Moths

How is everyone?

Very well, thanks.

I think Benjamin and I have had very wholesome weekends.

Oh really?

What have you been doing?

I've been narrow boating with

some old friends.

Oh my god, yeah.

That's the sort of thing I associate with a kind of little stop motion animated hedgehog.

Right.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes, but instead of a stop motion animated hedgehog, think of sort of six quite sort of puffy round-the-edges middle-aged men wedged into a deliberately narrow boat.

If you think it's laborious animating that little hedgehog walking up and down a narrow boat,

you haven't seen those lass try and get up and down it.

You were yearning

for a metal inner skeleton, weren't you?

And for a giant hand to be very, very ponderously making you get out of bed.

They never made that Sylvanian family set, did they?

six slightly hungover dance on the narrow range.

The two things which come to mind for me are one is is who was murdered, and have you got to the bottom of it yet?

Well, we're still at the stage where we're trying to cover up the murder.

See, so we're not

keen to

having scattled the narrow boats, we're hoping that no one will bother to sort of dredge it up and find the skeleton

of

Prince Jeremy, Prince Jeremy of Liechtenstein,

okay.

All stand for the king,

we're entering the Regal Zone.

Regal Zone.

Off with their heads.

On with the show.

Listen not to the knaves and the shopkeepers.

Bring me more advisors.

The Regal Zone.

Yes, because you'd all won a holiday, hadn't you, with Prince Jeremy of Liechtenstein?

Oh yes, and that's what finally prompted us to actually get together.

It's so hard to get together when you're that so much

jobs and it it's always when you all win that the jeremy of licensing draw then of course you do and it has to be narrowboating of course

obviously old european aristocracy the chance to meet old european aristocracy is one of the things that can get a bunch of middle-aged friends to finally hang out isn't it there's also if you do want to stage a murder during the course of a weekend of narrowboating you are better off murdering a sort of minor European royal just because there's so many of them and they don't know what to do with half of them they're expensive to run And if you off one or two here, and they're absolutely thrilled.

Yeah, and when they hear that Prince Jeremy has died, someone wants to say, Oh, of course, it is the curse, and they just move on.

They don't look into it too hard.

Yeah, it was the curse.

We can move on.

It was the same, probably linked to

the same curse, which is the reason I didn't have a lower jaw.

And everything I'm saying is actually being said for me by Susan of Lichtenstein, Jeremy's sister and mother, and aunt and brother-in-law,

and prize pony.

Now, of course, the reason you have to do narrowboating with someone like Jeremy of Lichtenstein is that as soon as he sets foot on British soil, he's a pretender to the throne.

So he has to stay on the narrowboat at all times.

He's under constant attack.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the canalways are a safe zone.

Yeah.

Which means not only can he legally be pelted to death with onions,

he actually must be.

Yeah, and in fact,

were you to pass through Thrupp in Oxfordshire, and if the people of Thrupp weren't to pelt him with onions, they could be held accountable.

Well, they'd be rounded up and pelted themselves then by the people of the neighbouring villages.

And then you get the pelt-on-pelt situation.

That's the thing that one of the things that Britain fears the most is exponential onion-offs, isn't it?

Exponential onion-offs, where every town takes out every other town with onions layer by layer, mimicking the great onion that is, of course, a foundational myth of Pacedonia.

Little hack for that: if you are puffing some of death with an onion, you are allowed to use an onion quiche and its plate.

Yeah, but not to the baking tray, not the baking tray.

I cannot stress that enough,

Mike.

How does Oxfordshire look look from a narrow boat standpoint?

You can see perfectly on one side of the bank an extremely high, poorly maintained hedgerow, and on the other side, an extremely high, undermaintained hedgerow.

Oh, lovely.

So essentially, you've got the sort of viewpoint of a sort of lab rat that's just going around.

All it can see is its immediate confines of wall.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And occasionally there's a clearing, and the clearing is great because it means there's a canal side pub.

Okay.

And that is the sort of canal rat cocaine button, basically.

That's the canal rat cocaine.

And I was explaining to Ben.

All pubs within a certain radius of Oxford claim to be the pub where they filmed Morse.

So

they do, basically you can just buy bitter and no other booze.

And

they all have pictures of John Thor everywhere.

And you can put your face through a little sort of cut out, cardboard cut out, and it looks like you've got the face of Morse.

You're standing next to Lewis.

It's really satisfying.

And also some of of the more lewd pubs have them where you can put your face through and be Morse's ass

as he's getting up off a chair.

And somehow, despite the fact that, you know, there are several pubs along the route, each one of them, you go in, and Kevin Whateley's in there, isn't he?

He is.

He is.

He moves fast.

Incredibly hard job for him, isn't it?

Well, they needed a lot of weight leases when they were filming it.

There are actually a lot of weight leases because weight leases are so hard to light.

When they made the TV show, they had to make a lot of extra weight leases.

For those who don't know, Kevin Whaitley played, what's his name?

Lewis?

Lewis.

Inspector Morse's sidekick.

He was basically a you know, sometimes there'll be a scientific

movement and an offshoot of it, an accidental byproduct of it will be useful.

Yeah.

So it was when they were trying to design fully cultured pork, isn't it?

That they really were producing Kevin Whately's, weren't they?

That's a sort of initially they were sloughed off and just thrown away in, well, in medical recycling bins.

Well, they were fed to birds of prey and stuff, weren't they?

But actually, eventually they realised, hang on, we can actually make some money off these Kevin Whateleys by getting them to do voiceovers for serial ads.

Initially, this is how he got into acting.

But now they have the whole thing sort of, they're actually making more money off the wheatleys than they are off pork.

They certainly were for a while.

And they'd create a kind of, it was almost like a loaf of whaitleys, wasn't it?

They were just being produced.

You get a big tax rebate on your weightleys as well, don't you?

It just makes financial sense.

Yeah, you get a huge tax rebate.

But the way that they grow off as a sort of side funnel off the main cultured pork cube, don't they?

And what you have to do is you have to slice.

So initially, the initial slicing of the of the Whateleys was was very unevenly done.

So you'll see certain episodes of Morse where

there's streaky whaitleys, for example.

And often in runs like that, you'll notice, you go back and watch them, that

he is really quite streaky.

And that often he'll be like half he'll be like stood up again facing a wall, for example,

in an attempt to conceal the rind.

I went through a period of, I don't know if you've ever had this, back in the days when people would pay me to write things.

It was so linear looking, that wasn't it, that

what a linear way of living your life.

You'd have to think about who would play the roles, for example.

Maybe you're pitching something, or maybe you're getting to the stage of casting something.

Very, very often I'd just, I'd throw Waitley's name in.

You'd be chatting to the producer, and they'd be talking about the sort of the zeitgeisty zeitgeisty comic names, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I'd just, there'd be a moment of quiet and I'd go, what about Kevin Whaitley?

You're nice.

And it always makes the producer go, yes, maybe.

But then Kevin Whaitley never says yes.

But, but now, really?

Well, that's because you have to get all the Whaitleys to agree, doesn't it?

And there are so many of them.

And obviously, some of them escape.

But now, the fact that I have done this podcast and we've had this conversation means I can never again work with Kevin Whateley, just in case he happens to hear this, or even the knowledge that it's in the world, and I'm in a room with Kevin Whateley.

The fact that I know that I'm responsible for a podcast in which we've talked about how he's an offshoot of cultured pork means I can never work with him again.

So it's good to put that to bed in a way.

Yes, I will never work with Kevin Whateley.

I will never work with Kevin Whaitley.

It's a nice feeling.

That's, you know, but of course, you'll never get the tax, you'll never get the tax benefits.

You might go on holiday with him or something like that.

Do you know what I mean?

It's not going to be, yeah, it might be leisure.

It has to be swimming with him.

And Ben has also been wholesome, haven't you, Ben?

Had a good weekend.

Slept overnight at Britain's most haunted prison.

That is superb.

So

you were at His Majesty's pleasure?

Decommissioned Majesty's pleasure.

Decommissioned.

So my friend Sammy

booked it.

She saw it on the website.

Shepton Mallet Prison, Britain's most haunted prison.

It was a prison until 2014.

You could sleep there overnight.

I thought, oh, that sounds fun.

I didn't think about it too much.

And when I got there, I realized

I was there out of a sense of this might be fun and also a bit of an interest in history, to be honest.

That's why I was there.

Yeah.

Okay.

The optics are good so far.

Yeah.

Optics are great so far.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I would say the rest of the people there, probably about 30 people,

100%

there to hunt ghosts

using their little plastic boxes with an LED on it that would go off when the ghost came near.

Oh, really?

And other ghost sort of

technology.

So no one's there to sort of seek a degree of empathy with what life might have been like as a prisoner.

That's kind of what I was, that's what I was interested in, really.

But everyone else was wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt.

I'm assuming quite a lot of this kit is

homemade, isn't it?

Largely speaking.

Yamiele Hoovers will have a ghost setting, won't they?

They'll have Georgian ghost, Victorian ghost.

They'll have Viking long ship.

The more expensive ones can suck up

an entire ghost Viking long ship.

A poltergeist fitting for the end.

Well, yeah, that's a special rotating brush, isn't it?

Yeah, so it's fair to say, I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I don't really believe in ghosts, but I don't have a problem with anyone who does.

And I don't want to mock these people necessarily.

What if we do?

because they do feel like a soft target?

And it's quite early on Monday morning, and I'm ready for a soft target today.

What I enjoyed was that the accoutrements they had.

So, for example, little box with an LED on it, dial.

I'm hoping there's a dial as well.

Is it just an LED?

Is it binaries?

Like, there's no ghost or no ghost, or is there like a no, there's a bit of a dial.

Nice.

Yeah, there is something in between.

Have you ever met Michael Paulzolo?

Ladies and gentlemen, please pray silence for a moment of satire.

Jonathan Swift, Holding institutions to account.

Mark Twain.

Speaking truth to power.

Chaucer.

A core part of any healthy democracy.

Chumber Wumber.

Can our jokes actually change government policy?

Of course they can.

Quiet.

Please respect this important mode of humor.

So let's, I think, let's take this seriously.

An LED light.

So what is that?

Is that a shop-bought light bulb?

No, it'd be like the little light that tells you that your stereo is on.

Yeah.

Or whatever.

So that says ghost or not ghost?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But as Mike says,

there's a little sort of scale.

I think it's based on electromagnetic fields.

The guy was talking about EMF quite a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

So apparently ghosts give off an electromagnetic field.

Don't know why that would be.

Well, it creates a bit of a sort of science.

It's a science word, isn't it?

So credibility adheres to your cause.

You can chop a science word in the next one.

There's two of them that you can smush together, electro and magnetic.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, because I'm not going to check both of those.

I might check electro.

I might check magnetic.

There's no way I'm checking both.

So I'm more likely to wave that through.

Also, ghost-o-matic.

Did he have a ghost-o-matic 5000?

Because, again, phrases like that, again,

I think generally that kind of stuff is probably normally true.

So I'm not going to try and pick holes in it.

What he also had were lots of cat toys.

So they're little balls that light up when they...

So in a cat scenario, when the cat plays with a ball, the lights come on.

Okay.

So they only come on when movement is present, basically.

So he would fill like B-wing, the floor of B-wing, with loads of cat balls.

They would occasionally go off.

I think probably because of a draft or something.

Well, it's a bit gusty down there, isn't it?

In your prison?

Yeah.

So yeah, sometimes the cat ball would move, and then he'd say, move it again.

Come on, move it again.

I know you're bored of doing this for me, but I want you to move it again.

He was kind of getting ratty with the ghost, which I found really funny.

From what I've learned about ghost hunters, they do tend to talk in the imperative to ghosts.

There's a lot of commands, there's a lot of way of

your P's and Q's.

Which I think if I was 450 years old,

I'd get a bit cheesed off with that.

Also, if you were 450 years old and you were cursed to roam the earth because you, you know, you were never able to avenge the murder of your wife or something, you wouldn't spend eternity like knocking catballs around in a prison,

would you?

You'd be going to

well, you'd be going to slipping in free to watch Phantom.

ABBA Voyage.

Abba Voyage.

You'd just be enjoying the musicals of the world for free.

You'd be slipping inside the ABBA personnel, wouldn't you?

You'd be inside Bjørn.

Yeah, you'd be up Björn from ABBA's arse, probably, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

Experiencing this.

Tell you what, this is.

Do you call that an ABBA Voyage?

You should try this, mate.

I'm watching herrings being slowly digested in an upper colon.

Sorry, that was stereotypical, wasn't it?

To suggest that Scandinavian people don't eat herrings.

There'd also be a mixture of

reindeer meat.

Ikea meatballs and smoked monk.

Smoked monks.

And a Volvo seat belt.

So the hit rate then, so this guy felt that he'd had some success, right?

He had a lot of success.

I mean, he had success in front of me.

Yeah, okay.

And he was saying, Thing is, I'm a sceptic.

He was saying.

I'm a skeptic.

He's saying that.

You've got to be skeptical.

I'm sorry, you are not when you are adhering LEDs to a mouse toy on your hands and knees in a disused prison.

Yeah, you're not full skeptic.

He was making the case that he's a sceptic, but in front of us was proof because there's a ball bearing in there, and that only when that moves, the light comes on.

That's proof.

So, what prison was this?

Shepton Mallet.

So, Bonjo, you are a bit of a skeptic.

You've come out of it still a skeptic, yeah?

No, just because you are a skeptic, aren't you?

But I've just read something quite interesting here about Shepton Mallet, which is Shepton Mallet Prison

was razed to the ground in 1842.

And all that remains is a naked patch of turf.

It's not there, Ben.

You didn't go to Shepton Mallet prison.

It's just a naked patch of turf.

It's just a premier inn with some temporary signage for the weekends.

There was a toilet in the room, but then no longer plumbed in, so you weren't allowed to soil them.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And there, your two wholesome weekends overlapped, didn't they?

Because that was true in both cases.

We were living without plumbing.

And if wholesome means no plumbing, then I had the most debauched weekend imaginable.

Dishwasher, sink, toilets, bath.

Plumbed.

The absolute works.

Everything Everything plumbed.

Please, sir, plumb in my oven.

How?

I don't care.

Just plumb it in.

I want an aqua oven and I want it soon.

That was my Friday.

And then Sunday, I went to an owl sanctuary.

So I think that is a pretty top-tier weekend.

I think, I mean, yeah, I think

it is quite wholesome, although that's not to say you didn't shag a couple of the owls, is it?

You haven't finished the story.

You may have had an owl threesome.

Or is it a plumbed owl sanctuary?

That's what we want to know.

Welcome to the flighted bird zone.

No, please, not my face.

A nice spread of owls.

Have we got a nice spread of your species, subspecies?

You've got your tawnies, your barns, your eagles.

Tawny, barn, eagle.

So those aren't that interesting, I would say.

What's the most interesting owl, then?

There was a freaky little one.

What was that?

Had like a devil's face.

Okay.

There was a steppe eagle.

That was good.

That sounds like a big boy.

Big old boy.

Yeah.

Probably the size of like a nine-year-old.

Yeah, can pick up a horse.

Yeah.

Right?

Exactly.

Fly with it for 16 miles to the Iri

to feed its young.

And what it'll do is it'll take that horse, it'll fly that horse 2,000 feet in the air and then drop that horse onto a tortoise

to kill the tortoise.

That's how bloody-minded and patient these things are.

Did you ask about whether their heads do go all the way around or not, or is it like a lid?

Is it lefty-loosey, righty-type?

Do you think it's looser when it goes to the left and eventually will pop off?

Did you ask that?

I tried to rotate the step eagle's head 360 degrees, didn't like that.

Well, just by maintaining eye contact and sort of stalking around it.

I'm quite jealous, actually, because as I said last week,

I get so much bird content put in front of me on social media for some reason on Instagram.

I'm constantly looking at owl sanctuaries and like bird people,

ravens.

We went to a swannery a couple of weeks ago.

Oh,

did you go to a swannery?

Abbottsbury Swannery to see the signets.

Bloody owls.

You two and your wholesome weekends.

What's wrong with a good old-fashioned inner-city brothel trip?

So

tell me about the

swan sanctuary?

Well, Swannery, because I think

when they started it off in the 16th century, it was basically a swan farm for the monks who just worked out every which way you can to turn a swan into liquor.

Exactly.

And they say it's the finest, strongest liquor they're into.

Into a digestique.

They say half a measure of swan and you won't just see God, you'll become God.

Wandering around Swannery, you must really get that sense that we often get wandering around a city, that

the rule of law law is a

it's an agreement, isn't it?

We agree to give the state control over us we because because we could over we could overwhelm the police

there were a lot of blurbs about the social contract I was surprised you have to bone up on that stuff because those swans you're visiting a swannery those swans

if they chose to could easily destroy you Mike Okay, they could have overpowered you could have completely overpowered you and turned you Mike into I'm gonna say 200 to 250 meatballs

with a little hair garnish

yeah the swans had the is it called the monopoly of violence yes exactly the swans had the monopoly have the monopoly of violence in a swan area so that must have been quite tense wasn't it knowing that they're just allowing you to look at them it was tens of times and there were i think there were a couple who were coming around to that idea because there'd be a couple of walkways where most of the swans would just ignore you and you get very close to them because it's quite sort of you know there's not a lot of room but there's a couple of walkways where there were there would be a you know a swan on a walkway

who's just like well

do you actually dare to walk past me you know

because because if i choose to

i will peck through your torso and effectively have a royal charter to do so

exactly and it looked it looked like it was having beginning to have those

thoughts so the tide might be turning because there's only a two or three swans who are like that most of them were very peaceful and just getting on with daily business The walkway thing is making me imagine you going through sort of like cavernous rooms full of swans reproducing a bit like the alien in the aliens films.

So there'd be like thousands of eggs.

There's a thousand sort of mucosal pods.

Yeah, yeah.

Millions of kind of swan pods.

Very, very dumb.

Yeah, sort of really gratesque, sort of fleshy little swans before they develop their feathers and stuff scampering around.

Yeah, just no real sound apart from the occasional sort of old piston coming to life.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

And then the huge mother swan, which is a huge, fleshy protuberance.

What do you think?

It's the flooring.

hang on a minute the question isn't where is it the question is we're in it

what the hell do we get out

there's that moment we've parked in the beaked in the beak

and you'll notice and you come out the the monstrous swan mother who's this huge sort of fleshy unspeakably grotesque sort of hairy fleshy sort of wobbly

slug like being isn't it it has the face of of Kevin Whaitley.

Let's turn on the bean machine.

Yes, please.

Turn on the bean machine.

This week's topic as sent in by Roddy

from London.

Ooh.

Look at Roddy.

Someone's doing well for themselves.

Someone's still got the hunger.

Someone still wants it.

And wants it so goddamn bad they'll do whatever it takes.

Yeah, come to this crazy town of dreams

and nightmares.

And itsus.

More itsus than a man can count if he can't count above 36, the 36 itzus.

The topic sent in my body is

moths.

Ooh.

Shit.

Yeah.

Shit.

Shit, the bed.

Yeah.

Fuck.

It was coming.

We knew it was coming.

It's been coming, hasn't it?

It's the devil's butterfly.

It is the devil's butterfly.

Having said that, I would take a mega moth any day over one of the tiny little ones.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A big, fat, weird-looking, scary kind of like creature from the depths of.

Yeah, like two big, like, mascara brush-style handles.

Yeah, those guys.

I don't mind them so much.

It's the little sort of flowery, puffy things that sort of disintegrate into a...

As if they should never have existed.

As if they were conjured from the dust by dark magic.

It's like moths, I feel like they're such creatures of the night, aren't they?

I feel like they're almost made of death.

Because when you kill a moth,

they just turn to nothing.

They turn to dust.

They're just like, was the...

You cannot kill death.

You cannot kill death itself.

Death simply becomes a powder.

Yes, you can hoover death.

You can hoover death.

You can't kill death.

You can get rid of it with a damp cloth, but you cannot kill it.

You can't kill it.

Yeah, I lived in a house in London that was mainly moths, structurally speaking.

Well, that's the London way, isn't it?

You live amongst plagues, don't you, for all the advantages that Roddy will know about.

You know, Roddy will be up to date with the very latest fashions and cultures and

just money pouring out of every orifice.

But all accommodation is riddled with moths, flies, rats, cockroaches, rats foxes foxes

yeah that the more i think about it that house had every we had load more moths than you you could conceive of yeah when i lived in london that was the only time in my life when my clothes actually were eaten by oh yeah creatures i had to i don't think i've had that end living anywhere else where they actually they did actually eat it i've lost

whole sleeves to moths over the course of a lunch.

Because you buy your cashmere sleeves just individually, don't you?

You go to your sleeveman on German streets.

Yeah, I tried to bring in the reverse tank top a couple of years ago.

I thought tank tops make sense.

Just sleeves and a kind of turtleneck on them.

Sleeves and turtleneck.

Maybe it's just because down here we mostly wear Gore-Tex.

I don't, maybe that's.

Yeah, maybe that is it.

We also had a kind of fly in that London house.

There is a word for it, I can't remember it.

Where they hibernate in your chimney breast

and then they all all come out on one day.

Aphids.

No, no, no.

They're really mad.

They're really

black flies.

They're an absolute horror show.

Oh, cluster flies.

Cluster flies.

Yeah, they're a complete horror show.

I'm looking out of my window right now at a six-foot moth.

I assumed it was my reflection in the full-length mirror, but actually

20,000 moths have learned to mimic me.

I'm looking at

at like

like 20 to 30 flies who every summer they just start hanging out on my balcony and they just fly around each other and they just is it's true that london has this sort of grotesque sort of um dark

fauna doesn't it of like

little nasty parasitic creatures so these flies as soon as the summer vaguely starts they're just there they just have this horrible dance they do amongst themselves right and if i open the if i leave the door onto the balcony open for more than five minutes all they do they just move into my my flat and do the same grotesque dance around each other.

Yeah.

Yeah, London does have a lot.

Oh,

I was in a menswear boutique the other day.

And

the guy working there was like freaking out.

He's like, oh my God, I can't believe

there's a bee the size of a bread bin.

And it was.

There was a bee the size of a bread bin in his little office at the back.

And I tried to help him get it out the window because it got stuck in that way that they do where he didn't realize there was a big door it could go away it could go through it stuck in this upper window bit and we had to try and hound it out using only menswear it could

so we were sort of like flinging man bags at it and sort of wafting ties and stuff ties and garters ties and garters

so when i was living there we tried everything didn't really work there were two things we didn't try yeah that i wish i had now

there's a thing called diatosomeus earth do you know what this is no diatomas

how how do you say this right i'm putting it in the chat how would you say this word diatomaceous diatomaceous diatomaceous earth diatomaceous iarth

which is basically this kind of rock that's made of um

fossils

and they grind it up and for some reason if you put it in the carpet and a moth touches it instantly all of the moisture in its body goes

into the mineral earth thing really

But you have smashed up a T-Rex femur in the process.

So it's only one T-Rex per moth.

We can do this.

Ben, were you sold this by a guy that also sells anti-ghost cat toys?

And then the other remedy, which I didn't do, but I wish I had, is you can buy really, really tiny wasps.

I thought you were going to say tiny, tiny clothes.

You can wear tiny, tiny little champas.

They're not interested

see well you can buy tiny wasps that you you release into your um carpet is there a phrase that's that's that's for for like you've solved one problem but you may have created

a spheric victory doesn't it he has got rid of the moths but his carpet is completely as you can see My jumper has no holes in it.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my face.

And those are wasps that are exiting the various holes in my face.

But the motor, some of them are coming back in because they now live in my head.

That's right.

I'm now a wasp, I'm now a mobile wasp nest.

But my birthday cardigan is tip top.

So the kind of wasps I've looked up, again, it's a word I can't say.

So I'm going to put this in the chat.

Mike, can you say this word?

Ichneumen wasps.

I-C-H-N-E-U-M-O-N.

Bloody hell.

Both of those solutions are so hard to say.

Is that a coincidence?

Diatomasius Earth or Ichneumen wasps?

It's a bit like the credibility of taking electromagnetic with your your ghost hunting kit and souping it up big time, isn't it?

Yeah.

Into words you just have never come across but sound scientific.

So tell me about the econumen wasps then?

I don't know much about them.

All I know is that you can buy a little sort of

Tupperware container full of them.

You'd let them go into your carpet and they cause merry hell.

Amongst them.

Carpet.

You get moths and carpets.

Moths will eat your carpet.

Moths are...

They are such a horrendous problem, moths.

So I've basically been living in a new build for the last few years and I've not had moths for the first time in my life and done this.

Any period property at all is, well, exactly.

As Ben said, they're in the fibers.

They're in the property.

They are the sofa.

They are the estate agent.

They are the estate agent.

And

yeah, they are the Marquis of Stoke Newington, who technically owns it on paper.

And if you have three children, they're one of of your kids.

One of them will be an accumulation of moths.

It's normally Motholina.

Actually quite ugly Motholina.

It's not always Motholina.

It's not always Motholina.

Right, so I found a website where I can buy some of these mini wasps, right?

Our mini wasps are tiny, 0.3 millimeter long parasitic wasps.

Can I say you start with your strongest selling point always, don't you?

Yeah.

Our micro-wasps are tiny.

And parasitic.

And parasitic.

They're also known as Ichnumen or trichogramma wasps.

They're practically invisible to the naked eye.

They are completely safe for humans and pets.

Ichneumen wasps cannot fly properly and cannot sting you.

If you were someone that was down on their luck and had recently read the tale of the emperor's new clothes,

you could sell invisible non-stinging wasps to people.

They really are no trouble.

You won't know they're there at all.

You can't see them.

They have zero footprint.

You also can't smell them.

Unfortunately, you can't see the can that they come in either.

Don't worry about that or feel it.

We make it an invisible can because it's made out of the woven corpses of ichneumen wasps.

So that's why it's invisible.

So they say, how many parasitic wasps do I need?

Right, okay.

For a standard-sized wardrobe, you'll need four of our mini-wasp cards.

Cards?

Cards.

Yeah.

Each card has 2,000 mini wasps.

Each more invisible than the last.

And what's great is if you transfer the money into the only, well, our very much visible bank account,

if you transfer the money into a bank, we can start delivering those Ikanhuman wasps to you with a zero-footprint system we have.

All you have to do is open your front door for a certain time, and we'll just tell you that they have gone in by our

delivered by our invisible,

one of our invisible team of employees.

I think we've got Invisible Barry.

Now, Invisible Barry, again, he's half thick human wasp, which is why he's invisible.

So anyway, I've been moth-free for the last few years since I've been living in this new build.

And I thought maybe this is it.

This is the key to not having moths.

But I've just the last couple of weeks, I've just started to s I just can't believe it.

Because I've been living like any human should be able to live, which is just like having jumpers and not being stressed and losing sleep about the fact that i've got a jumper oh yeah and i've even started taking them out because because i i started putting them all my jumpers in plastic bags and i've started taking them out and just relaxing and starting to sort of get over this sort of trauma of the of the moth attacks i've been living under my whole life and just the other day i've spot i've started to spot spot a couple of them so everything's gone back into plastic bags

henry i think i know how this happened as well well

Well, when I saw you in Machineth Comedy Festival, you'd bought a jumper in a shop in Birmingham.

And what was the one thing you told me about the the shop in Birmingham it was rank with moths

so I went so so on the way to the

comedy festival I did the classic British thing of seeing the sun and thinking I now live in the Caribbean effectively

so I packed my snorkel

my flippies, my sun cream, and then on the and then on the way to the train station realised it was May in in Britain.

Early May.

Early May.

Early May.

Really, really cold in my way to move.

Mid-Wales.

Yeah, I was going to mid-Wales in early May.

And

I then had to buy an emergency jumper in Birmingham.

And I had like a 45-minute crossover

train change opportunity.

So I went to this quite cool menswear shop in Birmingham, which I won't name because this is quite bad for them, probably.

But it was a lovely shop.

Everyone was super helpful.

I found a nice jumper.

Basically, when I went in, the guy welcomed me in was so helpful and nice.

He was like, oh, cheers, Mike.

Yeah.

Welcome to the shop, Mike.

So they'll know exactly which shop it is now.

People of Birmingham.

Yeah.

He went, oh, welcome.

I hope you enjoy your time in the shop and so on.

He was a really nice guy.

I was like, oh, yeah, I think it looks like a lovely place.

And then I started going through some...

one of the racks which had a bunch of cardigans on it

and these cardigans were absolutely rank with moths.

They were running up and down.

Yeah, so as soon as I parted two cardigans, it's like the blade Moth Olympics were going on.

They were just all running around.

That's mad.

Crawling over it.

And I thought, basically, I had this conundrum, which was...

Can I just say it's not a conundrum for me?

Okay.

Well, so I saw this as a conundrum, which was, do I tell this guy about the moths?

Oh, see, that is a conundrum.

My conundrum is I would not buy anything from this shop.

Well, I've bought a jumper, and safe of having recently, for the first time in three years, seen a couple of moths in my flat, I've not had a problem with it.

That's such a good point, Ben.

I think I hadn't made that connection.

I've brought infected good.

Anyway, you also bore that in my Saab.

You bore it in my Saab.

You'll cash me, Saab.

Quickly, darling, to the Saab.

What do you mean it's not there?

There's just four wheels, and

we're going to have to buy an Echinum and Hyundai.

I thought, I said, my dilemma was this.

Do I tell the guy, do I say to the guy, by the way, mate, your cardigan rack is actually rank with moths.

Because that's going to save him face in the long term, but in the short term, it's going to be an injury, it's going to sort of puncture his pride.

It's a bit like, I've talked about this on the podcast before, so it'll be very quick, but it's like the same thing happened as when I went scuba diving.

I was taught, learnt scuba diving.

in Thailand, the scuba instructor, an Australian guy,

during the first dive,

me and my friend saw a sea snake

swim through his legs.

Right.

Yeah.

And when we resurfaced, I was like, oh my God, mate, a sea snake swam through your legs.

And he was like, what?

What?

What, mate?

And I was like, a sea snake swam through your legs.

He was like,

what?

Oh, shut up, mate.

Oh, what?

Nah, what?

And he just reacted really badly to it.

Because it's kind of, on the one hand, I was trying to help him, but I was like insulting his pride.

It'd be like going to a baker and saying there's there's a there's a turd on your cross a turd on one of your croissants exactly I think the baker wants an earth is a turd on his croissant I think I don't know how it's related to the sea snake anecdote either to me yeah I don't think yeah it's like it's like it's pointing out to someone that they're at a very fundamental at almost the most fundamental level they are they are not pulling off a basic safety aspect of their work

So is he there to kill any seasnakes that came near you?

Well,

if you're a dive master and a sea snake is is swimming through your legs that's like running a menswear shop in birmingham and having a garden

rack that is ranked with moths it's like

you should have spotted this mate you should the customer shouldn't be the one pointing this out to you see what i mean okay yeah so actually that's weird i think that's why i didn't point this out to the guy in birmingham although the different the critical difference is there's nothing that the diving instructor can do about that now but

if you tell the shopkeeper he can do something about that also he thought you were making a joke about his penis

that it swum off,

yeah, Steve.

Yeah, huh.

Well, I would say I had a good wake last week.

Bad is an English prick.

I don't want to imply this, but my penis had swum off.

The thing is, he was right, Steve.

He was right.

How did he know?

I thought only you and me knew about the fact that my screen has swam off, Steve, which is why we're so close in a way.

Anyway, I'm going to move to the UK and open a cardigan shop.

I think it's start again.

Start again.

That's why we're so close, isn't it, Steve?

Because only you know about that.

Only I know about the fact that you've got a Mara Eel living up your ass.

Anyway, so what I chose to do was not touch, like what I did was I closed the,

it was a bit like I'm open in a thriller or something.

You know, you open the drawer, you're not supposed to look in.

I opened the cardigans.

I saw that it was ranked with moths.

And I made a choice.

I channeled a memory, a traumatic memory for Steve, not for me,

about

the penis snake, about the snakes going off.

And I closed, I reclosed.

You can never truly reclose.

Like opening the pages of the Necrononicon.

You cannot unread the Necroniconicon

and you cannot unsee the Moth Olympics that you saw taking place in Birmingham town centres.

And as much as you carry out that closing ceremony, that Olympics will carry on.

It will actually generate a lot of work, a lot of jobs,

certainly in the

wasps community.

Yeah, so

I reclosed the cardigans.

I went and bought myself a jumper.

I said, thanks very much, mate.

Went off.

And he went, thanks a lot, mate thanks for supporting the business and such and waved me off the other so i did i chose not to send him but maybe the other option i'd thought of was to send him a postcard well it was just a dead moth sort of pinned to the middle of it

nothing else

work it out

but the trouble with that is it could seem like a blood-curdling threat

i did think do i need to anonymously send him a letter do i need to send this man a box of wasps

Like a sort of gift, like a sort of horrible

mask, grotesque version of a gift.

Like a jack-in-the-box, but with 10,000 wasps.

A box of chocolates.

Yeah.

But just a

box of ochumens.

I had the same problem with a guy with really bad breath that I worked with, and I worked in Scotland.

There was a guy who worked at the company who had terrible breath.

His breath was so bad you could smell it from behind him when he was facing the other way.

And it was like, do we, but if you tell someone you've got bad breath, it's really offensive.

And I thought, do I write him an anonymous note or a letter saying I've got bad breath?

So in 20 years' time, when Ben and I have been killed in a tragic kinda i-10 accident and you're being interviewed about your time on the beans, what will you say that you didn't say?

It's weird I sourced the car and I didn't choose to take a lift with them that day.

Yes.

What will you admit that you didn't tell us at the time that you should have done?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I feel I felt a bit worried about them.

The

mothmonger.

But you know what's happened to me?

But you know, subsequently, by the way, I've been to another shop in London,

another clothes shop,

had the same thing.

I put on a.

Hang on a minute, I've just realised I'm the one carrying the moths.

So you

were you parted a clothes rack and moths tumbled out of your cuffs

onto the menswear.

Yeah, it's like

this one was more like a moth's FA cup and they were coming out of the tunnel.

Out of my cuff, they're all steaming onto the pitch.

There's A little moth mascot.

Little Moth Mascot.

Roddy, thank you for the topic because we've unearthed a great moth scandal.

We've worked out what Moth Ground Zero is.

Me.

It's Henry Packer.

I'm with the Ground Zero.

I'm the Super Spreader.

Moth Mary.

Moth Mary.

And if you'd like to buy some wasps so small you can't see them, threebean saladshop.com.

That's threebean saladshop.com.

Yes.

Henry, there is some new merch, isn't there, on threebean saladshop.com.

There is a new merch on threebean 3beansaladshop.com.

To coincide with Father's Day, we've released some provincial dad merch.

Yes.

So for all those provincial dads out there.

Yeah.

There's a provincial dad t-shirt.

There's a provincial dad t-shirt.

I think there's a mug.

I think there's a provincial dad mug.

Tea towel?

Is there a tea towel?

Yeah.

Brilliant.

Also.

Apron.

Yeah, apron.

There's a cap.

There is a cap, but it's hard to find the cap on the website.

Have they made that easier yet?

If you go to

Day as our century.

Answer the question, Ben.

Answer the question, Ben.

Have we made it easier yet?

I've got one.

I'm really, I'm very happy with it.

Put it on.

I'm going to put it on.

Yeah, let's have a look.

Yeah, so if you go on threebinstarshop.com and at the top there's a bit that says Father's Day, that's where you'll find the Father's Day bits.

And I don't know whether Mike was aware of how heavily he features in the Provincial Dad artwork, but he does.

I did see the artwork, yeah.

That's nice.

Oh, good hat.

So it's your classic baseball cap.

It's not your trucker style.

It's not your trucker style.

It's very nice.

Classic baseball style hat.

Nice colour of green, that's nice green.

There's a range of colours.

I've been wearing it around town.

Have you?

Yeah.

And the whole thing is absolutely rank with moths.

Okay, time to read your emails.

Yes, please.

When you send an email,

you must give thanks

to the postmasters that came before.

Good morning, postmaster.

Anything for me?

Just some old shit.

When you send an email,

this represents progress

like a robot shoeing a horse.

Give me your horse.

My beautiful horse.

You can email us at threebean saladpod at gmail.com.

Yes.

Henry,

should we start with crisp

swift bollock?

Oh, yeah.

My favourite kind.

This is from Sy in Tyneside.

It's listener bollocking of the week.

Accessing listener bollocking.

Bollocking loading.

Bollocking loaded.

Henry Rockalina is not a tortoise.

She is a box turtle.

Regards, Sy.

That's the Rockalina Bollockalina.

Can I say I Bollocka like it?

I'm going to take that.

Bollocking accepted.

Wow.

Cy got

a bollocking through on Henry.

That's no mean feat.

Yeah, so this is a reference to what I thought was a tortoise.

I tend to put

all of our shelled brethren into our shelled, slow-crawling, kind of withered old man's faced, beaked, lettuce-eating

quadruped brethren under the tortoise umbrella.

Either way, Roccolina's going from strength to strength, as far as I can tell.

So

that's great news.

It was a tortoise that I saw online that was being nursed back to health.

It wasn't a tortoise.

It wasn't a tortoise.

You've learned nothing.

Unless a tortoise is just an ill box turtle.

It might be.

Fabio emails.

Hello, Fabio.

Dear Beans, whilst listening to Henry describe his experience of the unregulated world of opticians, I was reminded of a story of one of our elderly neighbours in the small Yorkshire village I grew up in.

Upon deciding he was due an eye test, he went to a small local optician's on one of the nearby slightly larger villages.

There's too many sizes in this history.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The village is small.

And the optician is small.

But they just went to a slightly less small village.

Yeah.

And he's elderly, so he might be small himself.

Is that village...

Is the optician small, bearing in mind the size of the village, or is it just small as it's because everything in that village is small.

It's to scale.

Oh, so yeah, is this

entire anecdote to scale?

In which case, just flag that up at the beginning, Ben.

It could save us all a lot of bother.

That's that phrase, isn't it?

He's a small optician in a small town, isn't it?

That's a phrase to use if you're a small.

A one-optician town.

In a one-optician town.

Isn't that a Bruce Springsteen song?

We've got to get out of this one optician town, baby.

Get to a place where there's a range

of opticians.

Yeah.

Okay.

Upon deciding he was due an eye test, he went to a small local optician's in one of the nearby slightly larger villages.

Also, bearing in mind, it may have been appeared smaller than it was because he needed glasses.

But maybe it may have appeared further away than it was.

And the same might go for that village.

So, how close the village is and how big it is is basically unclear.

And is the optician operationally small or physically small?

We don't know.

Good point.

Also, recently, for example, I'm working on an animation project and I've been designing characters for it.

And we recently had a problem, which is one of the characters.

Is this a view from the animator's chair?

Pens, colour hold, pencils, the vanishing point, perspective, the horizon.

Not technically a profession in the traditional sense.

Eraser.

Crayon.

Charcoal.

A view from the illustrator's chair.

With Henry Packer.

And I thought to to myself, that beaver needs one thing.

It's either a moustache or a bow tie.

But it can't be both.

But I was wrong.

So we had a problem, which is one of the characters was too

small.

They're too tall.

This is a problem when you get me to design the characters.

One of the characters was so tall they couldn't actually.

Doesn't fit on my telly.

People are going to have to get a second telly and put it on top of their old telly.

Or use put their wide screens on a 90-degree angle.

Portrait telly.

It's going to be portrait telly.

So what we did was, we thought, you know, this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Just shrink the character down using computer technology.

So I was able to just grab the character and just go

and shrink it down, yeah, using my shrink system.

So I did that.

So I drag the character down, but then later on, what I realized was I'd shrunk all of the elements of this character at the same rate.

Yeah.

And what that meant was, their eyes were now too small.

So we had one character whose eyes were much smaller than all the other characters because I trunked the whole thing.

What's what I should have done?

What should have done was shrunk the character but kept the eyes the same size, roughly because human beings are born with the same eyes that you die with, aren't they?

That's why they seem bigger on a that's why kids seem cute because they've got adult-size eyes in a kid-size head.

Yeah,

so it's basically the question is: does the same thing hold for opticians?

If you shrink down, if you drink, if you shrink a town down, the opticians I think basically

should stay the same size,

Yes?

What I'm saying is, if you shrink a town size, a small town, the opticians are still the same size as in a big town, aren't they?

No.

You're saying it's like a sort of mini small town's like a sort of mini world, like Kidizamia for kids.

Everything's like a mini version.

Everything's the same, there's less of it.

Proportionately, the whole thing doesn't go down at the same rate.

The opticians say the same, the Rymans, the pubs all stay the same.

There's just less distance between them.

Oh, is that what a small village is?

Everything is just closer together.

Yes.

You can't conceive of an optician being bigger than another optician.

For example, having more

larger range of glasses to choose from.

Or more rooms to go and test people's eyes in.

Two things making this more complicated.

One is you.

Three things making this more complicated.

One is me.

Two is the fact that we're talking about how things look, and we're talking about opticians, which is confusing.

And three, the analogy I used was to do with cartoon designs and eyes, which is also making it even more confusing.

Yeah, which has very little application in real-world Yorkshire, it turns out.

Yeah, anyway, crack on okay.

Upon deciding he was due an eye test, he went to a small local optician in one of the nearby larger villages.

So, actually, it's an average optician because it

is actually, to be fair, to Henry, it is beginning to sound like the sort of thing where if you can follow this anecdote, you can immediately work for GCHQ as a code breaker.

Or it's one of those things to test if you're an AI because I think an AI would have no idea what was going on at this point and would initiate the doomsday module

whereby all the computers on earth club together and

release the wasps

release the ich nium and humans

ichn humans

yeah okay okay i'm gonna go to the next sentence now just please he was asked by the optician

in quotation marks interesting, if he'd prefer to shell out for their premium service or stick to the budget normal service.

I hate this kind of thing.

Being a true Yorkshireman, the gentleman in question settled for the regular cheaper option.

He was booked in for an appointment and usually for a time that evening in the hours of darkness.

Upon arriving for the eye test

in quotation marks, our neighbor was told to follow the optician in quotation marks outside and into the car park.

So the car park's not in quotation marks, just to be clear.

It was an actual car park.

Actual

car park.

It was a cloudless night, and the beautiful Yorkshire sky was in full display.

There's no such thing as a Yorkshire sky.

Sorry, no offence, but the sky belongs to the universe.

Well, it's British airspace, isn't it?

Yeah, so

they looked up into British airspace.

That's how you chose to choose poetic.

Can I say, Darren, your eyes tonight really remind me of British airspace?

Is that clear?

Your eyes make me want to ring the civil aviation authority.

It was a cloudless night and the beautiful Yorkshire sky was in full display.

The optician pointed to the sky and asked our neighbour what he could see.

I say, that's the most basic eye test there is.

The moon, he replied.

With a reassuring nod of his head, the invigilator told him, I,

about 200,000 miles away, that if you can see that, you can see anything on Earth.

What?

Reassured that his vision was as strong as ever, our neighbor paid the man £10, got back in his car, and drove up a cliff

and squinted his way through the drive home.

That's insane.

This is clearly bollocks, isn't it?

Fabio, what's going on?

I mean, that was one of the most disorientating anecdotes I've ever heard.

I don't think I know it.

I don't know anything anymore.

Yeah.

It probably won't have furthered your trust of opticians generally, will it?

It hasn't out there, but

it's now thrown into doubt things like who owns the sky?

What is Yorkshire?

How big is anything at the end of the day?

Oh, my God.

But surely that didn't happen.

That email reeks of bollocks, doesn't it?

It does, doesn't it?

That's crazy.

Also, is anyone called Fabio in Yorkshire?

Good point.

Maybe it was a Fabio Rication.

Oh,

lovely, lovely, lovely stuff.

Lovely.

We've got some emails about um

forest school camp, which is what the camp that Henry went on as a teenager.

Uh, this is from William.

Hello, William.

Hi, William.

Dear Beans, I also have a shit-related forest school camp anecdote.

Amazing good.

I went on a forest school camp weekend away with my mum.

The setup was a big field next to a buyer where we got our water.

What's a buyer?

Bayer.

Oh, what is that?

B-Y-R-E?

B-Y-R-E.

Is that like a little stream or is it like a

cow shed?

That's it.

Oh.

Is it possible?

It was lovely and sunny, bucolic even.

The camp kitchen was a communal hippie affair with everyone taking a turn to help in some way with a buffet-style meal that we would all line up for at meal times.

Some Bright Spark had the idea that they would place a washing-up bowl full of lukewarm water, a couple of dead flies and a bar of soap at the start of the buffet tables so that everyone had washed their hands before they tucked into the various various salad bowls, hummus, and couscous-based mains.

This could have been the source of the outbreak, or it could have been when the farmer came down on Saturday evening and said, You've not been using the water from that hose.

It's not drinking water, it comes from the leechiate pond.

What?

I've got so many

weird medieval worlds.

What's going on this week?

Does that mean the leech is in it?

No.

No, it's worse than that.

I've looked it up.

A leachate is any liquid that's, in the course of passing through matter, extracts soluble or suspended solids.

What?

It's going through a load of shit, basically.

That reminds me of, when I once went to a farm as a kid, to visit a farm as a kid, I just remember the smell of pig swell

and the smell of just the smell of the pig, the rank smell of the pig enclosure.

Yeah.

Where it was so rank, the liquid was on the sort of muddy, pooey kind of liquid area was so rank, smelled so bad that it actually smelled good again.

Rich, rich, nutrient-heavy.

Well, your brain didn't have the, couldn't, wasn't calibrated to work out how bad it was and just assumed it must just go all the way around the dial again.

It must go.

We must, we're going to have to start.

Yeah, it must be a full dial rotator.

It must be the opposite of what it seems to be.

So it went on to reflecto mode.

And they had to drag my head out of that trough by the end of the day.

Yeah.

Needless to say, by the next morning, about 85% of the people were very, very ill.

It was an absolute shit fest.

At one point, I recognized our local GP amongst the campers.

I pointed him out to my mum as if to say, maybe he could save us.

In a moment of mercy for the poor guy, she just said, Shh, don't tell anyone he's a doctor, he's on a holiday, there's nothing he can do.

That's so considerate.

That's fantastic.

I I like that.

I like that a lot.

The camping trip was over.

We needed immediate medevac.

There were people vomiting and the whole place stank of feces.

My mum's friend was so ill that she couldn't drive herself home.

So my mum drove us back in her friend's Freno 5 car while her friend lay groaning on the back seat.

At some point during the trip back into London from Kent, I shat myself.

You know what?

Almost didn't need this extra stuff about shit in the story.

Because, you know what I mean?

There's been a load of it anyway.

But Karen...

I barely felt it happen.

I didn't realize quite how bad it was until we got home and I got up to get out of the car.

My pants were full of poo.

It was running down my legs, and there was a big brown stain on the front passenger seat.

Actually, you know what?

I take that back.

This has been quite a nice coder to the story.

Mum and dad had a builder in who was doing some work on the bathroom, the only one in the house, and I had to explain to him that he had to stop work so that I could have a bath because I shamp myself.

You're sincerely will.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Will.

Thank you.

And hats off to your mum.

She sounds wonderful.

She does.

She does.

Before we move on, we've got a number of emails about me claiming that I could smash drug-free GCSE.

Most of them saying that I would have a terrible time trying to do it.

A lot of people suggesting that I do it.

But they want to to see you fail.

You understand that, Ben, right?

I think I will fail.

I'm not so pigheaded as you.

They want to see you fail catastrophically.

Yeah.

Are you up for that, Ben?

I'm really up for it.

A lot of people suggested maybe getting a past paper.

And then if we can, this is my shout out for a geography.

If we've got a geography teacher who listens,

who could maybe then mark the paper properly.

Oh, wow.

Can I say, I think this is a great idea.

And actually,

I think I potentially would be up for throwing my hat in the ring and do it.

Maybe we should compete against each other.

Oh, yes.

Are you up for a geography GCSE off?

Oh, God.

Look at Mike's poor face.

I mean,

yeah, it's probably going to be a bit annoying in the schedule, isn't it?

Scheduling and doing a geography GCSE for Mike is quite, quite, quite a sort of

busy parent.

It's a fairly busy schedule.

But

all we'd have to do is hire a badminton court.

You know,

it's an independent originator.

Yeah, a sadistic man man or woman in their 50s

to walk up and down.

So, yes, this is my official call out.

If we've got a grog-free teacher who would be happy to mark some papers that we do,

we'll take it on trust that you wouldn't be cheating, Benjamin.

Well, I could do it in front of you.

You're going to live stream you filling in a pass paper.

I could do that just to prove that I've been.

I've got a real slow TV, wouldn't it?

That's BBC4.

Love it.

Let's see what's what kind of response we get.

And I'm not going to rule out throwing my own hat in the ring, potentially.

I think you've already thrown it in, Henry.

The hat's in the ring.

Yeah, and Mike can invigilate.

Mike can invigilate.

And sort of just sort of pass judgment on the whole thing.

Oh, God.

Mike looks so tired by this idea.

I've never seen you look so tired, Mike.

I thought I was done with the exams.

It's time

to play the ferryman.

Patreon.

Patreon.

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forward slash freaking bean salad.

Thanks to everyone who signed up up on our Patreon.

Yes, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you.

Go to patreon.com forward slash three bean salad for bonus episodes and for ad-free episodes and video episodes.

There are two tiers to sign up at: the Pinto tier and the Sean Bean tier.

If you sign up at the Sean Bean tier, you get a shout out from Mike from the Sean Bean Lounge.

You sure do.

You spent the weekend there, didn't you?

I did indeed.

Thank you, yes.

Well, it was good, wasn't it, because it was the Gut Bacteria QA.

Wasn't it?

It was.

Thank you, Henry.

And here's my report.

It was the gut bacteria QA last night at the Sean Bean Lounge.

Zoe Fowler hosted the evening with the aid of a pneumatic arse sluicing pump, Sean Bean's patented man-to-microbe ear trumpet, and a dose of ruddy good luck.

An Entrococcus vicalis took to the stage first, and Mason Pratt, Nick Bailey Botanic, Chris Nevin, and Tiffany all wanted to know if the rumours were true of a love affair between it and Barack Obama.

This was denied, but a follow-up question about interspecies platonic love from Sean Pusey did prompt a wonderful anecdote about scuba diving with Tommy Lee Jones in the Red Sea.

Bridget Kennedy, Jen C., Stephanie Quesnel and Timpani saved their questions for an Isharisha coli that had spent most of the 90s in Buckingham Palace and which had some fascinating insights into feco-oral transmission within the royal family.

Chris Barnby asked a Lactobacillus for a selfie and was immediately ejected by its security detail which consisted of George Flatters, Dave Bastard Brayshaw, Bubba Reed and Martin Berg, all of whom were dressed as close-quarter protection yogurts.

Jay Willis, Jessica Moore and John Carnes Carnes began a debate with the Clostridium titani about the dominance of bacterial Napo babies in the transverse colon.

While animated, the debate only slid into intemperate and then fully heated when Peter Bubeck and Kate weighed in with claims that they would never have the chance to make it as far as even a descending colon residency because they weren't of the right stock.

Offers of free nutrient agar canopes from Maz Arif failed to calm the situation and may have made it worse, at which point Sean Downs was forced to step in and autoclave the lot of them.

The stirrups, Danny Kyno and Zoe from IT, all wanted relationship advice from a Proteus Mirabilis who claimed to have spent six months anus hopping between Test Ali and Vernon Kay, and which suggested trying to binary fission first thing in the morning rather than waiting until the end of the day when everyone's tired.

Bring back Ray Moss, Benjamin Pork Belly and Helen Hanniday then all attempted to binary fission on the spot, much to the horror of Haze G, who'd only just walked in on chod trying to extrude a genetic plasmid in the disabled loo as chewed by a thousand hounds looked on.

Things were getting out of hand, so thank goodness Evie Davey, Archie Bond, and Jeff Groves raised the tone by asking a klebsiella about the impact of antibacterial hand gel on transcendental cinema.

Leaning heavily on the dental element of the question, however, the klebsiella referred it on to a streptococcus mutans, who was taking five in the gob of Jay Birchell, who'd hit the buffet even though the somozas were clearly still covered in cling film.

Saskia Charity, Brent Russo, Hazel Reed, and Dean Owen wanted a Bifidobacterium Bifidum's hot take on screen time for adolescents, but it refused to be drawn.

The evening ended on a high, though, with a Peptostreptococcus that had been part of the team that replaced a faulty sequential shunt in the solar panels of the International Space Station during its time in the small bowel of Tim Peake, and who was able to persuade Louis Bellamy, Stephanie Glascardine, and Mark that the Earth is not flat, but in fact cylindrical, with a hole through the middle like a toilet roll.

Thanks all.

Okay, that's the show.

We'll finish off with the version of our theme tune sent in by one of you.

This is from Joe.

Thank you, Joe.

Joe Wrights.

Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, and now the beans.

I present to you with a jazz trio version of the three bean sound of theme.

Oh,

that's exciting.

Lovely.

This is from Joe.

Thank you, Joe.

Thanks, Joe.

Lovely.

And thank you for everyone for listening.

Bye.

Perfect, nice.