No Such Thing As A Fish - 110: No Such Thing As A Dull Post Box

Episode Date: April 22, 2016

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Sara Pascoe discuss underwater postboxes, easily distracted hijackers and the Disney film all about menstruation.

Hi guys, we've got a seriously special guest on the podcast today. It is Sarah Pasco and you're about to hear that she is brilliant and funny and fascinating and has a book out which is also all of those three things. It's called Animal or if you want the full unedited title it's called Animal colon the autobiography of a female body and it's out right now. Go and get it! Okay on with the show! Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andy Murray,

Anna Chasinski, James Harkin and Sarah Pasco and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you Sarah Pasco. Okay in the 1920s scientists concluded that menstruating women wilted flowers. So a proper scientist and so his name and I it's a he but his name's Bella Schick I think I've only seen it written down and he's a proper scientist he cured diphtheria and I think apparently he was the first person to use the word immunization so he's a proper guy but then one day his maid was passing him some flowers so she was like I don't want to pass you the flowers and then he's like do the flowers and then the next day they were all wilted these

red roses and she was like oh I knew that was going to happen I'm on my period and he was like what and she's like yeah women are poisonous when they're on their period it's like I can't look at bread or dogs or children or touch flowers or go swimming and he was like oh my god I'm a scientist I didn't even know about this so he then did all these experiments with women holding flowers and baking bread and he gave it the term menotoxin which were emitted by women in their tear glands and their sweat glands. So his study showed reading between the lines and hang on I'm no conspiracy theorist but reading between the lines it sounded like the women held the flowers for quite a long time outside of water and then they wilted whereas flowers in water the control group

they were fine. There was an experiment with bread as well and one maid who was on her period I mean it must have been such a lovely house to work in so she made everyone make bread and her hers didn't rise as much. She was holding it in a hand and the other people put it in the oven. The hers didn't rise as much for that exact reason and then he was like it's true we were in bread and so it was kind of supporting all of the really really old taboos and taboo means menstruation that's where the word comes from. No is it? Yes I mean sacred or it's a word for menstruating yeah amazing right? Because it is it's one of those things where throughout history the idea of menstruating women around certain things did affect things plenty the elder wrote about it. He wrote so many

crazy things like dogs would go mad or the caterpillars would fall out of the leaves of trees and my favourite is that even ants wouldn't pick up the grains if a menstruating woman had touched the crumbs. Ants would be like no thank you disgusting. I would be passing that by oh yeah and they'd cause thunderstorms to that kind of stuff. My favourite one is that they would dim mirrors. Oh wow mirrors so dark. There's one positive belief that I found at least traditionally. One? Yeah well it can make children. So this is a German occult writer called Henry Cornelius Agrippa and he said that menstruating women could protect crops from blight. He said of menstrual women shall walk naked about the standing corn. They make all cankers, worms,

beetles, flies and all hurtful things fall off from the corn but if they don't do it before sunrise then the corn whithers. That sounds like the weirdest shut-up line in the world. Would you mind coming round and taking all your clothes off? You've got to be gone by morning. But the other one that's really interesting is the synchronicity thing. So lots of people have this real common belief that women's synchronised periods has never been scientifically proven. Like one woman did a study, actually I've got her name written down, it's like McClintock studies and she did a huge study on seven women which is always heartening and she found that at the beginning of the summer they had periods that were entirely separate and by the end of the summer

they were much nearer and this is kind of mutated into people believing that pheromones mean that when women are living in the same house in close quarters they suddenly sync up. It's never been replicated. They can't find any scientific reason why we would. It's confirmation bias. So with a friend you notice the person who's like oh suddenly we're on at the same time or we have an overlap which is nothing to do with when you ovulate which would be the significant part of the reason to sync up with somebody and you ignore all the people you're around all the time and you never sync up with them at all. Also maybe they're lying because I reckon I used to claim on my housemates that I had my period at the same time so it was not to be left out but maybe everyone

else is doing that. Yeah I was like we're all synced up and you don't want to be the loser who's not quite in tune with your mates. I'm hiding your period. I think I never tell him never being moody in case they're like Anna. You're coming on again. I thought we were together on this one. There was McClintock it's sort of she defended her work because there have been lots of follow-up studies which as you sort of never found it and they've done studies for a full year and said there could be in the original study bits which synced up a little bit but that was just through coincidence really. It's much more to do with the moon than it is to do with other women so the one thing that's quite interesting is that 30% of women have their periods during the full moon

and the next nearest group of women being the same is 12.5% so that's quite a huge verifiable difference and when women live in cities electricity they have their period changes the how long their menstrual cycle has changed. I know I know it's like magic it's to do with melatonin in the brain so women when that starts to get affected even by when you start sleeping less or being an electric lighting all the time your cycle changes. Because people do sleep less when there's a full moon don't they and they think that's because of the light. So do people right up near the north pole in Iceland and stuff have mental periods do you think when they have sort of 24 hour day and then 24 hour night. I would love to know. Yeah well if anyone's listening

out there. Contact us with all of the details of your menstrual cycle. At Shriverland. So they have they do have positive connotations in some places there are various societies where women on their periods are thought to have magical powers so I think in some Native American tribes they would retreat to a moon hut for the duration of their periods and that meant that they didn't have to do any work and that they could just like have spiritual awakenings and stuff like that. Yeah. But then again I think you can read that from the other way because you can go like choose to go to a hut where I think you're like sent away to a hut like no don't worry put your feet up we'll handle this. Yeah it completely see for me I think what an absolute treat I'd love to do nothing for

five days in a hut but for most women I guess that seems like you're being. You like camping as well love a bit of camping yeah especially because in these huts people bring you your food and stuff there's nothing I love more than camping where someone else is doing the food. It's like glamping basically. Exactly. Menstrual glamping. Struggling with menstrual glamps. And so in terms of other experiments there was a married couple called George and Olive Smith and they injected rats and mice with women's menstrual blood and they all died and they were like see toxic poisonous if you inject vaginal blood into a mask totally dies and then what did they expect it to do? Well they just wanted to see and some of the and then what they did

is they then some other people did some follow-up studies where they also gave them mice antibiotics because they thought they might be the bacteria from used blood that they were put injecting into the animals that was killing them and then all of those animals survived but they do describe like oh but the mice were really affected they kept cowering in the corner of the cages like I wonder why. So there's a really fun thing that people can watch on the internet if they want to. It's a 1946 Walt Disney film called The Story of Menstruation and it is better than Fantasia. Yeah it's the first film they think that mentions the word vagina. The science of it is fantastic in terms of the the glands and the hormones behind so it's

not a lot of stuff that's educational for children or young women. It's about the physical stuff the stuff that you can see and it's much more about the relationship of hormones in your body and what it's caused by and what's happening. It's quite beautiful. It's 10 minutes long. Wow. And it was banned I think. Because Mickey in it or? Yeah yeah it's Mickey's spasperia. Very confusing. He gets injected halfway through I think by Minnie's vaginal blood yeah and he dies. That's very sad. Cowering. Okay it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that one proposed solution to plane hijackings in the 1970s was to build a pretend Havana airport in South Florida.

So the thing is that in the late 60s and early 70s hijacking was a huge huge problem and this was very much in the sort of you know before 9-11 days when the main thing that happened was someone would say take this plane to a different place. The big thing was take me to Cuba because obviously Cuba very nearby, communist state and lots of people just would hijack planes and fly didn't fly them to Cuba and between 1968 and 1972 they sometimes happened once a week in the USA alone. In 1969 82 planes were hijacked. It was just a huge huge thing and they didn't have any security at airports and people kept hijacking. So people started contacting the American FAA with suggestions and one of them was setting up this fake Havana airport in South Florida

so everyone just you know so the pilot says okay gonna fly you to Cuba. They fly around the sea for a bit and then fly back. I think that's how they do it. Just subtly change direction. They land then the CIA busts the hijacker. Yeah they had a special anti-hijack task force didn't they which people could send in their ideas. Yeah that's right yeah. But people started taking the piss as well. One person said make everyone wear boxing gloves so they can't hold a gun. But then they would just punch their way through. There was one where someone said play the Cuban national anthem before takeoff and arrest anyone who knows the lyrics. People are just so patriotic they can't help but stand up and chant along. So first of all the hijacking was going the other way wasn't

it? It was people trying to escape Cuba because you weren't allowed to travel to places. But my favorite one is the story about Alan Funt. So it's 1969 he was the presenter of Candid Camera so he was very very famous across the world and then he was on an aeroplane which had hijacking to go to Havana and he'd been recognized by a couple of people. So a man stood up and went no no this is a trick and Alan Funt the presenter knows it is not a trick. Everyone everyone calm down let's just listen to the guys and everyone was like you're not gonna get us. This is so like you. So there's different cases. His daughter's talked about it openly. She remembers people like dancing once they realized it was a trick and Ayrhastess is popping champagne and going

we're gonna be on TV and it looks like he's trying to like save the program like let's just take this seriously. Yeah right. There was that other guy who so at first people I think wanted to hijack planes and go to Cuba and then people started to catch on that you could also ask for shed loads of money while you were doing that and there was that guy Arthur Barkley who was debating his tax bill and I think he started debating it in like 1962 and this went on for eight years and he kept going to him from Washington and it was quite a small tax bill it was like 472 dollars he owed and he said he didn't owe it's the principal I can imagine James actually doing this so eventually he just hijacked this plane and he smuggled a gun on and he demanded that they do an emergency

landing and when they landed they had to have a hundred million dollars waiting for him so the hundred million dollars. How many tax bills is he expecting? If you get that kind of money is that tax free? How does it work? Is it like a gift? I think there are places in the world where people have declared their guns as expenses when they've done bank robberies and things like this. It was a famous case of a businessman I think claiming a ransom against tax I'm pretty sure. I've never seen that on my tax return. Can I gift aid the ransom please? It's worth a bit more actually and then you get something more back. This guy I just really love the idea of he said I need a hundred million dollars cash

waiting for me when we do this emergency landing so they landed the plane and the plane had radioed down to the ground to the airport staff at the airport saying you need to get as much cash as you can just go into all the banks in the area and so I first of all like the idea of all these airport staff running into all the banks and saying how much cash have you got give it all to us now please and they managed to get a hundred grand so a hundred thousand which they brought to the airport waiting for him and they brought it onto the plane when it landed and he opened up the sacks and was like this isn't a hundred million it's bloody do you think I'm an idiot and he took the plane off again and so he was like that's not nearly enough I asked for a hundred million so

then they got the government to really properly get enough bags so that at least looked realistic so they sent a bunch of CIA agents to stand down the runway and they stuffed sacks with newspaper. What I would have done I would have filled the bags with CIA agents as soon as he opened one they burst out. They might have covered CIA agents with money and they really tried to spend them you got it. Whitejackers weren't all bad like I think sometimes they were just like disturbed teenagers weren't they and there was that guy who hijacked a plane and wanted it to be taken to Cuba and then he got distracted by another man on the plane stood up and said hey do you want to see my coin collection mate

and he sort of dropped the gun was like oh yeah I collect coins actually and so that seems like someone who's not terrifying. The first hijacker in Norwegian history he hijacked a plane in 1985 because he was fed up with society but then he surrendered his pistol to authorities one hour later in exchange for more beer. So he'd already had some beer. After they started adding signs at airports about security so in the early 1970s when they started sort of screening passengers to see who looked like they might be carrying weapons all janitors at airports in America reported that they'd find just guns and knives and stuff strewn in the flower beds outside the airport because when it first came in people will come

to airports planning to hijack a plane and then see a sign that said by the way we've got screening going on to see if you're going to hijack planes they'd be like sod this. Wow. All right so it's not like you know if you go into a pub but you've got a kind of flag or something in your hand you're like oh I'm just going to have to leave this out here because I can't take it in. It's not like they were just carrying guns around and thought oh no it's not. I think it was in theory it was people who were intending to hijack planes. Do you often get to the pub with a can of lager already in your hands? Just tapping up on the way. Oh sure yeah that's called preloading isn't it? Yeah I've heard of that. Do you know that near London in Graves End there is a whole town

where they do practice a fake town where they do practice police things so like for hijackings or bombings or fires or riots. Wow. And there's pictures of that online there's a whole flicker account it's really odd but all the public transport and nightclubs and there's a pizza land and everything. That must be the most terrifying place to accidentally wander into. Yeah. Oh my god this is a crime hub. I think I saw photos of that the other day. There was photos of a train crash what would happen if a tube crash and they had people dressed up in makeup and they had emergency services come in. Yeah the spooky thing in the 50s in Nevada they did a whole city to test atomic bombs on and they put people they dress people up in mannequins they got all

these JC Penney mannequins it looks like family's having a nice time and then there's photographs in real time of what happened to their houses as I think it was like something like 43 kilotons was the most they let off when you think Hiroshima was 12 kilotons and people watch from six miles away and there's all these photographs are seeing just literally fire going through a house. Wow. You can still visit it. That's Richard Feynman I think watch those and he's the only person of all the people watching it not to wear the special glasses that were given to everyone. Why did he know that they could do nothing? Because he was in a car and he knew that the radiation wouldn't get through the glass is that right? Yeah so he had advanced knowledge.

You've really got to trust your science haven't you? Yeah that's really cool like that like I know exactly how this is going to work. Okay it's time for fact number three and that is Chazinski. My fact is that this year an organization will finish a 40 year long study of Britain's post boxes at which point it will immediately start again. What are they studying? They're studying everything about all the post boxes in Britain and they've been going since 1976 when they started they're called the letterbox study group and they decided they had to document every single post box like what what the Royal Insignia was on it what what kind of post box it was is it in a wall built into a wall is it on a lamp post is there's a lot of important things

to be told about. Well important is a very strong word. I was really sneering of this idea like oh my god and then I found out a bit more and now I'm going to join because I think it's so amazing what they're doing. Me too. Do you want to join them? I think it's only boys in it so far. Actually you're right I didn't read a single interview with the women. No they were all like I watched some videos of them online this guy Paul who I'm now in love with and he was like oh my wife's so understanding. He's like well she should be getting out then this is interesting. I didn't know that the monarch who was reigning when the post box was made has their initials on it apart from in Scotland where so in Scotland they had to take off they were protesting Scotland when they first

introduced the E-1-1-R because obviously she's the first Queen Elizabeth not the second of Scotland and so they don't have it on them anymore. They just have a little they have a little symbol it's a post box crown or something it's something wrong but not saying she's the second yeah. I really like and maybe this was a massive story but I missed it that there are now 100 golden post boxes. That's so cool. Did you not see one like in Edinburgh when the Olympics was on they did they spray painted one? When are they going to paint them back I wonder? I don't think they will yeah I think they ought to eventually. Do you? I feel very strong I feel very strongly about that. We should treat them. Because it's introducing a rogue element of individuality into the post box

design and I feel very strongly but they should all be red. Well there was a period when they were all getting painted red because they were green in Victorian times. And was that because people had won things or? I think it was just to make them stand out more because it's a green in rural environments. You might think it's a tree. Yeah exactly. For years no one could post anything. Well people were posting letters but just into trees and bushes and things and it made the collection. It was just hobble for the tree because it's made from paper. It's like a corpse of a relative. It's so mean. There was in 2012 in Birmingham New Street Station they found a post box that had been covered up for like 50 years or something and they kind of opened it and there

was a load of letters in there that had just been sat there for years and years and years. Oh yeah. And did they read them all? They gave them to the Royal Mail and the Royal Mail took them to the people who they should have gone to. Oh that's nice. Oh my gosh. Do we still have a dead letter office in this country? What's that mean? Oh I don't know. It's where posts that they don't know how to deliver it. The instructions on the outside, the address is too vague and it goes and these guys are amazing. They crack the codes on the outside and they try to get it over there. And they will get it to Father Christmas or Princess Diana as I found out as a child. Really? Yeah. What were you writing to them? Oh like the pretty lady in the big house. Oh what

was I writing? Good wishes. Just a big fan. He's to write loads of letters to the Royal Family. And to Santa? Not asking for presents. No no just wishing him well. Also I thought he needed stuff to do in the downtime. Everyone writes in December like when they want something. I'm just going to write in May so I don't see what he's up to. You're just trying to get on that nice list No. Charles Dickens had his own post box in his house. You've got a letter box. It was built into the wall on the outside of his house. So it was in the area where he lived

it was just Gads Hill I think. So he lobbied the post office said install it in my house please because everyone from around the village would come to his house to post their letters and the post he would arrive open the thing in his house and pick up all the letters from there. It was a private one it's a communal one for everyone. Also back then when he was alive they would have been up to 18 collections a day. Whoa. That's amazing. People were sending so many letters. Yeah that's insane so you could correspond with someone a few times in a day. A few times in a single day. Your letter would just get to them. I mean my email does hundreds of thousands of collections a day so it's not actually extraordinary. I found out about one now so that in Japan there's an underwater

post box for scuba divers who then send letters to other scuba divers and they're waterproof letters that you put underneath and that's collected twice a day. That's really cool. Do you have to have your own underwater letter box? I don't know how you'd have it as your address. I guess you just have to say like that starfish near the rock and then it would get to where you're going to collect it from. That's amazing. There are very remote yeah so the Everest Base Camp has a post box. Where else? There's the Antarctic one. I'm not sure if we've spoken about that before really remote. They did an application for it and they published it in the newspaper so we could see the application and they explained that the job would involve carrying big heavy

box over slippery rocks and slushy snow and you'd have to survive on no heating or running water. Are you happy not to shower for up to a month, live in close proximity to three people and 2,000 smelly penguins for five months? Yes sounds better than the Edinburgh Festival. I was thinking of some weird societies or apparently boring societies. Do you guys know how popular according to its website the Biscuit Appreciation Society is? How popular? It's very popular according to its website. It's a very reliable website I believe everything they say. So there's a message on their website saying that I'm really sorry we can't take any extra members as we have a backlog of memberships and there's a 17-year waiting list to get into the

Biscuit Appreciation Society. It claims our membership currently stands at about three million appreciators. We never expected more than a couple. Does it mean every time someone has a biscuit they go add them to the list they obviously appreciate biscuits. This sounds like the Raelians. There's a movement of UFO alien believing people on earth and the Raelians do that don't they? Well what the Raelians do is you can become a priest but by kind of just going there and they make you a priest but they'll also make you a priest without you even knowing it. So they kind of make celebrities priests just without even telling them and they say look at all these famous people who are priests and they're the famous people I like. Well I didn't even know

that was happening. Hey I'm inspired to set up a fan club for myself. I just would like Robbie Williams big fan of mine. It says 6.7 billion members. No waiting list. Everyone is always automatically entered. Oh it'd be so disheartening though for the letters you get from Robbie Williams saying please remove me from your fan club list. It doesn't work like that my friend. Now you're a double member. The minute you try to leave you love me more. In the olden days London they used to be really odd kind of gentlemen's clubs where they had very specific things they had to do. So there was a murderers club where you were only allowed in if you'd ever killed a man and there was the everlasting silence club where always someone had to be there but you were not allowed to ever speak

and it was for men who had to escape their noisy wives and there was a farters club all these kind of really odd things. Was the murderers club just a front set up by the police? They just sort of all the club all the club staff were hanging around saying so who'd you kill? I imagine that the murderers club would be people who used to be members of the silence club after the farters club walked in there. In Japan there are drain spotters which I also want to be a member of the drain spotters club which are people who spot drain covers because manhole covers in Japan are often really really beautiful and they've got yeah these amazing designs. Do you think they came up with a name first because it's like a pun on train spotters? If you haven't read the

Irvine Welsh book, Trains Bossing, it's incredibly boring. Can I talk about one more? Yeah we should move on. This is from the Dull Men's Club who are a fantastic organisation. This is and I'm quoting exactly, yeah. Bottlebanker Steve, I don't know if that's rhyming slang, it's not. Bottlebanker Steve Wheeler 66 from Malvern has spent 30 years collecting more than 20,000 milk bottles. He found his first bottle in the mid 1980s and now Steve who admits he doesn't even like milk houses them in an 80 foot museum in his garden. So when he collects them do they have milk in them? Don't know. Right. I mean if they do I'm sure he gets rid of it pretty quickly. That's why he hates milk so much. Milk is disgusting. Let me see what happens to it. How do people drink it every

day is horrible. Okay let's move on to our final fact and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that in the middle ages people slept with cow dung at the foot of the bed to keep bugs away. Did it work? I think it did to a certain extent. Really? Yeah. Because bugs would be attracted to the dung. Right. Would it try them maybe just to the end of the bed? Also it wasn't fresh dung. No. Was it? So it was dried dung and sometimes you'd set fire to it. It was actually the smoke from the dung. Oh so it's like incense. And so people still do that now apparently. Do they? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Sometimes people burn their houses down in order to keep them away. Yeah. So actually there's loads of cases with bed bugs where people have alcohol and different kind

of flammable things on their sofas and beds and then yeah setting fire to the neighborhood. Yeah. I think there was a woman in Detroit recently maybe the last couple of months. Yeah. Covered her apartment in alcohol and then turned up the heating super high because she heard that was how to get rid of them. Sometimes what they do like they go like oh I put alcohol on everything that's great that should do it and then I'll have a nice fag to relax. Wow. Bed bugs are really hard to get rid of aren't they? I've heard that they're getting thicker skin now to get rid of the insecticide. And the horrible things people are saying about them. Yeah. Insects could evolve so much more quickly because there's so many generations so yeah great. The concentration

of insecticide that you need to kill a bed bug now is about a thousand times more than it was like say a hundred years ago. Really? Yeah and apparently it always takes three times you can't just get rid of them in one swoop it takes three goes round. So what is wrong with having bed bugs? I've never understood this. So I don't think I've had them. Yeah. But if I did what would be? I think they cover you in painful horrible red livid bites. Do they? Because bedding apparently used to be worth like a third of people's possessions and that's why so when they traveled they would take their bed sheets and they're covering with them so they didn't wouldn't use them in inns and stuff and I hadn't really even thought about the fact that it's so unusual now

that we sleep in beds on our own. Yeah absolutely until about the 19th century you'd mainly share a bed with someone else wouldn't you? Yeah if you stopped in a tavern. Well like if you went to travel lodge you just have to sleep with like Lenny Henry or something. That's right. Wow. Lenny Henry in every room. I guess hostels are still kind of like that. Yeah but you're literally in a bed. But you are in a room of strangers which is quite rare. It's just like sharing a bed that was the standard that was the only option you'd have. In children medieval times people who are wealthy enough to have a bed which wasn't very many people would always take it with them so all beds were Z beds foldable beds and yeah so the king would travel with his bed

any nobles would travel with their beds folded up on the back of their cart. Well I was reading something by Lucy Worsley and she was saying that beds in that period were actually incredibly rare for the poor. Yeah so it would just be a huge hall where everyone's sleeping so did they have cow dung on the floor next to them in their kind of their floor bed? I think it was hanging up rather than like because it sounds like oh it would be spread at the foot of the bed. Yeah but I think it's kind of hanging up to keep the fire. Oh my god like the front of a car for yeah like an air freshener. Yeah like an air freshener. So cow dung is great stuff. Yeah oh my goodness. So I did not know that you can on the Indian Amazon website you can buy cow dung

cakes. You can get them about roughly six for £2.50. Good value. So what it is you get a cow pat and you mix it up with hay and then you slap it on a wall and it dries into a cake and then you can burn that in a stove to cook food or for religious ceremonies. People in cities these days don't use it for for food cooking anymore but yeah. So there's also an Indian centre which uses cow dung medicinally and their claims are so extravagant. Okay so this is in Ahmedabad and one claim is walking on fresh cow dung is very healthy. It completely heals all problems with your feet. They also have cow water which is a urine based soft drink and the director of this facility said this will end the market for carbonated fizzy drinks. I love it's like all

problems with your feet. Like I lost a foot. Come over here. Not for long yeah and the sentence on this website just says mainstream doctors are divided about the medical benefits with some pointing out that the curative claims have never been validated by independent bodies. Yeah you can get cow urine aftershave I think because it's very good for your skin apparently. So does this come from thinking that cows are precious? Yeah because cows are sacred aren't they and their dung is sacred as well which is why it's religious rituals. That's what yeah it says here their milk makes children more obedient that's part of the sacredness and touching them can lower your blood pressure that's one of the thoughts and they block nuclear radiation.

Okay well I'm all right with the first two because they make sense that yes if children want some more milk then they'll be more obedient. I think it makes absolute sense stroking lots of pets people have comfortable animals that would calm you down those quarters they'll find and the nuclear. Well not many people know but Richard Feynman is actually. He just slapped a cow pat on his eyes. I've got another thing about old bedtime habits. Great. Very evil times. So have you heard of bundling? Yeah. Bundle. Someone gets a break in the leg. So actually the very bottom of the bundle you don't have to be second in the bundle. Why is it okay to be on the bottom? I don't know for some reason it's just snuggly but the second one on it's not comfortable. You can kind of curl

up and defend yourself a bit more if you're at the bottom whereas you're second there. Yeah you're spread eagles when you're second in the bundle. But then I think you deserve it because you're the first one jumping in on the bundle you're causing all the problems. You don't know maybe the person underneath said bundle you just have to follow instructions. Can you get people to bundle you? It's pretty pathetic if you're laid out going bundle and everyone's going no James you're in your late 30s you haven't done that for a long time. It's a terrible sleepover we're going. Magatorgy that's when you do a bundle but you've all got sleeping bags on. So bundling used to be when you wanted to introduce two unmarried children to each other. Of age I should point out. So it'd

be two boy and a girl unmarried and the parents would let them sleep in the same room for an evening. The idea was to get to know each other so in order to prevent things from happening from getting sexy they used to either tie them to the bed so you would have to lay there tied both of you to the bed and chat all evening or they would put a ginormous wooden board just in the middle of the bed separating you two. Surely that's how people get fetishes. Your early sexual experiences are being tied up with the block of words. How old are these young people? I guess approaching marriage age. So they were kind of marriageable age. Yeah I don't know. It was kind of yeah roughly late teens I think. Yeah the next guy I meet I'm gonna like hey do you like being tied up?

The first draft of 50 shades of grey is actually incredibly boring a lot of conversation. Also final draft of 50 shades of grey is also incredibly boring that's not the point. You haven't read 50 shades of grey. I've read the first third of 50 shades of grey. Oh what did you think? 17 shades of grey. I stopped after the after the third or fourth time she shattered into a million pieces. I thought is that what happens? Did you read Humpty Dumpty? Anastasia calls all the king's horses and all the king's men. Yeah that's pretty raw and she's stubborn. Okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast we can all be found on our Twitter

accounts I'm on at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at Egg Shaped, Sarah. It's an underwater postbox in Japan. And you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep and also just reminder go get Sarah's book it's out now it's called Animal the Autobiography of a Female Body it's in every single bookshop that you will go near so go in you have no excuse and go to know such thing as a fish.com that's our website we have all of our previous episodes up there we will be back again next week with another rep we'll see you then goodbye