No Such Thing As A Fish - 370: No Such Thing As George Clooney In A Blackcurrant Suit

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Anna, James, Andrew and special guest Athena Kugblenu discuss sexism for babies, an international coffee conflict, and a political Corrector gone mad.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Well, what can I tell you about this week's show? Dan Schreiber is having a very well-earned little breather. He'll be back next week, don't you worry. And Dan is such a behemoth of a podcaster that in his place we have not just one, but two people. Now, the first person that we'll be replacing Dan is Athena Cablenu. Now, she is an amazing comedian, a really good friend of ours. You might remember her from our 20-hour comic relief special.

She was part of the Guilty Feminist team in that. And actually, when we were on the Guilty Feminist, she was part of that show. She also has a BBC Radio 4 show called Athena's Cancel Culture, which is out right now on Radio 4. You can find that on the internet as well. And she has a podcast called Keeping Athena Company, which is absolutely fantastic. I can't recommend that highly enough. It's such a brilliant podcast.

Oh, I did say there was a second person. The second person is Athena's son, who you might hear in the background from time to time, really kind of coming in at the exact moments that you would want him to. So it's almost like we've soundscaped this episode, but I promise you it isn't soundscaped. It was a tiny little human who was in the background of the show. I really hope you enjoyed it. We had such fun making it. We love Athena.

And I suppose all that's left to say is on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four secret locations somewhere on Earth. And specifically in London. My name is Anna Tyszynski, and I am here today with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and our very special, exciting guest, Athena Koblenu. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.

And starting with you, Athena, what's your facts? So this is my fact. The 100 folds of a chef's hat represent that 100 ways in which you can cook an egg. Right. Does that mean, Athena, if you can only cook an egg like one way, for instance, then you can only have one fold? Or you get a beret. Yeah.

I was going to say you get a little cone, but that's not a good kind of hat to wear. Big white cone on your head. That's not a good hat at all. I mean, I always thought I was an amazing cook. I'm like, you know, you see my Instagram, there's lots of food on there. But when I read that fact, I was like, I can't cook at all. I know three ways. That's it.

Come on, mate. Even I know more than three ways to cook an egg. What's your three? Scrambled, omelette, fry. Oh, boil. I know four ways. Oh, I'm still short. Not tried, pelching, any time.

Oh, God. Yes. Okay. Fine. Five. It's still, we're a long way off. We're five percent of the way there. And the rest of this section is just going to be us brainstorming other possible ways.

Now, I will say, have you guys ever coddled an egg? No. Coddling an egg is lovely. It sounds like sort of taking it to bed, bed with you like a teddy. I think you sort of, you put it in, is it like you give it a bath? You put it in a little glass ramekin and then you give it a bath and that slowly cooks within there and you mix it with spices and things. That's very nice.

Anyway, six, that's like a Banmari. Yeah. Seven. Yes. I think you can bake an egg. I once saw someone bake an egg. They put the egg in an oven and I thought, well, that's an egg before. Have you in an oven?

Yeah. Like, um, like hollowed out a pepper and then broken egg in it and just baked it. Oh, but I've seen that someone put the shell. You can do this. You can just put the whole egg in the oven and bake it, which just, which just for me feels like, like you don't really want the egg. So you're trying to wait as long as possible before you have to eat it. Well, do you know something that takes even longer than your boiled oven egg?

You can do it in the dishwasher as well. Very nice. Wrap it up. In fact, leave it in the shell and then just set the dishwasher running. Another longer way of doing it is the 100 year egg. Very long cycle in the dish. Sometimes it's called the thousand year egg. And sometimes it's just called a really disgusting egg because I've had this egg.

I had it in Singapore and it's kind of what they do is they put it in clay and salt and they leave it for a few weeks and it kind of turns dark black and really, really sulfurous. And sometimes they call it horse urine egg because it tastes a bit like horse urine apparently. Yeah. This is one way of eating eggs. There is.

Yeah, they've got a recipe for that in my Chinese cookbook. I think it looks unappetizing. It's disgusting. It's really good. I think they came out of recipe because somebody dropped an egg somewhere and they found it five weeks later and they're like, waste not want not. And they said, well, we'll make it a recipe and then no one puts me in prison for being disgusting.

And that's how that worked. Finally, we hadn't dropped it in this puddle of horse piss. If life gives you horse piss. Well, that is the story. It was like a Chinese guy who had like dropped some eggs, duck eggs in a muddy puddle of water and they had a load of calcium in the water and then he pulled them out and he thought, well, I might as well try them. You know, I might as well try them.

And he's like, these are delicious. I need to come up with a way of making them. That is my approach to eating pretty much every encrusted ancient bit of food on the back of the fridge. I might as well just have most of it and see if I die. Do you know, this is great because when you've got a toddler, you find food everywhere, but you know, so now I'm just going to give it a banana that's at the back of the couch because it's just cuisine, isn't it?

It's just a new recipe. Exactly. It's a delicacy. I have a slightly exciting advance on the hundred cleats in the chef's hat, which is, this is from a book called The Culinary Guide from 1903. And it's by George Escoffier. It was a very famous, um, he was an early celebrity chef, not the earliest, but he, yeah, turn of the century.

Anyway, his book lists 202 ways to prepare eggs, excluding omelettes and omelettes is another 82. And he also says that if you use the basic recipe for omelette norvegienne, it is, it is possible to produce an almost infinite number of variations of this type of omelette. Then he says in brackets, omelette surprise. Wow. Yeah.

Sounds gross. Do you know where the word omelette comes from? Oh gosh, I'd assume from the word for egg. Does it come from the, does it come from the om sound of meditation? Yes. Shut up. No, no, no, no, no, no, it isn't. It both isn't that.

And I think I've just lost hearing in one of my ears. It comes from the same word as you get amulet, omelette, amulet. And also where you get laminate. So it means something that's, something that's flat, basically. An old French word for something that's flat. And that's where we get it from. You know, apparently we've been boiling eggs wrong. According to.

According to who? We, we've been boiling eggs wrong. Was it this whole time we've been boiling them wrong? I love these headlines. I was trying to search for all the, all that you've been something wrong your whole life and I love it. Yeah. I want to say it's always like you've been tying your shoes wrong the whole

life and then you look at it and some guy on the internet has come up with a ridiculously stupid way of tying his shoes. Although you shouldn't say that because we actually did a fact about three years ago about how we have actually been tying your shoes wrong your whole life. Oh, was that us then? Oh, that was us on the internet. Yeah.

We've been boiling eggs wrong and doing everything else wrong, but I tried to do it the right way. So this is according to MFK Fisher, who I think was this like amazing food writer in the 20th century and she was very, very influential. And she said the key to boiling eggs is you shouldn't boil them and cause that cooks it unevenly. So if you boil it really hard, you drop it straight into boiling water. It cooks the white really fast and by the time the yolk inside is cooked and the

white is massively overcooked and it's all rubbery. So I tried her way, which is you put it in cold water and then you let the cold water boil and as soon as it hits the boil, you take it off. Oh, yeah, was it good? Or well, it was the most frustrating 45 minutes of my life. You should have put it in your oven. It was, you know, it was 45 minutes because it basically super glues the shell to the white.

So, you know, normally if you peel a hard boiled egg, then obviously the shell comes off and this, it doesn't shock the white away from the shell when you drop it in boiling water. And so it took, I mean, I'm not kidding. It took 45 minutes to peel the shell off. Wow. I lost most of the white along the way. Don't do it.

MFK Fisher was pretty amazing, wasn't she? She was the one who W.H. Odin said was the greatest writer of any style in the whole of America. She was a food writer and she was the one who also said the perfect way to make a sandwich was to sit on it. So you make your sandwich and then you have to sit on it for half an hour just to kind of warm it up and squash it and then it's going to be a perfect sandwich. You're going to get a lot of customers returning their sandwiches to the kitchen.

That's why I was fired from my job at Pret. Just on eggs and sort of how they're laid, you know, when you've got an egg and you've boiled it and you peel it and you know, there's that gap between the white and the shell. There's like a little air pocket. Yeah. And do you know what that is? I don't know what it is, but I know it makes it really easy to peel them.

That's my... It's really handy, isn't it? It's really handy. If you find that and you crap the egg there, you can peel your eggs really easily. Top tip. That's what it's for. That's evolution for you. It's evolved to help us peel our boiled eggs.

No, it's a little air hole for the chick. So in case the egg is fertilized, the chick will be inside and then it needs to practice breathing to inflate its lungs before it cracks out. So the way it does that, about a day before it cracks out of the shell, it pecks its beak into that little air hole and uses it like a snorkeler mask and just practices breathing. Every day I take a step closer to veganism and I mean, how adorable is that?

And we're here making omelettes out of it. Yeah. It's beautiful. I'm probably going to upset you now because I've eaten ballot, which is a Vietnamese thing where the egg has a semi-fertilized chick inside the egg when they cook it. I must admit, when I tried it, I couldn't... I could only eat the bit of egg around the...

I'll just eat around it. But yeah, and it's like, it's a real delicacy in Vietnam and sometimes used as a way of getting over your hangover as well. I mean, you can't criticize it, can you? If you eat eggs, then it's not really that much different. But how do you time that? Do you get like an ultrasonic scanner? You get like an egg ultrasound and you go, right, it's three weeks.

It's good to go. Oh, I don't know if I can... There's something about the idea of it. So obviously, you know... Well, if we're anthropomorphizing eggs and we are now, all eggs in America have had a little shampoo before they go into the shops. Yeah, it's so weird. So they love in America.

They love to wash their eggs, but that creates a problem because eggs have this natural bloom on them. They have this sort of bacterial layer, which we can't see, but it's... Or rather, it keeps bacteria out. It's a way of kind of protecting it. So, you know, if the egg gets a bit of poo on it or whatever as it's being laid, it's fine. It doesn't matter.

And so in America, they love to give them a little shampoo, but then the problem is you shampoo them and then there are the high odds of bacterial invasion. So then they have to refrigerate them and spray them with oil. It's a nightmare. So we don't do that in Europe. It is illegal to wash an egg before you sell it to people. Wow.

Yeah. I always think if you kind of get an egg and there's a little feather on there, I always think that's a very probably a fresh egg from a chicken who had a very good life or something. But I reckon there's probably a person in a factory just putting feathers in the okay. And the poo, yeah, but it's a bone. Because if you get a bit of chicken poo, you think, oh, that's literally just

come out of its arse. I hasn't even had time to lose the poo, but you're right. I bet someone's just taping it on because they do that with yolks. What colour yolks do you guys want? Like you... Orangey. You crack your egg into the pan. Yeah, orange, yellow, white.

I want a bright yellow yolk. Like literally like the sun, but like really deep rich yellow. Yeah. Rich, that's it. Yeah, I'll go with that. I want one that's more like Donald Trump's skin colour. Like really deep dark orange. You want to go orange?

Well, people do seem to prefer orange and it's because they think the chicken's like healthier. So yeah, if it's like really rich yellow or deep orange, they're like, that shows that it's had a better diet. And so producers have realised that people prefer that. And so they just feed them dyed food. So whenever you get an egg and it has a rich orange yolk, it does not taste better and it is not more nutritious.

It is probably in like 99% of cases. It's at the farmer has basically put usually an additive or some dye in their food. Sometimes if you're going organic, apparently they'll feed them marigold petals or red petals to help the carotenoids, you know, the stuff that dyes carrots and stuff. Orange to help them get into the egg. I think that is a good sign though.

If my farmer is willing to pick marigold petals, throwing the petals around some of the chickens have a really romantic evening. All right. Valentine's Day in the in the heart. It's a huge deal. Very quickly on the hat itself, the 100 cleats hat. Yeah. And so invented by Marie Antoine Karem, who was probably the predecessor

to a scoffier who Andy mentioned earlier on, probably maybe the first celebrity chef I would say. I'm not sure. I can't think of anyone earlier, but he had these big hats because he wanted to have authority and he thought the bigger and more erect your hatters, the more people take you seriously. And so the better a chef you were, the taller it was supposed to be and his was 18 inches in height.

Yeah. I mean, this is the man's like invention clearly. This is like, how can I make people respect me 18 inches? That's respect. Yeah. I kind of think it was a bit of that. Alexis Sawyer, who was around the same time. He was the chef of the reform club.

He wore a big black velvet beret with a huge tassel and the whole point of that was he was too important to cook with it. He was like the head chef. Everyone else, the sous chef and stuff did all the work. He was the big late head chef. And if he wore a hat that was too impractical to do any work, it showed that he was really important. That's brilliant.

That's so clever. So, yeah, it's just too difficult for him to cook. Therefore, he's the boss. Pretty much. You should try it in the office, Andy. Come into the office wearing sort of mittens and a balaclava. And sunglasses, so I can't see any words in front of me. Gaffer tape your mouth.

He's like, I'm too... This is sounding better and better. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that when men are played the sound of a baby crying, if they're told it's a boy, they'll think it's in more pain than if they're told it's a girl. Wow. So, what men think male babies are macho?

Is that... Yes, you've kind of got there, Andy, almost. So, this is a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex, the University of Leon, Santetienne and Hunter College City University in New York. And what they did was they played a load of cries to men and women, parents actually. And they asked them whether they thought the child was in pain or happy or sad or how much pain it was in, et cetera, et cetera. And the thing is that before puberty, the voices of boys and girls,

and especially babies, the cries of boys and girls are the same. There's no difference in pitch. But people, especially men, think that the male baby will have a deeper cry. And so, when they hear the cry, if it's high pitch, they think it's in more pain. And because they expect the male baby to have a deeper cry normally, they think that the difference means that it's in more pain. I think that's really funny that it's like, what's wrong with a child? And they expect to like bury white to come out of its mouth.

And it's a high pitch squeal. It's like, oh my gosh, no, it's a baby. There's nothing wrong with your child. Where's the beard? Where's his beard? And yeah, it is quite funny. The thing that the researchers say is it could have implications for the welfare of children because it means that if a female child is crying, you might give it less attention than if a male child is crying.

Oh, this is why we have man flu then, clearly. Because boys are so used to being given attention they don't need. Or, you know, then they grow out to be like, oh, got a little cough. Oh, it's a flu. It's the flu. Where with girls, they're like, yeah, girls are going to work with headless because it's fine. It's just a scratch. Oh my God, I think you might be hit on something there. That feels right, doesn't it?

Yeah, I thought it was that male parents say, you know, they'll listen to the crying and they'll think, well, my baby boy wouldn't be making a fuss unless it was something really serious. It wouldn't be disturbing me. Well, that might be true as well, but this study was specifically about the pitch of the cells. Well, so we just have to start complaining in a deeper voice in order to have people take notice of us.

No, you have to complain in a much, much, much higher voice to make up for the fact that you have a higher voice already. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we have to speak in deeper voices all the time. That's right. And then the contrast to our high complaints. Don't go too high because then it will just be dogs that care. Dogs are pretty comforting. I think that might work for me. It's weird the response to babies crying, right?

That you get, well, I'm always told that once you become a mother, I guess specifically, you have a very instinctive response to babies crying. So I hear babies crying and I think that's a really horrible noise. And I think actually there was a study on the noises people find most grating and babies crying was the worst. But like, is there a difference? Do you find there was a difference once you had children, Athena, when you hear a baby crying and a bit of you dies?

Yes. Or does it sound lovely? Does it suddenly sound wonderful? There's only one difference and that is when you hear the baby cry, you lactate. That's the only difference really. It never gets more or less annoying. It just, you just start leaking. But yeah, there's definitely, I think it's, I mean, I would speculate it's evolution, isn't it?

Because when it's, what's really funny is babies have unique cries. They all do, but sometimes you go out in public and there'll be a baby that sounds like your baby and that baby will make you lactate because it will just have a similar pitch or a sound, right? And I'll be like, oh, that sounds like, that sounds like one of my kids. And then it's, oh, dearie me, here we go again. I forgot my pads. Yeah.

I can, sorry. I can only apologize to any listeners who can hear the baby in the background that have spontaneously started lactating. Lactation is so weird though. So there's tons of stuff I didn't know. Like people can lactate when they're not mothers. And this is really, really important in loads of societies. And it seems to be quite under-researched.

So there are like hunter-gatherer societies where there's a lot more aloe parenting, where it's parenting in groups. So there's not even really one specific caregiver. Your baby will be cared for by maybe 12 different people. And grandmothers will be able to lactate. So they'll, and it's just by like having the nipples stimulated very often. Women who have had a baby before at some point, they'll just lactate again so they can nurse their infants.

Or your friend who's had a baby once can nurse the infant. Interesting. And the idea is that if you live in like a society, then it's useful for more than one person to be able to do that, right? Is that the idea? Yeah. I think it's a little bit of a survival wasn't as guaranteed. So if your mum dies, then you can just latch on to someone else.

But also, I guess it's just a different way cultures develop. Like the Aka people who are in Central Africa, I don't think we've talked about them before. They're the ones who have fathers who spend as much time with the babies as the mothers. And they're totally interchangeable, their roles. And they're always holding their kids. So they're in contact with kids up to the age of one and a half for like 97% of the time. They're either touching or holding.

What? And the fathers, when they're doing it, which will be about 50% of the time, they will let the babies suckle on their nipples. So when the baby needs comforting, it just suckles on its father's cheeks. At least there's a use for male nipples because they have no other function. Exactly. That makes a lot of sense. There's a great fact about breastfeeding, which I found out with the first baby.

If you do it continuously, it's a form of natural contraception. Did you know that? I didn't know that. So useful. Because you don't want to conceive children one after the other really quickly. That's quite bad if you're like a woman and you've gone through pregnancy. You want to go out and wait. Give yourself a bit of time, you know what I mean?

And the lactation helps you do that, which I didn't know. That's really interesting. It's smart. I feel like it's not guaranteed. No, I wouldn't bank on it. I'd give yourself a safety net if I was used to anyone listening. Get yourself an insurance policy. However, when I had my first, I didn't have a period for like a year.

Nice. Yeah, it was brilliant. I was like, I'm going to breastfeed forever. It's kind of in the child's interest then to carry on breastfeeding, because then there aren't any more children to kind of use up the... Oh yeah, resources. Yeah. You don't want any bastard siblings.

That's why they want to keep latched on. So, Athena, you were saying that you can really tell the difference between the cries of your baby and someone else's baby. This is interesting because lots of animals and even lots of mammals can't tell the difference between their young and other animals. So this was an experiment by someone called Susan Lingle, where she played a deer through a speaker the noise of other mammals' babies crying and making a noise.

And the deer cannot tell the difference. So they will react very strongly to a baby deer, but also to a baby bat, a baby marmot, a baby eland. It will just run. It's like, oh no, there's a young mammal in trouble. And this might be because... I mean, the reason is because mammals have the same larynx or really similar larynxes until puberty.

And then the difference between all the species kicks in. But before puberty, basically, it's like spread betting. Parents need to respond to a cry which might be their child just in case it's their child in danger. And so, if it turns out to be a baby marmot, then well, such is life. And it's useful for the child because then you might get some... If you're in trouble, you might be a deer bambi

sort of getting in trouble because there's some people coming trying to shoot you. And then a friendly bat might come along and save you. Well, you'd hope for a bear. You'd be like, oh man, I hope the bear would come. That'd be really useful. But this does imply that if you're walking past a certain fox cub or something, Athena,

then you might start lactating. I would have thought that certain mammals could induce lactation in the same way that certain babies could, right? I hadn't considered that. The neighbours have just got a new puppy. You're in trouble. Stuck up on paths.

I'll have to go outside and I'll just say, get your dog out here for a second. Let's see how that works. Babble is a weird thing. Baby's babble, right? And it kind of starts to imitate language, I guess. And I think people can tell if babies are babbling in their own language.

So if I heard a five-month-old making nonsense noises, I should be able to tell whether it's an English speaker or a non-English speaker. Because again, they imitate the quality of the tone, the timbre of the voice in which they're speaking. But it's really interesting because

babies of deaf parents who speak sign language babble in sign language. Whereas you'll have a five-month-old baby who doesn't know any sign language, has never seen sign language, they'll just randomly clench their fists and like, spray their hands out. Sign language babies will kind of babble,

so they'll make signs a little bit like words but that don't specifically mean anything yet. But with quite deliberate, like, they're practising trying to learn it. But baby sign is a thing, that you can teach your babies how to sign. From about six months onward, you can get them to tell you when they're hungry,

you can get them to tell you when they need to go toilet. It takes time and effort, but this is a true story. I didn't do it with my first song, it's going to be bothered, but this one now, I was like, right, we're having such a hard time put your train in the first one.

I'm like, right, we're learning sign. I'm doing it. I'm investing 20 minutes a day in the, just tell me when you need a toilet. That's the only thing I want. That's the only thing you need something. That's it, isn't it? Everything else is fine,

but they're instinctive as well. So they're babies, a lot of the time it's, you just have to learn what they're doing instinctively. So apparently they, if a baby brings their finger to their mouth, really easy one, I'm hungry. And there's another one,

which means I need a poo, which I've forgotten, but it can be done. I've been told this. I've been told this. I'm going to interview you in six months time and see if you've actually seen this through. You'll be interviewing the baby.

How about that? I think you mentioned an email, Athena, and I've read this thing as well about potty training babies. And I actually forgot to go back to it, but there are definitely people who don't believe in nappies at all. And there's a way of potty training babies

where you just kind of let them poo whenever they want to. And you learn when it looks like they're going to poo and then you run them to the loo and you never have to use a nappy, which sounds great. And there's a bunch of New York mothers who kind of do that.

And they say for the first month or two, you do get some poo on your carpet. Sounds like a lot of jeopardy. Yes. But then you sort of train the baby to give you a sign when they're going to go to the loo. Like you say, there'll be a sort of sign they use

or they point at their bum. I don't know. Do a little fart. And then it's like, you've got to run them to a toilet. Yeah. Yeah. Laminate floors.

That's what I'd say for that one. That's the real key. If you haven't got a laminate, I'd probably just get some pampers. Yeah. But nappies are really wasteful. Like I think a baby goes through, you know, in, well, first of all, in the 80s,

babies used to potty train around 18 months. Because at that point, because people used to use terry towels and things like that. And terry towels get wet. So babies are like, oh, this is horrible. And they're like, you know what, let me get me on a toilet.

This is disgusting. And they're also harder to crawl in. So they're not as mobile. So they're uncomfortable. But now we use kind of these nappies that are really comfortable. So I understand they're comfortable. They're really dry.

They make, they allow babies to be mobile. The average age for potty training now is about between two and three. So we've just been doubling it. So you're saying they've been indulged? Well, yeah. Absolutely. Well, indulge obviously to make more money

for companies that make nappies. But that's incredible, right? Like babies that used to train at 80 months, now train at three years. That's the supervillain plotline. Do you want a company that's investing in making nappies so good that people never take them off? I know.

That's what I was thinking. There's new smart nappies that have just been invented by Pampas. They're called Lumi. And I reckon once these are in, you're literally until you're in your early 20s, you're going to be wearing them. Oh, stop.

Is this where they text you, James? Well, they tell you. Yeah. They tell you. They text the parents saying, I have, chat myself. Yes. Well, if I'm so far from my baby

that I need to be texted, that means someone else's job. What are you texting me? I've paid the sitter to deal with that. What are you texting me for? You should just text the nearest phone, shouldn't it, to the baby. But then everyone, of course,

because it's a smart thing, everyone's worried about hackers, and that someone might hack. What possible data can the hackers get that's going to help them on this? Unless they're working for Big Pampa, or maybe. Well, all it can really do is tell you

how often this individual child shits themselves or pisses themselves. But the idea could be that it might be attached to your phone, and then using your phone, they might be able to get your bank details. Maybe. It feels like a stretch.

It feels like, if I was a hacker, this wouldn't be the first thing I would hack in order to get to the purse strings, you know? Yeah, getting bank details to a baby's bottom does feel like a roundabout way. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that traditional

Ethiopian households can spend up to nine hours a day on coffee ceremonies. Wow. Now, I know what you're thinking. No, come on. No, no. This is a lie.

That's what I'm thinking. They wouldn't get anything done. So, I should specify, I asked far too many people about this. I actually ended up interviewing four separate people who have lived in Ethiopia or Ethiopian, and basically, coffee ceremonies

are a massive part of life in Ethiopia, and they can last up to three hours. So, the first hour is roasting the coffee, and then you kind of grind it and make it, and then it's all about sitting around, having a chat, debating politics. What have you. And so, you'll do that,

and then, particularly in rural places, you might do it three times a day, and then you might do it three times a day, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner time. Now, you probably aren't doing it three times a day, every day, for three hours, because you wouldn't be able to hold down a job. Maybe they have, like, a Nespresso machine

for day-to-day stuff, and then, for the special occasions, they do the three-hour thing, no? Yeah. Maybe it's a lockdown thing. You know, it's a lockdown. You might as well spend nine hours a day. You're right.

It's a good idea. How do we fill our time? Let's drag this out for a while. The queues at Starbucks in Ethiopia must be absolutely enormous. Can you imagine if there's one person in front of you that's two days ahead of you? And after all that time,

let's still get your name wrong. Three hours. Come on. I spoke to one guy who runs this place called Kaffa Coffee, which is actually this really nice Ethiopian coffee, what do you like, van in Dalston? Anyway, he was great. So, he was...

I was asking him about it and holding up the queue behind me, and he was saying that actually how it would work where he was from anyway is that you'd be in your village and you would hear the first person to get up and start roasting the beans because it makes a really loud noise. You've got a very, very hot pan

and when the beans crash onto it, they really crackle at first. And once you hear that person, you're like, okay, someone else is doing the coffee today. I don't have to. And you'll bring your leftovers from the night before from the meal if you've got some bread left over and you'll sort of swap that for some coffee

and hang out doing that. So, that makes more sense like it's not every single household is doing that many times a day. Well, kaffa actually is the name of the region, isn't it, in Ethiopia, where coffee originated, I think. And actually, it's where we, and almost every country in the world,

gets the word for coffee is from this place, kaffa. Wow. Makes sense. We have said before, just in case there's a pedant out there, that coffee originated in Yemen and there is some hot debate between those two countries about it

and you can engage with that if you want. What I think, and I don't want to get into a conflict with the Yemenis or the Ethiopians, but I think the coffee plants was really found in Ethiopia but then modern day coffee, actually not even modern day coffee, but early modern coffee came from Yemen to drink. Does that sound right?

Well, it sounds like you're determined to not pick a side in this conflict. Quite cool in this coffee ceremony as well. The traditional ceremony has three rounds and the first round is where you get your strongest cup and then you re-pour the water so it's a weaker cup for the second round and then the weakest is the last round

and they're called Abol, Tona and Bereka and that is, according to their legend, the name of the three goats who invented coffee, according to Ethiopian legend. Again, I did ask this guy and he was like, yeah, yeah, the goats. They're the names of the goats. And the idea is that like over a thousand years ago,

a goat herder saw his goats acting all jumpy and twitchy and weird and then he saw that they'd eaten these cherries sitting next to them and they were the coffee cherries and so he brought them to some monks. See, this is just like the eggs. It's just like the thousand year egg being discovered completely by mistake.

No one is ever willing to admit, I grew a plant and I experimented with hundreds of ways of cooking it and this is the one I discovered. It's my work that's done this. It's always, oh, there's a magic plant and the goats happen to be sprightly. What makes me laugh about that story

is that he saw his goats were dancing. He was like, I want what they're having. I wouldn't go near it personally myself, but thank goodness that person did. Exactly. The mind of a great inventor always wants to mimic the dancing goat. Have you guys heard of the women's petition against coffee?

It was a pamphlet that was published in England in 1674 and it was at a time when coffee was quite controversial because coffee houses, as I think Anna said, they allow discussion of all sorts. Politics is one thing, so you might be discussing politics and you might decide that you don't like the king very much or whatever, so political discussion was dangerous. Anyway, this women's petition against coffee was published

in 1674, which claimed all sorts of stuff. It said, coffee makes a man as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought. It damages men's fertility. Or that when a woman approaches the nuptial bed, expecting a man that should answer the vigor of her flames, why should she only meet a bed full of bones and hug a meagre useless corpse?

Strong stuff about coffee, but yeah, I know. The weird thing is, it probably wasn't by women. It's written in a way which implies that it's written by a man sort of ventriloquizing women, like, oh, it makes men so gossipy, they're more gossipy than us women who are writing this petition. It's in that kind of vein. Yeah, and also, was it in the petition,

the thing about meeting an old skeleton corpse in bed? That was in the petition, yeah. See, that doesn't sound like a woman to me. That feels like a relief if what you're meeting is sort of skeletal mess. He doesn't want to do anything. That sounded very much a man. And also, coffee's supposed to make you live longer, so you're less likely to meet a skeleton.

He'll be full of life. These are all arguments against the women's petition. I also thought if you drank lots of coffee, you turned into George Clooney. Yeah, that's great. Keep drinking it, James. Keep going. You're nearly there. Is that right? I'm doing nine hours a day,

so I should be by now. Now, Anthony Head, do you remember his old adverts? Of course. Anthony Head, is he the guy from Buffy? Yeah, but he's the guy from the Nescafe sexy couple flirting adverts, really. He was quite an anxious character in Buffy, so a bad person to advertise coffee,

whereas George Clooney is much more chill. That's true, but why do you think he was anxious, Anna? Is that delicious Nescafe, isn't it? He was off his head on Nescafe all the time. That's what it was. All withdrawing. So coffee withdrawal is a thing, which I don't drink enough coffee. I don't think to get serious withdrawal,

but you've quit before, Andy, haven't you? I've quit. I'm currently quit. You're currently quit. You seem like you've got the shakes. You've been actually very old. Is that why? You've never been properly on it, though, have you? I was for years and years. I was just drinking several a day, and then when you stop, you just have a headache for two weeks, and then that's that.

Yeah, I can vouch for that. I quit drinking coffee. It's very inconsistently advice. Some people say you can have coffee when you're pregnant. Some people can say you can't, but I just quit anyway. I thought I'd quit and then my teeth would stop being yellow. Is that a real advantage? And I got a headache. Yeah, you feel like well when you stop drinking as much caffeine as you used to. Absolutely.

Did you feel less awake or less alert or less focused or anything? Yeah, but that's what we do to the fact I was growing a human. To be honest, I started drinking coffee again recently, and I think it's all a bit of mythology really. I don't think it makes you any more alert or awake. I just think you just get a bit attached to the kind of your brain getting a bit wired.

But I'm not more productive when I'm like, I'm not more productive when I'm shaking like a leaf. If anything, I'm less productive. Well, some people, it does seem to work for some people. I kind of agree. It makes me twitchy and endlessly Google weird health symptoms wrong with me rather than do actual work. But Michael Pollan, who's the brilliant food writer

who wrote a book called Caffeine, which is an audio book actually. He is a huge coffee fan and he quit while writing the book and it almost ruined the actual book, which I like a book on caffeine was almost destroyed by caffeine withdrawal. But he basically said that he felt like he wasn't even writing in his first language anymore. Everything was so like words didn't hang together properly. There was this fog between him and reality.

He lost all confidence and he thought this whole book is a completely stupid idea. I'm going to stop writing it. I mean, that is a symptom of writing a book. I think you might be blaming the coffee so that he can plug his book about coffee. Yeah, that literally sounds like imposter syndrome. You old cynics, I felt sorry for him. No, I didn't.

But he did tell me why coffee apparently does keep you awake, which again, I've always thought it sends me to sleep. But I didn't know that it was that we basically have a neurotransmitter like a chemical which sends your body a signal which is called adenosine, which is what tells you to go to sleep. So it slots into a little receptor in your body, which is just the right size for it and tells you to go to sleep. And caffeine, the chemical, is exactly the right shape to fit into that receptor.

So when you drink caffeine, it slips into there ahead of the sleep chemical and so it stops the sleep chemical getting in so it just doesn't tell your body to go to sleep. That's really clever. Yeah, it's so cool, isn't it? I didn't know that. Do you think... Okay, here's a question for you.

Do you think you can flush out caffeine by drinking decaf? No. No, what? No, no, no. Well, you can't. You're all right in your assumption. Is that a thing? What?

I was just checking. I read this online and I thought, well, that seems very obvious and basic to me, but I was hoping one of you would fall into my incredibly obvious trap. Wait, let me... Well done. Did you ask, like, so somebody would drink a cup of, like, caffeinated coffee and then drink a decaf and think that balances that out. That's like having a gin and tonic and then having a Coke

and being like, I'm fine to drive. No, no, no. Don't worry. I've had 15 Cokes. They make a lot of coffee... They grow a lot of coffee in Mastnik, the island, and the story of how they did that is really interesting. There was a naval officer called Gabriel de Cleur,

and he decided... Why is that funny? That's a funny name. It just sounded like you'd seen a long name and you'd given up on it. It's a Gabriel de Cleur. Maybe I was doing, like, some French babbling or something. Gabriel de Cleur. And he decided that he was going to take a plant from Paris

because they had some in the royal gardens there, and he was going to take it down to Martinique and grow some coffee plantations down there. But the king didn't really want to give him any of his coffee plants because they were really valuable, so he kind of sneaked in and stole a little seedling from the royal garden. And then he decided to go to Martinique, which is a long, long way away from Paris.

First of all, he was caught in a storm, and then they got attacked by pirates, and all the time he's got this tiny little coffee plant that he's looking after. There was a spy from the Netherlands who went after him and tried to kill his seedling. Just one seedling he had. One little seedling, one little plant.

That's so funny. And this little plant, like the spy, came and tried to kill him. Because he was at sea for a long time, they didn't have much rations, and so he took his tiny bit of water and he was allowed to drink, and he would share it with his seedling to keep it alive.

And then he got it to Martinique and planted it, and 50 years later there were 80 million coffee trees on Martinique. I can't even look after my yucca. And he looked after a coffee plant on a boat. Good for him. I think that has the makings of a great film where it's one man and his seedling. And, you know, he's on the boat

and all the other sailors are looking hungerily at the seedling, and they look at it, turns it into a big leg of ham before them or whatever. I can't believe you didn't even bring a spare. Take two. I can't believe that Andy, when he becomes a film director, his kind of film will have people looking at things

and then turning into massive hums. It's strongly based on the cut, the Looney Tunes. I can't see you getting many Oscar nominations for that kind of movie. We'll see, we'll see. When the best ham category is launched thanks to my extensive lobbying campaign. And the winner for 10 years, the road, John Hamm.

One more thing, the coffee filter was invented by a woman called Melita Benz. And she, according to her son, you'll love this, Andy, because I know you love your origin stories. She was trying to come up with a way of making coffee and she just got really frustrated and dropped out a page of her son's notebook from school

and stuck it in an old tin pot and it just happened to make this perfect coffee and she decided that, go on. I like that story because it's an innovator thinking of looking at her environment, coming up with a thing and adapting it. If it was going with the classic format, it would be she was trying to pour her coffee

and unfortunately her son dropped his notebook and a leaf was torn out and landed on top of the cup. And when she poured it, it caught all the ground. Oh my God. So I applaud Melita Benz for this. Okay, fair enough. Well, during World War II, the company stopped making any filters

and started making supplies for the Nazis. Okay, when I said I applaud Melita Benz, I'd like to clarify up to a point. Wow, you don't applaud her, Andy, because after the war, she started a program that compensated victims of a Nazi's forced labour policy. When I said I didn't approve of her, I'd like to clarify again.

Coffee was officially blessed in the 17th century by the Catholic Church because the Pope liked it and you could do that. So it was kind of thought as an evil drink. It started in Africa or in Yemen somewhere and they're all drinking it around there. Then it got up into the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, everyone's drinking it.

So then it came over to Catholic Europe and everyone went, well, it's the drink of the infidel. And then Pope Clement VIII tasted some and thought, right, I love this. What am I going to do? Because everyone's saying this is the invention of Satan. It's awful. So he said, look, it's so delicious

that it would be awful to just let the infidels have use of it. Let's trick Satan and bless it so we turn it into a Christian drink. And he did and that's why you go to heaven if you drink coffee. But that's really interesting. I didn't really realise this is how popular coffee is. There's only one thing that's drunk more regularly than coffee

and that's water. It's literally the second most popular drink in the world. Wow. Isn't it? Which is incredible because it doesn't taste that nice. I thought it might be Ribena. But it's the second, which means that humans, we're doing something wrong in life

for us to be needed so much caffeine in our life. We need to introduce siestas all around the world basically. This is what we need. You're right because it doesn't taste nice or whatever anyone's claiming. We are just doing it in order to keep ourselves awake. Let's just start sleeping more. The idea of a Ribena-based society,

I think it's less sexy if Anthony Head from Buffy is knocking on his neighbour's door at night saying, have you got any Bina? He would be dressed like a massive Ribena Berry, wouldn't he? Why is that not sexy? His little arm sticking out. I don't know. George Clooney and that's still sexy.

I think we could all agree. OK, it is time for our final fact of the week and that is Andy. My fact is that the 18th century grammarian, Alexander the Corrector, carried a sponge wherever he went just in case he spotted any offensive graffiti. He sounds great.

He's my hero. He was a Scottish author. His name was Alexander Crudden, C-I-U-D-E-N. He was an author, proofreader. You could see why he sort of changed his mnemonic to the correct, can't you? Yeah, he was a bookseller.

He was a stationer. He was eccentric, definitely. He was famous for having written a concordance to the Bible, which is an index of the Bible. We'll get onto that later. But also, he carried a sponge. Let's get onto it now.

He wrote an index to the Bible. He wrote a verbal index of the Bible, so he took every single word of the King James Bible, apart from, you know, the, and of, and, you know, really sort of nuts and bolts ones. Every single other word, you know, shoe, or ham, or whatever, he made an index.

Ham's a good one because the son of Noah was called Ham. Son of Noah, I knew you were going to bring it up. I don't know if Ham and Ham would have different entries. I suspect a word. He knew what he was doing. That is three times as long as the actual Bible, and it just tells you which words appear where in the Bible.

That's like only the really hardcore fans read that one. It's like people who've read the Silmarillion Overlord of the Rings, isn't it? Oh, you might have read the Bible, but... Have you read it in alphabetical order? Yeah. Such a weird thing to do. It took him 12 years, didn't it?

Unsurprising. And it was, like, all of the word all, for instance, he recorded, so he included some pretty relevant words in there. Yeah. But the thing is, the Bible's a ready index. It's like Proverbs, Mark, John, Luke. Like, it's a ready intersections. Yeah, well, that's a good one.

You're making the classic mistake of confusing contents and index, and Alejandro, the corrector, would be turning in his grave right now. You'd be corrected. Dan wouldn't have done that. Dan wouldn't. It's taken this long for us to feel he's lost.

Yeah, he was weird. He didn't like grammar mistakes, either. He didn't like grammar mistakes, and he didn't like offensive graffiti, and he had his own very idiosyncratic interpretation of what offensive was, so he didn't like the number 45, which, at the time, lots of people were writing...

That was the main one, wasn't it? The number 45 was the main thing that he hated the most. He only liked LPs, didn't he? He didn't like... Maybe he predicted... Did he predict Donald Trump's presidency and hated that? That's exactly it. It's because of John Wilkes, the radical.

John Wilkes was a radical author at the time, and he had written a work Attacking the Monarchy, which had been published in issue number 45 of a magazine called The North Britain, which published exciting political content. So 45 became a bit of a rallying cry

for anti-monarchists at the time. People would write 45 on walls and doors and floors and things like that, but if Alejandro, the corrector, spotted it with his sponge, he'd get rid of it immediately. What do you think he would do if, like, just your house number was number 45?

I don't know. And you've got 45 when you've really been. Yeah. And he keeps coming round and taking it off. That's such a good point. Also, the Jacobite rising was 1745, which was another reason

why they used this name. Yeah, that's why he did it in that issue. He waited. He printed 44 issues of this pointless magazine, so he'd get to 45 and make an obscure reference. He was an Iliad. Do you guys know what an Iliad is? Oh.

No. Did he like the Iliad? I would guess that. Yeah, that's a good guess. Did he like Ili coffee? That's actually closer, because that's the correct spelling. So you're definitely getting warmer, but still quite cold, so I'm going to tell you.

An Iliad is someone who always refers to himself as the third person. So it's like Iliad from Lassen. I double L. Okay. I hate him. You've said it all. He's a grammar police, which he'd be good on Twitter.

He keeps getting my really bins nicked and he speaks in third person. I can't stand the man. Yeah, he's not likable. He wasn't popular at the time either, to be fair. You're matching the opinion of him then, because he was institutionalised several times that you know, was he really

ill? Or was he being put there by his enemies? And there's a biographer called Julia Kay, who argues that he was put away not because he was ill. He sounds pretty eccentric, sounds pretty out there, but on one occasion

he was put away by I think the brother of a woman he was trying to propose to or try to marry. But he had discovered that the woman he was trying to propose to was sleeping with another and he raised a big old stink about this and then was putting an asylum for it. That was the first time,

but then later on he was putting an asylum for unwelcome attentions to a widow and then another time for attacking a man with a shovel and then a third time for he formed an emotional attachment to a woman without even having met her first

and he then called himself instead of Alexander the Corrector, Alexander the Conqueror and this woman was his predestined partner in life and tried to get together with her even though she didn't know who he was. Okay, all right, I mean...

But that first time it was just a different setting. But there is, like in the Oxidictionary of National Biography they say that that first time is what kind of threw him over the edge a little bit and from then on... Yeah, well he wanted to regulate private madhouses and supposedly

the fact he didn't manage to improve private madhouse regulation made him very depressed, which then meant he was sent to Bedlam again. Although, as James points out, hitting people with a shovel and forming unwelcome attachments to women will also do it. That'll do the trick. So he was complicated. He wasn't an

unproblematic fave is what I'm trying to say. Fair. Fair assessment, but I'm impressed that in those days you were able to form attachments to people you hadn't met romantically pre-internet. How are you doing that? I see what you mean. It was the daughter of Sir Thomas Abney of Newington

who was the Lord Mayor of London. So basically, he'd heard of the Lord Mayor's daughter, possibly seen her in some periodicals, and decided that that was his future wife. He called her Princess Elizabetha and said that her home was a place called Silesia

which he would besiege. I have the same thing about Daniel Craig. You know, so I think that's fine. You're planning to besiege Daniel Craig's house because it's probably a public service we're doing. No, it's not his house. It's our house.

We live together. It's been our happy spousal home for a few years now, actually. Opens the door. Dressed as a massive black currant trying to make ribena for you. Yeah, so that's Alexander. So on,

I should say he's an Ilias, sorry, just to go a long way back to him referring to himself in the third person, because I wouldn't want you to think badly of him. I don't know if he did it in speech. He just did it in the book he wrote, which I read Decent Portion of, which had the catchy title The Correctors

earn its address to the inhabitants of Great Britain showing that the late earthquakes and the fact we are at war with a powerful nation are allowed to call from divine providence for a speedy and thorough reformation. It actually goes on, but it was basically saying, look, we've

had some earthquakes, we're at war. This is clearly because you guys aren't abiding by my grammatical correction. And that whole thing, he refers to a lot of stuff that's happened in his life, but he always calls himself The Corrector. He would write pamphlets as well, called things like Mr Crudham Greatly Injured

or The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, which is practically a comic book, writing a pamphlet about yourself and calling it The Adventures of. It is. And then I think that was just about how his sister tried to have him sectioned or had him sectioned. So it's disappointing if you think you're getting an adventure book and you get an annoying sibling rivalry.

Yeah, imagine if The Avengers were like that. It was just Iron Man's brother, stimulus trainer. It's like, that's why there's a, you know, get your own shoes. Captain America turns up with his sponge. Yeah. So on graffiti, some stuff on that,

I was going through my old files and stuff on graffiti and the ancient Roman graffiti seemed to so often be about discouraging public excretion. So Roman Graffiti includes the phrase anybody urinating here will incur the wrath of Mars to the one

defecating here beware the curse and shit with comfort and good cheer so long as you don't do it here. Wow. So it seems like Graffiti in those days was doing a public good. Yeah, it's like no ball games kind of thing, isn't it? It's just trying to stop people from doing bad things around

your house. Exactly. So it's like getting in this driveway. That's my favourite one that people put up. This gate permanently in use. Permanently in use. If it was permanently in use, I couldn't read the sign. Get out of here. I was in a really

beautiful place in Cotswold recently going for a walk on my own in a wood and there was a massive tree and it was like, and it's Cotswolds, you know, it's like David Cameron Territory and like Bluebell Wood and someone had carved in giant letters into the tree, Millwall.

I just thought that was so great. I'm so glad Millwall fans are going that far afield to stop making this down. Underneath it, it said, get your parliamentary favours here, Col Dave on 01. Will that still be relevant when this goes out? Definitely. It will keep it relevant. We'll keep it in

the news. I've seen some celebrity graffiti which is very exciting. I saw something that Lord Byron wrote. Really? There's a place in Greece called the Temple of Poseidon and he carved his name really big and florid into the

column of this 4,000 year old temple, which is pretty disrespectful but it's surrounded by other names because it was just the thing you did at the time. Byron does it. It's kind of okay, isn't it? I bet the council got really pissed off with all the other people who did it. He's like the Banksy of the

19th century. You're right. That Banksy did a load of graffiti just in Waterloo and that tunnel in Waterloo, I don't know if you remember it was one of the first things. I went to see it when it happened and then we started

filming QI and I saw it right at the start and by the time we finished filming it, it had already been covered three or four times by other people putting graffiti on. That was kind of the point. He was like, this is now a graffiti place and just put whatever you want here. We've come up with a new way of using hydro gel

which is like this amazing kind of substance. You put it on the wall and it just sticks to the top covering of paint and it can take that off and you can see the graffiti that's underneath that graffiti. So in theory, you could keep going taking layers

and layers and layers off this, I think it's called leaky passage or something, isn't it? Leaky tunnel or something. I think you're right. You'll be able to get to the Banksy's again. That would be awesome. I used to work for Camden Council and Banksy did some graffiti on the side of a shop and

I used to work in a street team that used to do with waste and street cleaning and obviously our guys cleaned that off, right? The shop owners tried to sue Camden. They were like, what did you do? You got rid of a Banksy. We were going to cover it with glass and make loads of money. I don't know how that was so funny. I find it really incredible about the point of graffiti

is that it sort of lives out in public but now because of capitalism people are like, no, no, we're going to preserve that. We're going to get the first specs on it and make it rich off of it. I can't believe you were... That's always reported on. I can't believe you were one of those people who cleaned

a Banksy off. It always creates this massive controversy, doesn't it? And Banksy's just there in the sidelines, chuckling away. But whenever Banksy does anything, Athena goes along with her sponge, doesn't she? Yes. Well, not just Banksy, everybody. Can I correct some...

Just correct some grammar broadly before we finish. Which is... Who's grammar are you going to correct? This thing that I'm pointing to here. Bicep. What is it? I'd say bicep. Yeah, I'm accidentally incorrect, guys.

This is not a bicep. This is a biceps. And whenever you hear someone refer to a singular bicep, you can correct them and stick that S on the end. Biceps literally means two headed, two biceps headed. There are always two heads. It's never just unicep.

And it's just because the muscles got two, like, connecting bits. James, you've just been paninode. I can't believe it. That was an amazing moment. Well, if Anna didn't have such impressive biceps, then maybe I wouldn't have done... Yeah, I threw you off your game with that.

You said bicep implying that you think they're so small, it only qualifies as one. Good point, yeah. There's only one on each side. So you have to say I pulled my left biceps too. Exactly. Even if you pulled your right one.

No, that's not true. I just called mine guns. I'm worried about that. OK, that's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. We will be back again next week. If you're lucky, you might get another guest. If you're unlucky,

you might get Dan Shriver back. But until then, you can find these guys on their Twitter accounts, James. At James Harkin. Andi. At Andrew Hunter M. Athena, if you've got Twitter. I do, at Athena Cablenu.

Athena Cablenu, and you can contact me by emailing podcast at qi.com. You can also go to our website, know such things as fish.com to listen to all our other episodes, pick up a hoodie or a cap or a vinyl, whatever bit of merch you like. And you can also book tickets to the

podcast stop festival show we're going to be doing. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.