206: No Such Thing As A Pig In Court

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From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street Showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Czaczynski and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.

Starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that the dome of the Taj Mahal is held together with sugar, fruit juice and egg white.

It's actually just a pudding recipe that they accidentally turned into a mausoleum.

Is it all sold with bricks?

There are conventional building materials in there as well, so it's actually a mixture of lime,

which is probably delicious yeah sounding more and more like a caipirinha yeah sorry it's the other kind of lime you know the one they built buildings with limestone um quick lime uh lime uh and it's mixed together with fruit juice and sugar and egg and it's called tuna uh chu na it's all very food stuffy i know um with some shells bits of shells and some gum and yeah this was the plaster that's used on the inside of the dome of the Taj Mahal to hold it all together and it actually turns out that egg white especially was quite a common building material.

But this is used in lots of places?

Yeah, I think so.

So I heard something in passing on the radio, and I ended up looking into egg whites in buildings.

And there's quite a lot on it in like vaguely obscure books.

So there's an essay by a Filipino food researcher who does an essay called Eggs in Philippine Church Architecture and Its Cuisine, as if cuisine is just a leftover.

I reckon Anna, you're the only person who's ever read that book.

I think I may.

You've got to be right.

It's about Filipino churches and egg whites.

What's her name?

Give her a shout-out.

She's called Pia Lim Castillo.

It's not obscure, however, if

you're a devout chef in the Philippines.

There's a massive seller in that community, maybe.

And also, if you are Filipino and you know about traditional Filipino recipes, this is really interesting.

A lot of them contain just egg yolk.

So in a lot of traditional Filipino food, it's just egg yolk.

And that's because they had so much leftover egg yolk because millions and millions of egg whites were being used to build their churches.

No way.

This was for centuries.

Absolutely true.

So there's traditional food like brioche, a thing called yema, which is egg yolk sweets.

And it's just because there's loads of egg yolk lying around.

That sounds extremely untrue, doesn't it?

Well, that's amazing.

Take it out with Pia Lim Castillo.

So here's a fact.

The Taj Mahal was built by 22,000 workers and it took 17 years to complete.

And 22,000 workers is the same number of workers as Facebook has.

And they've been going for 14 years.

Wow.

That is very good.

They also had a thousand elephants working in construction.

I don't know if they were.

Sorry, I'm talking about the Taj Mahana, not Facebook.

Yeah, they did, didn't they?

Dragging all the building materials.

And I think they had some elephants operating pulleys to lift.

You know, to lift.

Those are the especially trusted elephants that are working the pulley system.

Absolutely.

I don't fully understand pulleys.

Pulleys are a really simple concept.

God, if you don't understand pulleys, I do worry about what else you're missing.

And there was the story wasn't there that they cut off all the sculptors hands after they built it yeah so they couldn't build anything else really yeah did they tell you that at the start of the gig

Probably not ironically they do ask you to sign something at the beginning and then there's no redress what but what if they made a mistake and of course they said oh dear we're gonna have to get the second gallery redone um can you get the guys who made the second gallery in they turn up sorry yeah I don't think they actually did do that there's also a theory that they blinded them so they wouldn't be able to build anything as beautiful.

But that kind of myth is for lots of different buildings, like St.

Basil's in Moscow has the same myth.

So I had my place, I had my flat repainted recently, and I did the same thing at the end of it.

You know, a couple of bike tans off and I blinded him.

There was also a tale that they used brick scaffolding.

That's not a tale, that's true, which was quite unusual.

They usually would use like bamboo or something.

But it was said that they did it to conceal what was happening as they built it, so it would be a big surprise when it came down.

And then there was another thing, the brick scaffolding, Shah Jahan, who was the emperor who commissioned the whole thing and it was a Muslim for his favorite wife, he was told that the brick scaffolding would take five years to dismantle.

And so he had the bright idea of telling the workers that if they dismantled it as fast as they could, they could keep whatever bricks they removed and it came down overnight.

Supposedly, yeah, he told them that it was like made of delicious chocolate or something.

Is it true?

Have you guys heard about the architecture being angled at such a case and built in such a way that should it topple over, it would fall perfectly away from the tomb itself.

Well, supposedly the minarets, there are four minarets around the outside, and supposedly they are angled to fall outwards rather than inwards.

But I would presume that they're just built not to fall over at all, yeah.

Totally.

Yeah, I think it would be weird building in a structural floor that meant that they only fall over in one direction.

Yeah, I know, but at the same time, you've made half your building with eggs and flour and fruit juice.

So, you know how he was saying that it was built for his favourite wife?

So, it was, what's his name again?

Shah Jahan.

It was his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal, that it was built for.

But there is a mausoleum for his first wife on the other side of the river, which I've seen a picture of it, and it's currently covered in black mold and cats.

Black mold and cats.

Yeah, just cats everywhere.

Just they're there, not covered in cats.

It's just full of cats.

Was she a

cat person?

Well, that's what they say now.

Like, the locals say, well, all the cats are here because she was such a lover of cats.

Was she also a black mold person?

That's quite cool, though.

Just

I read about how they clean the Taj Mahal.

So that one's covered in black mold.

That one needs a cleaning.

But the Taj Mahal, in order to clean it, they don't do a classic sort of water-based clean.

They give it a mud bath, effectively.

It's like a spa treatment, and that gives it the glistening white.

Wow, and then hat massage to follow.

Yeah, put some cucumber on the wall covers.

That's why there are no lights allowed on it at night.

You're not allowed to have big spotlights lighting it up because it would look beautiful at night, but they don't do that because that would attract insects, which would then poo all over it.

And these particular insects poo green.

And that's partly why it's been looking a bit grubby in recent years.

It's just constantly battling against excretion from insects in the river nearby.

Yeah, and air pollution is getting so bad now that they think the mud bath is not enough now.

They're going to have to have a shower post-mudbath.

I was looking to some stuff about building materials.

I thought this was really interesting.

That, so, first of all, hair is added to plaster to make it stronger.

And actually,

you will have seen this.

So, it genuinely adds proper extra strength.

It's added to lime plaster.

So, any bit of lime plaster has got lots of hair running through it.

You can order horse or goat or cow hair from just construction suppliers companies.

And actually, if you imagine like a broken off bit of plaster, you know, you because I see little threads coming out that I always thought, I don't know, what are the bits of dust that had all got together?

That's just actual hair.

That's just actual hair.

Yeah.

Look it up.

Google like broken off plaster.

And then you'll see the goat hair.

Wow.

Isn't that weird?

That's very weird.

Yeah.

Also, sugar is used as a concrete retarder, which is a thing that stops concrete from solidifying too fast.

So if you need to properly shape concrete, you pour it down, and maybe it's like a particularly hot day, so it will bake really fast.

If you add lots of sugar to it, which a lot of builders do, then that slows down the setting process.

That is why builders always want lots of sugar in their tea.

They then whip it out so they can stick it in the concrete.

Have you heard of the English equivalent of the Taj Mahal?

It's a memorial to a wife by a grieving husband, and it's this thing called the Eleanor Crosses.

Oh, yeah.

So it's...

Yeah?

Oh, yeah.

There's one just down the road.

Yes, exactly.

So they were built by Edward I in 1290.

Queen Eleanor died, and he wanted to commemorate her, and she died up in Nottinghamshire, and he commissioned a huge spire cross.

Everywhere her funeral procession stopped on on the way from Nottinghamshire to London, he commissioned one of these huge crosses.

So there were 12 of them.

There are only three remaining.

And outside Charing Cross, there's a restored Victorian replica, and it looks very cool, like a little space needle.

It's got three statues of a woman.

And it was Eleanor of Castile, wasn't it?

Yes.

His wife.

Yeah.

And she had a triple burial.

This is rare.

So her heart was buried at Blackfriars Station.

I think it was something else before it was Blackfriars Station.

They've just renovated Blackfriars Station, haven't they?

Oh, yeah.

I wonder if they found the heart when they were doing that.

Maybe.

You'd probably miss that, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

With your big truck.

I don't think you'd spot a shriveled thousand-year-old heart.

But maybe it helps the concrete to set.

It does, that's why.

You have to put a heart in every brick.

And her organs went to Lincoln Cathedral and her body went to Westminster Abbey.

So where would you go to grieve at her graveside?

Wherever it's closest, I guess.

I guess that's the true convenience of it.

Very Good point.

I think you would go to Black Friars because of the heart.

Would you?

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

My fact this week is that there is an ice golf championship held each year in Greenland, 600 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

However, because of the constantly shifting ice shelf, no players hold any records on that course because it changes on a daily basis.

Isn't that nuts?

So there must be no guide as to how to play the course well, is that right?

There's a lot of guidance on how to play it well because

you're playing on icy terrain.

You're allowed things that you're not allowed in a normal game of golf.

For example, you're allowed to clear the path.

Like in curling.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, you can sort of just make it nice and a bit softer.

The par is much higher.

I don't really play golf or understand the rules, so it's a par of 36 per hole.

Wow.

Okay, so in normal golf, you wouldn't go above five.

Right.

Are you sure it's 36 per hole?

It's maximum handicap of 36.

Ah, okay.

Is that different?

That basically means that you get more shots taken off.

Right.

Basically.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Otherwise, the par of 36 would just be so tediously long.

Golf's tedious enough anyway.

Imagine if it was 36 shots per hole.

I mean, is that what we're going to say?

That golf's tedious?

I've got some stuff about that.

So just a bit of explanation about this.

This is played in a town called Umwanak.

It was set up by a man called Arnie Nyman.

He's a hotel manager.

And it's this tiny, tiny town.

It's got, you know, just over a thousand residents.

There's more dogs there than there are people by a factor of three to one at least, because you get everywhere by dog sledding.

That's the mode of transport.

So yeah, and so he set this up in 1997.

It's an annual event, except for when it's too cold and the course has to be closed because it's just too icy and impossible, and you'd get frostbite the moment you step out.

Maybe if it got too hot, they'd have to cancel it as well.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

And the ball is red, isn't it?

The ball is red so that they can see it.

The hole that you hit the ball into is twice the size.

So there's lots of different rules that get played, but it's seen by golfers.

I know you're a golfer and you probably didn't know about it necessarily beforehand, but a lot of golfers talk about it as the craziest course you could ever play.

So they actively fly out to this remote place to yeah to be a part of this odd game and it has uh all the holes are a bit closer together because the cold air is more dense and so there's more drag so I didn't realize this and that golf balls move a bit slower through cold air that does happen if you play golf you know that when the cold weather's on it just doesn't go as far I played golf once in the Himalayas where the air is really thin and it just goes miles Really

that's the best place to play golf by the way because it's not having to tussle its way through a load of air molecules all the molecules, that's it.

The molecules get in the way.

Well, this is what's confusing, because cold air is more dense because the molecules aren't moving as fast, so there's more drag.

But you would have thought, as you say, once you get at altitude and it's cold because there are just fewer air molecules, it must move faster, because they get in the way.

So it moves slower through some cold air, but then faster at altitude, it sounds like.

This is why golf is such an interesting game.

Is this what the commentary's like?

If I ever bothered to turn it on.

Do you know the um I was reading about the dimples inside the golf balls.

That doesn't really have a proper science to it, does it?

It's just it What do you mean by that?

Do you mean it works outside the laws of physics?

No,

I guess you would look at any sort of sporting equipment and you would assume that the design and the shape was for a specific purpose and tests.

And it sounds like original golf balls didn't have any of these dimples, but golf players preferred to play with ones that had little indentations on them.

As far as I know, but you might know better, there's no exact reason why it's that many dimples.

No, I don't know why it is.

It's easier to pick up a golf ball with dimples than it is to pick up a golf ball without dimples.

Yeah, they're like finger holes if you're a Lilliputian.

But then ping-pong balls are easy to pick up.

Yeah, I think I don't find that actually.

I find that ping-pong balls are almost impossible to retro.

But you should play with sticky gloves.

That's a good idea.

But then you'd never let it go for the syrup.

Which would be a problem.

What I do is I put the ball on a bit of string.

That seems to solve the problem.

I think you would get more grip on the ball to get spin on it.

Yep.

And there might be a thing about vortices, but I just, you know, I don't know what that is.

Okay, James, here's a question.

Have you found that golf has been getting harder?

Because you've been playing for some years.

How many years would you say you've been playing?

30.

Wow.

Okay.

So.

Supposedly developing.

You've been playing since you were 32.

It's just a joke about you being old.

Sorry.

Yeah, I actually got the hurtful comment.

Sorry.

So supposedly, developers have been building longer and harder courses because professionals were getting really good in the 90s and 2000s.

And I think there was a conflation between pros playing on courses and amateurs.

The equipment's a lot better, though.

Right.

Than it used to be.

Yeah, so apparently there are a load of quite hard courses now these days.

And people who might not want a very hard game of golf are saying, oh, I can't be bothered with that.

Is that right?

I don't know, but it's a theory.

It's hard for me to remember back so long.

When I started playing, it was just sticks of wood and golf balls stuffed with duck feathers.

And I remember on the first round, I said to Mary Queen of Scots.

We should put dimples into these balls.

Do you guys know about the most southerly golf club in the world?

No.

Of course.

So this is called Scott-Base Country Club, and it's 13 degrees above the South Pole.

And so there are a lot of skewer birds around.

So if you have your ball stolen by a skewer, you get a one-shot penalty, which seems harsh.

They're always stealing the balls.

That does seem harsh.

Yeah, but if you hit one, it counts as a birdie.

So it's the one instance where if you hit a bird, you get a birdie.

I think that sounds cruel, though, doesn't it?

Do you mean hit it while it's trying to steal your ball or you hit it as part of a hit and it's in the sky?

No, it's part of a hit in the sky.

I don't think you see it trying to steal your ball and you attack it with your golf ball.

What happens when you do that?

Because you don't want the penalty.

You get arrested, I don't know.

Ah, okay.

This is a confusing game.

I mean, you could just try and hit the skewer bird into the golf ball hole, but it's probably too big, isn't it?

We really don't know the sports.

What's the name for it?

It's called a hole.

Interesting.

It's good to be the expert for once.

I heard tell, James, of a thing about golf.

I read that until January this year...

You were allowed to ring up a tournament if you were watching at home and report a rule violation.

I know that that happened last year.

Yeah, and they've just brought it to an end.

Have they?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Lots of the tours have come together and said, guys, stop phoning in.

We'll just have some officials watching who know all the rules.

But this used to be a major thing.

And also, if you committed a mistake and someone phoned it in

and you didn't know, you would then, at the end of the day or the end of the round, you fill in a scorecard, don't you?

And there's a penalty for filling in a scorecard incorrectly.

Yeah.

So you get the penalty for making a mistake which you didn't know you made.

Yeah.

And then you get a double penalty for filling in your scorecard wrong.

Exactly.

That's so much.

You're disqualified

I think Lexi Thompson had that done to her.

Yes.

That's as unfair as the skewer bird thing.

Yeah.

Can you imagine if someone rang in and goes, I'm pretty sure you hit that skewer bird.

Do you, James, as a former accountant, do you prefer golf for the admin side of things or for the sport itself?

Or does it combine the two loves?

It's my two loves, yeah, sport and admin.

Wow.

Filling in that form.

Yeah.

Well, it's just crunching numbers a lot of the time.

Well, it's mostly just adding one every time you hit a ball

Apparently a lot of high-end professionals can't even manage to do that.

Yeah,

um Umanak

this place

Just one or two tiny little facts about this very very small place

They have notable people Which was such a tiny little town, you would think that wouldn't be the case, but Miss Greenland was from

that place, Umanak.

She's married to an actor called Nicola Costa Waldo, who you would know better as Jamie Lannister from the Game of Thrones

TV show.

So, yeah, Jamie Lannister's wife is from this very tiny town where ice golf is played.

Yeah.

That's my fact.

That's a good fact.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's a very tiny, tiny place.

Lots of ice in Game of Thrones.

Lots of ice, yes.

Yeah.

Winter is always there.

Not much.

Not much golf.

No.

Well, we haven't seen the last series yet.

Very true.

They're going to have to put in a lot of golf to make up for the deficit in the last few series.

Wouldn't it be great if the last series is just golfed by all the characters?

It would be amazing.

I might start watching, and then whoever wins a golf tournament gets the throne.

Yeah, brilliant.

Perfect.

My money's on Brianna, Taft.

Oh, good.

We're so gaming for instance.

And Cecily Lannister gets penalized because she illegally moved the ball when no one was looking.

A scooter bird dies.

That's the grand finale.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in the 14th century you could be executed in France for wearing stripes because they were the clothing of the devil.

Ooh,

there was a cobbler in the town of Rouen and he was also part of the local clergy and apparently he got caught in stripe clothes and he got condemned to death.

It's such an easy condemned to death to avoid, isn't it?

I'd have to really, really like stripes.

You are wearing stripes today.

That's true.

But that's only because I'm not in 14th century France.

I'd just wear something plain.

So I read this in a review in the New York Times of a book called The Devil's Cloth, A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric by Michel Pastoreau.

And it looks like an amazing book from the review, I gotta say.

And they think that maybe it was from the Bible.

In the Bible, it says, you will not wear upon yourself a garment that is made from two.

And maybe in medieval France they thought that that meant you can't wear stripes and so they would send you to death if you did.

Wow.

It's such an extreme reaction against something relatively

that we think is innocuous.

Supposedly that even zebras, I also read the same review, the zebras were included in Satan's bestiary.

Yeah.

Because they were thought to be a satanic animal.

So was all zebras were put to death?

That's right.

Were they really?

That's why we don't have any zebras anymore.

That's correct.

They used to be huge in France.

No, they would make bestries, wouldn't they?

And they put the animals in different places in the books, and the zebras would be in the evil part.

It's so mean to animals to just call them evil for no reason.

I guess we still do it a bit.

But it seems like 14th century France was just you would be executed for a lot of things that would seem ridiculous.

Like, you would be executed if you were a naughty pig, for example.

Like, pigs were taken to court, actual animal pigs, and tried in court,

and then sentenced to death.

We do execute pigs

Even the nice ones.

Yeah, but we don't take them to court

to charge them.

We don't have lawyers.

They deserve a trial.

You're right.

Actually, we've gotten worse.

That's true.

Bacon's going to get a lot rarer if every pig has to go through a full judicial process.

The appeals process?

Imagine that.

It's weird that stripes have often had negative associations, though, because stripes obviously were the attire of prisoners since the 19th century.

And so that was seen as a badge of shame.

And in fact, it was so much so that by the mid-20th century, prisoners had stopped wearing stripes, and that's where the jumpsuit came on, the all-one-colour jumpsuit, because it was kind of unfair, because it was so associated with this shameful thing.

And weirdly,

they are coming back in.

I think maybe as a sign of the direction that America's going in, but because it shows you're tough on crime if you introduce stripes, because it's a proper badge of I'm a prisoner.

So it's like stripes are the new orange, which is a new blad.

Stripes are the new orange, absolutely right.

Supposedly the stripes in prisons thing is not connected to this 14th century France thing.

As in the author of this book, Mr.

Pasteurot, just has found no direct link, so there's no guarantee.

But prostitutes used to wear stripes.

Yep.

And jugglers.

Jugglers, prostitutes, and jugglers.

Two most dangerous groups in society.

Clowns, hangmen, lepers.

It's a mixed feast, isn't it?

Hangmen and clowns.

So is this Britain or is this France?

This is going to be Europe.

Europe.

So you've got prostitutes, jugglers, clowns, hangmen, lepers, cripples, heretics, Jews, Africans, bastards, and the condemned.

Wow.

Did you book the clown for our daughter's party?

No, but I've got a condemned man, a leper.

And a

bastard.

Yeah, it's all people who are outside society, wasn't it?

That was kind of.

Jugglers, come on.

Juggling is not a normal social profession.

Imagine.

I tell you what, if you got condemned to death for juggling, then that's an easier thing not to do than wearing stripes.

It's very easy not to do.

Oh my god.

Although, if you accidentally dropped something

and then you caught it just as it was falling.

Juggler.

Death.

I like that in France in the 14th century, they tried to ban those long-toed shoes that you see almost as parodies.

This is my favourite fact ever.

Really?

Oh,

because they banned, specifically banned shoes shaped like penises.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because they got bigger and bigger and bigger and more pointy and pointy and pointy.

And then someone thought, I'm going to make mine look like a penis.

And then they were like, we're going to have to put a stop to this.

That's so good.

You don't get shoes shaped like penises now, do you?

No.

So they got, they did, it worked.

So the long, pointy shoe thing, they tried to to ban that in France.

And in England, you could get them in the 14th century as sort of as long as two feet in length, that sort of long point.

And they were very fashionable and cool, but they were never practical if you had to suddenly make a dash, you know,

if someone was chasing you or whatever.

So what they used to do is if they knew that they were in trouble, they would cut off the fronts of them.

And then they would dash off.

Nice, like a lizard.

Yeah, exactly.

So cool.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

You couldn't have a mullet either in the 13th century.

You couldn't have an Irish hairstyle, which it turns out Irish hairstyles were having the top of your head shaved and then long hair down at the bottom.

Wow.

Like a mullet.

Like a bullet.

Like a bullet.

A bald mullet.

Like a bald mullet.

Oh, yeah.

I thought a mullet, that was a name for the bald head.

Is it?

No, a mullet was more like short on top and long at the back.

Whereas completely bald on top.

Like a bullet.

Like the Bill Bailey style.

Yes.

Why weren't you allowed an Irish hairstyle?

It was a classic kind of racism.

You know, they thought the Irish were a bit barbaric and then they had this weird hairstyle, so don't do the hairstyle, otherwise you're a barbarian.

They had something this week where there's a school that's banned the Meet Me at McDonald's haircut, which is the opposite of that, a mullet, which is like kind of curly and long on top and then shaved on the sides.

Oh.

That all the kids have.

Why is it called Meet Me at McDonald's?

I don't think anyone knows.

I think actually people under the age of 20 know.

And then people of our age are just like, why did they call it that?

And they're refusing to tell us in the Elizabethan era.

Only royalty could wear leopard, leopard skin,

completely limited to royalty.

Yeah, I mean, there weren't many, there weren't thousands of leopards around, which you know, depends on the availability.

That's really good, yeah.

And uh, yeomen's wives were there was there were due to these sumptuary laws, yeomen's wives were only allowed to wear lamb, rabbit, fox, or cat fur, nothing else.

The leopard is a type of cat.

Oh, yeah.

I'm just saying, if I was a yeoman and my wife wanted to wear leopard, I'd let her wear a leopard and then just argue.

Well she'd be arrested and put in prison and then she'd blame you because she said, are you sure I'm okay to wear this outside?

And you'd say, yeah, it's officially a cat.

They'll find that out in 500 years.

I have a terrible husband.

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

My fact is that Victorian Britain had such a fern mania for so many years that some species were almost completely wiped out.

Yeah.

There was this massive fern craze, and it lasted 50 years.

Victorian Britain, all the other stuff they did, they were basically just killing time in between collecting more ferns.

So people would go on these huge collecting parties into the countryside and they collect ferns for their homes.

And there were so many collectors going out that there's one species called the Kilani fern, which was almost wiped out in the UK and it's it barely clung on to survival so it's huge it was a huge problem well it was a problem but on the other hand they were doing lots of crossbreeding so they invented a whole load of new species so actually by the end there were more species than where you started that's cool yeah

so for example

custard creams the biscuits yeah they have ferns on them you know that curly design on a custard cream yeah that's a fern yeah it's a day from from fern mania days From Fernmania Days.

Is that this isn't actually that useful for a podcast, but I think we've got a fern in this very room, haven't we?

Is that a fern?

Is that a fern?

I don't think it is.

I don't think it is.

It looks like just a pot plant to me.

Because ferns have got these kind of

fractal bits coming off.

A little bit more intricate, aren't they?

Sorry, Andy's giving me a look like literally I just saw a dog and said, Look at that lovely horse.

Okay

That coming from a guy who doesn't know how pulleys work

is literally named after the thing you do, you just pull pull it.

And he turns up at the pulley and just pushes, what's going on?

And if Fern Mania, they marketed it as something that only appealed to intelligent people.

That's a really good bit of marketing, yeah.

Isn't it?

So clever.

Yeah.

And

the other nice thing about it was railways were spreading across the country, so you could go on more expeditions than you could before.

Literally, travel was easier, and you got to maybe talk to the opposite sex without a chaperone.

So that was a big draw.

Well, that seems to be the big thing from the bits of reading that I did about it the big thing was ferns no no ferns was ferns was tinder ferns allowed you as Andy says to talk to the opposite of sex and go on adventures you always say this opposite of sex

opposite sex

yes well opposite of sex is marriage yes

just on the flirting thing yeah I think it was also kind of liberating for women so it was quite an important phenomenon for women's liberation because it was something that was deemed acceptable for them to do on their own.

So, it wasn't really acceptable for women to go out without a chaperone for many reasons at all.

But Fern Mania was particularly attractive to the ladies because, whatever, they like collecting plants.

And so, they could all go out on their own and collect them.

So, it gave them all this independence and this adventure and really caused suffrage.

Wow.

Made a big leap.

Big leap.

Yeah, it sounds like it sort sort of just took over, well, let's say London, even just every theatre suddenly became packed with it.

The orchestra pits, they just used to just turn it into basically a botanical garden.

It was just the orchestra were just covered in ferns as they were playing.

But people loved it because they were there for the ferns more than the music, even.

Yeah, I think that was a Prince of Wales Theatre, wasn't it?

Where they did that, turned it into a fernery.

And it was, we should say, it was all because of this thing called the Wardian case,

which is which Andy looks really excited about already.

But this was invented in 1829 by Dr.

Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward.

And it was basically he accidentally discovered that in a glass airtight jar, ferns could survive.

And it meant that ferns, which wouldn't have been able to cope with the British climate until then, when they'd been imported from sort of China or Australia or whatever, could suddenly survive in these jars.

And these Wardian cases became really fashionable.

So if you were anyone in high society, you had to have this big, beautiful Wardian case full of ferns sitting on your dining room table.

Can you still get them, do you think?

Ooh, maybe antique ones.

I don't know if you can buy new ones.

Or maybe you can because I'm looking at kind of decorating my spare room with curiosities and stuff.

So I thought like a Wardian case would be really good for you.

Fill it with ferns, yeah.

Because they're really lovely looking.

I think that's a great idea.

They do look gorgeous.

I think Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward might be the man who won the Second World War.

Oh, God, here he goes.

So ferns got us suffrage and winning the Second World War.

Pretty much.

Okay, so basically.

Did he also invent Facebook?

Yes, he did.

So

his whole innovation, he discovered it kind of a little bit by mistake, but when he realised that these hermetically sealed things, you could keep a fern alive in them, he built two custom-made cases, hired a carpenter, and he sent them to Sydney full of ferns.

Okay, so they were on the boat for six months.

They got there, they were alive, they were all fine, so that was incredible.

So then he filled his case up with Australian ferns, which previously they'd never been able to get to the UK, and they returned.

So they arrived about 18 months later, a very, very long journey, and it completely changed the entire

world history of botany, basically.

So it meant that tea plants could be transplanted to India from China.

So that created the British Empire in a no small way.

Wow.

It contributed to the British Empire's rise, smashed the Chinese tea monopoly.

And it meant that rubber trees could be brought from Brazil to Kew Gardens in the UK and then to Malaya and Sri Lanka.

and that created the British colonial rubber industry which was very significant in the Second World War.

But then I think it also sounds like you're saying he invented colonialism.

It massively changed the imperial project.

That's true.

That's the diplomat's response to that.

Well, it just like huge unintended consequences, I guess, of this hermetically sealed case, which just meant that suddenly you could move plants around the world like never before.

Also, Russia and America played a big part in winning the Second World War, and I should make that clear.

It wasn't just this one guy.

No, but, you know, yeah.

That's pretty, no, that's pretty cool.

It's often very amazing and mind-blowing to hear how a tiny invention somehow impacts a world in a way that you previously thought it was just flirting.

I thought, okay, that's all it was.

All of your notes on Tinder, Dan.

It's amazing that Tinder helps us win World War III.

Do you know how ferns have sex?

So they release spores, which is known, but then they sprout into a specific sexual generation which looks nothing like a fern.

So it's a specific organism called a pro thallus, and that grows independently for several weeks, and then that grows its own sex organs, and they produce the eggs and the sperm, and then that sporophyte it produces grows into a new fern.

It's like if we had sex and then gave birth to something that wasn't a person, and then that person then produced a person.

Yeah.

It is weird.

That's weird.

The double stage.

You don't want to be, I don't think, in the crap generation that's only got half the right number of chromosomes and that just its job is to make the sperm and the egg, which then create the real one.

It's like if we

gave birth to penises.

No, it's like if we gave birth to testes and ovaries, I think.

It is.

Yeah.

And then the human grows off of it.

Well, then the testes and the ovaries would hang out together, and then they'd bump into some more testes and ovaries, and then they'd create humans again.

Wow, that is weird.

Every analogy analogy breaks down eventually.

That one was pre-broken down, I think.

That helped me understand that more.

But what I find amazing is in this crappy stage where they're the thing that creates the sperm and the egg, the sperms swim.

So this is why ferns only survive in damp environments because they need to swim through water to find themselves an egg.

So you've got little fern sperm swimming around everywhere looking for eggs.

That's very cool.

That's weird.

But they didn't know how it worked for ages, did they?

And they thought it must be seeds.

But they couldn't couldn't find these seeds, so they thought the seeds were invisible.

And what they thought was, if you could find a fern seed and carry it on you, it would make you invisible.

Because they thought weird shit in the old days, didn't they?

But it was the idea that

if you eat a walnut because it looks like a brain, then it will help your brain.

And in the same way, if you manage to find an invisible fern seed, it would make you invisible.

So how do you find an invisible?

Worlds, they don't exist, the seeds.

No, I know, but like, if you were peddling that as an idea.

Do you think people ever thought they'd found one that's what I mean would you sell would there be a guy in the you know the alleys going I've got some fern seeds like magic beans isn't it yeah exactly just a bag of invisible fern seeds and then I think it would be really fun if it in like a medieval Truman show way to have an entire village persuade someone that they were invisible

so if you let someone think you've got some fern seeds and then he buys them and then everyone just pretends they can't see him for the rest of his life yeah in 2015 there was a fern found in the french mountains which was the offspring of two groups of ferns which haven't interbred in 60 million years.

They split into separate lines of descent that long ago.

And one of the authors of the paper on this was called Kathleen Pryor.

She said, reproducing after such long evolutionary breakup is akin to an elephant hybridizing with a manatee or a human with a lemur.

Wow.

But she did also say, although to most people, they just look like two ferns.

That is incredible.

And it also implies that are we all going to start interbreeding with other species until we go back to being a single-celled organism?

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

What?

That's a cool and interesting idea, isn't it?

Suddenly feels like that's the obvious conclusion to all.

Isn't the problem that a lot of the people who we'd have to interbreed with have died out?

So really we'd have to breed with some Neanderthals first, and then the Homo erectus, and then the monkeys, and then the lemurs, and then

some old fish eventually.

Yeah, but some of them aren't there anymore.

The shit, the theory's falling apart.

Does this work?

It's such a cool theory.

It's like the uh big crunch comparison to the big bang yeah it's imagine that's how it all goes back what sorry what's the benefit

there's no benefit

from just life it's just the way oh you just think this is this is how evolution is going to go it's just a great sci-fi idea it's just inevitable started with the ferns

and it ends with you having sex with the seelic ant i'm not sure what they'll be saying as we de-evolve i can't believe they didn't spot this with those ferns all the clues were there they should have known

um fern mania there was also tulip mania wasn't there i didn't know there was also rose mania hyacinth mania dahlia mania and cactus mania really yeah and carnation mania when were these around the same time no cactus mania in the usa in the 1830s uh rose mania in ancient rome hyacinth mania in holland in the 1730s dahlia mania in england in the 1820s it just seemed to be a thing where every now and then everyone would just love a plant and just go crazy for that plant and then stop.

And we haven't had a mania for ages for plants.

We haven't.

Well, no, but we have manias, don't we?

I think maybe they just had less stuff back then.

They didn't have Bitcoin, did they?

Exactly.

They didn't have Tamagotchis, they didn't have Pokemon Go, but they did have an abundance of rare plants.

Have you heard of Orchid Delirium?

Yeah, so that still exists.

Well, as in Everyone's Still Into Orchids, I would say that's the longest-lasting mania.

You could still, if you find a rare orchid, the police will look after it to make sure no one steals it and stuff.

Really?

Yeah.

That happened on the golf course that I used to play on.

Yeah.

As in the orchid was found in nature in the golf course or somewhere.

The orchid was just by the side of the golf course.

Yeah.

And then they had a policeman there kind of looking after it.

Wow.

That's so weird.

Why?

Because otherwise, if you damage it, then you've destroyed an entire species.

Because it was extremely rare.

Oh, but you couldn't dig it up and just cultivate it somewhere else.

It's quite difficult to.

Yeah, exactly that.

They die, basically.

If you try and do anything with an orchid, it just goes, nope, mate.

Okay.

It's just going to die.

It's almost drawing attention to it to have a policeman standing next to you.

Yeah, you know what?

I did play golf a lot on that golf course.

I was a member, and I never saw the policeman.

Oh, he was very good.

He had some of those fern seeds.

On really rare plants and how mad we go over them,

in 2010, a group of botanists were doing this routine plant survey on Ascension Island.

You know, it's a tiny island in the South Atlantic.

And they saw saw what looked like a tiny mini parsley sprig on a sheer cliff face, like sticking out of a rock.

And apparently they, both of them, two of them saw it, they instantly recognised it as a fern that had been described first in 1876, only seen two more times in history, the last time in 1958.

So instantly both of them were like, oh my god,

check that out.

So it had been declared extinct in 2003.

So obviously they abseiled down to it to check it out.

And then they thought, we've got to preserve this fern.

This is really precious.

So they abseiled down every day or a couple of times a week to water it and to weed it and to care for it until it produced spores because it was so valuable.

And then when it finally produced spores, that was obviously an incredibly exciting day because they could collect them.

So two of them went down and they have only 24 hours before the spores won't be useful anymore.

Yeah.

And so

they had 24 hours to get them to Kew Gardens.

And so from Ascension Island from the bottom.

From Ascension Island.

I'm not sure I could get to Kew Gardens from here.

It would take me about three hours.

Well, they had some extra help put on, so they rushed them to this airfield where they were flown immediately to RAF Bryce Norton in Oxfordshire.

And a car was specifically waiting for them there to drive them straight to Kew Gardens.

And then they got on the district line and

sat at Ellscourt for four hours.

Wow, and is it there now?

Still there, and it's produced a few offspring and yeah, hanging out with it.

It's so cool.

That's the tensest I've been.

I've seen films in the last week that were not as good as that.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shriverland.

James?

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our Facebook page, No Such Thingasafish.

You can also go to no such thing as a fish.com, our website, and it has links to everything.

Our upcoming tour, our book, it has all the previous episodes.

It's got everything we've ever done.

Okay, we'll see you guys again next week.

Goodbye.

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