No Such Thing As A Fish - 415: No Such Thing As Tiddlywinks In The Wild West

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Live from Bath, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss top tiddlywinkers, poking pork, and bathing in Bath. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week Coming to you live from Baaaaa! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshensky, Andrew Huntsomurry and James Harkin 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 fact number one, that is Anna My fact this week is that the reason that you can no longer bathe in the Roman bars at Bath Is because they contain brain eating amoeba

Wow So I was, I don't know, doing like a de-rate horror film or something But yeah, it's true, there are amoeba in the bars that will eat your brain I must say Anna, since you told us this fact and we got to our travel lodge or Premier Inn or whatever it was today I was thinking can I drink the water in Bath? Oh yeah, I have a question about this which is that I have drunk the waters of Bath And I don't know exactly which ones I drunk, I imagine that Just some random bathwater

Actually that's the problem with this fact, when you try and research it, if you google Bathwater All you get is someone called Belle Delphine Who is apparently an adult influencer who was selling her bathwater for $30 a bottle Oh wow Okay, well you shouldn't be bathing in Belle Delphine's bathwater or Bathwater And it's not all the water in Bath, it's just directly from the spring So this was, this was discovered in the 70s, I hadn't realised that until 1978 You could bathe directly in the spring, you know when you're in the bath, baths in the museum

There's that bath, how many times do I say the word bath? And I hadn't realised that people used to swim in it until 1978 And then they realised that coming directly from the spring was this amoeba called Nigleria fowleri Which is also known as the brain eating amoeba And you get it in warm fresh water, it's very rare And like I said, it's just this one spring, it's not in any of the rest of the water And it burrows into your brain through your nose, so it goes up your nose and then burrows straight into your brain And it's 100% fatal

But that's okay, that means it's fine if you drink water You're not gonna get it, it doesn't, if you drank the water If you jumped into the, and don't do this, but if you did jump into the bath spas And you just took down a lot down your mouth, but kept your nose out of the water, you'd be fine But then if someone made you laugh halfway through and it accidentally went up into your nose Oh yes, it would murder you It came out the other way What a great murder mystery though

What did I pay 50p to drink in about 2006? That was just Evian, they siphoned it into it It tasted horrible, it tasted sulphurous and it was really strong stuff Sorry, what's the story Andy, what's his story? I went to the bath pump rooms in 2006 and paid 50p to drink a glass of Frank I'm sorry guys, horrible water Very clever, seeing his magic, it was nasty I think this is the bit that doesn't have the amoeba in it

So it's boreholed now, so basically you still get the really curative, brilliant waters of bath That feed the Roman barns and they feed, you guys have probably been to that hotel with the swimming pool on the top That's fed direct from the spring, which is very lovely And that's just all through boreholes, so it's not coming straight from the spring So this amoeba is filtered out Why did you drink it? Why was the thing to do, was it? It's advertised

You go to the bath, you know the beautiful tea room at the bath spa They say this is the water that people have been drinking for hundreds of years for its curative properties This is the water that hasn't cured anyone for the last 2,500 years It did, it cured a man called Bladdard, who was the whole reason for the bath being founded And Bladdard, he had an infection basically, he had a Bladdard infection And he was... He had leprosy He had leprosy, he was exiled by his family

He went to Athens, got leprosy and then came back to England, was exiled by his family for having leprosy And became a swine herd, but then his pigs jumped into the waters of the bath Which were coming up through the borehole And they frolicked and they got better and their leprosy was cured So he built the city of Bath So that's what happened And that is a true story He's like a semi-mythical, probably actually mythical king, isn't he?

But he was like the father of King Lear, Bladdard They first wrote about him, the first person to write about him was Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century And he wrote that Bladdard died when he constructed some wings for himself and flew into a wall Nice one, mate That's so good What a waste Because it sounds like the wings worked, but it was a directional issue that... It was his sat-down, yeah

He was a necromancer, supposedly And so he got the devil to make him wings and stuff like that Wow, that's really cool So just very quickly, because I think a lot of, you know, we're in Bath And so everyone here knows what we're talking about But we do have a lot of overseas listeners And I know it is famous, but these were Roman baths These were built by the Romans and they used to go in every single day

They used to swim, and in the city as well, there's been festivals It's a big deal that after the back of the 70s, no one can swim because of this amoeba Because the city is literally named for it, it's called Bath for it And apparently the reason that this amoeba came around is because there used to be a roof over it And the roof is gone now And so the sunlight has caused for this amoeba to find itself This is what I read on a tweet Wow

But it's from a tweet from someone who felt like they knew what they were talking about You know, there was a solid hashtag next to it And he was a historian, but supposedly there was a big roof that was over it So what did the roof do? Stop the sunlight, and the sunlight is what was attracting the amoeba Wow, because they say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, don't they? But except in this case, when it causes a fatal brain-eating amoeba That's the second half

He's in the small print of sunlight There was a guy who in 1999, a naked man, jumped into the baths He was claiming to be Julius Caesar He jumped into the baths and he refused to get out And there was a big standoff because Well, he's the emperor, you can't just drag him out, can you? Exactly, and they didn't want to go in, maybe because of the amoeba thing But they had to unplug it and then wait for it

It takes three hours to drain Well, they drained the whole thing Wait, just drag him out into the steps and murder him Do it the Roman way It sounds so fun, I don't know if there's anyone listening Maybe there is who remembers this But they used to hold things called the Roman rendezvous And they were held for four nights during the bath festival

And this was in the 60s, you'd pay five shillings And it was a huge party And you'd all just jump around and swim in the baths And then you'd go and dance the night away in the pump room It sounds so fun, like 1,400 people will go to this big old bath party Sounds amazing Someone remembers it? That's a scream that's 40 years too young to remember that

Oh, the baths are so rejuvenating Well, that's the thing, Annie, you said that no one was cured from it But I've checked some local newspaper archives And apparently there was a guy called William Toop of Froome Who suffered from paralysis after getting into cold water to gather watercress And he was cured There was someone else who was bottling wine in a cold damp cellar for several hours And they were cured of their palsy

And there was someone who got colic after drinking stale beer in hot weather And he got cured as well, so, you know, that's evidence for you Yeah I'm not even sure you can get ill from bottling wine in a cellar for seven hours Let alone then get cured by a bath But maybe, it definitely does actually have some curative properties Like things like arthritis Sorry, is that how you get watercress?

You have to go into some water to get it That's the name I'm very interested in that Did you think it just grew naturally on the painted clay heads of those little things you make in your seven? Yeah, I thought it was just like Cress Cress doesn't grow in water, does it? Well, why do you think they cold it? All those years ago, why do you think they cold it watercress? I've never given it even a second thought in my life why I've got watercress

Well, I'm a busy guy Where do you think seaweed's from? Just out of curiosity Yeah Okay The baths used to be prescribed on the NHS until pretty recently Really? No Yeah, they actually had a deal Bath did this bath, Buxton, which for overseas listeners is another big spa town in the UK

Had deals with the NHS, contracts where people will get prescribed water treatments And you'd go in and be sent there for back and joint pain and stuff like that And actually in World War Two, there are really cool pictures, if you look it up No, sorry, I think it's after World War One They decided that sitting soldiers, wounded soldiers in baths for long periods of time Would help them recover more quickly And you can see hospital rooms where instead of lying in beds There were just lines of men who were submerged in baths

Which they had to stay in for up to 42 hours Wow Imagine how wrinkly you go Yeah So the, I'm sorry, bath dimension of rivals, spa town But Harrogate has a spa as well And it's, I don't know guys, it sounds pretty good So some of the treatments that you'd have

These are from the 20s in Harrogate Spa The sulphur electric bath, sounds pretty good Not, there was the beat The old combining electricity with the bath Well, I don't feel quite right, I took another toaster in, will you? There was the peat bath, which used fresh peat from the Yorkshire moors in PEAT You know, the peat that you put on the garden I didn't think you meant peat easily

Someone called Peter gets thrown Fresh peat, room for another? But there was also electric peat Where they put you in a bath full of peat And just ran a current through the peat Every patient got a fresh peat Okay, because you don't want to have someone else's peat That would be disgusting

Imagine some peat that someone else has been in So they use 25 tonnes of peat a week 25 tonnes That's a lot of peat That's so much Do you think all the people who are called peat together weigh more than the amount they use in a week? If it's 20 tonnes, yeah

Yeah Like quite a considerable amount Okay Probably the maths doesn't stack up I've been to a rival spa as well I've been to one in Budapest Budapest has the most thermal spas in the whole of mainland Europe Some more in Reykjavik, but in mainland Europe they have it

Unfortunately, when I went there, I'd left my swimming costume in the hotel And so I thought, well, I'll just buy one when I get there But they only rent them Oh So I had to rent a swimming costume in Budapest But the good news is that the baths are very good for skin diseases Right So it just balances out, doesn't it, at the end?

But can you request size, or is it like a school's lost property box when you forget your swimmers? I think they just looked at me and went, peat! Very extra large Have you guys heard of the bath curse tablets? Oh, no Oh, this is very cool This is a collection of 130 Roman-era curse tablets

And they were discovered in 1979, 1980 And the idea was if someone stole something from you in bath You could go to these tablets which were connected to a goddess And you could say, I want you to take over the investigation, goddess And you can smite the person So the idea was if they went to that the person who stole the thing might return it because they were freaked out that, you know, some of the goddess was on the case

It was a very low crime-solving rate back then, wasn't it? That was their method But it's amazing because there's one thing, and they're not too sure yet but it's written in sort of, you know, Latin as how they wrote on these tablets But they're also written supposedly in British Celtic And if it's the case that it is, and they still don't know if it is the case that it is, it's the only example of British Celtic that we have that has survived on tablet form

Yeah, so historians are trying to work out whether or not that is the case Because I know some of them are And this is a really amazing discovery which goes to show that bath is the bitchiest place known to man because the only things that were found here when everyone excavated the Roman baths was all these tablets saying, I don't like semen suit, they stole my hair clip I want you to kill them It was all such disproportionate stuff like Dose Medis has lost two gloves

So this is Dose Medis referring to himself in the third person So already a bit of a dick Dose Medis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their mind and eyes in the goddess's temple Come on! That's disproportionate It is Dose Medis

It's probably thought, no, after he died, everyone's going, no one will ever mention that guy again Well, I think we've got to move on, guys, to our next fact I've got one little adventure that someone had in a bath recently Great! Save your personal stories, Andy This happened in 2017 in Texas, this is amazing This happened to a woman called Charlesetta Williams She was in the bath, she's 75 years old

and a tornado hit her house and it ripped the roof off the house and then it ripped the bath out of its moorings And she was in there She was in there Wow She was actually in the bath with her 40 year old son at the time And it was...

How old? How old? 40 40? Well, they were Charles... They were Charles Rick from the tornado, they weren't... Who was it? Who was it?

I... I presume Unless... As someone's called Pete, in which case, completely normal When they land, the tornado ripped our clothes off, it must have How did that happen? Come on This is very upsetting

They were fine He was... He was tossed out of the bath by... Come on, come on, come on The wind speed was about 130 miles an hour of the tornado They didn't end up that far away from the house It wasn't like they ended up miles away They were in the garden at the end of it

Okay, I mean, does it have a happy ending? It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy My fact is that there is a Spanish firm Which has six official ham sniffers Their job is to poke pork loins, sniff them, and make sure they're good And at most, they smell 800 hams a day Well, I have a question Don't they all just smell of ham?

Well, that's to you and me, they absolutely would But to these amazing experts So you may have seen this I did the rounds a bit online before Christmas But it's such an incredible fact It's this Spanish firm called Cinto Jotas It's a company that they sell hams And they're 150 years old, they're very ancient lineage firm

They produce very traditional Iberian ham From pigs which have been fed on special acorns, this kind of thing And they have trained workers whose specific job, exclusively It's not like they do this for a couple of hours a day Their job is to smell the hams To make sure they're good before they go on sale And they have little kind of pipettes Or little kind of jabbers to jab the ham in four specific places

And then they have to smudge it over, right? It is the most amazing jobs And some people will be qualified to sniff some types of ham But not other types of ham Yes, what? There's more than one type of ham? There is a guy who is really good But he is not qualified to sniff a particular bit of ham

Wow His father is Like, he hasn't yet qualified to sniffing that particular bit of the ham So they have five seasonal workers at Christmas time But there is one guy who sniffs year in, year out And you have to do each ham in four places So he sniffs 3,200 times a day Yeah, but that's in the high season

Like on a usual day, he'll do 200 and going to 800 So 800 loins a day He'll do 3,200 sniffs And he says even that is pushing him to the edge, to the limit That's one sniff every nine seconds Yeah, it's insane Assuming the standard eight hour working day But if he's only doing nine seconds per sniff

That says to me he's not really doing a very thorough job Well, he accusation leveled Yeah, he's very proud, he's called Mr Vega And he says the job that he is doing pushes him at the limit of human possibility It's just, it's amazing It was in the Wall Street Journal, it's just such a good piece, it's so interesting And they do say that if you can't tell straight away then you're not doing it right So they say it's really got to be an immediate instinctive thing

Oh, okay So, you know, really you should be doing more Yeah, they do tests where they take a smell and they put it into So let's say they'll take 5 millilitres per litre of a smell and pop it into some water And then they'll put it into plastic cups Oh yeah And you'll have to then sniff the cup and because a plastic cup, the odor of the cup itself will take over There's a sort of time limit of about an hour or so where that starts taking over

So the younger I thought it was a couple of minutes of the smell of plastic Oh wow, really, okay Surely it doesn't take us an hour to smell plastic No, because some of the smellers, according to the Wall Street Journal article They take ages sniffing it, but Mr. Vega, this guy who pushes himself to the limit of human possibility He says if you doubt yourself, you cannot do the work And then according to the article, taps himself on the chest

And he says if you doubt one, you have to doubt all of them So he's like, you've got to make your decision now He's an amazing guy Yeah So was this also in the article about Christina Sanchez Blanco Who's the first woman to be head ham sniffer At Cinco Yotas Oh

Because I read that she has such a good sense of smell That whenever her husband buys her a gift She knows what it is before she unwraps it Wow He keeps buying her cowl packs though, doesn't he? Apparently if he buys her perfume, he has to quadruple wrap it So that she won't be able to smell it That's so funny

I didn't realise at first that you were talking about things like perfumes And then I thought she'd be able to say This is an Xbox It's a book by George Elliot, I think It's one of the earlier ones But the accuracy of the nose depends on their exterior life as well So Mr. Vega, talking of perfume He says he wishes and hopes that his wife never changes perfume

Because if she does, that alters his nose Like he went through a bit of a chaotic time When he swapped to a new anti-bolding shampoo And that absolutely messed with his nostrils Because he was like, it was so potent It threw him off and he couldn't do his job well Quite difficult people to be married to really So this poor woman either, you know

A, can't change her perfume and B, her husband's now bald And then Sanchez Blanco Ms. Sanchez Blanco, who you mentioned, James She said that her husband's a policeman And then at the moment he comes home She tells him every day about the day he's had Before he can say a word Because she can smell it on him

Whether it's like gasoline from a car crash She says, soot from a fire Danda from a rescued pet God, you wouldn't risk having an affair, would you? No Well, you might, if you had an affair with like a butcher or something Then that would be okay, wouldn't it? Because all they get is the smell of the meat

And the perfume, it was off their own clothes and stuff Also, he's in this quite small town It sounds like he's having a much more action-packed police life Than you should Are we sure he's not just dousing himself to cover his affair with soot Just before he gets home Or smothering himself in sausages to catch the sausage bang I didn't know

Do you know that Wait for Thin Ham has up to 25% water? They've recently done a study of this And they found that like, when they get this Wait for Thin Stuff Most of it is actually water, not most of it But like a quarter of it could be actually water And so that means that if you have a hundred gram pack of Wait for Thin Ham Which costs about 90p That means, and it's 28% water say

That means you're paying 25p just for the water Which means you're paying the equivalent of like a five pounds for a very small bottle of water That's the equivalent Oh It's only eight times less expensive than Belle Delphine's Bathwater Um, gosh You know Linda McCartney who makes vegetarian Which she doesn't anymore

Veggie, yeah Veggie stuff Someone sent this ages ago And I just remembered it She, the factory that makes her vegetarian fake meat is in Fakenham What? No Fakenham

No Yeah So I don't know, did she choose it specifically? That's amazing Where is it? Where's Fakenham? Do you know, does anyone know where Fakenham is? Oh Fakenham Norfolk

Norfolk Yeah Right Yeah Wow That's why we've never heard of it That's really good And how

Pro sniffing things Oh yeah Professional sniffers This is a thing And there are lots of different kinds of professional sniffer all the way across the world So there are people who sniff armpits for a living There's a man called Barry Druitt Who genuinely works for a firm called Princeton Consumer Research

And he's spent 20 years smelling armpits You haven't explained why Great point Cosmetics companies send this firm Princeton Consumer Research All their products which have different active ingredients So he smells armpits of volunteers Rates how smelly they are And then they use the deodorant or whatever it is

And he will rate how well it manages to mask things Oh really So a firm might have six different kinds of potential new deodorant And he will, you know, assess which one is best But he doesn't like smelling armpits, he said He thinks they're disgusting Well, you know, a job's a job, isn't it? He should have said it in the interview, shouldn't he?

What they said in the interview, do you like smelling armpits? He should have gone, no, I don't actually Well, if you liked it, that would actually be bad Because you wouldn't want a deodorant to mask the smell of an armpit That's a good point He needs someone who hates the work Yeah But he doesn't have to do it nose to pit, as it were

He has these smell cones that he sniffs through You get specific smell cones, which are for sampling smells And you put the pad under your armpit, don't you? I think No, no, no, he goes into the pit He goes into the pit But he has got a cone kind of caught on sanitaire of little paper cone I see

Because sometimes they do it with an armpit pad I think maybe if they've got a bit of extra budget And there's a company called Cavincare Which is an Indian cosmetics company And they say they have a real problem with women's deodorant As in they have a shortage of volunteers to donate sweat Because women, in particular in India Women is a bit taboo to donate your sweat to be smelled

I actually thought that was sort of taboo worldwide But apparently particularly in India In lighter news, there was a great story today Which Andy showed me Which a dog that was lost in the forest Was taken out of the forest, rescued Because a drone held off a string, a sausage for it to sniff To sniff and chase

And I think it must have been its sense of smell That was helping guide it Obviously it was its sense of smell Well, you can see your sausage You can see your sausage in the air No, they held the barbecue on the beach To lure the dog towards a particular bit of the marshland To keep it safe

So it was definitely a sense of smell thing Hang on, I thought you said they were hanging a sausage from a drone They did a lot of things to find this dog How special a dog was this? It's a very loved dog To the queen's dog? It was the queen's dog Speaking of dogs actually

Obviously you have sniffer dogs in airports quite often And there was a report in 2015 Of the sniffer dogs at Manchester Airport And apparently in the previous 12 months They had failed to spot a single person Carrying heroin or cocaine over the border But they had found 181 kilograms of illegal meat Wow

Small amounts of cheese But no drugs That's so good There's a Dustin Hoffman quote that I always think about Which is to do with dogs as well And it's attributed to him And I really hope he said it But the line goes

If a lot of dogs are on the beach The first thing they do is smell each other's ass The information that's gotten Somehow makes pacifists out of them all I've thought if only we smelled each other's asses There wouldn't be any war And I don't know why But I think about that all the time

I am saying that it's not one of Dustin's best No, it's not up there Whether you're trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson Yes, you are That's a cut scene from the movie Dustin, stop sniffing her, please Okay, it is time for fact number three And that is James

Okay, my fact this week is that Until it was identified by an art dealer in 1975 Donatello's bronze, the Madonna and Child Was being used as an ashtray and a tiddlywink bowl So yeah, this was Donatello One of the, maybe the greatest sculpture Of the early Renaissance And he made this kind of bronze roundel

And these days it's like one of the best things You can see in the V&A One of the most expensive things But we think, basically It was given to this family And then it was taken by a guy called Lord Malton When he was on the grand tour, he bought it He brought it back

And then generations and generations and generations Of people in his family Just kind of saw it as a little bowl It's kind of, it's like a candy bowl It's quite small You might not know it was from Donatello If you didn't know But then one day they brought it to the V&A

On what they call an options day It's a bit like Antiques Roadshow Where you say how much is this worth And they went, oh yeah, it looks like a tiddlywink bowl And then a few weeks, a few years later The head of the V&A was seeing this person And said, you know what, that's a Donatello And they brought it back

And it's completely priceless But they were just using it to play tiddlywink So funny So with it, you say it looked like a sweet bowl Because it sort of was It was a thing called a Desco D'apato When Donatello made it Which is called a birth tray

And it's a tray that you fill up with sweets And you bring to a mother When she's just given birth Because a birth tray sounds like a tray You would give birth on Someone showed you that tiny little thing You'd think I just thought we could talk about tiddlywinks

What do you think? In all the different countries Got lots of different names In France it's called the game of the flea In Croatian it's called jumping flea In Danish it's called the flea game In Dutch it's called the flea game In Russian it's called the game of fleas

In Spanish it's called the game of the flea In Ukraine it's called game of fleas And we call it tiddlywinks And it appears that we got the word tiddlywinks From an unlicensed alcohol shop Really? Yeah What do you mean?

As in the word tiddlywink used to mean A place where you could get beer But it wasn't licensed And then we kind of stole that name And used it as a game instead Should we say what tiddlywink says? Sorry for the benefit of any listeners Who are not familiar with tiddlywinks

It's a little game where you have plastic counters And you have to sort of flip the plastic counters Using other plastic counters into a bowl And you shoot a wink And you have a special plastic which you shoot with Which is called a shooter But it's also known as a squidger You shoot your wink

And if you get it in the target, great But you might fail to do that But cover an opponent's wink, which is good And if you've done that, you've swapped their wink And they then can't wink anymore with that wink Well, this all sounds very clear I'm glad you played it so fun It's full of a lot of really silly

But actually that thing where if you Tiddle your wink onto someone else's wink And they're not allowed to tiddle that wink That used to be really, really looked down upon And that was really bad form if you did that Now it's part of the game But it used to be, you know, if you did that In the Wild West, you'd get shot

I'd love to walk into the salute bar Where there's a poker game at one table Blackjacket at another one And then the tiddlywink corner And everyone's dead You know, you can also perform a boondock And a boondock is when you free a swapped wink By sending it all the way away

So that's a boondock But how do you send it? So that's... A swapped wink is a wink that's covered by another wink Yeah, so you... How do you free it? You free it by using your wink To fire at your swapped wink

And you knock the swap away So you free your wink However, there's another move then Which is a simultaneous boondock and swap Whereby you boondock someone So your wink has been swapped But you boondock it free You boondock it free

But then your wink lands on top You swap someone else in the middle of boondocking Your wink Yes! Fuck! And that, for some inexplicable reason Is called the John Lennon Memorial Shot There are so many versions of it

That's what I love So it was a big craze in the 1890s And then it fell out of fashion But there were all these sort of late Victorian Abordian versions of it So there's Tiddly Winks 10 There's Tiddly Winks Golf Winko Baseball

Battle Winks Which is Battleships with Tiddly Winks There's Pedro Where you have to get in... There's a clown's mouth That you're trying to wink your winks into In 1992, there was Widdly Tinks Where you have to...

There's a toilet and that's the target Ah! Which is clever Well, it started as Tiddly Winks, of course And then no one knows why the V Of course Well, it fell out But as I'm sure you all know here

It was Chris and Tiddly Winks By Joseph Ascherton Fincher Or Ass Heaton Fincher A double S H I don't know And he invented it in 1889 And got the patent for Tiddly Winks

And I was trying... Going through the British Newspaper Archive I was trying to pinpoint the moment That we definitively lost the D And I think it's roughly 1920 Okay, so you're interested But it really took off again With Oxford and Cambridge

Competing against each other in the 60s, didn't it? And it became a real source of pride For Cambridge And they had this notorious match And it was in 19... It was in 1958 And it was a guy called Peter Downs Who was head of the Tiddly Winks Society

At Cambridge And he wrote to Prince Philip Saying, Prince Philip, have you noticed There's been an article written in the spectator Claiming you cheat at Tiddly Winks There was a satirical article been written And he said Would you care to defend your honour

By playing us Cambridge University at Tiddly Winks And Prince Philip wrote back Saying very politely I absolutely loved to Bit busy But perhaps I could nominate someone in my place And he nominated the Goons

So there was this bizarre match The Goon show Which was Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan And Harry Seacom It was the biggest thing on radio at the time For a comedy show And the Royal Family were big fans So yeah, he sent them along to do it

Yeah Which apparently they tried to get the Goons To play the Tiddly Winks Cambridge had before And so it was so great They managed to get to the Royal Family And they had a royal instruction to go So they had to

And they played Cambridge University I was watching the video of When the umpire kind of launched the big match And he read out a letter from Prince Philip Which I still don't know if Prince Philip Wrote it himself Or if it was a bit of satire from the umpire I hope he wrote it himself

And the letter said Give my best wishes to both teams But try if you can To do it in such a way That you convey that I wish the Cambridge team to lose Then I had hope to join my champions But unfortunately while practicing secretly I pulled an important muscle in the second

Or Tiddly joint of my winking finger And then in the end Unfortunately Cambridge did win, didn't they? They did 120.5 to 50.5 A walkover Yeah, it really was The students were in full evening dress

All the way through The goons were wearing yellow night shirts With a royal Tiddly Wink tie On that And the game finished With Harry Seacum singing a special Tiddly Winks anthem And it was a big deal

Like this was the big moment For the Tiddly Winks community in the UK Not for the goons They had bigger moments Not for the Tiddly Winks Not for the UK Or for the University of Cambridge Yeah

But Tiddly Winks got a big moment there And interestingly So that was on the 1st of March 1958 On the 10th of March 1958 Spike Milligan in the time since the match And the next goonshow being recorded and going out Wrote an episode of the goonshow called Tiddly Winks In which after the hands of the defeated Cambridge

Nettie Seagoon, who Harry Seacum played Seeks his gameful revenge And the whole episode So again, broadcasting to millions and millions Tiddly Winks became this big thing And there's a Facebook page Which is the official Tiddly Winks Organization in the UK

They have a Facebook page There's only about 400 people who follow it Really old me Only 400 I thought it would be in the low hundreds of thousands The content is slammin And there's a guy on there called David Lockwood And he says, this is from his post

He says, Prince Philip did more to expand The noble game of Tiddly Winks than anyone else in the world I tell people that his sponsorship of the Goonsmatch of 1958 Created an extensive publicity And by the early 1960s There were more than 200 clubs in the British Isles Prince Philip continued to support Tiddly Winks Through the establishment

He made a silver wink trophy And he backed the 50th anniversary in 2008 So he was big It's one of those sports that I'm afraid America has trounced Britain at consistently For a couple of decades now Yeah, they're much better at Tiddly Winks Than British people now

The British players I'm really sorry, there was an article in the LA Times In 2019 about the kind of Federer and Nadal Of Tiddly Winks They were called Larry Kahn and Oh, I think it's David Lockwood is the other one Yeah, Kahn and Lockwood are the two Anyway, 2019, they reported on this match

That Kahn was playing in Cambridge And I'm quoting directly here He'd flown over from Washington DC on economy Nobody asked for an autograph or to pose for a selfie Kahn's privacy hasn't been invaded By being the most successful Tiddly Winks player of all time The man who was officiating the match he played in Cambridge Quoting here

E-mailed the members of the English Tiddly Winks Association To encourage them to come and watch In the following five hours of play Nobody did And that's him e-mailing the English Tiddly Winks Association If they're not turning up I know I think one of the reasons is

Because it used to be illegal to play Tiddly Winks In the UK in a pub without a licence What? In the UK in a pub without a licence Wow So there was a Tiddly Winks match In fact, it was a marathon A Tiddly Winks marathon

Over 15 yards at the York Beer Festival On the 3rd of November 1970 And this was supposed to take place This was an article in the Daily Mirror that I found But it was called off because the police rang up And said no, it's illegal to do that without a licence Was this a gambling thing? Or is it dangerous?

It was for money It was for charity they were doing it And they said there's certain games that you're allowed to do in pubs If there's money involved And Tiddly Winks wasn't on that list And so they weren't allowed to do it And so they replaced it with a marathon of blowing peas through a straw Hang on

And that was on the list of things you were allowed to do It wasn't counted as a spot I see Actually, there is a genuine crisis in the world of Tiddly Winks happening now And it's that there is a massive wink shortage And it's a problem because most of the winks that are being used these days Were made a long time ago There are not firms making Tiddly Winks these days

So even the Cambridge match I just mentioned from 2019 They'd be using 1980s winks No Really What were we using with Tiddly Winks? My winks weren't from the 1980s The supplier has gone bust So this is a problem

And there are hopes that 3D printing will save the day Right Which will be amazing You know, yeah Well, I don't know if it is as young and vibrant as one might want it to be Because if you look at the list of Tiddly Winks champions I think you mentioned Lockwood and Khan I would say they are more the Djokovic Nadal

And the Nadal Federer are Khan and Patrick Barry The British So who's the guy who doesn't like vaccines? Look, they're all very well vaccinated And it's social distance matches And I have no idea But basically Patrick Barry is a British chemical engineering lecturer at Cambridge And he has been playing Larry Khan on and off

Since they first met in 1995 Right So that's a good 26 years Even in 1995, Khan had been going for 15 years So he's basically going for 40 years this guy They need fresh blood, I think, in the Tiddly Winks game Yeah, maybe Patrick Barry is sponsored by a type of whiskey, isn't he? Yeah

Basically, the whiskey company have decided that they don't want to sponsor Christiana Ronaldo Or Federer on Nadal Or anyone like that They want a real person who is passionate about their spot And so they found Patrick Barry, who is the world's singles champion at Tiddly Winks Is it possible they looked at the cost of getting Federer to be sponsored to sponsor the whiskey? If you look at this 24 year old whiskey from Cameron Bridge grain distillery It has a picture of the Tiddly Winks champion on the label

Amazing Awesome Apparently it has waves of vanilla, peppery spiciness, and the taste of pencil shavings I think it's really exciting that this exists And I think there should be Like, because when you read the Facebook page And if you ever get a chance, I encourage everyone listening to go and check out Newswink The newsletter by the official Tiddly Winks

Have you read Winking World? That's another one No, I haven't even gone there Winking World is another very good one Right They recently ran a 12 page biography of Alan Dean No How did they confine that to 12 pages? It's a genuine, Winking World 101 said

Most of your comments on WW100 were broadly the same This is all very well But why isn't there a 12 page biography of Alan Dean? Well, dear reader, I aim to please Then there was a 12 page biography of Alan Dean It is time for our final fact of the show And that is my fact My fact this week is that there is such a thing as Bendy Rocks

But this is, I mean, it sounds bullshit, but it's true There are genuine Bendy Rocks in the world So there is a sandstone, it's called Itacolomite And it's not found in many places in the world You get it in Brazil, you get it in North Carolina You get it in Georgia, there's a town in India You get it, I'm sure it's other places But they've only been found in sparse areas around the world

And this is a rock where basically you should watch videos online It wobbles when it's held on either side In a way that rocks don't And it's because... It's because in the inside of the rock there's quartz And there's these interlinking bits These interlocking sort of Bendy bits inside that hold the quartz together And there's voids in them

Which means there's bits of space where they just find themselves Having a bit of flexibility But there's enough of them that the whole thing can bend So it's not like if you're walking along the mountain You're like you're on jelly the whole time It's not like that, you have to get quite a thin slab And then you can see it wobble a little bit Yeah, exactly, yeah

If there was one thing we were certain of in life Is that rocks don't bend So I was fascinated to learn that they actually do And actually, interestingly, it turns out all rocks bend They just don't do it as quickly as old Bendy may over here What they do is If you see, and you can see rocks all over through Even on the side of cliffs where you notice that they have this kind of bend in them

Over millions of years Exactly, but over millions of years If there's a pressure on the side of a rock It will slowly bend to the pressure It takes thousands, if not millions of years But if you've got the time You can bend any rock Yeah

Is there a use for this Bendy rock? I'm sorry to be all practical Bouncy castles? Like actual castles? What, where you have that a bouncy? Awesome I'm not sure we have enough of it Or if it's been studied enough to know if it's useful for practical things

Like building or so on So the example that I've got on the screen here for the audience tonight Is from Leeds University, that's in their archives So they obviously send it to universities around the world Going, look, a fucking Bendy rock So it's obviously a new... That's very cool Do you want to hear about another magic rock?

Yes, please There are magic rocks around the world Which are the opposite of seismometers So they tell you when there's not an earthquake Bingo I have a feeling I can do that anyway You probably could You probably could

Is it when they're not moving? That means there's no earthquake Yes, yes, but They're even more magical than that Imagine, they're called PBRs They're precariously balanced rocks They look like they should fall over any minute now But they're still standing

And if you know, you know, how long they've been there They're reverse seismometers They tell you they haven't fallen over There hasn't been an earthquake In that set period of time that they've been balanced So this is really useful Because if you want to build a nuclear plant You want to build it somewhere where there hasn't been

An earthquake for a very, very long time Or a bridge or whatever So you build it right underneath A precariously balanced rock And so these are really useful That's amazing, but aren't that many of them? No, there aren't that many It's not that useful actually

I can think of one This isn't a rock so much as a virus But there is a thing called a Medusa virus I think it might be useful in Bath Because it can turn amoebas into rocks Oh, really? Isn't that clever, yeah So when the virus goes into the amoeba

It kind of makes this kind of rocky shell Over itself and turns itself into a rock That's incredible Isn't that cool? But there's the amoeba still inside The amoeba is still living inside, yeah What a horrible way to go Yeah, that's great though

So Baths Park could become a rock pool Which would be awesome Is that a thing here? It's in Australia Yeah, we have rock pools in this country Yeah, but we've also got watercress It doesn't mean we've all thought about these things I've got a magic rock to accompany yours You can get rock

I think we actually mentioned this once I don't know if such a thing is the news The long-lost TV show we once did But you can get rock that is as soft as butter That you put your finger in it And it bends like clay And this happens It's quite rare, but it happens for instance

Cavers are told to look out for it It happens when people are making big quarries They come across it And it essentially happens when rock's being dissolved The stone can be dissolved by very salty water Or acidic water surrounded But sometimes a bit of rock will be dissolved But then it will be surrounded by other rocks

So the rock doesn't dissolve and then flow away It just gets trapped, this soft dissolved bit of rock Inside another rock And so apparently when you're caving sometimes Or when you're quarrying, you'll tap through a bit of rock And then suddenly you'll think it's rock solid And you'll put your finger in It just penetrates all the way through like magic

Why is that dangerous? Why is it dangerous? Why is it? It's not I thought you said that people were told to look out for it But look out for it, look out for that adorable squirrel It's not, look out! Right, sorry

Look out Look out Do you want to hear some rock related words And maybe guess what they are? So these are kind of mining related I would say So can you guess what a bottom steward is? Bottom steward Bottom steward

Is Dustin Hoffman played this role actually? Someone who looks after the lifts in the mine? Pretty close It's someone who looks after the people who work at the bottom of the pit Oh, okay, yep Back ripper Back ripper No?

It's someone who removes the old supports So when you're going away from somewhere You get all the supports from behind you And then you put them in front of you So you're ripping them away from the back That's so clever Do you know what a glory hole is? Yes

Well, I think, I thought I did Perhaps they've got time for that sort of business down the bottom of a mine though Everyone's got to let us steam at the end of the day No, I've no idea If you have that rock that you could just put your finger in Then maybe down Is it a way of seeing from different mining tunnels to each other? No, it's just what miners call an extremely impressive excavation on the surface

They call that a glory hole Can I just quickly tell you something about glory holes? Oh, yeah, go on Finally, we're on that subject, are we? I remember, so when Covid first kicked off The EU had a bunch of recommendations for how to avoid getting it And there was, and I was on the EU legal side of the website A recommendation that you take advantage of glory holes

To stop yourself from contracting the disease Wait, that's how you have sex through, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes Yeah And it's in the EU law It feels like there might be other diseases that you're leaving yourself open to You just saw people walking around with a dart in you with a hole in them I know that the oldest glory...

We're just on glory hole facts now But the oldest glory hole in Australia is in a museum, I think, in Perth And there was a big argument about whether this should be allowed to be in a museum Because, you know, it's a glory hole But they were saying, well, it's a really important part of the LGBTQ community In Perth and in Western Australia How old is it? Is it like cavemen? And is it an interactive exhibit?

Have you seen... Dan, have you seen those things at the seaside where you put your head through And you get photograph? It's like that I know it's my fault we're on this, but let's go back to your raw vocabulary No, no, I was going to say... Oh, do you know the word bougie? It was a particular fast-drying type of cement that you would pump into the bottom of a mine To give you a flaw

Cool That was known as bougie Yeah, isn't that cool? Mining is so cool Some mines are so deep that the lifts can't go all the way down Because the lift cable is so heavy Oh, wow That you have to stop, because the lift would snap under the weight of the cable

So you have to go down to a certain level and get into a new lift and go all the way down to the bottom Wow The technology that they have is just crazy So that's taller, like, it goes deeper than the Burj Al Khalif, for example Well, no, I think they have to have more than one lift as well Oh, there's more than one lift there, right? Yeah, same issue with skyscrapers Oh, wow

Tracy Emin, the artist, married a rock a few years ago The rock are... No, just a rock, sadly Sadly for her She found a rock in her garden and she said, I'm marrying this rock She was 52 She wore her father's funeral shroud for the marriage And she said, it's not going anywhere, it will be there waiting for me

And she said, the stone I married is beautiful and dignified, it will never let me down They divorced two years later Do you know what's mad about that? Is that I'm pretty sure I was reading an interview with Tracy Emin recently And her mum wanted to call her pebble I'm fairly certain that's right And her mum really wanted to call her pebble And I think the doctors at the hospital said, we can't let you call your daughter pebble

Because you'll be fucked up if you do Why would they say that? The doctors They said it's not a good name They said it's not a proper name Well, tell that to Fred Flintstone Okay, that is it That is 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 our Shriverland Andy At Andrew Hunter M James At James Harkin

And Anna You can email podcast at qi.com Yep, or you can go to our group account Which is at no such thing or our website No such thing as a fish.com All of our previous episodes are up there Do check them out And I just want to say, Beth, thank you so much

That was so much fun We love being here every time And we'll come back again And everyone else who's at home listening right now Thank you for listening We'll be back again next week with another episode We'll see you all then Goodbye!