149: No Such Thing As The Train King Of Europe

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

My name is Anna, and I am here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anne Miller.

Once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite bats that we found in the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go starting with you James.

My fact this week is that Anna wants to be like Madonna and known by just one name.

What was that all about?

Did I I couldn't work out if normally we do two names or one so I mixed it up.

I thought it was casual and friendly.

Like done enough podcasts.

I thought it was power mad.

I thought it was maybe that you couldn't work out how to pronounce your elder surname.

It might have been that Dan's confused me over the years.

I'd like to be known as Lightning from now on on this podcast, please.

All right, that's great.

You've already got three.

So I'll introduce you all again.

My name is Anna, and I'm joined by Lightning, James, and Anne.

Solid.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1758 there were two camels on display in London, one with a single hump and one with two humps.

They were advertised as the surprising camel and the wonderful camel.

Yeah, which was which.

I think the one with a single hump was surprising and the one with two humps was wonderful.

I think they're all surprising to start off with.

Yeah, I agree.

And then a difference in humps is also surprising.

So I think they're both surprising, are they?

And they're both wonderful.

Yeah.

Let's not do camels down.

I agree with lightning.

I read this in the London Review of Books and it was a review of a book called Menagerie by Caroline Grigson.

I haven't read that book yet, but I am going to read it because it looks amazing.

There's so really good facts in that review.

I read a really good book about the history of London Zoo a couple of years ago.

My favourite thing in the whole book was that London Zoo used to be at the Tower of London, and when it was there, you could get in for free if you brought a dog or a cat to feed to the lions.

Nice.

Was it entry for one, or was it for a family?

Or did you have to bring kittens if you wanted your children to go and see the lions?

I think if you were bringing a family, you had to bring a surprising camel.

So one other thing that I saw, because yeah, that book does look incredible, doesn't it?

And one other thing that I really like that she spotted is that this was in the age where it was very fashionable, if you're a wealthy person, to bring back lots of exotic animals from various places or to send agents off to get them.

And apparently, one London merchant asked his agent to send him two or three apes, but he forgot the R on OR, and so he was delivered 203 apes.

Where did he put them?

No.

I don't know.

Apparently, a first cargo of 80 apes arrived with a letter promising them all to work.

Wow.

There was one other thing in there that George IV had a giraffe at Windsor and the giraffe didn't flourish very well because it was in Windsor and not where it's supposed to live.

Which is a sandringham.

And when it got sick they put it down to sympathy for the king's gout.

What a load of PR nonsense.

Sympathy for the gout.

That is outrageous.

You can say that or in an alternative fact universe you can say that maybe you know it was feeling sad because the king was sad.

Maybe it was sad.

Do you you know they have camel wrestling festivals in Turkey?

Is that camels wrestling against each other?

It is camels wrestling against each other, yeah.

But how does a camel wrestl?

Yeah, they're on all fours.

Well, with great difficulty, is the old joke.

I don't know if they do this with camels, but often they do it by showing the two combatants a sexy lady insert animal here.

So they might bring on a sexy lady camel and then remove it, and then the two blokes remaining say, well, I want it, well, I want it.

And little do they know, they're not going to get it.

Do you know what constitutes a beautiful camel, Since you mentioned a sexy lady.

Long eyelashes.

Yeah, they've got lots of eyelashes.

They do have lots of eyelashes.

Although, maybe in the camel world, because that's so common, then short eyelashes.

Lovely lady humps.

So I've been reading about Oman lately because we were researching for the O-series, and they have camel beauty contests in Oman.

And they're put on by the government, and it's a milking and beauty contest.

And a beautiful camel, apparently, should have a well-proportioned body and face, a long gar rib, which is the area between the hump and the neck, a clear and huge hump.

It needs to have.

This was written by men, wasn't it?

Firm ears and pouty lips, big whiskers and a fur shimmer.

Right.

Yeah, and it needs good posture and it needs to be huge.

That kind of makes sense, all that stuff.

That sounds quite attractive, doesn't it?

Is it of both sexes?

As in, do male camels compete against female camels?

It just has to be a beautiful camel?

Yes.

Really?

I don't think you can tell a male and female camel apart by looking.

I bet you can.

It depends where you're looking.

In the 18th century, there was a collection of camels on display on the Strand, just around the corner from us.

So it was at the Tolbot Inn in the Strand, and it belonged to a man called Richard Hepenstall.

And so that's exactly where Aldwych tube station used to be, which I think is just at Aldwich, isn't it?

He tried to lure women in to view his herd of camels because at the time women were afraid they would be a bit dirty and a bit spitty and a bit smelly.

So, he advertised them as having breath as sweet as a sow's, which is weird because I didn't think of sows as having particularly sweet breath.

But apparently, soon afterwards, there was a journal article or a newspaper article that reported that the ladies are especially charmed by the camels and express great satisfaction at the sweetness of their breath.

See, that's quite high risk because I read that when a camel spits at you, it's also kind of vomiting at you because the content of their stomach comes up as well.

Yeah, it's not a spit, is it?

Yeah, really.

So, we go, oh, it's just spitting.

No, maybe that's what generates such sweet breath, though.

Do you know what you could get from a camel if it spat at you?

A cold.

Because one of the four common cold viruses originated in camels.

No.

Yes.

Really?

Why?

Yeah.

And spread to humans.

This is according to the German Center for Infection Research.

Yeah.

And there are four

global human, they're called coronaviruses.

And there are also things called rhino viruses, rhino meaning nose.

Do they come from rhinos?

Yep.

And so one of these main ones apparently has made its way over from camels a long time ago.

I don't know if you could still get the same virus inhabiting both or whether it's come over and now it's only humans.

Not sure.

Wow.

Yeah.

Still.

I didn't know that.

A thirsty camel can drink as many as 30 gallons of water in 13 minutes.

Okay, which sounds impressive, but I worked that out and that's 3.25 seconds per pint.

And I can drink a pint in less than three seconds.

Right.

So I can drink faster than a camel.

It's short and long furlongs, though, isn't it?

Well, I would be ahead after the first pint, but then by probably halfway through pint two, it might overtake me.

And then by pint 240,

I'd be struggling a little bit.

So you just have to pick your race when you're challenging the camel to the drinking contest.

So when you say to the camel, I want a drinking contest, and he says, okay, let's do 240 pints, you're like, oh, well, let's start a one and see how we can.

And don't do double or quits on the next 239.

I didn't realise that there were three kinds of camel.

I thought dromedary and bacterian were the only kinds, but the wild bacterians apparently have different chromosomes.

Got three hundred.

Yeah, they felt they did a DNA sequencing on it, and it's a different species.

Wow.

So we've mentioned before that Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia because for meat, but actually, now, have you heard that they're trying to rescue camels from Australia?

So Australia's got too many camels, apparently, they're becoming a bit of a pest.

And they were threatening to cull, I think, 6,000 camels a few years ago.

And there was a big campaign set up in Saudi Arabia, an internet campaign saying, send the camels to us instead, and we'll look after them.

Yeah, but Australia has a million feral camels, so 6,000 is pretty small beer, actually.

I think we've said before they shoot them from helicopters.

Yeah, they do.

Apparently, one, I think this was in the Australian.

Apparently, camels in Australia smash water tanks, destroy fences, come up to houses, and antagonize people.

I don't know how a camel antagonize people.

I'm just trying to blend in

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Okay, on to fact number two, and that is Andy's facts.

It's Lightning's Fact, I think you'll find.

Okay, my fact is that before they are launched, London sends all its trains to Austria to be beaten up.

So there's this wind tunnel, which is called the Rail Tech Arsenal.

There's a huge article on Wired about them recently, and the article describes them as train torture chambers.

So you can put a whole 330-foot-long train in this tunnel, and then they basically simulate extreme weather conditions and see how the carriages stand up to it.

So you can see what it'll be like for passengers if the train gets stuck in boiling sun or snow or what huge wind conditions are.

That must be very confusing for the train because normally when he goes in the tunnel there's no weather.

It's like uh Thomas getting fucked up by the CIA.

Are we in danger of anthropomorphising trains a little bit here?

Well, they shouldn't draw those faces on the front, should they?

Yeah.

They do simulate conditions that they wouldn't necessarily come across in this country, don't they?

Don't they go down to ridiculously low and high temperatures?

Well the London ones they only test to minus 13 Celsius which

would be very low for London but they can set it to

minus 50 Fahrenheit.

What would that be?

It's that's cold.

That's really cold.

So trains from Kazakhstan get sent there as well and they'll have lower temperatures probably.

So everyone's trains go to this tunnel.

Loads of them.

Germany, America, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia.

They all...

The article describes it as the Eton College of the train testing world.

Where you get beaten up for everything.

You shove the train in a toilet for a bit.

You think if all the trains have to go through this tunnel, wouldn't it make sense for all the train factories to be in Vienna?

Yeah.

I guess it would, but we've got, I guess, once you've built a train factory in Derby.

And how do you reck do you reckon they go, are they allowed to go on the train tracks to get to the tunnel?

Or do they have to go on a lorry because they're not past safety?

Yeah, I think they get boated over.

They do.

They get over trains on boats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get trains which you can put cars on, don't you?

I think we have one or two of those in Britain, but you get them especially abroad.

Are you suggesting that?

You put cars on the Eurostar.

I would just love to have

a car on a train on a boat.

And then probably put like a bike rack on there as well.

Also, they've got, I think it was in the news this week or last week, we've finally got a direct train service from Britain to China.

I don't know why I say finally, like we've all been desperately waiting.

We've all been still on the platform, but I don't be here any minute.

Southern!

But yeah, I think that's amazing.

It takes 18 days.

It's a freight train, so you have to be a piece of freight.

You're a piece of freight, mate.

But it goes to Yiwu, which is in East China, and that's the place that provides 60% of the world's Christmas decorations.

And so, I think it's like the new Santa's slate, and it goes direct from China to London.

But that has to actually be lifted from one track to the other sometimes because different countries have different gauges.

Just on train testing, do you know what the new measurement train is?

No.

This is this train that's constantly in operation around the country and it's to test all the tracks and it runs 125 miles an hour and it has various means of testing the tracks.

So there are no passengers on it.

It was made in response to Hatfield, so that was the year 2000, wasn't it?

But it's got this amazing technology.

So it can test tracks as people would have to at a walking pace, but at 125 miles an hour, by, for instance, firing lasers at them.

And it measures contacts with the rails and it measures the electrical supply.

And you know, in some places, you need to have a tilt on trains, it checks that the tilt isn't too much so it won't crash into a cliff next to it or something.

And these are running around the country at all times.

So there are 100 mile-an-hour trains going around the country firing lasers at things.

That's correct.

It's so cool.

They're really cool, yeah.

Have you heard about Operation Smash Hit?

Is it about 1970s pop stars?

No, it's not.

It's very well known.

God.

No, it was an experiment they did in 1984 in July by the British Central Electricity Generating Board.

And what they did was they got a train and they set it to smash at 100 miles an hour into a flask of nuclear waste.

What?

A flask.

And they televised this.

A flask of nuclear waste.

Yeah, so they had these new ways of storing nuclear material, hazardous material, in these flasks, right?

And very strongly built flasks.

And they set one of these up on a track and they sort of wedged it into concrete.

And this is an old bit of testing track that they didn't need to use anymore.

And they got an old train they didn't need and they set it going at 100 miles an hour and then they they put it on TV and millions of people watched it all around the world and it was to show how safe these nuclear flasks were because it didn't break.

Oh wow.

It barely lost any of its pressure at all.

And this was the final of a series of experiments they did where they like engulfed them in flames, these flasks, and they dropped them from a big height.

Amazing.

And they did like all these Looney Tunes experiments just to show you cannot break into these.

It was to reassure the public.

It's high risk though because if one of those goes wrong, we just wiped out the country.

So France has had problems with trains lately.

And I think it's important that we smash the myth that France is the train king of Europe because in 2014.

So who is the king of trains?

The train king of Europe.

Well, I think we should enter ourselves into the contest because France is out, right?

In 2014, I think we've mentioned before, they made those trains that are too wide for their stations.

Do you remember?

So

they spent billions.

That's pretty embarrassing for the train king of Europe to do that.

So this was they'd spent 15 billion euros on these trains.

They were too wide, so they had to amend thousands of platforms across France, so they fitted them.

And then the following year, they made trains that are too tall to get through tunnels to take them into Italy.

Wow, so who's going to be your new train king of Europe, Anna?

Well, like I say, I think we're in with the shot, guys.

I would have thought Switzerland, but I was on a train in Switzerland last week and it got cancelled and I had to walk across to another platform.

You wouldn't think that in Switzerland, would you?

Because you know.

For me, they were always the train prince of Europe.

I have a nomination.

I nominate Sweden because I went to Stockholm a few years ago, and the train there was so amazing.

It was really lovely.

It felt like first class, but standard glass.

And they had a sign-up saying, if you're more than two minutes late, we'll refund you in full.

Two minutes, yeah.

Wow.

It was the airport express train, but that was a pretty good deal.

So I nominate Sweden for Train King.

Okay.

Look, these nominations have all been accepted and will be duly considered.

I'm a train Republican.

I think we should put all the trains in a shed.

We should move on quite soon.

Has anyone got anything else?

So, in Vienna, also in Austria, they had an escalator reopening in 2015, and 14,000 people signed up to turn up to this reopening of an escalator.

In the end, a good few hundred people turned up, and the party just got out of hand, and police had to be called to calm the crowd down.

Did someone afterwards say, Well, that escalated quickly?

Okay, moving on to fact number three, and that is Anne's facts.

My fact is that the oil company Shell used to sell shells.

And is that a coincidence?

The name and the selling of the shells, or are the two things related?

They were different generations.

So Marcus Samuel in 1833 had an antiques business and started selling seashells.

And then they got very popular.

So they started having these trading routes for import-export all over the world.

And then his son, Marcus Samuel Jr., expanded the business, different goods, and then ended up doing oil.

Oil is more lucrative than shell selling, isn't it?

I guess they

flopped onto that.

A bit riskier, though.

Yes.

For the world?

Yeah, I think so.

But also, you can't power a massive industrial economy just grinding up seashells.

So I'm glad.

Actually, seashells used to be used as currency

many, many years ago.

Not in Britain.

No, before Britain existed.

Like, I'm I'm talking about thousands of years ago.

I think they were cowrie shells.

I'm going off memory a bit here.

And they were used around Africa, I think, as currency.

But then they found a new bay which had tons and tons and tons of cowrie shells in.

And then people just went and collected loads and loads of them and ended up completely collapsing the very early economy.

Did you know that Shell is revisiting its shell-based roots?

Are they?

In that they are helping to return shells to their natural environments.

So they're sponsoring this non-profit organization which collects shells from restaurants and then puts them back on beaches and in areas where oysters can cling onto them because apparently oysters like to cling onto other oyster shells.

So there you go.

They're collecting shells again.

So I was really impressed with this fact and I thought it was brilliant.

My husband already knew it because there is a Kurt Weil song from the 30s about Shell.

Did you notice?

Anne is married to a 101-year-old man.

The whole song is about in Wargate there was a promenade and a man was selling shells and his son comes along and turns the business around and then it's petroleum and ends up being this big thing about how its conflicts come out of oil and the United League of Nations from the 1940s.

Wow.

It's kind of cool.

They used to write songs about very different things in the 30s.

The first ever oil company was founded to harvest just oil that was floating on water.

Because that was the first people knew about oil.

Obviously you don't know oil's in the ground.

Yeah.

Yeah, so they sort of saw it there in Pennsylvania in 1859.

And they they said, huh, maybe there's more oil underneath here.

They started drilling down.

And they struck oil.

But

I think that was the first time that oil was actually struck.

You know, that just speaking of oil floating on water, so bitumen is

like more solid oil.

It's made of the same stuff, but it's slightly more compressed.

And so I think the first ever oil kingdom that made its money from oil was the Nabataeans, who I love.

I remember researching them for the end series.

So

you're always trying to shoe on the Nabataeans.

In fact, Anna is actually shaufer and Nabataean.

I'm even older than Anna's husband.

No, this is incredible.

They made their money because they were near the Dead Sea, so they based their kingdom around the Dead Sea.

And they noticed these lumps of bitumen floating in the Dead Sea, and they were islands of tar.

And the Egyptians liked to buy tar because they were used in the mummifying process for embalming, and they were also used for waterproofing boats.

And so the Nabataeans went and swum out to these islands on the Dead Sea, easy to swim swim in it because you float.

And they collected this bitumen and sold it to the Egyptians, and that's how they got so rich.

And that's how they had the biggest kingdom of that time.

That is great.

Isn't that cool?

That's really good.

Love the Nabataeans.

Do you know someone who wrote about seashells?

Was Edgar Allan Poe?

Did he?

He wrote a book called The Conchologist's First Book, and it was his best-selling book.

No,

yes, and also he didn't write it really.

The original author said, Can you rewrite this and sort of remix it in a cheaper way?

But like, don't tell the publishers that you're doing this.

Because the publishers didn't want the author to do this, but the author wanted to make extra money.

Like a Spark Notes version of the original book.

So,

and Poe needed the money, so he reordered the picture.

He wrote a preface.

One of his biographers, Jeffrey Mayers, said, Poe's boring, pedantic, and hair-splitting preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.

Do you know when the best time to buy petrol is?

When your car is like 80% empty.

It's the winter, actually, because petrol gets more dense when it's colder, and so that means you get more for your money.

So if you make sure you go and buy a petrol on a cold day, then more of it's going to come out of the mount because it's measured by volume.

Like how metal expands when it's hot, so bridges change in length.

Yeah.

You get a different volume of petrol.

Bridges don't expand that much in length.

Oh, we've been on this bridge for ages.

Well, it's a very warm day.

Earliest oil drilling platform.

Do you guys know when it was?

Was it the Nabataeans again?

That was collecting, not drilling.

It was not.

It was Chinese, obviously, as all great inventions seem to be.

This is in the third century BC, and they drilled down 800 feet for oil and they siphoned it up through bamboo poles.

And the reason they did it was because salt was very valuable, and they used oil to create fuel to create heat, to evaporate brine so that it left salt.

And they had oil pipelines underground made of bamboo that led from one like salt well to another.

Come off it.

Isn't that incredible?

Bamboo pipelines.

Apparently.

Does not confuse you.

It was in a real book, and I'll look it up again later to check that it wasn't Crazy Facts About Oil by Mr.

Muppet.

Dan Schreiber.

So if you defecated at 650 degrees Fahrenheit with a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch, it would burn.

It would, and your poo would turn into oil.

So oil is made through organic material which is pressurized, and that would give you the same effect by doing that.

We've all had curries like that, haven't we?

But doesn't that mean we could take if everyone's poohs work?

Because it would be horrible, but if someone collected everyone's poo's and put them in a hot, pressurized room,

so why don't we do that?

Well, the reason being that the energy that you would need to create these conditions is a lot more than the energy that you would

get from those laws of thermodynamics.

It's called hydrothermal liquefaction, and it's a report by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Did they say the defecation thing?

Was that the Harkin spin?

Yeah, that is a Harkin spin.

But they said if you put feces under these conditions, that would happen through a pipeline.

And what is pooing apart from feces going through a pipeline?

That's true.

We should move on to him, but has anyone got anything else?

Oh, I was looking at other businesses that originally sold different things.

My favourite, which kind of makes sense when you think about the name, is American Express.

Do you want to say what they might have done first?

Travel or transport?

Sort of, so Post.

Because in those days, so they were founded in 1850, and the Post, U.S.

Postal Service, was sort of not as thick as it is today, and you could only post things as big as a regular letter-size envelope.

And so anything bigger, you'd go through an express company, so sort of horse guys on horseback and

some other form of transport that was around.

Like the Pony Express Express.

Yeah, and they would just take things.

And American Express found out that they did a lot of business for banks, and carrying things like stocks, certificates, and currency was a lot more lucrative than carrying big, bulky things.

And so they specialized and made their own products.

Which I thought was really cool because American Express makes sense.

Yeah.

My other favorite one is that it's still the same product, but the guys who invented YouTube thought it was going to be a dating site.

People would upload videos for what they were looking for and you see what they were like.

Oh, and then it turned out no one is very camera friendly.

And we all like cats, but not in that way.

Yeah.

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Okay, we should move on to our final fact, and that is my fact, which is that when Mozart first performed in Naples, he had to stop to take his ring off halfway through because the audience complained it was a magic ring.

A magic ring through which he was producing oil.

Yeah, 650 pressures.

Oh, dear.

That's disgusting, but it wasn't that kind of ring they were referring to.

Mozart would have liked that, wouldn't he?

Because

he had a dirty mind.

Yeah, he had quite quite a sense of humour.

He also wrote about his farts and things.

He was obsessively scatological, actually, wasn't it?

And I think people have really tried to analyse this and work out why.

But

he wrote to his cousin quite rude letters very often.

And one of them, for instance, was, Well, I wish you good night.

This is a swear warning for any listeners.

He said, Well, I wish you good night, but first, shit in your bed and make it burst.

Sleep soundly, my love.

Into your mouth, your ass, you'll shove.

What?

And then he wrote another one saying, I poo on your nose so it runs down your chin.

Ugh.

He also wrote a lot of really good stuff, guys.

Well, that's some of the good stuff.

Yeah.

He wrote enough music that it would take you 202 hours to listen to all of it.

Wow.

That's pretty cool.

I think they might.

This rings a bell from Classic FM.

I think they might have just released the complete Mozart 200 hours.

202.

200.

Maybe they skipped off the last two.

That was all the poo stuff.

Yeah, it was the best-selling CD of last year, wasn't it?

Or

more Mozart CDs were sold than any other artist last year.

Mozart loved Pooh.

It's possible that Pooh loves Mozart.

There is a sewage treatment plant in Switzerland, and in 2010, they started playing Mozart to the waste.

No.

Yes.

No.

And what?

It started dancing.

I don't know if you've seen Flubber.

They claimed that the music's vibrations would help the organisms, the microbes in it, to break down the waste and the cadences and all of these things.

So they developed a process to play it.

And the man who ran the place is a guy called Anton Stucky.

And he said he wasn't actually a fan of Mozart.

They had to convince him quite strongly that it would work to do it.

I don't know if they're still doing it, but they did start.

Interestingly, if you take

human eggs in IVF, they grow better if you play techno music to them.

Really?

I read that last week in some study around.

Wow.

So is this vibration with thinking?

Yeah, that's vibration, yeah.

I've just realized I haven't actually explained my fact because you all derailed me with with your scatological sorry magic ring, yeah.

Magic ring.

So he was doing this concert in Naples, he was 14 years old, and it was in 1770.

And a rumour had been spreading anyway that he was using magic powers to play.

That the audience refused to be entertained.

So they refused to applaud, and they just didn't see it as impressive because they assumed that his power was coming from this magic ring.

So halfway through his performance, he had to stop and take off his ring.

And at that point, apparently, the audience gasped in astonishment and fear while crossing themselves.

I went onto the Wikipedia for magic rings.

There is one.

And it starts off: a magic ring is a ring, usually a finger ring.

I want to know what these magic cock rings are.

Oh my god.

Toe ring, James.

They're talking about toe rings.

Toe ring or earring, it could be, I guess.

I don't know why my mind went there.

Yeah, magic ring is a ring, usually a finger ring, that has magical properties.

Great.

Makes a lot of sense.

I should say I found this fact in a book called Timekeepers by Simon Garfield.

It's amazing.

And you should buy it.

I'm loving it.

I'm about a quarter of the way through.

He's brilliant.

So I didn't know, I knew Mozart was a child prodigy.

I didn't know quite how much of one he was.

So he could play the harp and the violin at the age of about three.

Well, he started playing then.

When he was five, he was quite good.

And then his father took him on tour, age six, for three and a half years, playing across Europe with his sister as well, who doesn't get as much cred.

Was his sister better?

I read somewhere that his sister was a better musician.

I don't think so.

To start off with, because she was older,

I think, didn't she like transcribe?

Because he would play, I think she would transcribe, and there's some thought that she had more influence than

giving credit for.

Interesting.

Yeah, and he could.

I read this.

I can't, I don't know if I believe it.

He could write music before he could write words.

You can sort of believe that.

It's easier to write blobs on a manuscript than it is to write actual letters.

Yeah.

It is very interesting psychologically because he is the original child prodigy and you've got to wonder what effect it had.

So when I was listening to, I use this podcast as an excuse to listen to my genuinely favourite podcast, which is the Radio 3 Composer of the Week podcast.

Genuinely favourite podcast.

Second favourite.

Radio loud's my favourite.

And yeah, he was, and people were amazed at him and it must have affected him hugely.

And apparently, when he got older, he was very angry that people didn't treat him with the same kind of amazement and deference.

Because once he was a grown-up, he was just an incredibly talented musician and composer.

But as a child, he was like this magic genius.

So he used to get very annoying.

That is really rough.

But also, because he will be a better player than he was when he was a kid, but rather than being admired for being more, like, better, more skilled, everyone's gone, oh, you're not cute.

Yeah,

it's like someone whose absolute best year was

the first year of university, and they can never quite

get back that magic again.

That is the story of my life.

So, Mozart's first name was John,

Johannes Chrysostom Wolfganges Theophilus Mozart, and he was named after Saint John Chrysostom.

And I was reading about the story of Saint John Chrysostom, and it's quite good.

He was living in the desert, and then a princess came to his cave because she was being attacked by animals.

And he didn't really want her to move into his cave because he was worried that he might have sex with her.

And so, what he did was, like some kind of 1960s sitcom, he drew a line in the middle of his cave and said, I'll stay on my side of the line and you stay on your side of the line.

And then despite this, the sin of fornication was committed.

And in an attempt to hide it, he threw her off a cliff.

Just tell her to keep it quiet with her friends.

It was a different time.

Middle of the 70s.

It was 70s AD.

Then he went to Rome to beg for absolution, which was refused.

Like for the murderer, for the sex?

For the murder, really.

I'd like to be absolved from murder, please, but with a sex chaser.

At the beginning, when you said a princess comes into his cave, I was thinking, well, it sounds a bit like the beginning of Notting Hill.

Because that's where a celebrity comes into Hugh Grant's bookshop in Notting Hill.

Like a very famous, wealthy person comes into the life of an ordinary man.

I've not seen Notting Hill, does he?

Then throw her off a quick dust.

Anyway, so then um he lived like a beast um crawling on all fours and feeding on wild grasses and roots and then the princess reappeared alive with the saints baby what okay

and the baby miraculously pronounced his sins to be forgiven and that was the miracle that made him into a saint very forgiving of the baby was she brought back to life by god or was she did she just survive being thrown off a cliff we don't see that we don't see that

off screen yeah you have to infer it from yourself Like, it's one of those stories where it could be one or it could be the other, like the end of inception.

I thought you could only become a saint by doing three amazing things.

I didn't realize you could just get a baby to forgive you.

He's done three amazing things, he's had sex with the princess, he's lived like a beast,

and he's been to Rome, he's been to Rome, and he's got a talking baby.

It's basically Notting Hill mixed with inception, mixed with look who's talking.

And that's the story of Mozart.

Um, Mozart got a lot of bad reviews, interestingly, even during life, probably used a magic ring, one star

fake.

So, these were phrases that were used about him: too strongly spiced, um, impenetrable labyrinths, bizarre flights of the soul, and overloaded and overstuffed.

Really?

Yeah, so it wasn't all completely positive.

I'm not saying he was bad at music.

One of the haters.

Yeah, he may have died.

This is interesting, he may have died because he got too little sunlight.

Really?

Yeah, because he died so young.

He was 35 when he died.

And he was very nocturnal towards the end of his life.

And where he was living, he died about three months into the winter.

And there's a theory that a contributory factor was lack of vitamin D.

Because you can't make vitamin D if you don't get sunlight.

So

there are so many other theories, though.

There are about 20 theories at least of what killed him.

He was also rejected in other ways.

So he was rejected in love by the first woman he fell in love with actually Aloysia Weber

and he ended up marrying her sister but he fell in love with her at first and when asked after his death why she turned him down she just said I did not know I only thought he was such a little man to reject her because he was too small and then another person

the

Prince-elect of Bavaria once heard him play and then afterwards said who would believe that such great things could be hidden in so small a head so he obviously had a smallness problem that perhaps he was trying to compensate for with his his music.

It must have been hard for him to play music with such small hands.

He ran up and down the keys.

Like big.

Yeah.

Maybe there's anything about him not getting, if he was indoors, not getting enough vitamin D, because you need that to grow, right?

Yes.

This is a cracking theory.

This is the kind of thing that bullshit science studies get written about.

Was Mozart too small because he didn't have enough vitamin D?

Okay, we should round up pretty soon.

Has anyone got anything else?

Oh, I just have one thing, which I'm not sure is true, but I like it so much I wanted to say it.

Mozart apparently had a fear of trumpets.

And I read somewhere that to cure him of this, his father hired someone to follow him around with a trumpet and blast the noise to surprise him.

And I don't care if it's not true, because I really like that idea.

I can, kind of knowing what I know about Mozart's father, I can totally imagine.

Yeah, it totally fits.

Oh, man.

He's your slave driver.

A little bit, I think.

He put his six-year-old on tour for three years.

Yeah.

With no sunlight.

He stunts at his gross.

Okay, yeah.

Deliberately shrunk his own son.

It's like honey, I shrunk the kids.

Okay, we should finish on that excellent reference.

That's all of our facts for this week.

We'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

And in the meantime, you can get in touch with us at our group Twitter account, which is at QI Podcast, or individually, you can get in touch with Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at egg shaped and at Miller underscore Anne.

And you can email me at podcast at qi.com.

To hear any of our previous episodes, you can go to no suchthingasafish.com.

Thanks for listening.

See you again next week.

Bye-bye.

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