Answer Me This! - AMT251: Wikipedia, Morning Sickness and Arsenic in the Walls

Episode Date: April 4, 2013

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Can you believe that they still print loot? That's to be this, that's to be this How can you escape a fart in a space suit? That's to be this, that's to be this Helen and Ollie, that's to be this In last episode, listeners, I suggested to you that we might have a special guest in a couple of weeks And now...

That time has reduced to one week Only a week, yeah, that's how maths works, isn't it? So stay tuned to find out who a special guest in a couple of weeks. And now... That time has reduced to one week. Only a week, yeah. That's how maths works, isn't it? So stay tuned to find out who that special guest is. We'll tell you at the end of the episode. Oh, hook and tease, Helen. Hook and tease. Yeah.

Repay the diligent for people that know how to fast-forward podcasts. For those of you who were saying, where was Martin last week? He was here. If you listen back to the episode, you can hear him coughing occasionally. I think he sniffed a bit. You were feeling a bit down, weren't you, Martin, last week? I was a bit tired and I just thought, you know, I've carried these guys for 249 episodes. I'll take a step back and let them have the landmark for a change.

Usually when Martin's quiet, it's because he's got some very chewy sweets that he's occupied with. Last week, he was just taking it easy. But he is here. We haven't replaced him with a flower pot or something. A big, hairy flower pot. Well, we're kicking off with some good news uh it's from mark in surrey his wife is currently pregnant congratulations i suppose in the omen it wasn't such good news that she was pregnant that's right

rosemary's baby well he says this is on the whole a good thing it's just as well that you feel that way well yeah no need to get the coat hanger out oh she seems to be enjoying the experience again good yeah yeah do you mean you're enjoying it because her boobs have got a lot bigger however she is also suffering from morning sickness that she is literally not keen on fair enough uh so helen answer me this does morning sickness do something useful is it a side effect of some positive thing that's going on regarding the baby or is it just another way that god has made the production of children bizarrely one-sided and unpleasant it's mainly caused by hormones so progesterone prepares the womb for the inmate and in doing so it relaxes the muscles of your

digestive system which can make you feel more sick and then um coupled with that that you're also producing human chorionic gonadotrophin gonadotrophin okay which that's produced by the fertilized egg and that makes people feel sick it sounds like something from The Hobbit doesn't it? gonadotrophin and then mainly oestrogen levels rise

especially in your first 12 weeks which is why the first trimester is the worst for the puking and that makes you really sensitive to smells and that is so that you are protecting the fetus against things that are potentially toxic to it because a lot of foodstuffs are toxic to fetuses that aren't to adults and so it's just like a warning system telling you not to eat these things that could be dangerous for the baby and also for you because your immune system is compromised by uh the fact that you're incubating. So your womb's going, don't eat that stuff, don't you know that it's toxic? To what extent do you think

morning sickness and tales of morning sickness actually put women off getting pregnant? Is it something you'd think about in your hostility to opening up your womb to an incumbent? No, my problem isn't even the horror of childbirth. It is the 18 years of being

someone's moral and educational guardian afterwards. That to me is the truly terrifying thing. You've already uh 18 years of being someone's moral and educational guardian yeah afterwards that to me is the truly terrifying years of me i suppose that people when they're looking to get pregnant they maybe just ignore the unpleasant side and they think maybe it won't be so bad and then by the time they are pregnant if they wanted to be pregnant they think too late now not getting rid you'd think evolutionarily it would be more useful for childbirth to look straightforward and then everyone would do it certainly you'd think thatarily it would be more useful for childbirth to look straightforward and then everyone would do it. Certainly you'd think that there was an expedient to have a better escape route than the ones currently available. And the fact that people get depressed and of course the nine month gestation period might be part of this as well.

Maybe there is a small part evolutionarily of saying to women, it's not just a fun ride, this. There was this cliche, isn't there, that women in the distant past of humanity had to be very selective about men because of this process, because it's a long process. They only wanted people who had a Ferrari. If you make it a very unpleasant process as well, that further emphasises that you don't want to just have a load of children. What you should do is focus on one child, and that should be genetically the best one.

It doesn't really make that much sense. But also, whatever you say about evolutionary tactics, the urge, the sexual urge, I think it's fair to say, is stronger than everything else. You're not thinking at that point when you're on your back or you've got a massive erection, you're not thinking, oh yeah, but I'll get morning sickness. So at the end of the day, I guess that is the strongest. It doesn't really matter all the other stuff, does it? So actually it is probably just God being a dick again. It's like when you're eating Toblerone for breakfast and you're not thinking this won't set me up for the day and it will probably lead to my early death amazing how you just plucked that uh example from your

imagination i read about it on the internet here's a question from andy who says my wife and i live in tufnell park and we have a one-year-old son what a life we're thinking about moving to the cannons park slash stanmore area for the excellent schools and comfortable suburban family life as enjoyed by the young ollie man and man family however says andy my wife is a bit worried that it's too far out of central london and that there are hardly any cafes or restaurants or life out there compared to taffner park so ollie son of stanmore answer me this how did you like growing up in stanmore and what did you like and dislike about it i'm not saying you're making a mistake uh but i might infer that with what i'm about to say i'll start with what i disliked i disliked the fact that there is

no culture at all anywhere in stanmore unless you literally take culture to mean bagels otherwise that's enough for me there is there is i mean there's not a bookshop in stanmore apart from oxfam there is no theater or music venue or cinema within walking distance of stanmore whereas tuffnell park well well tuffnell park your as pubs there's music there's quite a lot actually there is a bit going on and actually on that on that big shout out to 2j's secondhand bookshop in edgware which basically saved teenage ollie man from a life of um well just adrian mole which is all you could buy in the oxfam bookshop it's good isn't it but you want to read it yeah yeah and jilly cooper you could buy all the jilly cooper books as well the ones that had the fronts with riding bottoms on that's all of them isn't it

except the one about an orchestra if jilly cooper and two towns had ever collaborated on a novel you can guarantee it would be filling the shelves of that oxfam it'd be very difficult though because jilly cooper would be like yeah sex and then adrian moe will be like failing at the sex um how far is edgeware from stanmore if you are looking for a cultural hub edgeware is a half hour walk okay slash five minute bus ride away well so that's the same as me living on the outskirts of tunbridge wells and it was a 25 minute walk into the town centre yeah but again let me be very clear on this point unless you take culture to mean nando's edgeware is also not much of a cultural hotspot but it does have the bookshop there used to be a record store as well didn't their loppy logs loppy logs gone now yeah it's uh some sort of kosher chocolatier i

think interesting i'm not making it up this is a different way um however that said uh on the bright side stanmore now inconceivably to the young ollie man has not only a sainsbury's uh when i lived there you couldn't buy a pint of milk but you could buy a three thousand pound dress uh but also a bowling alley wow which is actually like i say i mean that would have been revolutionary to me when i was a teenager i would have been there all the time and actually there's also this quite buzzy lebanese restaurant that has hooker pipes outside so there's loads and loads of teenagers out on the street which gives it a certain ambience which is different to what it used to be

a little bit more um bit more exciting than perhaps it was not everyone there looks like they're about to die of old age at any moment that's changed and you've got that nice butcher with the statue of a pig outside no that's closed oh it's all god uh morris gold the photographer now now a subway but then you can get on the jubilee line from stanmore and be in central london in what an hour well i was gonna say i think it's a bad sign when the best thing you can say about a place is that you can quickly get to other places from it however yeah uh the tube that is a really good thing you know that is the reason why people obviously historically families for generations have moved out there since they built it obviously being able to hop onto the jubilee line and get into town did enable young holly man to do his weird theater flyer collecting missions which

is useful uh if you want to live somewhere green and leafy and suburban but also actually not be completely trapped by it so you know there is that to it okay so uh there's just more stuff to debate therefore you haven't given him a clear answer of what he should do with his life well i don't think he was asking that to be fair he said what did i like and what did i dislike i think i've given him a fair appraisal of that i mean ultimately i'm not going to make that decision for you andy and it sounds like you are in any case going to do this i still feel very confused well the thing is i think looking back on it obviously i was a kid and i didn't appreciate the fact that my parents had moved there for my safety and happiness you wouldn't really would

you just don't children are selfish but looking back on and at the time i wanted to live in central london because it was cool but actually looking back on it i think there are elements of living in suburbia which are quite nice for example i could cycle unimpeded on footpaths even though you're not supposed to you monster the only people you'd run into were in their 80s and they were powerless to stop you and they're gonna die soon anyway

thought the young ollie man I think also growing up in suburbia makes you appreciate interesting places when you finally get to live in them I think there is an element of that as well

I've got a question email your question to answer me this podcast at googlemail.com to answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com To answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com To answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com To answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History?

On Monday, we bring you the real story of the mutiny on the bounty. On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day somebody invented the meatball, but who? On Wednesday, the iconic British car that ripped off an iconic American car. On Thursday, how American airlines invented air miles. And on Friday, the UFO sighting that gripped colonial America. We discuss this and more on Today in History with The Retrospectors. Ten minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Jess from Dorset who says,

Helen, answer me this. Where did the name Wikipedia come from? What was the idea behind it? It seems a hugely ambitious concept to try and catalog everything known to man i think that's fair jess i think it is quite an ambitious concept but it was a concept that others had been doing before like the poor old encyclopedia britannica that wikipedia is effectively punched out of existence yeah and actually i mean when you look at it sort of realistically you know now we know that

crowdsourcing can work actually wikipedia seems like quite a sober sensible idea compared to encyclopedia britannica which is get a handful of people to write a book about everything ever i mean actually that's harder isn't it that's more ambitious yeah well wikipedia was a spin-off project of um newpedia which was a free online encyclopedia project but where it was written by experts and it was a formalized process so that started in 2000 then the following year they started off the wikipedia because a lot quicker than getting experts to write everything and then what if you ran newpedia wouldn't you be absolutely livid that this little tiny trifling side project that you'd started then just effectively swamped all your own work well maybe but if you were even part of the development of something that revolutionary i mean i think it's safe to say we don't know for certain but i think it's safe to say that in 100 years

people will still know what wikipedia was even if it's not a going concern i don't think it's that safe to say because 100 years will all be underwater i think the remaining nuclear fish will know uh what wikipedia was well they'll be editors um the thing that i don't like about wikipedia is the editors actually it is the thing that because you't like about Wikipedia is the editors, actually. It is the thing that... Because you start contributing to a page and then someone sends you a message saying, oh, I noticed that you didn't use the correct source material when you referred to...

And it's like, I know you have to have rules, but actually to elect yourself as the person who imposes those rules is not something I could have ever imagined doing. So what kind of people do that? People that like accurate facts, which is not you. But people who should be volunteering their services for charity, I think. Yeah, but Wikipedia is a magnificent resource that is giving people for free

vast quantities of information that was unthinkable before. Yeah, yeah, no. So it is a charitable thing. I know, but come on. You know as well as I do that some of these people, the bureaucracy they're referring to

is so tedious that it's not important, really. Well, it is important, though, because otherwise the service wouldn't be worth having. Because if it was a bad service, then it would be a bad service. I suppose they're trying to engineer consistency well it is important though because otherwise the service wouldn't be worth having because if it was a bad service then it would be a bad service i suppose they're trying to engineer consistency you have to because otherwise if you've got something that's only 50 accurate it's like i've got a watch that is accurate to within about five minutes to an hour of the correct time so that is an ornament really isn't it it's not a useful watch so if

wikipedia was not accurate then it's not worth having no i know i agree with that i'm not really talking about the accuracy i'm talking about when they talk about how you lay out your footnotes, for example. I know that someone has to do it, like I said. I just wouldn't want to be the person who devoted my life to that. You're just not a complete and finished roller. You're like an ideas man.

There need to be people who look at the detail. Drones. So anyway, where did the wiki bit of the name come from? Wiki, wiki, wah, wah, wes. From that sort of Will Smith tribute. Actually, fair enough. Wiki was just a term that meant that the website was collaborative. It is a Hawaiian word that meant quick.

And the person who developed WikiWikiWeb, which was the first wiki, i.e. a collaborative website. Just bounce with me, just bounce with me. It's a man called Ward Cunningham. And he got the idea because when he was at honolulu airport uh he was told to take the wiki wiki shuttle that goes between the terminals and he said well i thought i'll use wiki instead of the word quick because calling my stuff quick web rather than wiki web just sounds a bit rubbish and boring and unimaginative yeah and it also suggests actually doesn't it that speed rather than quality is more important whereas somehow using a word that is

foreign doesn't do that it's just fun to say as well it is fun yeah it is wicked i remember when wikipedia first became big i thought yeah but that is a really stupid name whereas now it's just assimilated into my vocabulary as an acceptable number of syllables everyone everyone said when the ipad came out oh it sounds like a tampon no one says that anymore you just get used to it i never heard that every bloody set person i didn't say that. I didn't. Well, this is in from George, the submariner, who says, My wife, Samantha, and her mum are currently taking down a load of horsehair plaster from our living room in deepest, darkest Wales. You're probably safer on the submarine, George. They were told by a friend to make sure they wore face masks to protect themselves from the dust, which is obvious.

And also to protect themselves from the arsenic that would also be in the plaster, which is obvious. And also to protect themselves from the arsenic that would also be in the plaster, which is not so obvious. So, Helen, answer me this. Why would you put, and indeed, why do you, Helen, put arsenic in a plaster mix? Because I want people to die slowly and not know how. Did they used to do this as a bonding agent? Indirectly, because actually the critical part of this is the horsehair of the horsehair plaster.

In tanneries, they used arsenic to soften the hairs, to strip them from the leather, and then they shipped off the hair to be used in the plaster to sort of pad it out. So the hair was still laced with arsenic. Okay, so it was accidental, basically, or incidental. It wasn't part of the crucial part of the war, it was just how they used to get their horse hair off. That's right, and arsenic also was used as a wood preservative and in wallpaper face to discourage rodents. So I think people just thought,

ah, well, it's the 19th century, you'll probably die of cholera or tuberculosis before the arsenic gets you, let's just put it in there. And when you say that they put arsenic in the walls also to repel rodents, that's quite a strong repellent, isn't it? That's kill rodents, isn't it? Is the euphemism, really.

If your children happen to be licking the walls, then that is their fault. Apparently they're also, though, if the walls predate 1895, there could be anthrax spores in the plaster. In 1895, they introduced controls about putting anthrax in your walls. And there might be lead paint, too.

And yet I never saw an episode of Changing Rooms where Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen knocked down some plaster and got anthrax and died. It is only a matter of time though, isn't it, before there's an episode of Jonathan Creek using this as a mechanic? Well, Napoleon, they think, died because of arsenic poisoning from his wallpaper because it was used as a pigment for green wallpaper. And obviously he loved to eat wallpaper.

Luckily for you, George, your wife and her mother are unlikely to be killed or particularly injured by the presence of this arsenic. It's not nice and it's not good for you, but the smallest amount from one house, you're probably okay. If they were doing this every day as their job for years and years, yes, they might get cancer from it, but it might just make them feel quite sick.

But on the plus side, you could gather all the horse hair together and knit yourself a lovely wig you make a stick on beard yeah you know mustaches are all the rage at the moment aren't they i actually think that might help me get into the role of being a builder if i was doing some diy stuff do you know what i mean because it's so not really my character to be doing that kind of thing i always struggle having the uh the chat the conversation with the the plumber or the builder or any masculine type men basically um i had one the other week that came to measure my blinds and you said did you see the revival of chess it's just like it was like oh yeah you've got a non-movable bracket there mate uh what you want to do is you want to put it down you oh you got the center roller oh no you see it right center roller here see this bracket the two don't go together and he

started drawing me a thing on the bracket i just didn't know what to do with myself i really didn't there should be a linguaphone course that you could do so that you could talk handyman i think a tool belt really helps as well get you into role because it does feel like you've got a bigger penis oh god do you remember why because you've got a hammer dangling do you remember those shows that like a car heart used to do these jeans with that hammer loop on the back that's so late 90s isn't it oh god they're so twatty and that's funny isn't it Carhartt used to do these jeans with? Oh, yeah. Hammer Loop on the back. That was so late 90s, isn't it? Oh, God. They were so twatty. And that's funny, isn't it?

Because boy bands used to wear those jeans. And girl bands. All Saints used to wear them. And yet you'd never see All Saints putting up a wall, ever. What's your favourite question from our first three years that's really made you guffaw? Tim Curry or Tim Rice disposing of dead mice

safe from smethic on kosher law if you like fact or bawdy talk or just a soundtrack for your walk we've got stuff to entertain you cos for 79 pence each you can buy our first three years episodes or just the good ones, who could blame you? go to answermethispodcast.com

slash classic or iTunes and if you don't you'll get a visit in the night from our band of hired goons. Hired goons, whack, whack, whack to what they say, if you value your knees. Right, we've got to that point of the show where we like to remind you of our phone number, so get your pens at the ready,

because that's, of course, how you note these things down in the digital world. And get ready to write down the phone number to send us a question, which is... 0208 123 58 007 And hopefully you left enough room on that piece of paper with your crayons to write, answer me this, which is our Skype ID, if you prefer to telecommunicate that way. Let's see who has been in touch.

Hello, it's Steve from London. I'm an actor and I'm on my way to an audition for an advert for Pimms. Other disgusting liquors are available. Helen and Ollie and Martin the sound man, answer me this. Why is it called an audition?

Has it got something to do with auditorium or audit? I'm going to audit your talent. They're all from the same root, which is the Latin word audere, which means to hear. So audio is from the same. Ah, yeah, OK. And audition was just the act of being heard.

Yeah, because, of course, I mean, until very recently, with the advent of method acting and so on, I imagine acting really was just about projecting and being heard, in a way. It's like when you're at junior school and the best singer is just the loudest one well it is kind of you know until until the advent of recorded sound and microphones the the ability to project and be heard was kind of the most important thing about going on stage in that sort of olivier style of acting oh god was just about sort of telling everyone that you're the king i'm not fond of declamatory uh acting style just as martin is not fond of vibrato which was

for the same reason so that opera singers could project right to the back of the building yeah well yeah but sometimes you see someone it's just a beautiful noise like patrick stewart he's probably the modern version of that style of acting and i'm sort of not that convinced by him when i've seen him on stage but it is just beautiful to hear his voice because you want to have a bath in it so it doesn't matter that you don't think he's actually going to go and kill the king you think well does manny made it sound delightful i do think he was miscast as the beyonce role in dream girls so it used to be in the in a sort of legal trial sense the evidence was being heard and then as a trial for a performer it first

appeared in 1881 it's interesting i think unless you're an actor or know people who are in the acting profession and who do stage auditions, most people listening to this will probably think of an audition as being a screen test. You say audition and it's as much about someone looking at what you look like through a camera, like our correspondent here,

who's going to an advert for Pimms. When you audition for Pimms, they don't ask you to do your King Lear, do they? They look and see what your nose looks like when you're taking a sip of Pimms. Yeah. Do you look right on a cricket pitch in June? And is that demeaning as an actor, as a professionally trained actor, do you think? Do you wince at the taste of Pimms? Because I do. I auditioned for a couple of musicals when I was at university.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. You were in a couple of musicals. Yeah, yeah. Both of which I got. You were in West Side Story. You were the only non-singing and dancing part in a chorus line exactly now you were michael douglas no i was the only non-singing non-dancing part in a chorus line and before that i was also at university the only non-singing non-dancing part in west side story i was doc what does this say about you um no no but i auditioned for that yeah and they'd specified you know there are parts for dancers part for singers and parts for people who can't sing or dance but can act

so I was like okay I'll go for that and then when I got there they asked me to prepare a song and I was like but I'm here for the non-singing role and they were like yeah but we just want to test run it and I thought okay

is this like when they play drama games like are they seeing that I'm willing to take direction and what did you do because at the time you were quite keen on the song All Rise by Blue which is very much in keeping with the west side story yeah yeah you hear that you just think if

sometime was around today no what i did actually you're not that far off in fact what i thought i'd do is i thought well look i can't really hold a tune but i am i do have a baritone voice you have a lovely bar and i. And I can project. You really can. So I'll do a song that looks like I'm having fun, and I know that I'm just having fun. I'll have to do a character song. So I thought, what can I do?

And actually, I did the Bear Necessities from the Jungle Book. So I went for that. I thought it was quite successful. Well, it must have been, because you got it. Well, yeah, but I still don't know why they punished me by making me do it when I was going for a non-singing part. But I think, possibly, they just wanted options. They thought, could I carry a tune? Could I be in the chorus me do it when I was going for a non-singing part. But I think possibly they just wanted options, you know. They thought, could I carry a tune?

Could I be in the chorus? But obviously I couldn't be in the chorus. I'm a fat Jew. There's no part for that in West Side Story apart from Doc. Who am I going to be? A Latino backing dancer. Ridiculous. And no one wanted to see you in a leotard in a chorus line.

No. Well, here is another question of acting from Toby from London, who says, in films like Lord of the rings where there are battles with actors riding horses okay so it's a specific example from lord of the rings he's not just using lord of the rings as an illustrative example of what a film is he says in films like lord of the right yes okay where there are where there are battles with actors riding horses okay and the horse is dramatically hit with an arrow or a cannonball or whatever and falls over yeah how do they get the horses to do this well i

think that the key thing is they don't just suddenly introduce a tame untrained horse onto a film set and throw a cannonball at it but they get professionals what you're looking at is is the culmination of perhaps months of training stunt horses right stunt horses uh but still you can't necessarily mentally prepare a horse for the fact that they're acting which you could with a human being no you can't mentally what you can do is you can pair them up with other horses like you know to the untrained eye most horses look the same so so long as they're all the same breed and they're the same size they take shifts basically so you know obviously the actors are there all day filming the same shot but the horse isn't the horse just does one shot and then they put it out to pasture and like relax it and rest it shot with a bolt gun. The horse isn't all day around people firing guns and stuff around it.

And the horse has been trained, just like when they train seals or dogs or anything, to accept a reward for every single part of the fall. So like I say, the moment that the horse gets hit by the cannonball and falls to the ground, that is in fact five or six or seven different tricks that they've been taught in succession. And what if the horse has a diva fit? I'm not doing this again. Well, that must happen all the time doctors and horses alike but it's the thing is a lot of it is camera trickery as well well especially in lord of the rings that is not all real i mean i don't want a spoiler in in the final one there's that battle and there are these sort of giant hairy elephant things with tusks and orlando bloom slides down one of their heads now i have led a sheltered life but i've never seen

one of these beasts i think that was cgi never seen a big talking tree i think maybe some of the other things in that battle scene were also cgi so you could make a horse fall over with cgi but you know there's lots of things you can do with the camera to do with perspective braveheart apparently there are a lot of complaints to the American Humane Association saying how can it possibly be that animals weren't harmed during the making of this film? The way its film suggests that, there's a horse being engulfed in fire. I mean, that's a very simple thing. You let a fire off in front of the lens.

The horse is like, you know, 20 yards away. There's also things you can do with, you know, retractable knives, hollow boulders, that kind of thing. You know, you're not actually throwing military-grade at the horse are you like they're props i suppose the point is though that horses falling over is often very damaging to the horse and how do you do that to your equine actors but it's training isn't it i mean the horse is trained in falling over that's all the horse does professionally so whereas other horses can do dressage and jumping this horse does falling over that's its trick it's like everything else is done with foley and sound isn't it so it sounds like the horse is in pain because it goes but actually it's fine it's

absolutely fine he's going yes nailed it it's going it's going hooray i'm gonna get a biscuit now and then i get to go over there and have a dog why does god need both a staff and a rod in the 23rd Psalm? And the founder being Romulus, ain't it odd? We don't call the city wrong. My knowledge is too slight, so I think I shall write. To answer me this podcast at googlemail.com Here's a question from Dan from London.

He says, Ollie, answer me this. If you're in a relationship I am! and have phone sex with someone else... I don't do that. ...does that count less as cheating than if you had actual physical sex? Ooh.

A.K.A. the Jason Manford defence. Ooh. Okay. Like, obviously my instinctive reaction is that I'm aware that people are listening will want me to be saying with all of their hearts, yes, of course, it's all cheating, all cheating it's all cheating yeah your girlfriend doesn't listen to this show though so you don't have to put up that front it is all cheating it obviously is all cheating but i think you have to be realistic and say that there's still a scale

yes there's still a scale at which at one end you'd have complete fidelity and at the other end would be a threesome with her two sisters so where on that scale your girlfriend happens to have two sisters she does but i was talking generically she just happened to have two sisters all right two brothers then okay yeah you could easily have a threesome with her two brothers uh where on that scale does phone sex fit and i think therefore it's very much who's it with how is it happening does the partner know about it you know there are lots of things to ask are you paying for it and i think that changes where it is on the scale and i guess dan from london you know this which is why you've asked this question very provocatively it's very difficult to say isn't it i suppose the thing is in your partner's mind it may seem less acute form of

cheating than actually sticking your body into someone else's body however the mental process is one of betrayal and that will hurt a lot if not as much it will still hurt a lot but i think it does depend who with and i know that sounds ridiculous but if my girlfriend had an affair with someone from work i'd be hurt by that more than if she slept with someone that she met in a bar i think or actually you know this happens less frequently with women but if she paid for sex with the man right I'd still be hurt but I'd be less hurt so if it was a fair with someone that I think she was growing to love right now if she was having phone sex with that man from the office that to me I think would be the same as if she was actually having sex with him but if she was

having phone sex with someone she was paying to give her phone sex i'd either consider that a reflection on my poor performance or i'd think well okay it's just the same as her watching porn i can't take it too seriously it's just escapism so it's who she's talking to and why she's getting off on it i suppose if the tenets of your relationship are absolute fidelity then anything which you could not decently do in a room that had say your granny in it and is considered out of bounds what i mean is things that you know are too private and too intimate with someone who's not your partner if your relationship is uh not an open relationship then i think you know that you are transgressing and therefore you have to ask yourself why you're doing that but if you are transgressing i would do it in a better way than phone sex because what is the point honestly well

even just flirting is better than phone sex isn't it you get away with flirting do you know what i mean like you can get away with flirting in front of your partner actually sometimes makes them feel a little bit more uh like that you know you're worth competing for can't imagine martin flirting the thought is so hilarious i've never seen it happen yeah i try and flirt with our dentist but it's really hard when she's uh got a drill in your mouth in my jaw open so is that fair do you think it's fair to say there is a distinction that it's it's it is cheating but it's not as serious as having sex so that we are actually kind of saying we're not saying it's all right no but we are saying there is a distinction and there is a scale yes i think

actual physical congress with somebody else is several steps further than phone sex but i wouldn't advise phone sex if you're supposed to be in a monogamous relationship it's not a scale you want to step onto at all no it will just tell you that you've put on a stone since christmas well listeners next week you are in for a special treat because we have a special guest unless she forgets to come that's right and it is i'm trying to do a drum roll with one hand and it just sounds ridiculous the sound of one hand tapping on a desk she deserves more than that it's like a buddhist cone yeah can i just say it because i

feel like we're building too much climax into this no it's good it's a good one it's izzy sooty izzy sooty yeah that girl that you fancy who plays dobby and peep show yeah or possibly you might know as a stand-up comic she's in Shameless, maybe you like Shameless I've never seen it. I've never seen it either And it's now about to end which means I probably never will Maybe I'll catch up with it on Netflix and pretend that I was a massive fan all along. If next week you hear me say Oh my god I'm so sad, Shameless is

finishing. Yeah that was really good stuff Anyway, if you've got a question for Izzy City and it's not just Will you marry me? She's got a boyfriend then do send it through to us using the usual channels which you can find

on our website answer me this podcast dot com and also you can find links on there for our twitter account and our facebook page and our classic episodes

and our albums all of that and our apps as well bye