and you go, oh, you know why that's there?

You know why that's there?

You know why that's there?

It's a really cool book.

Oh, great.

He's amazing.

Roman Mars.

We could just

99% invisible do not need any extra advertising for him.

Yay.

Knocks the head with the new book.

Funny you should ask.

It's so cool how people keep doing this around the place.

And it's kind of all these micro-banksies, but with particular bugbears.

So there is a thing currently going on in Sheffield where people are changing noughts on street signs into Qs and no one really knows why they're doing this.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So there is a theory that it's to do with Q and ON.

I was wondering if it might be that.

Which is the insane conspiracy that the USA has run by Satan worshiping child sacrificing paedophiles.

But I don't know why in Sheffield people will be changing the street signs.

This will get the word out.

So it may be nothing to do with that.

One of the road-based public service that people perform, which I think is very cool, is in the Czech Republic, where a group of Czech nerds basically just saved the government $18 million.

What?

And they did this because there's this guy called Tomas von Draček, and he is a businessman.

He runs some tech businesses.

And he found out that the country was about to pay $18 million to switch their road toll system to a digital system.

And as someone who knows about coding and programming and stuff, he was really pissed off.

He put a post on LinkedIn saying, this is classic bureaucracy gone mad.

This task is simple enough for a group of programmers to do over a weekend and he just put that on linkedin and the prime minister got in touch and was like well is that true and would you mind doing it and so he was like all right i'll ask some friends and he signed up 150 of his programmer friends and over 48 hours they got together and redesigned the whole czech road system and they got like meals brought to them by members of the public and that saved the country um speaking of european road stuff and road signs uh the big story of this year, as we all know, was the town of fucking,

which is in where is the town of Austria in Austria.

And they are sick and tired of all the fucking tourists coming over and stealing their road signs, right?

They really are.

They're fucking road signs.

They're fucking road signs.

So they decided that they were going to change their name to Fugging.

And they voted on it.

And this has happened.

And the town of Fucking is now called the Town of Fugging.

but it hasn't stopped the vandalism because there's been a whole load of more vandalism of people changing the signs back to fucking

fugging is objectively a funny sounding word as well, and it's quite close to the original.

They should have changed it to Ghent or something.

They can't change it to Ghent.

There's already

something nicer.

Vienna, yeah, exactly Vienna.

Thank you.

In 2017, in China, in the province of Jiang Zhu, a man was arrested for repainting road signs in order to make his commute easier.

He was really annoyed being stuck in traffic in a lane on the motorway, and he was caught on CCTV painting big white paint arrows to redirect all the cars in his lane into the lane next to it to stop the traffic.

That's brilliant.

But as if he would get out, paint it, get back in, and then all the cars would go, whoa!

I couldn't work out for a long time.

When you started saying this, I couldn't work out how you would choose road signs to make your commute easier because I thought he was putting up directions for himself, like this way, Derek, or whatever, which I would love to do.

Do you know that's a thing that exists in Los Angeles?

This is another thing I read in that book.

So if you live in Los Angeles, you would know about this, but I'd never heard of it before.

There are these road signs, rectangular yellow road signs that just turn up every now and then.

And they tend to be a black arrow with some letters above it and some letters below.

And the letters below are kind of the inverse mirror image of the ones above.

And what these are is they're directions to movie sets or to TV show filming locations.

And when you're in LA and you're filming in some kind of parking lot somewhere, you'll put these signs up so all the techies will know where to go, all the actors will know where to go, stuff like this.

And obviously the people in LA know what this is.

But if you're a tourist and you're kind of looking for celebrities and stuff, you just wouldn't know.

You'd just see this sign and you'd think, well, it's just nonsense.

Also, it doesn't say Batman or or whatever.

No, but what they do is they tend to put words that the people in the know would know what it is, but the people who don't know what it is wouldn't know what it was.

For instance, it would say Magnus Rex this way, Magnus Rex this way.

And that was the Batman reboot, the Dark Knight Rises.

So if you saw those signs, you would know to go to the Dark Knight Rises.

There were signs for Rasputin, so you would think, oh, they're just doing some low-budget Russian movie, but actually, it was for Iron Man 2.

But that's got a Russian baddie in it.

Does it?

Yeah.

Does it?

So that's a very tricky clue.

Yeah.

Iron curtain man.

Brilliant.

I think that's what they actually tried calling it.

Yeah.

Well, in ancient Rome, they used to have names on road signs, didn't they?

I think I read this.

That, yeah, you used to have, if you had a road sign, whoever built the road would have their name on it.

So you could admire the work of this particular person.

And then it would have the name as well of the person who last repaired it.

So it's sort of update on who to thank for the smoothness of the road.

These toilets were last checked by

signs that you get in Pablo's.

Yeah, exactly.

So, this is kind of about

street art and artists mucking around with things.

So, I just thought I'd try and find out a little bit about Banksy.

And I'm here to tell you who he is.

No, I don't know that.

But there was a large theory that did the rounds that it's Neil Buchanan from Art Attack, if you remember that from your childhood.

I do.

Because he's very used to large outdoor multimedia installations.

You know, there's lots of good circumstantial evidence.

It got so bad this year that he had to put at the top of his website an announcement saying Neil Buchanan is not Banksy.

We have been inundated with inquiries over the weekend.

This website does not have the infrastructure to answer all these inquiries individually, but we can confirm there is no truth in the rumor whatsoever.

It's exactly what Banksy would say.

It's Neil.

So the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a few of these over the years.

There was a guy called Harvey Stromberg who who in 1971 decided he wanted an exhibition in MoMA, but obviously they wouldn't let him because he wasn't very famous.

So what he did was he went in every day and he would take photos of a light socket or of a tile on the floor or of a brick on the wall.

He would go home, he would print it out on his printer, and then he would go in and stick it over the exact place where he'd taken the photo from.

So like a load of them, they never found them for years and years and years.

Whenever he put one on the floor, they would find it on the same day because they had those kind of buffing machines that would go around and clean the floor and they would find them.

But there were some that were just over a brick on the wall, which they didn't find for decades.

I'm going to start doing that in my house to broken bits of wallpaper and you know, rusting bath handles.

Just take a photo of a nice bit of wallpaper, stick it over.

Have you guys read about the Grammar Vigilantes?

No, these

are people who go around correcting signposts.

They seem to happen in various countries.

In Bristol, Bristol has the UK's leading grammar vigilante and he specializes in apostrophes.

He began in 2003.

It was when he saw a council sign which said open Mondays to Fridays but with apostrophes in both of those words, which obviously is a painful experience.

And so he invented something called the apostrophiser, which is an eight-foot long tool which basically has an apostrophe stamp on the end so that he can reach the really high signs and insert the apostrophe.

And he doesn't like to do damage, so he built his own specially made stepladder so it didn't have to be lent up against shops.

How much damage is he doing with a normal stepladder?

You're using the stepladder wrong.

Every time you're taken away from the building, bricks fall out of it.

He's not a stepladder pro.

I've got a couple of things just on signs, general signs.

So firstly, I found it quite amazing that signs played quite an important role during World War II in the UK in that there was a message that went round to a lot of people to remove the signs so that if any Germans were coming over, they'd be confused and have no idea where to go.

So

people encouraged us to take them down, and people would arrive, not know where they're going.

But on the flip side, there was also a movement by Hitler to change signs around so you would send people to the.

Apparently, that's a thing that was attempted.

I don't know how successful it was.

So it must have just been very confusing driving around in World War II.

Sounds like your source for this is Dad's Abbey.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

If you are Hitler and you've got spies on the ground during the Second World War, I would definitely want to know about troop movements and the state of the country's defences more than misdirecting people to their local church or whatever the signs are for.

Getting a commuter lost on his way home for tea.

Well, this is why they lost the war, Andy.

It was definitely a sign of resistance in Norway when the fascists took over Norway.

A very subtle sign of resistance was apparently you often gave Nazis incorrect directions when they asked the way for somewhere.

That was a signal that you were on the good guy's side.

And they can't find their way back to you because they're lost.

So that's actually pretty effective.

Yeah.

Have you ever given someone wrong directions in London, for instance, like a tourist, and then realised afterwards that you've done it, you didn't do it on purpose.

And then

you think, oh, fuck, I've just sent them to the wrong place.

That is one of the worst feelings in the world, isn't it?

It's bad.

But if you suspect that they're a foreign spy, then it's actually actually patriotic things anyway.

Yeah, they were a leftover Nazi still plugging away 80 years later.

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

My fact is that King Edward III owned a Yeti mask.

So, riddle me that.

Okay, so I've said Yeti mask.

There is a creature in English mythology, which I think is kind of close, sort of analogous to the Yeti.

Basically, these were things called Wodwoses, and they were wild men who lived in the woods.

They were big, they were not civilized, they were covered in hair, they weren't really human from all the depictions of them.

They crop up a lot in medieval manuscripts and things like that.

Normally, kind of trying to carry women off, and then a knight has to turn up and save the day and kill the wodwos.

And in Edward III's accounts, they have these wardrobe accounts which list everything that the king bought from from 1348 AD, there is Capita de Wodwos, which is the head of a Wodwos.

In fact, before it, there is Xiv, which is 14 of Roman numerals.

I don't think that means he bought 14 of them, but I really hope it was.

It could be, yeah.

It was that.

Yeah.

So, this is a wodwose.

He, um, he really liked, he's from the 14th century, Edward III, right?

Um, he really enjoyed doing like tournaments and jousts and stuff like that.

And according to one paper I read, so this is by a guy called A.

Chester Beatty, who is like a american billionaire who became a historian he reckons that edward might have used the mask for one of his christmas tournaments so that maybe people would be jousting with a wold woe's head on so it might have been like you know like the masked singer where people are kind of jousting but they're in masks and stuff because there was also a capita elephantum a capita virginum a capita leonum and a capita signorum so in his wardrobe he had an elephant head a virgin's head a lion's head and a swan's head.

A

virgin's chances in this fight between several wild animals.

How can you tell a virgin's head?

I mean, the hymen's not on the head.

He's going to give it away.

Just on Edward's royal wardrobe.

He did have pretty lavish taste.

So this might be the same year as the Wurdewurza costume.

But in 1337 to 38, the clerk of his wardrobe ordered these huge amounts of like cloth and yarn and full bull's hides and loads of gold leaf and also 86 plain masks and 12 masks with long beards.

And this was preparation for the King's Games, which they had every year.

And along with that, they built an entire fake forest.

So out of timber and paint and everything, a massive fake forest.

And then they made loads of linen baboons.

And they sort of dropped all these linen baboons into the forest.

And they sewed the baboons into tunics with sort of pearls and hose and gloves and caps on them and everything.

So they were wearing the proper gear because they're in the royal household.

And then I guess they galloped through the fake forest and hunted down linen baboons.

Oh my god, that sounds amazing.

A lot of this was because,

so Edward was married to Philippa of Hainault, right?

And they were very young when they got married.

And so there was a regency period where Isabella was looking after the country, who was Edward's mother, right?

Isabella.

So Isabella kept Philippa and Edward in real punery.

Like she wouldn't give them much much money to do anything.

They kind of had to live their life almost not as normal people, but as normal rich people.

But then, when they became king and queen proper, they just really went for it.

And Philippa of Hainal just spent so much money on all these incredibly lavish clothes and jewels.

And by 1360, they owed about £16,000 to various different clothing embroiderers and tailors and furriers.

And that's a couple of million pounds in today's terms that they owed to these people and i was reading about like one robe that she had which required 952 ventras and i didn't know what a ventra was apparently it's the fur that you get from the belly of a red squirrel so they had to get 952 squirrels to for this one robe it's like whoa

Is the whole blaming the grey squirrels thing?

Were they a scapegoat that these guys created?

Because they actually caused red squirrels to go almost extinct.

Maybe, yeah.

He really went bust later on.

Edward III had to pawn off the crown jewels so that he could raise money.

He didn't have a...

Yeah.

But he pawned off the great crown of England to Simon de Mirabello.

Wow.

Just one thing that he did own, which is quite similar to something that Dan owns, is he had a Yeti mug.

In as much as he had a silver cup that was decorated with wodawoses.

And so if we're saying that those are Yetis, then

he had a Yeti mug.

I think Dan will pro Dan, you've been keeping a very polite diplomatic silence about whether they're Yetis or not.

I'm pretty sure Dan thinks they're not Yetis.

They absolutely aren't Yetis, yeah.

It's a completely different species.

Completely different species.

Before we get into me absolutely ripping Andy over that,

just sticking on Edward III for a second.

He's an interesting character.

I hadn't heard of him as a king, I have to say.

Again, I'm not British, so he's very far back.

But you've you've heard of, you know, Edwards the fifth and sixth.

Presumably, you knew that a third must have happened before that.

Yeah, I've got all the other in the trilogy of Edwards.

But I've not seen that one, unfortunately.

No, it went downhill, actually.

Yeah, so it's interesting in that...

all of us are probably related to him.

He's one of those guys where they've done a few reports where they say there's a 99% chance that if you are of British origin, if you were born and your family was through this period, you are directly related to him.

So all of us are his great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren.

But also, he created something that still goes on today, which is also connected to clothing, which is the chivalry Knights of the Garter.

And the garter itself is literally a garter, which you would wear.

There's a story that he was at some dance and he was dancing with the Countess of Salisbury.

And the garter, and this is one of the stories, there's many stories, but the story is that the garter slipped down her leg and everyone started laughing.

But he got very furious and he yelled, shame on him who thinks ill of it about the situation.

And that is the motto of the Knights of the Garter.

Shame on him who thinks ill of it.

And that is a garter that became the code for these knights, which is a thing still going on today.

In fact, there's over a thousand Knights of the Garter now, the thousandth of which was Prince William, which is a very convenient number to land on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who had to fill in those last 20?

It was all 20 books wandering past.

Do you think that they rushed through a load to get to a thousand?

Or do you you think a load of people weren't allowed to become for like 30 years?

They weren't allowed to do it.

Yeah, interestingly, it's the two princes.

It's Andrew and Edward, and then it's meant to be William next, but they just slipped in an MP in between.

So there's one guy just taking up 999.

Jini possibly at 999.

Anyway, Woodwo says, Andy, you fucking idiot.

They are Yetis, Dan.

They're the British Yeti.

Wow.

And this is, okay, this is the real thing.

I think they may have a kind of relationship with real history in that, obviously they're mythical, these wodwoses,

they didn't exist.

But after the Norman conquest, you did, for many years, you got gangs of wild men living savage in the woods, the swamps.

They were social outcasts.

They were criminalized.

So that is a possible origin point for this story, you know, sort of wild man living in the woods.

There are lots of medieval churches which have wodwoses in their stones.

And so there's this weird kind of relationship between local myth and, you know, newer Christian traditions, that kind of thing.

Well, even

great scientific minds actually, for a while, thought that these were real things.

And they didn't think it was a separate species.

They thought it was someone, as you say, went wild, became wild, had children that were wild, and they grew up as a sort of subspecies that knew nothing but the wild.

In fact, the person who gave us the name Homo sapiens, he had Linnaeus, that was Linnaeus who did that.

And one of the categories was Homo ferrous, which was these wild people.

and he was convinced and that's been dropped since we don't talk about his homo ferrous group um there's a few but he believed that there were wolf boys or feral children um that were abandoned by lost parents and subsequently raised by wolves that's the actual wolves not virginia wolves family and

and there's lots of legends like romulus in rome and remus who were suckled by a she-wolf and they there was a belief that they sort of naturally grew hair i think in the forest to protect themselves because they were living in the elements wasn't there that's right i I quite like that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf because Edward III, who wore Wodewus, was suckled by a she-wolf as well.

No, he wasn't.

Was he?

Yeah, that's what his mother was known as, the she-wolf.

Oh, very

leather switcheroo.

These tenuous links to animal themes.

Oh, that was a great one, Dan.

Don't let them

bother you.

T.S.

Eliot would have rejected that for publication.

Oh, no.

You know, Wodwoz's art and wild men and stuff like that are in one very famous historical poem, seeing as we were talking about T.S.

Eliot, and that is the 14th century romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And according to that poem, the Wodwoses in the UK, they live on the Wirral Peninsula, which is just outside Liverpool.

According to this poem, in the wilderness of Wirral dwelt there but few that God or man with good heart loved.

And it was basically, this was such a wild west, wooded, crazy area that this is where you would get these wild men living.

If the, it's a little-known fact that if the Beatles didn't shave meticulously every day, they would be covered in hair from head to toe.

The other stuff that Gawain fights in Gwain and the Green Knight is quite odd.

So, the Green Knight himself is a kind of Wodowosa.

Tolkien does a translation where he translates the Green Knight as being a Wodowoza, and they were often green men as well, were another mythical wild man.

But Gawain also fights in that chivalric myth,

wormers, which are dragons.

Dragons were called worms.

Really?

I think that's a huge promotion we've given dragons that they were worms.

He thought worms, wolves, and word was.

And the reason I'm saying it weirdly is because every time it's spelled, it's spelled differently.

So you can say word of was, a wada, wood, a ward, a wardwaza any way you like.

It is weird, isn't it?

And one of the spelling is waderhouse, which is where PG Woodhouse gets his name.

That is amazing, isn't it?

P.G.

Woodhouse is descended from Yetis.

Dan, do you agree with that?

I do, but for different theories.

You guys know, do you remember John Falstoff?

We've mentioned him before, friend of the podcast.

He was maybe the inspiration for Falstaff.

He was, and he was there at the Battle of Agincourt and stuff.

He was there when Joan of Arc came into Paris and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, he had a big old tapestry with woe duos in his hall.

Yeah.

So they were big.

Well, you also said they appear quite a lot in architecture and cathedrals and stuff.

One example of where Wodwoers, or in fact, green men, the sort of descendant of Wodewoza, appears, is Norwich Cathedral.

And that is because they were very common in roof bosses, which we know a lot about because they featured heavily in our last year's Book of the Year 2019.

And that's why, if you remember, in Norwich Cathedral, they erected a helter skelter that you could climb up last year so you could get a better view of the roof bosses.

And I mentioned it because I love that reverend who was the guy who decided to put the slide in.

And he was inspired when he visited the Sistine Chapel.

And the thing he thought as he looked up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was that Norwich Cathedral's decorations were every bit as wonderful, but just too high up to be appreciated.

Yes.

Sistine Chapel, they have

recently, because it's such a pain to look up constantly, you get a kind of crick in your neck if you're in there and you're always having to look, you know, crane your neck up.

So they, I think, have just installed swings so that

you get a really good view.

Oh, that's me.

Oh, I was with you for so much of that.

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

My fact this week is that there's a single termite home in Brazil that's the same size as Great Britain.

Wow, it's astonishing.

Big home.

It's not as

home.

Yeah.

I'm going to preempt you, James.

Okay.

Right.

I want to say it.

No, stop it.

Shut your mouth.

It's not a single termite.

It's a single home, but it is more than one termite living there.

Since the kids have left, we're rattling around the place.

It's the size of Great Britain, and I'm the size of a grain of rice.

The bedroom tax has taken its toll on these termites.

This is just incredible.

It was only confirmed a couple of years ago, only sort of discovered a couple of years ago when they've been clearing this pasture in Brazil for agriculture and stuff for 20 or 30 years.

And people started noticing there were a lot of mounds around.

And eventually, in 2018, someone decided to do a proper study of it and survey of it.

They realized there are 200 million termite mounds, these piles of excavated termite dirt spread across something the size of Great Britain.

So all across Brazil, and no one had really noticed before.

So then the people who lived there knew that there were these termite mounds kind of scattered about.

It wasn't that a scientist came along and he went, what are these massive mounds doing?

They went, what?

Oh my God.

It wasn't quite that.

Because their termite mounds are quite solid, they would just build their houses around them, wouldn't they?

They would, you know, they'd be in your garden and you'd like turn it into a barbecue or something or

sit on it about it.

You could put a slide down it for their kids.

Yeah.

It's amazing as well, isn't it?

Because it's a single termite species that's been been working on this and the amount of so they've looked into the amount of soil that they've managed to excavate that sits on top of the earth and they say that it's equivalent to 4 000 great pyramids of giza it's the amount that they've managed in all these years amazing it's extraordinary some of them some of them are as old as the pyramids so all of these are at least 700 years old give or take a few years and they're up to 3 800 years old and that's just from the 11 that they've properly studied the age of so far so some of them could be way older than that, but that is roughly the age of a lot of pyramids.

Yeah, no, they've said it.

That's actually the minimum estimate of their range, and it's like 4,000 years old is the minimum.

It might be twice as old as that from what they've studied so far.

And, like you say, it is one family because they thought that it must be lots of different species of termites that are rivals.

But they took a bunch of termites from one pile of dirt and then put them with a bunch of termites from another, and you'd expect them to always fight.

And they got along like what, like family, like a happy family.

and so that and they basically proved that this is just one home one family

cool do you know how they um found out how old they are this is quite cool what they did was they dug into the bottom of one of these piles of earth and they took out a little bit of earth and there's a technique which is really complicated so i won't go into it but you can kind of fire lasers at this earth and like look at what happens to the electrons and you work out the last time that it was exposed to sunlight so

they can just work it's so clever it's like carbon dating but for things that have not been alive.

And you just fire your little lasers at it, and it'll tell you when the last time it was in the sun.

God,

so clever.

We're so clever.

We're here talking about how clever these termites are, but look at us.

I mean, kicking ass.

When we say we, it is the scientists, because when I say it's complicated, I don't want to go into it.

Partly, it's because I don't really understand it.

We can take credit.

I bet there were just two termite architects that built this whole thing, but the rest of the termites are going, God, we're impressive, aren't we?

That's right, yeah.

You take credit for your species.

But

they're not even proper mounds like other termites build.

So some termites build...

sort of chimneys or ventilation things.

These were just described by the scientists who worked on this project as slag piles because

they live underground.

All it is is they're making space for their chambers underground.

So they make a vertical hole to the surface and then they just chuck the soil out of those holes.

And over time, that builds up into however tall these are, two meters, two and a half meters.

I mean, imagine what's underground, this huge cathedral space that they've emptied out.

Yeah.

And they were first discovered by a few scientists, but one in particular, a guy called Stephen Martin, who's an entomologist at the University of Salford.

And he doesn't even care about termites.

He is an expert in giant killer hornets.

The things that actually we should just call giant hornets these days, just big old hornets.

We're not supposed to call them.

Murder hornets.

Murder hornets.

We're not supposed to say that.

But he's an expert in those guys.

and um he was in brazil looking for some bees because he wanted to see how the bees were getting on in in brazil and then as he was going down the road he was like wait a minute what are those what are those things and why are they so regular and why are they in like a pattern and that was when they worked out that it was all this same species Absolutely it's worth saying, I don't know if this has been mentioned or even if it's assumed by the listener, but they're still building these mounds.

This is an active house.

It's not dead.

It's not like a a fossilized, old, abandoned Great Britain.

It's an active thing.

Six

houses in Griton, sorry.

Not enough.

Not many.

No, no, no.

So termites are, termites are pretty incredible, and possibly the most incredible termite is the queen.

So they've got a queen-based structure like bees and other species.

And England.

And England.

And much like in England, the termite queen is the only fertile member.

And so

she is super fertile, the termite, I mean, and she basically spends her entire life incessantly mating.

So she chooses a male to mate with, and then she spends the subsequent 15 to 20 sometimes years constantly shagging him.

And she'll make one egg every three seconds.

So in her lifetime, she makes over a quarter of a billion eggs, constantly producing them.

Is there a king termite that produces all the mating?

There's a king termite, and he's what's quite funny about them is that she's about 100 times bigger than he is and than anyone else in the colony.

So he's this microscopic thing.

She's next to him, and the reason she's so large is because she is one giant ovary.

And do please look on YouTube at a picture of a queen termite with eggs inside her.

So she's like this big, pulsating, transparent lump that's full of eggs.

And you can see the eggs bubbling and moving around inside her under her surface.

And yeah, and she can't move.

So it's awful being the queen because you're stuck.

She can't fit out of the door of her enclosure anymore.

She can't move at all.

So she depends totally on members of her colony to wash her, to feed her, to lick this weird sweat off her.

She's just stuck.

Is this still the termite queen we're talking about?

I'm just going to leave that ambiguous.

Scandal.

But the door, the door thing seems to be a bit of a mystery because if you've got a house the size of Great Britain, you'd think you could make the doors a bit bigger to fit your leader out of.

What's going on there?

Such a good point.

Termites usually have quite small doors.

They have like termite-sized doors.

Indeed.

She doesn't want to go anywhere either.

I mean, she's attached to this huge body of.

Her legs are tiny compared with the breeding mass of her.

Yeah.

If you gave her a big door, it would actually just be horrifying for her knowing she couldn't even get through it because she can't move.

Oh, so they're tricking her.

They're basically saying, oh, you could go everywhere, but oh, the doors are too small.

What a shame.

So she never knows.

The door thing is quite important in termites because a lot of them can't really defend themselves very well.

They can do a little bit of squirting horrible stuff out of their anus, but there's not really much they can do if they're attacked.

And so usually what they'll do is like a few different insects, they'll come back into their door and then use their head as a block to stop anything else from coming into the door.

And so basically then anything coming in will have to get past that one door head and then another doorhead would go into their place and then that stops anyone from getting into their tunnels.

And that is interesting as well, because in 2018 in Japan, they found the first all-female termite colonies where all of the termites, usually you would have kings and you would have lots of male soldiers and stuff like that and male workers, but this one is all females.

And the reason that they think it works is that the males are lots of different sizes, but the females are all exactly the same size.

And so they can have a head which will exactly fit in the door.

every single time and you're not sometimes going to have someone whose head's a bit too big or a bit too small.

And so by just having females in this colony, it means means that they have less chance of being attacked, which makes up for the lack of genetic change that you kind of need males and females for.

So, it's kind of interesting.

Nice.

That's really cool.

It's like they're the IKEA door blockers, you know, it's just like made to very basic specifications.

It's all the same, it's going to fit together.

Smart on.

We do take advice from termites on building these days.

So, they are particularly good at ventilation, which is something that we are quite bad at because the amount that ventilation costs the atmosphere and greenhouse gas emissions, et cetera, is so massive.

So, we're now building buildings that are inspired by their ventilation systems.

There's this place in Zimbabwe, which was the first massive building.

It's a big shopping center called the Eastgate Center, an office block, inspired by termite systems.

And what they do is they have this system of opening and closing doors that they're constantly tending to to make sure that air comes in the right places, moves up through the termite mound so that it's heated in the right places, it's cooled in in the right places because it needs to be at one precise temperature the whole time on the inside for them to be able to survive.

So, yeah.

And they make the reason that they work so well is the termite mounds catch the wind so it blows through them.

So, a mound is like a lung, and the wind comes in to them and then is absorbed by the various bits, the cells that need it, and then goes out.

If you want to go into this shopping center, there's a security guard with his head blocking the door.

Yeah, always female, though.

Yeah, that's amazing.

And another good thing, because they're ventilated so well, they make really good ovens.

So in South Africa, you'll get people where they'll take a termite mound and they'll kind of drill a little hole, make the door a little bit bigger.

Hopefully it's a termite mound where all the termites aren't there anymore, I hope.

But they'll set a little fire inside and then the air will be sucked in through the door and then go up through the top of the termite mound because it's so well ventilated.

Brilliant.

And it means that you can cook like pizza in there or, you know,

anything that needs a high temperature, you cook in there.

Do they warn the termites like a demolition or do they put a sign up saying in three weeks time this will be turned into an oven?

Please vacate your home.

I'm just hoping that they're old ones.

You don't have the ashes of termites on your pizza as you're taking it out of the oven, do you?

Maybe it's a delicacy.

Well, they do, people do eat termites, don't they?

They're infused into muffins in certain countries.

Yeah, so it's possible that termite pizza is a thing.

Do you know how they transfer water across their mounds?

So sometimes a bit of the mound gets really dry and it needs moistening, lubrication.

This is so cool.

They drink half their body weight in water.

They go to a dry part of the mound and then they pass it into another termite's mouth.

It's basically they have

all the water, yeah, yeah.

And there's a scientist called J.

Scott Turner who fed them fluorescent dyed water and could see it moving from one termite to another.

So basically, it's like it's as if a bucket chain to put out a fire was people just, you know,

pushing the water into each other's mouths.

It's not very COVID friendly, is it?

It's not very COVID-friendly, but it would make firefighting a much sexier profession than it already is.

Is it?

Wait, so is it to make sure that

I think it would make it a much less effective profession because every time he would swallow a little bit of the water and by the time it got to the final fireman, it would just be a little dribble coming out of his mouth.

You'd obviously hire people with enormous mouths to hold as much water as they could.

So the physical profile of the firefighter might change.

Yeah.

I'm not suggesting a change in the system.

I'm sorry.

I'd just like to clarify.

Is this to just as you see your house being burnt down, why not at least have something sexy to look at while you're watching your light get destroyed?

I get it.

I get that.

Is this to moisten the other side then, or is this to give a drink to the people on the other side?

It's to moisten the other side.

So it's sort of, it's, but they then go and you know, spit the water out on the on the actual mound itself.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

They never sleep as well.

Termites don't sleep.

Really?

Yeah, they're just building 24 hours a day until they die.

Do they rest?

Do they have like a nap?

Or not even

time?

Yeah, downtime, exactly.

Yeah, they might play the Xbox for a little while.

In fact, I think I've read that they're normally, like Dan says, they're just all active.

But if they run out of holes to fill, they just stand around touching each other's antennae.

So that might be their equivalent of downtime.

Well, the queen rests a lot, rests her entire life.

And then her life ends really tragically because her children lick her to death.

She sort of dies in the same sort of tragic way that she lives.

She stops being useful, stops laying eggs.

And so her kids like lick and lick and lick her, drawing all the fat and fluids out of her, and she just disintegrates away.

God.

That's another sexy image for you there, Andy.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can 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 thingasofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check it out.

And that's it.

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

We will see you then.

Goodbye.