NATO commits to committing to Ukraine, one day

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4270 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world with me Andy Zaltzman recording this week back where it all didn't begin but where it carried on for quite a while in the something else studio in London's glamorous Old Street area, just yards from where I once had an actual job, my first and indeed last actual job, sub-editing articles about stock markets and securities, intermittently wondering whether I should at some point try to find out what securities actually were, and also wondering if it was normal to end every working day thinking that all human life was futile.

I lasted nearly a year in that job, the highlights of which were A an excellent sausage from the now defunct cafe round the corner, b the morning where two pigeons started humping on the roof of the building across the road, and C resigning and casting myself into the fickle winds of freelancery.

But what would have happened if I'd stuck at it?

If I'd stuck with sub-editing what I've got, an alternative career simulator on my laptop, so let's find out what I would have been doing almost a quarter of a century on.

Well, I'd have been senior features editor at the fashion magazine Vogue.

Viewed

and I'd have been viewed across the world as one of the leading style icons of the century.

Oh, the life I could have had.

But I guess you've got to accept the cards you've been dealt.

One of which, in a rare summer gap between being contractually obliged to watch every single ball of cricket available, is introducing our two co-hosts on this week's Bugle.

First of all, it's a great pleasure to welcome the literary agent for the prominent author, Dancy Lagarde.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

The vision of you as the editor of Vogue is the winter of my discontent, Andy.

Also, I like Old Street London.

I like coming to Old Street because it is one of those places in London that has a name that could belong to anywhere in London.

Yes, it's all degrees of oldness.

How are you, Alice?

Well, it's been a while since we've been in the same

physical studio.

Yeah, it's delightful to be back in the Zoltzmann Musk.

It feels inspirational.

I feel back driven to create good satire and ruin people's lives.

Zoltzmann Musk, also, one of the outside tips for the Wimbledon Men's Doubles title this week.

Also joining us, also here in Three Full Dimensions, back in the UK to negotiate the return of East Anglia to India, the renowned agriculturally productive and resolutely unmountainous region of England that new research suggests was taken by the East India Company in 1742 from Bengal, towed back to Britain by a squadroon of special boats and attached to the English mainland using special ties fashioned out of Indian rubber.

So you're here to claim it back, Anuvab.

Welcome, welcome, Anuvab pal, to the Bugles, part of the special

envoy from India.

Thank you, Andy.

I wasn't hoping to start with talking about return Ipswich to Calcutta as my political motto,

but here we are.

And it's, I mean, I'm privileged to be across from somebody who could have been the future editor of Bloomberg News.

You know, mutual funds.

Are they here to stay by Andy Saltzman?

I didn't think that those are the articles we'd read instead of about English opening batsmen.

But I have to say, Alice, Andy, it's pleasure.

We're meeting up after a long time.

I didn't want to be in London this time, but I had to rush here because I don't know if you guys know, but yesterday it was announced that we're in a new geological epoch.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

We're now, as of Wednesday, in the Anthropocene period, which is a period defined by climate change and humans doing things to climate change.

So I had to fly here immediately

to discuss this new epoch.

Apparently, I realized once I got here that an epoch is not a geographical thing.

I just didn't want to be in a different epoch.

I thought being in Mumbai had been a different epoch.

But apparently, it covers the whole thing.

Yes.

So it's not like a Schengen visa.

No, no.

We're all in it.

Well, you say that, but I think, you know, in Britain, we'd like to be, we will have a referendum on whether we remain part of the Anthropocene epoch or if we go our own way and go back to it.

I don't know what came before the Anthropocene epoch, the British.

Well, this is what worried me.

We were in in the Holocene epoch.

1700 years ago, that began, and I didn't want to be the only bugler left in the Holocene epoch.

But then I realized that it's fine.

All over the place, it's the same.

Till, of course, Andy leads Britain out of the Anthropocene Epoch.

I mean, as of Wednesday, I didn't know why I was feeling so uncomfortable on Wednesday, but I was straddling an epoch, something that was on my bucket list.

Worry.

And I'll be honest, when I said to the guy at Immigration that I'm here for this epoch thing,

he was confused.

and that's just because his views on epochs are different than mine.

Oh, there we go.

We will have full, exclusive coverage of the Anthropocene epoch as it unfolds over the next 40,000 years of human history here on the bugle.

We are recording today on the 12th of July, 2023.

On this day in 1543, Henry VIII, King of England, married his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr,

an occasion at Hampton Court Palace, famous for the most awkward father of the bride speech in human history.

Well, we first got to know Henry shortly after he'd had his then-wife's head chopped off for the second time.

Not the second time that wife had had her head chopped off, of course, I mean, the second wife to have

a little joke there.

Tough crowd.

Of course, though, we're all very excited to see what happens to our Katie.

Probably something that rhymes with died.

Divorce, beheaded, died, divorce, beheaded, fried.

Have you got a new execution method up your suspiciously puffy sleeve Hal?

Pied?

Maybe a bit of slapstick, custard, pie in the mush.

I think we'd all take that.

Hide, good idea.

Looks like about the only way to get through a royal marriage these days.

I'm joking, of course, it's lovely to welcome Henry into our family.

A wedding where everyone could smell his leg, apparently.

Oh, really?

Yeah, apparently he had a real smelly leg

by that point.

Well, he was massive and quite ill by that point, I think.

Yeah, he did.

He's sort of gone putrescent from the knees down.

So we think about Henry VIII.

We sort of think, you know, he was sort of famously athletic in his youth and then famously unathletic in his

late years.

But actually, he crammed in five of his six wives to the last 15 years of his life.

Yeah, probably the smelly leg.

The smelly leg era.

I mean, it was advanced gout, and by that age, he was eating a whole goose for dinner.

But it was a love marriage, you know, and I don't know what you guys think of this, but I think if you're honest with your partner, there's a lot of things they'll forgive, like gout and beheadings.

Let's not forget Osama bin Laden's fourth marriage was a love marriage and it was after 9-11.

So I think if you confess to your partner that you've been up to no good

they'll forgive things.

It's all about open lines of communication.

On this day in 100 BC Julius Caesar

Roman superstar was born.

Happy birthday to Julius, the celebrity ancient Roman warmonger, diarist, despot, populist, salad inventor, month pioneer, boxing venue architect and knife crime victim.

Born on this day, as I said, in 100 BC at the age of minus 55, died at the age of naught in March 44 BC.

That's how age worked in those days as the years went down.

Ominous.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, as we enter the, well, we're now almost halfway through the second week of Wimbledon.

We have a Wimbledon Facts section for you to leaf through as you watch Novak Novak Djokovic proceed inevitably towards yet another title.

Fact one, if you tipped all the strawberries sold at Wimbledon every year into a quarry for the next hundred years, then covered it over, in just two million years you would have fossilized jam.

If you took all the players who've ever played at Wimbledon in the men's, women's and various doubles tournaments and stood them on each other's shoulders, they would reach part of the way to the moon, but not back.

The stack of tennis players would in any case collapse due to the high number of corpses involved as many players from the 19th and early 20th century Wimbledons are dead.

Cliff Richard famously sang a vomit-inducing medley of his own god-awful f ⁇ ing songs during a rainbreak at Wimbledon in the 1990s.

But he wasn't the first rock act to belt out an impromptu karaoke session.

American heavy metalers Man of War entered the crowd on Court 14 in 1982 with a quotes ear-bleeding rendition of their Battle Hymns album after hooking up the umpire's microphone to a spare amp they had with him in their picnic box.

Fact 4, is this 4 or 5?

I love

it.

Fact 4.

In the days when only amateur players were allowed to play, the person at the front of the overnight queue on the first day of the championships was invited to enter the singles draw.

This practice was abandoned after the young professional wrestler and tennis-obsessive giant haystacks ended up in a feisty first-rounder against the rascal American principal Sprott in 1967, which ended when the 6-foot 11-inch 430-pound haystacks thought he'd won by a submission before Sprott whacked him around the head with the umpire's chair.

That's why umpires now sit on big high chairs and why Wimbledon allowed professionals the following year.

Fact 5:

Former world number 43 Blanchard Ferrettier of France was disqualified from the 1992 tournament after turning up for his first round match with German qualifier Flausten Hoffelklauster wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.

The Frenchman explained that he was unable to remove the mask after a pre-tournament session with his sports psychologist aimed at making him feel like a more intimidating opponent.

And even though his coach painted it white to comply with Wimbledon clothing regulations, he was kicked out.

And finally, Fact 6, the first recorded fist bump in tennis history was performed at Wimbledon in 1886 by the Hon.

Strevelle Hampstead Watsbury, although it's now thought that rather than celebrating a well-won rally, he was in fact trying to punch an imaginary dolphin after a long night in an Earlsfield opium den.

There's your Wimbledon fat in the pin.

Top story time!

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

If you love NATO summits and the general awkward sense that the world is teetering on the precipice that may lead to another precipice,

which if we fall off that one as well, onto the third precipice, we will be on the precipice of nuclear war.

Much discussed at the summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, including the future membership of Ukraine.

The NATO chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said Ukraine will join NATO when allies agree and conditions are met.

Eerily reminiscent of the negotiations before I and my now wife got engaged.

He also announced that Ukraine's pathway to joining NATO was changing from a two-step process to a one-step process, albeit that one step is now twice as long.

Um I think that's how it works.

I haven't looked at the details.

Um I know you're massive fans of uh all international summits, both of you.

What uh what have been the highlights for you from from the NATO chinwag?

Well I I mean it's the heightened feelings, you know, that makes this kind of incredibly boring bureaucracy uh uh seat grippingly exciting.

Uh Vladimir Zelensky has been quite mean about NATO not properly inviting Ukraine to join the party after the leaders signed off a declaration that did not give a firm timetable or clear conditions for the eventual membership of the Ukraine.

So you've got to love a declaration that avoids declaring anything.

It's like someone getting down on one knee and saying they love you so much it makes them weak in one knee and they want to spend the rest of this $50 gift card at Costco with you.

I mean, I can understand why he's frustrated.

He's accused all of the other leaders of showing disrespect and saying there wasn't any readiness, but you know, the other leaders did their best.

They, you know, mouthed platitudes of support and kept one wary eye on the extremely unpredictable and nuclear-powered feelings of crazy ex-girlfriend Russia while making commitments to commit to definitely think about one day thinking about inviting Ukraine to brunch.

So I feel like everyone's walked away with their pride intact.

Well, that's the important thing.

I went a little off topic, Alice Andy.

I googled

weird shit you can do in Vilinius.

Because I always feel like when the conference is over, where do these NATO leaders, what do they do?

They have the evenings free.

And one of the coolest things you you can do in Vilinius is go to the KGB Museum.

It's the capital of Lithuania and they have a KGB Museum.

And the review...

Oh, no wonder they didn't invite Ukraine.

The Google review for the KGB Museum of Vilinius says not very revealing.

I don't know what to think of that.

The other thing you can do is go to a tower, a massive tower sits in the middle of the city called the Diminius Tower.

And it was named after the founder of Vilinius, the Grand Duke Dyminus

from the 14th century.

And he thought of building this tower after it showed up in a dream

where he saw an iron wolf howling on top of a tower.

When he woke up, he realized what was missing in that dream was the tower.

And so I suppose if he built that, the wolf would come.

Right.

If you build it, they will come.

Exactly.

So there's a tower, I assume at some point.

Family.

Sure.

Lithuanian dildo manufacturers?

All, all, all.

Yes, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Same belief in the business.

You've got to hope.

You have to have a dream in the dildo manufacturing business.

I think the Iron Wolf is a product in that.

I guarantee you it is.

So Yes Zelensky described as unprecedented and absurd the fact that Ukraine did not yet have more detail on exactly when it could join Club NATO.

So everyone's agreed that it will, but it's just a question of when they'll be allowed to join and get the free members' goodie bag, including branded stationery set, bumper sticker, personally engraved picnic spork, and collective security agreement promising military aid in the event of being invaded by someone else.

Ukraine is currently a partner to NATO, so a bit on the side status.

And the reasons stated by NATO for not currently fast-tracking Ukraine to full member status, well, there were five of them.

One, it's really awkward right now.

Two, C1, it's still really awkward.

Three, there's a bit of an issue with having too many countries beginning with the letter U.

And four, there are 31 member states now, and they've just agreed with Sweden to make it 32 with the accession of Sweden.

So finally, they've reached a nice, easy format for the NATO Summit table tennis and breakdancing competitions.

Eight groups of four, four groups of eight, a five-round knockout, so many options.

And you just don't want to spoil it by adding a 33rd country.

It just leads to, I don't know, some kind of repository or playoffs.

No one wants that and reason five yikes uh so uh we will keep you up um updated on uh whether

uh whether ukraine is eventually allowed to join um turkey has backed sweden's nato uh nato membership uh which uh is exciting uh for uh if you're sweden i guess and you want to join now are either of you thinking of uh because you know obviously you're looking on from australia and india um and you're just you know not in the you know the atlantic there's not enough of a feature of your coastlines.

Do you feel excluded by this?

Is this just geographical prejudice of the highest water?

You know, Erdogan, as we know, leader of Turkey, is a great believer in democracy and freedom.

In the same way, Maradona was an advocate for no drugs and football.

Turkey isn't even properly in Europe, but it's always a key player because of that geographic influence, right?

As a gateway to continents, Bosphorus River.

NATO can't do anything without a gateway, right?

So Turkey is like the HTTP of Europe.

It swings its weight around a little bit more than it maybe should.

It's a bit of an Istann bully, if you will.

But that's why I think this is why I'm realizing Turkey knows how to come to a party, right?

It goes to show that when you go to a party, it doesn't matter who you are or how you're dressed.

It's where you stand that matters.

And just Turkey always stands in the right place.

It's good that it's, I mean, it's genuinely good that it's changed its mind because up until this point, it's been Constantinople

to Sweden's.

I'm sorry.

This is the fun run I've been meeting with.

No, we're done.

That's it.

Because then it's just Istanbul again, and then Constantinople is the same.

Just goes round.

Very candid.

Maybe someone will write a song about this on this.

Well, I mean, there might be a bit of sort of lingering ill feeling because the Vikings did make it all the way to, well, it was then Byzantium, didn't they?

They toddled off down various rivers.

So I don't know if it's just taken Turkey.

I don't know if this week was the week that they finally got over it.

1200 years on, I don't know.

Technology news now.

Well, you mentioned this earlier.

The Zuck v Musk latest.

The launch of the Twitter alternative app Threads by Mark Zuckerberg.

Threads presumably named after the 1980s British TV series that people in my generation were forced to watch at school about what happens if there was a nuclear strike on the north of England.

Basically, every single person of my age in this country, haunted by nightmares from the TV series Threads, and the absolute devastation of, I think it was Sheffield, wasn't it?

Obviously, that was...

very, very harrowing for me because it meant, you know, there was a world in which the world snooker finals wouldn't happen.

So you could see why it was so traumatic.

But so he's launched threads named after some kind of fictional nuclear holocaust.

Or possibly the parasite that falls from the sky in the Dragon Riders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey.

I'll take your word for that.

Yeah, it eats through human flesh and stuff.

Not good.

I'm a bit behind on

lucky they have the dragons to fight it, so that's nice.

Yeah.

And also the power of banging, if I recall correctly.

That's always a power.

So, I mean,

what are we to interpret in terms of

the battle between Zuckerberg and Musk?

So it's super fascinating.

Zuckerberg's really bullish on it.

He says the new app reached 100 million users of the weekend.

What he didn't mention was that all the users were people with zero commitment to the product just showing up to kick the tires and see if it's really going to be the Twitter rival.

I mean, I signed up.

It is the easiest onboarding process I have ever been privileged to participate in.

It just sets itself up without you touching it like

an Apple computer, and it is immediately the worst user interface, the most unusably cluttered feed, the most unpleasant experience that I've ever had online.

It's just

horrendous.

You're immediately completely swamped with influencers, brands, ads, weird fawning clout farmers trying to artificially juice engagement by saying things like, the 10 best single exposed boobs in film history, go!

It immediately lets you import all of your Instagram followers, which feels like a good idea until you remember that you follow people on Instagram to look at their pretty pictures.

You follow people on Twitter to follow their thoughts, and pretty pictures are the opposite of thoughts.

So you've immediately populated your feed with the most vapid people you could possibly imagine.

And then it just says a lot about how much goodwill Elon Musk has lost in the social media sphere that people are running willy-nilly back into the arms of Zuckerberg.

He's responded to the launch of threads, Musk has, by threatening to sue Meta over the copycat app.

But I feel like once you threatened and then backed down from a cage fight, you've got nowhere else to go.

You've backed yourself into a metaphorical octagon.

So the cage fight is

that's not going to happen anymore.

No, Elon's mum called it off.

Alright.

There's talk that AI robot versions of Musk and Zuckerberg could be set to hack each other to pieces with giant saws and pneumatic hammers in a new edition of the TV series Robot Wars, which I think really will be the end point of all human civilization.

Anivab, are you excited about this new game?

It's quite sad it's not happening.

I mean, I know Alice has been following Elon Musk very closely for many years.

and when the fight was announced I thought this would be sort of the crowning moment Alice of all the things you've been following.

But let's settle this once and for all is a really good idea.

You know I think we've lost it somewhere in history.

We lost single combat yeah.

Single combat exactly exactly.

See that's why English is my second language.

I didn't have the word for it but that's it.

Single combat.

And I made a little list of who else I'd like to see in battle.

Just a single combat battle because their thing was what's the best social media app in the world?

And I'm willing to fight you in the Coliseum to prove that mine is better than yours, right?

When threads came out, I just want to see slightly different battles.

For example, these are three battles I think we could benefit from.

One is the philosopher Bertrand Russell versus Bruce Lee.

That would be to solve whether mathematical pacifist logic could win over the one-two kick and the nut punch.

That's one battle I think we want to see.

I'd really like to see Mahatma Gandhi versus Roger Federer

on whether what's better, non-violent revolution or a furious backhand.

And finally, Dalai Lama versus George Osborne to just see who does austerity better.

Buddhism or the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I mean, if we are going to do a settle once and for all and the Colosseum is available, why just do one fight to settle only one thing?

I just want to hear Federer against Gandhi on how each of them feels about cows.

Wasn't Federer given a cow?

He was given a cow, yeah.

Because he won a...

I think it was at his home tournament in Basel, he got given...

They'd both nurture it, I think.

They'd both get the most out of it.

And he took that cow around with him for the rest of his career, every tournament.

Well, that would be...

They turned up to

look up to the player's box and his wife, coach, manager,

prize cow.

Yeah.

I mean, look, in Bandra, where I live, there's a Starbucks, and oftentimes on Wednesdays there are about three cows sitting there and we have to sort of leap across to get the the double espresso.

Yeah.

So I mean, you know, it wouldn't be that I mean, I know it's shocking for you guys.

On the bright side if they haven't put enough milk in your coffee.

I could get it from the outside.

Yeah.

I mean there's somebody's cows.

You can't just start milking private property.

So the next developments in social media set to

further crowd this crowded marketplace threads include Bilge, which is a new automated AI-driven service that makes up things that users might make up themselves if they could be asked, then posts them to the Bilge platform where other AI bots on behalf of other AI users who also can't be asked respond with a mixture of ill-informed counter-arguments and personal abuse.

That's basically just taking it to its logical end point.

The new social media platform AHHH!

when all you can post is a link to another thing on the internet and the word ah

so I'm not sure anything else is needed anymore and Elongate in which you post an idea and AI technology transforms it into the most dystopian possible version of that idea, as it would become were Elon Musk to develop it.

And also Zuck It Up, which is similar to Elon Gate, but marginally less mad and marginally more depressing.

You know, at some point there is going to be a start-up division of the bugle.

Various start-up ideas would be launched.

India news now.

And well, Anivab, there's a tomato crisis in India due to a bad weather causing prices to rise 400%

and I mean I guess the eternal question with tomato is is it a fruit is it a vegetable answer is a vegetable because it goes in salads but not in desserts that is all that is the only defining characteristic of fruit and vegetables anyone who says anything else is a liar

but I mean this is this is quite economical because it is fundamental to to a lot of Indian cookery prices have gone up 400% in recent weeks It's too hot and too cold in India.

The rain has ravaged the crop.

Things are so bad that McDonald's has decided it's not going to use tomatoes in its burgers.

So, I mean, I don't know what's going to mean a McDonald's burger in India because beef is banned and you can't have a tomato.

So you're just getting bread, really.

Bread in a gherkin.

That's good enough.

And I think India is just going to have to stop watching, you know, Bolonais recipes on Instagram because all this tomato requirement has to come to an end.

Basically, in India, we used to get four months of rain, and we look to the heavens around May, as all developed countries do, and hope it rains, and all our crops come out fantastic, and, you know, we feed the country.

It's all gone off.

I mean, now it rains in February.

In July, there's been...

in some parts of India, drought.

In other parts of India, just entire highways being washed away.

And tomato needs a calm sort of environment with predictable rains.

And I think that's it for us and tomatoes, really.

We may have to export it from Spain.

But I mean, I remember stories back in the early 2000s about people cross-breeding tomatoes for additional robustness.

I mean, surely

you could cross-breed a tomato with a fish for drought, you know, flood resistance.

So it can just

grow underwater.

Yeah.

I don't see why that can't happen.

Yeah.

That should happen.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm surprised how in tropical countries you now get fruits and vegetables that just there's no logic by which they should be there.

Like, how are there strawberries in Mumbai?

But these things are all happening now.

It's funny that the amount of energy it takes to ship a strawberry to Mumbai is about as much energy as goes into ruining the atmosphere so that a tomato can't survive.

This is the choices the world will have to make.

One to one.

Yeah, lose a tomato, get a strawberry.

In other Indian India news, well, I mean, there have been many rivalries that have shaped this planet,

you know, humans versus nature, we've talked about.

But trains versus goats could be one that really decides the future.

And there's been a, well,

and there's been, well, a

landmark showdown, Anuvab in India, this week in the trains versus goats battle.

Just bring us up to date.

I mean, this is the main debate, really, the world is facing, and you're right.

You know, I think a lot of people talk about economic development versus fossil fuels.

You know, like, should developing countries give up economic development because they're not allowed to use coal, that sort of thing.

That's the wrong debate.

I think the big debate is high-speed rail versus goats.

Right.

So, the Prime Minister of India has a pet project, and high-speed rail is his pet project.

Short distances between Indian cities covered by high-speed trains that India hasn't seen.

We've had long-distance trains for a long time.

You'd be familiar with those because the British put them there

and we've at most repaired an engine or two but essentially we're still running on Laswegian engines and doing Mumbai to Delhi in 24 hours.

You're making me jealous now.

I know you want to be on those trains.

A lot of English people would love to be on those trains.

I think it's in the monsoons, it's 48 hours actually on that train to get from Mumbai to Delhi, an hour's flight.

Prime Minister Modi wants to change all that.

He started a train train called the Vandebharath Express.

So you can do Delhi to the Taj Mahal, for example, now in two and a half hours.

Well, it used to take seven hours.

Now, high-speed rail comes at a cost in a developing country because it goes through a lot of farmland.

And this is the fourth incident where livestock have been killed, have been run over by high-speed trains.

This time it was a train from Delhi to Lucknow ran over four goats.

And clearly, the proprietor of that, a man from Uttar Pradesh called Mr.

Manu Paswan, and his sons were very upset at the loss of their livestock.

So they decided to take the best legal recourse available, which was throwing stones at the train.

And they damaged the windows of the Vande Pharat Express after their goats got mowed down, which I think is natural justice in some way.

They have been arrested, and there's a big debate in India as to what is more important, goats versus trains.

And I want to know where you guys stand on the debate, really.

Well, I mean, it's the betrayal of the trains, really, because it used to be, obviously, that the goats would be aware of the train coming for, you know, up to 16 hours before it actually arrived.

There'd be a small toddler walking in front of the train to warn anybody that it was on its approach.

And, you know,

it was kind of a gentleman's agreement that if the train happened to be coming up to the goats and the goats were still on the track, that the train would stop for up to three weeks until the goats decided to leave.

So, all of a sudden, to change the rules on the goats feels unfair.

Yeah, and India's not ready for your CNF or Talgo

or the French train, Talus.

You know, we're not ready for that kind of speed.

I have often been on the Mumbai-Delhi train where people have walked much faster or cycled much faster to the next station.

And the whole point of it was a sort of lumbering, Victorian, lackadaisical mode of transport.

Now, I realize Prime Minister Modi wants to change that, but it's going to come at the cost of a lot of wild animals.

Well, I mean, my answer to this would be to try to find out which is better goats or trains

so we're going to do it in five categories category one as a means of transport trains are faster and with a wider choice of seating options goats more reliable

it's close but trains can take more people so trains edit one nil trains range of drink options well when you're on a goat you're pretty much restricted to goat milk unless you want to go really off the east whereas on a train you can get a range of hot and cold beverages including tea coffee and alcoholic and soft drinks train 2-0 to trains.

Edibility.

Well, goat curry, a classic dish in many parts of the world.

Boiled goat, I had in Greece once, which was literally a bit of goat that had been boiled.

Trains, however, notoriously hard to cook.

Goat gets a point.

It's 2-1 to trains.

Ability to negotiate a passage through mountains.

That's a big win for goats.

They can do it without years of advanced planning and millions of pounds of funding for infrastructure.

So Goat pulls it back to 2-0.

It's like the ass is all over again, Chris.

Come on you goats.

The decider, usability as a motif in blues songs.

Ah shit.

Trains take the decider.

Trains

coming in and going out of the station as a metaphor for human emotions and relationships.

Well, that's pretty tough to beat.

Goats trotting into the goat pen just doesn't quite do it.

So trains are better than goats.

There we are.

I have to say I wasn't expecting this analysis from the many things I was expecting.

So I'm just, I think I'm going to go back to Mabana Goat now.

UK news now, and the British Immigration Minister has painted over some cartoon murals at a children's asylum centre, because it's not enough to have an inhuman answer to a human problem.

It's not enough.

You have to have performative

alongside it.

And that is pretty much the only strand of the government's immigration policy that they've shown any aptitude for or willingness to properly fund.

This is an extraordinary story.

Robert Jennerick, the immigration minister, ordered an asylum centre to paint over cartoons of Mickey Mouse

because that was viewed as too welcoming to children who have been dragged across the world and risked their lives.

I don't know if he's replaced it with a mural of Nigel Farage saying, f off instead, but certainly the Mickey Mouse has gone.

I mean, you'd call him a cartoon villain, but he's clearly an anti-cartoon villain.

He's had these murals painted over, and I clarify had them painted over.

He didn't paint them over himself.

His hands are too full of a purring cat and a blueprint for how he's going to blow up the moon to actually pick up a paintbrush.

He then apparently spat at a picture of Dolly Parton, said he thought David Attenborough was overrated and then did a poo next to the toilet on the floor just to get his morning's busy ding quota up to level.

I just, I'm a bit worried here.

Like it's not enough to imprison unaccompanied children running from war zones.

You also have to make sure their underpants are extra itchy.

It's like, it's like I worry that he's got like body dysmorphia for horribleness.

Like he's looking in the mirror and going, no, I'm not enough of a cat.

I just need.

And you don't know where that'll end.

It's dangerous.

I want to ask you guys, what do you think would be welcoming posters that gives a summary of the United Kingdom to children?

I was thinking, would it be a mixture of the film O Men

and a poster of the Battle of Algiers?

I was thinking, what what if it wasn't Disney, what what films would you choose to put posters up?

Well, I guess, I I mean, you could still use Mickey Mouse, but after he had finally been caught and savaged by a cat, you know, it's just

like the remnants of Mickey Mouse's corpse.

That would

truly stick in these children's minds forever.

M-I-C-K-E-Y-M, M-I-C.

I mean, it does raise the question of...

Does our government think that there are children around the world badgering their parents to come to Britain for the Mickey Mouse murals, and that if they know there are no cartoon murals, they will persuade their parents not to make this death-defying journey.

Will it dissuade a single asylum seeker from risking everything to come to Britain?

Will they be sitting there saying, well, I'm wavering, should we relocate our entire existence to a not especially welcoming place via a series of very ill-advised means of transport in the hands of some of the world's most exploited of shitheads?

Well, that doesn't sound like a great idea.

Let's just have a look at the brochure.

Oh, look, there's a picture of Daffy Duck playing football on the wall at the processing centre.

Count us in.

I'm just not sure that's part of the thought process.

No, and I mean, it's a decision.

I mean, these are unaccompanied children.

They're not just going to walk in and be like, well, it's a bit grim and turn around.

This is the last gasp of their safety on a journey that has to have been incredibly devastating.

I mean, I don't know, maybe the the cartoons are a little bit uh a little bit not enough, but taking the cartoons away is way too much.

You know, the US consul, sorry, the UK consulate in Calcutta has posters to define Britain.

And it's got a beef eater, it's got the queen, and it's got Alan Partridge.

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

I guess it's a tough decision to say, this is Britain, kids.

Which posters you choose are always tricky.

Well, I guess that shows that generally when people try to define Britain, certainly on that side of the political spectrum, they make up an absurd, largely fictional version of it.

because the reality is quite hard to express in a single image.

They had it at the visa processing centre in Australia, where I went to get my ancestry visa, they have a sort of a series of icons that are meant to represent Britain and all of the things that it has to offer.

And you sort of got the thistle, you know, and then but two of the icons are different versions of a cup of tea and then a teapot.

And then three of them are just different shapes of sport ball,

which I feel is probably representative.

In other

Britain dealing with asylum seekers news,

there are plans to house asylum seekers on a barge

to reduce the reliance on housing them in hotels.

But it turns out that this scheme will only save £10

per person

per day.

and basically involves imprisoning people on a barge.

Yeah, I mean, the decommissioned warships anchored in the mud off Woolwich, and and they're dark and damp and verminous and very few prisoners managed to escape.

Sorry, that's the notorious Victorian prison hulks, which were your solution to unwanted types a couple of hundred years ago, just before you invented Australia.

Not my personal solution.

But I'm being blamed for this.

It seems like your home secretary is quite keen.

on these people not touching the UK mainland.

Yes.

There's something about the soil, I think, that is morally...

Our British soil, yes, it was given to us by God.

Yeah, it's fair enough.

So Rwanda, floating hotels, you know, like various options, just as long as they don't touch terraforms.

Well, I mean, it's possible that your your father was an inspiration this because he we talked about this but he used to own and run a floating hotel in in Kolkata.

He was a marine architect and spent his whole life designing floating hotels and now he's 84 and blind and thank God he's doesn't have to see that they're mostly used for refugees who are not allowed into countries.

£10 per person per day sounds like it's not a a huge saving, but it will all add up.

Because let's not forget when it comes to asylum seekers, as pointed out by Siwella Bravman, there are millions, perhaps billions, of potential illegal asylum grants out there.

It's heading towards 8 billion now, I think, people who are not currently in the United Kingdom, who might want to come here.

So if we even get 1% of them, that's £80 million, £10 a day, that's £800 million, that's £300 billion a year.

This is a tidy little money spinner, to be fair.

Finally, in other Britain news, well, the Empire could be entering its final stages of total collapse.

Obviously, we've lost most of our former

partner territories, I believe, officially

over the last 100 years or so.

But in the latest blow to the Empire,

Orkney, the Scottish archipelago, could be jumping the sinking shark and joining Norway.

They're looking at proposals to become a Norwegian territory.

Now, obviously, we've talked about East Anglia being returned

to India.

I mean, what next?

If Orkney goes, could London itself be bought by Saudi Arabia or even relocated to the Gulf as a backup Dubai in case Dubai itself gets blown away in a sandstorm or collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisies, in which case London would be a viable like-for-like in that regard?

I mean, where's this going to end?

Well, I mean, where did it begin?

I feel like this is the victory victory of the Vikings after many, many hundreds of years of trying to nick Orkney and various other associated bits of England and in some ways succeeding and, you know, interbreeding and becoming part of etc.

etc.

But I mean, this is, I worry that we're giving the Vikings exactly what they have always wanted.

Right.

You know,

and then, you know, what is Orkney?

Is it more of a nation statement or is it more of a nation question mark?

We have to deal with these

issues in terms of self-definition.

It's very complicated.

Orkney was under Norwegian control until very recently, the year 1472,

which is very recently as far as the history of Britain goes, which was 13 billion years ago that Britain was invented as part of the Big Bang.

And in 1472

the Scottish Parliament absorbed Orkney into the Kingdom of Scotland because

the family of Margaret of Denmark had failed to pay her dowry when when she married James III of Scotland.

So they basically they just nicked it in lieu of

basically a wedding debt.

So that's.

I mean that sounds like a fair cop.

Britain got a lot of stuff in dowries.

Mumbai was Charles II.

Are you suggesting that Margaret was not worth Orkney?

Exactly.

Or Charles I shouldn't have had my neighbourhood.

I like how this representative of Orkney said, we were part of the Norse Kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom.

And my favourite thing about the story is that I did not know citizens of Orkney are Arcadians.

No.

Which means that they're also a cluster of killer whales, apart from being human beings.

We've all learned.

I hope you have as well, buglers, from the unrelenting deluge of facts we have presented to you this week.

Before we go this week,

a very exciting moment in literary history is imminent with the publication of the Dancy Lagarde book.

Alice, as Dancy Lagarde's literary agent, just

tell Bugle listeners exactly what they can expect from it.

Well, the Dancy Lagarde Reader will be coming out soon.

It's 170% funded on Unbound, so if you want to pre-order your copy, you can go on Unbound and do it.

Dancy Lagarde, as you know, operates in something of a different dimension, and not a lot of the work of Dancy has leaked into this dimension, but what work there is, I am the curator of, and so it is my great privilege and pleasure to bring you some of these extracts, book covers, moments of great achievement in the work of Dancy Lagarde, which, as you know, is about one book every four to five days over an unquantifiable period of time.

So,

for example, I can advertise the most recent release.

A new novel is out, my self-published Romance Maven and online bestseller Dancy Lagarde.

Out of Time and In His Arms is the fifth in the 24-book Time Traveller's Mistresses series.

An ahistorical romance with a supernatural twist, Out of Time and In His Arms, is a swashbuckling frenemies to lovers' romp through a sexy steampunk universe full of excitement, boners, and rogue dinosaurs.

Dr.

Rafe Symantec is a young professor of time travel recently recruited into the secret Time Spies League of Improbably Hot Brothers in Arms.

Passionately devoted to saving the world from chrono-terrorists, he has all the time in the world, but none for love.

Dianthra is an eccentric but devastatingly beautiful half-librarian, half-time wizard at the Academy of Time until a chrono-terrorist kidnaps her for her encyclopedic knowledge of encyclopedias, her sexy time travel skills, and her massive rack.

Rescued by RAF, their time vessel damaged by a laser gunfire, they are cast adrift together on the seas of time with no option but to use Diana's special ability to navigate through time only while in states of heightened passion, they are forced to bang it out constantly but professionally, while trying not to fall in love.

I mean, look, I know that this is from another dimension, but this is sounding like my family history.

They must solve the mystery of the missing pyramid, get a pivotal pterodactyl back to the late Triassic period, and capture the sinister head of the chrono-anarchists, whose dangerous obsession with Diantra threatens the very fabric of time, all while fighting the passion they feel rising between them.

With a small but pivotal cameo from Isambard Kingdom Brunel, out of time, and in his arms is the feel-good hit of this and every summer.

When you have a sexy librarian, you know it's only a matter of time before her glasses and the wheels and her pants come off.

Find your copy just in the corner of your eye or in all deconsecrated bookshops.

That's Dance of the Guard for this week.

I've never heard the erotic librarian as a genre on Amazon.

I think it's just...

How can people pre-order their copies?

You can go to thebeaglepodcast.com.

There's a link there to fund it.

Or if you go to unbound.com and write Alice Fraser, because I guarantee you will not spell Dancy Lagarde correctly the first time round.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's bugle.

Don't forget, if you are a cricket fan, or even if you're not, but are cricket curious, tune into the Bugle Ashes Zoltzcast coming to you every morning of every men's ashes test this summer.

The series tantalisingly poised at two tests to one, despite Australia breaking every single law of justice.

I'm on your side, Andy.

Cannot a simple English gentleman go for a gentle country stroll from behind the crease while the ball is still live without being cruelly stumped from behind by an et tu brute on the other seat of another team.

That also sounds like a plot of a Dancy Legarde, I've lost it.

Once you get your eye in everything, sounds like the plot of a Dancy Legarde.

I do like how this has escalated into a prime ministerial level conflict between your two countries with them trying to outdo each other with photographs of injustice on the cricket field.

So yeah, Anthony Albanese gave Rishi Sunak a photo of the controversial Kerry Burstow incident

and

Sunak made a little jibe about sandpaper, which just goes to show that

cricket mirrors life in the sense that everyone can be f ⁇ ing childish about it.

Zinger-based politics is my least favourite form of international relations.

Alice, you also, aside from your

overseeing the publication of the works of Dancy Lagarde, you are doing the Edinburgh Festival, correct?

I am.

My show, Twist, will be in Edinburgh at 8:30 p.m.

at the Underbelly Bristow Square.

We've also got live gargles,

two live gargles.

There's no other representative from the Bugleverse there, so I figured I should step up and do these live gargles.

You can get tickets again on thebuglepodcast.com, and you can come to Twist.

I think it's a good show.

I think it's my last show for a while, so come along and watch it.

Anna Graham, you will also be at the French.

I will.

I am, and hopefully I'll see Alice up there.

I'm seeing, I'm doing the last two weeks and a but this is a different kind of show.

It's not just straight stand-up.

I am on a mission to promote Britishness.

I feel like that's sort of a dying thing in the world.

And I started out with India where I live.

I've been having great success.

I mean, people have been beating me up, but that's not important.

The point is, I feel, and I hope you guys feel as well, that Britishness needs to be spread.

So, my show is called The Department of Britishness.

It just says how we need more British things in the world.

And I'm just looking for supporters, really, not really an audience.

Okay.

Well, I've got three different shapes of sports ball that you could really deploy well.

We've just secured a date for a Bugle live show in London the 16th of September at Leicester Square Theatre.

Ticket details will be available on the internet very soon.

If you are part of the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Scheme, you will get the ticket link first.

I'm hoping to also have some further dates soon, and I will be on tour next year.

Details to be confirmed in

the next couple of months.

So, keep an eye out for that.

I like to keep it vague.

If you wish to join the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Scheme to keep the Bugle and its stable of shows free, flourishing, and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

And if you take out a premium voluntary subscription, you will get a place on the Bugle Wall of Fame for your contribution to human civilization, alongside these people.

Mike DuPriest was instrumental in the development of shaving foam after realizing that humans as a species have an evolutionary defense mechanism whereby if they think they look like an ice cream, they will attempt to remove the stuff that is making them look like an ice cream in order not to be eaten.

Andrea Scholler formulated a theory that states that the reasons humans like ice creams is because of a collective deep-seated shared memory of the last ice age, because of which eating ice cream helps us feel we are connecting with our prehistoric selves.

Bart Mosley ran a simulation of the future which proved that if and when a new ice age ever begins, running down non-snowy mountains will become just as popular as skiing down snowy mountains is now.

Keith Waters is working on a gravity assisted roadway that functions like a downhill slope even when it is in fact an uphill slope.

If successful, this will enable people to ski everywhere, weather permitting, and thus save the environment by stopping people using cars or going on skiing holidays.

Neil Schahr is working on a new form of slalom pole to spice up professional ski racing.

The new poles will pop up from beneath the snow just before the skier arrives, forcing them to make frantic last-second off-the-cuff moves to stay in the race.

Ski racing should be like life, says Neil, unpredictable and liable to end face down in a pile of snow.

Since we're on the subject of ski racing, Elwyn Ainsworth was instrumental in the evolution of the sport by suggesting using timing devices to work out how long it takes skiers to make it from the top to the bottom of the course.

Previously, they were just asked to estimate their time and asked to confirm the shape of a snow sculpture halfway down the course to prove they'd actually done it.

Michael Bertwistle has developed a form of artificial snow that functions at all temperatures up to and including 52 degrees Celsius, enabling the regions of the world that don't have a proper winter to get some variety into their lives.

Michael explains, waking up to an entirely different looking landscape fosters not only creativity, but also sledging.

And Derek Matthews has conducted a feasibility study into the logistics of making everyone in the world move to a different region of the world every three years so we can all know what it is like to live in different places with different climates.

It's feasible says Derek and it would make us all more tolerant and understanding but it would also cost around one billion dollars per person so it's probably a non-starter.

Thanks to all our voluntary subscribers who've made it onto the wall of fame this week.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.