110: No Such Thing As A Dull Post Box

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Hi guys, we've got a seriously special guest on the podcast today.

It is Sarah Pascoe, and you're about to hear that she is brilliant and funny and fascinating and has a book out, which is also all of those three things.

It's called Animal, or if you want the full unedited title, it's called Animal Colon, the Autobiography of a Female Body.

And it's out right now.

Go and get it.

Okay, on with the show.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Sarah Pascoe.

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 you, Sarah Pascoe.

Okay, in the 1920s, scientists concluded that menstruating women wilted flowers.

So, a proper scientist, and so his name, and I, and it's a he, but his name's Bella Schick, I think.

I've only seen it written down.

And he's a proper scientist, he cured diphtheria.

And I think apparently he was the first person to use the word immunization.

So, he's a proper guy.

But then, one day, his maid was passing him some flowers.

So, she was like, I don't want to pass you the flowers.

And then he's like, do the flowers.

And then the next day they were all wilted, these red roses.

And she was like, oh, I knew that was going to happen.

I'm on my period.

And he was like, what?

And she's like, yeah, women are poisonous when they're on their periods.

They can't look at bread or dogs or children or touch flowers or go swimming.

And he was like, Oh my god, I'm a scientist.

I didn't even know about this.

So he then did all these experiments with women holding flowers and baking bread.

And he gave it the term menotoxin, which were emitted by women in in their tear glands and their sweat glands.

And it

kills flowers.

So his study showed.

Reading between the lines, and hang on, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but reading between the lines, it sounded like the women held the flowers for quite a long time outside of water

and then they wilted, whereas flowers in water, the control group,

they were fine.

There was an experiment with bread as well, and one maid who was on her period.

I mean, it must have been such a lovely house to work in.

So

he made everyone make bread, and her hair didn't rise as much.

She was holding it in her hand, and the other thing was holding it in the oven.

Hers didn't rise as much for that exact reason.

And then it was like, it's true, we ruined bread.

And so it was kind of supporting all of the really, really old taboos.

And taboo means menstruation.

That's where the word comes from.

No.

Yes, it means sacred or menstruation.

It's a word for menstruating.

Yeah, amazing, right?

Because it is, it's one of those things where throughout history, the idea of menstruating women around certain things did affect things.

Pliny the Elder wrote it.

He wrote so many crazy things.

Dogs would go mad, all the caterpillars would fall out of the leaves of trees.

And my favourite...

Because they'd all wilted.

And also, my favourite is that even ants wouldn't pick up the grains

if a menstruating woman had touched the crumbs.

Ants were like, no, thank you, disgusting.

They'd always be passing that by.

Oh, yeah, and they'd cause thunderstorms and that kind of stuff.

My favourite one is that they would dim mirrors.

Oh,

wow.

Mirrors are so dark.

There's one positive belief that I've found at least traditionally.

Yeah, working.

It can make children.

So this is a German occult writer called Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and he said that menstruating women could protect crops from blight.

He said, if menstruous women shall walk naked about the standing corn, they make all cankers, worms, beetles, flies, and all hurtful things fall off from the corn.

But if they don't do it before sunrise, then the corn withers.

That sounds like the weirdest chat-up line in the world.

Would you mind coming around and taking all your clothes off?

You've got to be gone by morning.

But the other one that's really interesting is the synchronicity thing.

So, lots of people have this real common belief that women synchronize periods.

It has never been scientifically proven.

Like, one woman did a study, actually, I've got her name written down, it's like

McClintock, the McClintock studies, and she did a huge study on seven women,

which is always heartening.

And she found that at the beginning of the summer, they had periods that were entirely separate, and by the end of the summer, they were much nearer.

And this is kind of mutated into people believing that pheromones mean that when women are living in the same house in close quarters, they suddenly sync up.

It's never been replicated, they can't find any scientific reason why we would.

And it's confirmation bias.

So, with a friend, you notice the person who's like, oh, suddenly we're on at the same time, or we have an overlap, which has nothing to do with when you ovulate, which would be the significant part of the reason to sync up with somebody.

And you ignore all the people you're around all the time, and you never sync up with them at all.

Also, maybe they're lying because I reckon I used to claim they're my housemates that I had my period at the same time so as not to be left out.

But maybe everyone else is doing that.

Yeah, I was like, we're all synced up and you don't want to be the loser who's not quite in tune with your mate.

You're hiding your period.

It's like never telling you.

You're never being moody in case they're like, Anna.

You're coming on again.

I thought we were together on this one.

There was McClintock,

she defended her work because there have been lots of follow-up studies which, as you say, have never found it.

And they've done studies for a full year and said there could be in the original study bits which synced up a little bit, but that was just through coincidence.

Also, I think it's much more to do with the moon than it is to do with other women.

So,

the one thing that's quite interesting is that 30% of women have their periods during the full moon, and the next nearest group of women being the same is 12.5%.

So, that's quite a huge verifiable difference.

And when women live in cities, electricity, they have their period changes.

How long their menstrual cycle is changed from women.

I know, I know, it's like magic.

It's to do with melatonin in the brain.

So women, when that starts to get affected, even by when you start sleeping less or being in electric lighting all the time, your cycle changes.

Because people do sleep less when there's a full moon, don't they?

Bec and they think that's because of the lighting.

So do people right up near the North Pole in Iceland and stuff have mental periods, do you think?

When they have sort of 24-hour day and then 24-hour night?

Yeah.

I would love to know.

Yeah, well if anyone's listening,

contact us

with all of the details of your menstrual cycle.

At Tribalab,

so they have they do have positive connotations in some places.

There are various societies where women on their periods are thought to have magical powers.

So I think in some Native American tribes, they would retreat to a moon hut for the duration of their period, and that meant that they didn't have to do any work and that they could just have spiritual awakenings and stuff like that.

Again, I think you can read that from the other way, because you can go like choose to go to a hut where I think you're sent away to a hut.

Like, no, don't worry, put your feet up, we'll handle this.

Yeah, it completely, for me, I think, what an absolute treat.

I'd love to do nothing for five days in a hut.

But for most women, I guess that seems like you're being you like camping as well.

So, this is love a bit of camping, yeah.

Especially because in these huts, people bring you your food and stuff.

There's nothing I love more than camping where someone else is doing the food.

So it's like glamping, basically.

Exactly.

Menstrual glamping.

Struggling with menstrual glamps.

So, in terms of other experiments, there was a married couple called George and Olive Smith, and they injected rats and mice with women's menstrual blood, and they all died.

And they were like, see, toxic, poisonous.

If you inject

vaginal blood into a mask, it totally dies.

And then what did they expect it to do?

Well, they just wanted to see.

And then what they did is

then some other people did some follow-up studies where they also gave the mice antibiotics because they thought they might be be the bacteria from used blood that they were injecting into the animals that was killing them.

And then all of those animals survived.

But they do describe, like, oh, but the mice were really affected.

They kept cowering in the corner of the cages.

Like, I wonder why.

So, there's a really fun thing that people can watch on the internet if they want to.

It's a 1946 Walt Disney film called The Story of Menstruation.

And it is better than Fantasia.

Yeah, it's the first film, I think, that mentions the word vagina.

The science of it is fantastic in terms of the glands and the hormones behind.

So it's not a lot of stuff that's educational for children or young women is about the physical stuff, the stuff that you can see, and it's much more about the relationship of hormones in your body and what it's caused by and what's happening.

It's quite beautiful, it's 10 minutes long.

Yeah, wow.

And it's banned, I think.

Because Mickey in it, or yeah, yeah, it's Mickey's Glasperian.

Very confusing.

He gets injected halfway through, I think, by Minnie's vaginal blood.

Yeah, and he dies.

That's very sad.

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

My fact is that one proposed solution to plane hijackings in the 1970s was to build a pretend Havana airport in South Florida.

So the thing is that in the late 60s and early 70s, hijacking was a huge, huge problem.

And this was very much in the sort of, you know, before 9-11 days, when the main thing that happened was someone would say, take this plane to a different place.

And the big thing was, take me to Cuba.

Because obviously, Cuba is very nearby, Communist State, and lots of people just would hijack planes and fly them to Cuba.

And between 1968 and 1972, they sometimes happened once a week

in the USA alone.

In 1969, 82 planes were hijacked.

It was a huge, huge thing.

And they didn't have any security at airports and things like that.

And people kept hijacking.

So people started contacting the American FAA with suggestions.

And one of them was setting up this fake Havana airport in South Florida.

So everyone just, you know, so the pilot pilot says, oh, okay, gonna fly you to Cuba.

They fly around the sea for a bit and then fly back.

I think that's how they do it.

Just subtly change direction.

They land, then the CIA busts the hijacker.

Yeah, they had a special anti-hijack task force, didn't they?

Which people could send in their ideas.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

But people started taking the piss as well.

One person said, Make everyone wear boxing gloves so they can't hold a gun.

But then they would just punch their way through again, yeah.

There was one where someone said, Play the Cuban national anthem before takeoff and arrest anyone who knows the lyrics.

People are just so patriotic, they can't help but stand up and chant along.

So, first of all, the hijacking was going the other way, wasn't it?

It was people trying to escape Cuba because you weren't allowed to travel between two places.

But my favourite one is the story about Alan Funt.

So, it's 1969.

He was the presenter of Candid Camera, so he was very, very famous across the world.

And then he was on an aeroplane which had men hijacking to go to Havana, and he'd been recognised by a couple of people.

So a man stood up and went, No, no, this is a trick.

And Alan Front, the presenter, knows it is not a trick.

Everyone, everyone, calm down.

Let's just listen to the guys.

And everyone's like, You're not gonna get us.

This is so like you.

And they're like laughing.

And so there's different case stories.

His daughter's talked about it openly.

She remembers people like dancing once they realised it was a trick.

And Air HSS is popping champagne and going, We're gonna be on TV.

And it looks like he's trying to save the programme.

Like, let's just take this seriously.

Like, yeah, right.

There was that other guy who, um, so at first, people, I think, wanted to hijack planes and go to Cuba, and then people started to catch on that you could also ask for shed loads of money while you were doing that.

And there was that guy, Arthur Barclay, who was debating his tax bill, and I think he started debating it in, like, 1962.

And this went on for eight years, and he kept going to and from Washington.

And it was quite a small tax bill.

It was like $472 he owed, and he said he didn't owe.

It's the principal.

Yeah, it is actually.

I imagine

that's still quite a lot of cash.

I can imagine James actually doing this.

So eventually he just hijacked this plane and he smuggled a gun on and he demanded that they do an emergency landing and when they landed they had to have a hundred million dollars waiting for him so the CIA would have to be there for a million dollars.

How many tax bills is he expecting?

If you get that kind of money is that tax-free?

How does it work?

Is it like a gift?

Does it count as a gift?

There are places in the world where people have declared their guns as expenses when they've done bank robberies and things like like this.

There was a famous case of a businessman, I think, claiming ransoms against tax.

I'm pretty sure.

I've never seen that on my tax return.

But anyway, this guy.

Can I gift aid the ransom, please?

It's worth a bit more, actually, and then you get something more back.

This guy, I just really love the idea of, he said, I need $100 million cash waiting for me when we do this emergency landing.

So they landed the plane, and the plane had radioed down to the ground to the airport staff at the airport, saying, You need to get as much cash as you can, just go into all the banks in the area.

And so, I first of all liked the idea of all these airport staff running into all the banks and saying, How much cash have you got?

Give it all to us now, please.

And they managed to get a hundred grand, so a hundred thousand, which they brought to the airport waiting for him.

And they brought it onto the plane when it landed.

And he opened up the sacks and was like, This isn't a hundred million.

Do you think I'm an idiot?

And he took the plane off again.

And so he was like, That's that's not nearly enough.

I asked for a hundred million.

So then they got the government to really properly get enough bags so that it at least looked realistic.

So they sent a bunch of CIA agents to stand down the runway and they stuffed sacks with newspaper.

What I would have done, I would have filled the bags with CIA agents.

And as soon as he opened one, they burst out.

They would have covered CIA agents with money.

And then he tried to spend it, and you got it.

And the hijackers weren't all bad.

I think sometimes they were just like disturbed teenagers, weren't they?

And there was that guy who hijacked a plane and wanted it to be taken to Cuba, and then he got distracted by another man on the plane stood up and said, hey, do you want to see my coin collection, mate?

And he sort of dropped the gun.

I was like, Oh, yeah, I collect coins, actually.

And so that seems like someone who's not terrifying.

The first hijacker in Norwegian history.

He hijacked a plane in 1985 because he was fed up with society, but then he surrendered his pistol to authorities one hour later in exchange for more beer.

So he'd already had some beer.

Yes.

After they started adding signs at airports about security, so in the early 1970s, when they'd started sort of screening passengers to see who looked like they might be carrying weapons, all janitors at airports in America reported that they'd find just guns and knives and stuff strewn in the flower beds outside the airport.

Because

when it first came in, people would come to airports planning to hijack a plane and then see a sign that said, By the way, we've got screening going on to see if you're going to hijack planes.

They'd be like, Sod this.

Wow.

Oh, right.

So it's not like, you know, if you go into a pub but you've got a can of lager or something in your hand, you're like, oh, I'm just going to have to leave this out here because I can't take it in.

It's not like they were just carrying guns around and thought, oh, I might have to go to the bottom.

Oh, no, it's not.

I think it was people, in theory, it was people who were intending to hijack planes.

Do you often get to the pub with a can of lager already in your hand?

Just tucking up on the way, isn't it?

Oh, sure, yeah.

That's called preloading, isn't it?

Yeah.

I've heard of that.

Do you know that near London, in Gravesend, there is a whole town where they do practice, a fake town where they do practice police things.

So, like for hijackings or bombings or fires or riots.

Wow.

And there's pictures of that online.

There's a whole Flickr account.

It's really odd.

But all the public transport and nightclubs, and there's a pizza land and everything.

That must be the most terrifying place to accidentally wander into.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is a crime harm.

Yeah.

I think I saw photos of that the other day.

There was photos of a train crash.

What would happen if a tube train crashed and they had people dressed up in makeup and they had emergency services come in.

Yeah, the spookier thing in the 50s in Nevada they did a whole city to test atomic bombs on and they put people they dressed people up in mannequins.

They got all these JCPenney mannequins so it looks like families having a nice time and then there's photographs in real time of what happened to their houses.

I think it was something like 43 kilotons was the most they let off.

When you think Hiroshima was 12 kilotons,

and people watched from six miles away, and there's all these photographs of seeing just literally fire going through a house.

Wow.

And you can still visit it.

Richard Feynman, I think, watched those.

And he was the only person of all the people watching it not to wear the special glasses that were given to everyone.

Why did he remember that?

Why did he knew that?

It's because he was in a car and he knew that the radiation wouldn't get through the glass.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So he had advanced knowledge.

You've really got to trust your science, haven't you?

To take a call like that.

Like, I know exactly how this is going to work.

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

My fact is that this year an organisation will finish a 40-year-long study of Britain's post boxes, at which point it will immediately start again.

What are they studying?

They're studying everything about all the post boxes in Britain, and they've been going since 1976 when they started.

They're called the Letterboxd Study Group.

And they decided they had to document every single post box, like what the royal insignia was on it, what kind of post box it was, is it in a wall built into a wall, is it on a lamppost?

There's a lot of important things to be told about.

Well, important is a very strong word.

I don't know.

I was really sneering at this idea, like, oh my god.

And then I found out a bit more, and now I'm going to join because I think it's so amazing what they're doing.

Would you want to join them?

I think it's only boys in in it so far.

Actually, you're right.

I didn't read a single interview with a woman.

Oh, really?

They're all like, I watched some videos of them online, this guy Paul, whom I'm now in love with.

And he was,

I mean, I was like, oh, my wife's so understanding.

It's like, well, she should be getting out there.

It's interesting.

I didn't know that the monarch who was reigning when the post box was made has their initials on it, apart from in Scotland, where.

So in Scotland,

they had to take off.

There were protests in Scotland when they first introduced the E11R because obviously she's the first Queen Elizabeth, not the second of Scotland.

And so they don't have it on them anymore.

They just have a little, they have a little symbol on it.

It looks like post-box.

Crown or something.

Something royal, but not saying she's the second.

I really like, and maybe this was a massive story, but I missed it, that there are now a hundred golden post-boxes.

That's so cool.

Did you not see one?

In Edinburgh, when the Olympics were on, they did, they spray-painted one.

When are they going to paint them back, I wonder?

I don't think they will, yeah.

I think they ought to eventually.

Do you?

I feel very strongly about that.

I should tweet them.

Because it's introducing a rogue element of individuality into the the postbox design, and I feel very strongly about that they should all be red.

Well, there was a period when they were all getting painted red, because they were green in Victorian times.

And was that because people had won things?

I think it was just to make them stand out more, because if they're green in rural environments, they can be very strange.

Yeah, exactly.

For years, no one could post anything.

Well, people were posting letters, but just into trees and bushes and things.

It's just horrible for the tree because it's made from paper.

It's like a corpse of a meditative.

It's so mean.

There was in 2012 in Birmingham New Street Station, they found a postbox box that had been covered up for like fifty years or something and they kind of opened it and there was a load of letters in there that had just been sat there for years and years and years.

Yeah.

And did they read them all?

Or was it?

They gave them to the Royal Mail and the Royal Mail took them to the people who they should have gone to.

Do we still have a dead letter office in this country?

What's that mean?

I don't know.

It's where posts that they don't know how to deliver it.

The instructions on the outside, the address is too vague.

And it goes and these guys are amazing.

They crack the codes on the outside and they try and get it.

It's really vague and they will get it to Father Christmas or Princess Diana, as I found out as a child.

Really?

Yeah.

What were you writing to them?

Oh, like the pretty lady in the big house.

And what was I writing?

Just good wishes.

Just a big fan.

I used to write loads of letters to the royal family.

And to Santa?

Not asking for presents.

No, no, no, just wishing him.

Also, I thought he needed stuff to do in the downtime.

Everyone writes in December, like, when they want something.

I'm just going to write in May.

So I have to see what he's up to.

You're just trying to get on that nice list, aren't you?

No.

Charles Dickens had his own post box in his house.

Yeah, so in order to send it.

You've got a letter box.

So the postman would come and collect the post from his house.

From his house, yeah.

It was built into the wall on the outside of his house.

So it was in the area where he lived, which was Gads Hill, I think.

So he lobbied the post office, said, Install it in my house, please, because everyone from around the village would come to his house to post their letters.

And the postie would arrive, open the thing in his house, and pick up all the letters.

It wasn't a private one, it's a communal one for everyone.

Also, back then when he was alive, there would have been up to 18 collections a day.

Whoa!

Royal Mail.

Yeah.

People were sending so many letters.

Yeah, that's insane.

So you could correspond with someone.

A few times in a single day.

Your letter would just get to them.

Yeah.

I mean, my email does hundreds of thousands of collections a day, so it's not actually as extraordinary to it.

I found out about one now.

So that in Japan, there's an underwater post box for scuba divers who then send letters to other scuba divers.

And they're waterproof letters that you put underneath, and that's collected twice a day.

That's really cool.

Do you have to have your own underwater letter box?

I don't know how you'd have it as your address.

I guess you just have to say, like, that starfish, that starfish near the rock, and then it would get to where you were going to collect it from.

That's amazing.

There are very remote.

Yeah, so the Everest Base Camp has a post box.

Where else?

There's the Antarctic one.

Not sure if we've spoken about that before.

Really remote.

The polar bears.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

They did an application for it, and they published it in the newspaper so we could see the application.

And they explained that the job would involve carrying a big, heavy box over slippery rocks and slushy snow, and you'd have to survive on no heating or running water.

That's what it says.

Are you happy not to shower for up to a month, live in close proximity to three people and 2,000 smelly penguins for five months?

Yes.

Sounds better than the Edinburgh Festival.

I was looking at some weird societies

or apparently boring societies.

Do you guys know how popular, according to its website, the Biscuit Appreciation Society is?

How popular?

It's very popular.

According to its website.

website, it's a very reliable website.

I believe everything they say.

So there's a message on their website saying that I'm really sorry we can't take any extra members as we have a backlog of memberships and there's a 17-year waiting list to get into the Biscuit Appreciation Society.

It claims our membership currently stands at about 3 million appreciators.

We never expected more than a couple.

Does it mean every time someone has a biscuit, they go, add them to the list.

They obviously appreciate biscuits.

This sounds like the Raelians.

There's a movement of UFO alien-believing

people on Earth.

And the Raelians do that, don't they?

Well, what the Raelians do is you can become a priest

by kind of just going there and they make you a priest, but they'll also make you a priest without you even knowing it.

So they kind of make celebrities priests just without even telling them.

And they say, look at all these famous people who are priests.

And the famous people are like, well, I didn't even know that.

Hey, I'm inspired to set up a fan club for myself.

I just would be like, Robbie Williams, big fan of mine.

It says 6.7 billion members.

No waiting list.

Everyone who's born is automatically entered.

Oh, it'd be so disheartening though for the letters you get from Robbie Williams saying, please remove me from your hand, publicly.

It doesn't work like that, my friend.

Now you're a double member.

The minute you try to leave, you love me more.

In the olden days, London, there used to be really odd kind of gentlemen's clubs where they had very specific things they had to do.

So there was a murderer's club where you were only allowed in if you'd ever killed a man, and there was the everlasting silence club where always someone had to be there, but you were not allowed to ever speak.

And it was for men who had to escape their noisy wives.

And there was a farters club, all these kind of really odd things.

Was the murderers' club just a front set up by the police?

They just sort of all the club, all the club staff were hanging around saying, So who'd you kill?

I imagine that the murderers' club would be people who used to be members of the silence club after the farters club walked in there.

In Japan, there are drain spotters, which I also want to be a member of, the Drain Spotters Club, which are people who spot drain covers because manhole covers in Japan are often really, really beautiful.

And they've got, yeah, these amazing designs.

Do you think they came up with a name first?

Because it's like a pun on drain spotters.

If you haven't read the Irvine Welsh book, Drain Spotting,

it's incredibly boring.

Can I tell you about one more?

This is from the Dull Men's Club, who they're a fantastic organisation.

And I'm quoting exactly here.

Bottle banker Steve.

I don't know if that's rhyming slang.

Bottle banker Steve Wheeler, 66 from Malvern, has spent 30 years collecting more than 20,000 milk bottles.

He found his first bottle in the mid-1980s.

And now Steve, who admits he doesn't even like milk,

houses them in an 80-foot museum in his garden.

Wow.

So when he collects them, do they have milk in them?

Don't know.

Right.

I mean, if they do, I'm sure he gets rid of it pretty quickly.

That's why he hates milk so much, because of the rancid smell.

Milk is still disgusting.

Have you seen what happens to it?

How do people drink it every day?

It's horrible.

Okay, let's move on to our final fact, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in the Middle Ages, people slept with cow dung at the foot of the bed to keep bugs away.

Did it work?

I think it did to a certain extent.

Really?

Yeah.

Because bugs would be attracted to the dung.

Right, it would attract them maybe just to the end of the bed.

Also, it wasn't fresh dung.

No, was it?

So it was dried dung, and sometimes you'd set fire to it.

It was actually the smoke from the dung.

Oh, so it was like incense.

And so people still do that now, apparently.

Do they?

Yeah.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah.

Sometimes people burned their houses down in order to heat up the bungalow.

So actually, there's loads of cases with bed bugs where people have alcohol and different kinds of flammable things on their sofas and beds and then, yeah, setting fire to the neighbourhood.

Yeah.

I think there was a woman in Detroit recently, maybe the last couple of months, who covered her apartment in alcohol and then turned up the heating super high because she heard that was how to get rid of it.

Sometimes what's they do, they go like, oh, I put alcohol on everything.

That's great.

That should do it.

and then I'll have a nice fag to relax.

Wow.

Bed bugs are really hard to get rid of, aren't they?

I've heard that they're getting thicker skin now to get rid of the insecticide.

And the horrible things people are saying about them.

Yeah, insects could evolve so much more quickly because there's so many generations.

So

the concentration of insecticide that you need to kill a bed bug now is about a thousand times more than it was, like, say, a hundred years ago.

Really?

Yeah, and apparently, it always takes three times.

You can't just get rid of them in one swoop.

It takes three goes round.

So, what is wrong with having bed bugs?

I've never understood this.

So, I don't think I've had them.

Yeah.

But if I did, what would be wrong?

You think they cover you in painful, horrible, red-lived bites?

Do they?

Okay.

Because bedding apparently used to be worth like a third of people's possessions.

And that's why when they travelled, they would take their bed sheets and their covering with them, so they didn't use them in inns and stuff.

And I hadn't really even thought about the fact that it's so unusual now that we sleep in beds on our own.

Yeah, absolutely.

Until about the 19th century, you'd mainly share a bed with someone else, wouldn't you?

Yeah, if you stopped in a tavern.

If you went to travel lodge, you'd just have to sleep with Lady Henry or something.

That's right.

Wow.

Lady Henry in every room.

I guess hostels are that.

Hostels are still kind of like that.

But you are in a room of strangers, which is quite rare.

It's just like sharing a bed.

That was the standard.

That was the only option you'd have.

In Tudor and medieval times, people who are wealthy enough to have a bed, which wasn't very many people, would always take it with them.

So all beds were Zed beds, foldable beds.

And yeah, so the king would travel with his bed, any nobles would travel with their beds folded up on the back of their cart.

Well, I was reading something by Lucy Worsley, and she was saying that beds in that period were actually incredibly rare for the poor.

Yeah, so it would just be a huge hall where everyone was sleeping.

So did they have cow dung on the floor next to them in their kind of their floor bed?

I think it was hanging up rather than like

because it sounds like it, oh, it would be spread at the foot of the beds.

Yeah.

But I think it's the dung is kind of hanging up to keep the fires out of the way.

Oh my god, like the at the front of a car for

a while.

So cow dung is great stuff.

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

So I did not know that you can, on the Indian Amazon website, you can buy cow dung cakes.

You can get them at about roughly six for £2.50.

That's pretty good.

So what it is, you get a cow pat and you mix it up with hay and then you slap it on a wall and it dries into a cake and then you can burn that in a stove to cook food or for religious ceremonies.

People in cities these days don't use it for

food cooking anymore, but yeah.

So there's also an Indian centre which uses cow dung medicinally and their claims are so extravagant.

I just want to say it is.

Okay.

So this is in Ahmedabad and one claim is walking on fresh cow dung is very healthy.

It completely heals all problems with your feet.

They also have cow water which is a urine-based soft drink.

And the director of this facility said, this will end the market for carbonated fizzy drinks.

I love it as like all problems with your feet.

Like, I lost a foot.

Come over here.

It solves all problems.

Not very long, yeah.

And the sentence from this website just says, Mainstream doctors are divided about the medical benefits, with some pointing out that the curative claims have never been validated by independent bodies.

Yeah, you can get cow urine aftershave, I think, because it's very good for your skin.

Apparently.

So, does this come from thinking that cows are precious?

Yeah, that's in their religion.

Yeah, yeah.

Because cows are sacred, aren't they?

And their dung is sacred as well, which is why it's religious rituals.

That's what, yeah, it says here: their milk makes children more obedient.

That's part of the sacredness.

And touching them can lower your blood pressure.

That's one of the thoughts.

Oh, yeah.

And they block nuclear radiation.

Okay, well, I'm alright with the first two because they make sense.

That yes, if children want some more milk, then they'll be more obedient.

I think it makes absolute sense stroking lots of pets, people have comfortable.

Animals that will calm you down.

That was cool to find.

And the nuclear.

Well, not many people know, but Richard Fine made it a lot of fun.

Yes, he might do that.

He just slapped a cow pat on his eyes.

I've got another thing about old bedtime habits.

Great.

Oh, yeah.

Medieval times.

So have you heard of bundling?

Yeah.

Bundle!

You all jump on someone.

It's great.

Someone gets a break.

Okay, no, no.

Is it the very bottom of the bundle?

You don't want to be second in the bundle.

Why is it okay to be on the bottom?

I don't know.

For some reason, it's just snugly, but the second one on, it's uncomfortable.

You can kind of curl up and defend yourself a bit more if you're at the bottom, whereas

you're spread eagles when you're second in the bundle.

And I think you deserve it because you're the first one jumping in on the bundle.

You're causing all the problems.

You don't know.

Maybe the person underneath said, bundle.

You just have to follow the instructions.

Can you get people to bundle you?

It's really pathetic if you were laid down going, bundle, and everyone's going, no, James.

You're in your late 30s.

You haven't done that for a long time.

It's a terrible sleepover.

We're going.

And then magatorgy, that's when you do a bundle, but you've all got sleeping bags on.

So, bundling used to be when you wanted to introduce two unmarried children to each other

of age, I should point out.

Okay, so younger age.

So, it'd be two

boy and a girl, unmarried, and the parents would let them sleep in the same room for an evening.

The idea was to get to know each other.

So, in order to prevent things from happening from getting sexy,

they used to either tie them to the bed

so you would have to lay there tied, both of you, to the bed and just chat all evening, or they would put a ginormous wooden board just in the middle of the bed separating you two.

Surely that's how people get fetishes.

Your early sexual experience is all about being tied up with block of wood.

How old are these young people?

I guess approaching marriage age.

So, yeah, so they were kind of marriageable age.

Yeah, I don't know.

It was kind of, yeah, roughly late teens, I think.

Yeah.

Now, the next guy I meet, I'm going to be, hey, do you like being tied up?

Because I want to get to know you.

That's why I always got kicked out at these bundling parties you guys are going to show up in my rope and my huge blocks of wood.

The first draft of 50 Shades of Grey is actually incredibly boring.

A lot of conversation.

Also,

the final draft of 50 Shades of Grey is also incredibly boring, but that's not the point.

You haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey.

I've read the first third of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Oh, what did you think?

17 Shades of Grey.

I stopped after the third or fourth time, she shattered into a million pieces.

Oh, yeah.

I thought it's so suck.

Is that what happens?

Did you read Humpty Dumpty?

Anastasia calls all the king's horses and all the king's men.

Yeah.

That's pretty raw and she stuff, isn't it?

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

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It's out now.

It's called Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body.

It's in every single bookshop that you will go near.

So go in, you have no excuse.

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We'll see you then.

Goodbye.