No Such Thing As A Fish - 431: No Such Thing As A Vampire From Devon

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Dan, James, Andrew and special guest Rachel Parris discuss piano prodigies, snow-struck skiiers, urine luck, and the Devon Dracula.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody Andy here just before we start this week's show wanted to let you know we have a very special guest on This week Anna is away very sadly. She's on her holidays, but the great news is that in her place We have the absolutely magnificent Rachel Paris now I'm sure you may have heard of Rachel if you haven't frankly wherever you're being guys. She's a Comedian she's a musician. She's an actor an improviser. She does it all She has been on so many brilliant shows and she is a musical comedian as well She tours the country with a grand piano performing magnificently funny solo shows She's basically the heir to Tom Lear and Tim Minchin put together and on top of it all

She has just published her first book. It's called advice from strangers And it's a kind of comedy book slash memoir slash feminist manifesto All centered around the time that she traveled around the country asking her audiences to give her pieces of advice It's funny. It's serious. It's hilarious. It's uplifting and we're so glad that she could come on the show because as you're about to hear She was absolutely great. So that's it without further ado on with the show Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray James Harkin And it's our very special guest Rachel Paris 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 and that is Rachel My fact is that list the composer played the piano so hard in his concerts that he regularly broke piano strings and Superfans would nick those strings and make bracelets out of them I I've so I don't play the piano But it feels like that's quite a hard thing to do to break a string Guitar string, right?

Piano string. It's rare. It's very rare. He's not the only person to ever do that But I think that I think that it happened to him all the time That was like his thing is I'm gonna break these. Why was he so angry? I don't know. Maybe he just had like really heavy hands or something There were comments that he had massive hands Which allowed for him to stretch a lot of piano players say that that's not actually a thing There was certain there were certain patterns that he would play that a big hand doesn't necessarily We actually have plastic casts of his hands, so we know exactly how big they were. Yeah, we do you mean in your home? They're here tonight

We find that his fingers were slender and long but they weren't like massively long like I think Rachmaninoff had really big hands Rachmaninoff had 12 inches and his hands I Measured mine mines nine inch span because I've got small hands, but a big stretch But yeah, when you measure 12 inches out on a rule, that's insane So Rachmaninoff was known for having like absurdly big hands and you could only play Rachmaninoff pieces If you've got those giant you can fake it a bit But you have to do some very clever maneuvering if Rachmaninoff was alive today Yeah, and if he if he did that mine, you know when you mime a phone

Your thumb in your little finger. Yeah, he would itch the top of his head with his thumb He could only mime a car phone from the 80s So this whole thing of him banging on the piano He was a passionate amazing player and that was kind of a thing. He was like a rock and roll list He was like rock and roll wasn't he list but fortunately if he did smash up a piano He always had two pianos on stage with them That's such a cool idea And I'm not sure if it was necessarily because he knew he was going to smash up a piano

It's because he was such a showman that he wanted to give both sides of his face basically to the audience So he didn't have a roadie bringing on the piano when he broke his like dragging it along I think he would drag it out. Really? Yeah, it's like I've read in the count of a gig where he He he dragged the second piano out and I think if you were an audience member there was a second piano You would be slightly disappointed if it didn't come into play. Yeah, you think he hadn't given it his all It's like a Czechos piano, isn't it? And he had these like beautiful flowing locks of hair which made him very popular as he really had the whole like Elvis You know someone coined the term listomania

Yeah, that people were absolutely obsessed with him the way they are sort of today about pop stars But he actually had the talent To earn it, but yeah people would ask for locks of his hair. Yes, and cut they would collect his cigarette butts They would wear them in the chains on their necklaces with his initial There's a kind of one lady doing But there is it like it's a it did happen and apparently everyone hated it because she was carrying another stinky old cigar end basically They were like Susan In the butt

I was reading listomania it does sounds like it was a bit of a just like beadle mania You know where it was just screaming girls and stuff like that But apparently the original term the mania was used in terms medically It was it wasn't just that people were just getting too excited They genuinely thought that this might be leading to medical conditions So if lists came into town, they'd be like, you know, we got to get doctors ready. We got I mean, I'm making that up To effect. That's what the mania meant. It was that right people actually got ill. Yeah, exactly I was thinking that his performance is a bit like you too, Andy and Rachel you do ostentatious, right?

Which is an improvised Jane Austen play and his concerts were quite a bit like that I was reading it's a while since I've seen you two live by poorly received Well, he would like get what a member of his audience to give him a little sort of motif a little theme And they might just go do do do do or something maybe not like the Nokia theme And then he would spend the rest of the concert just like doing the amazing bits He had a very interesting life, so he was a prodigy as a child and he was your hot house by his None of these none of these was like doodling around till they were 50

They were but it was kind of interesting just on that I'll we'll go back to that but like because mass market pianos are just coming and Also, the French Revolution had just happened So you had pianos were only played by posh people and they were really really expensive and you could only get them if you Super posh but then suddenly just around the time of Mozart and then list after him suddenly You could get cheap pianos and that meant the children could play it children could practice it And so you had these children coming up who were as good as the you know posh You know and also all the previous pianos were cheap if slightly spattered with the blood of aristocrats

It would be dragged away Some somewhere But so yeah, so his dad took him around his dad worked him like a dog for years You know years his father died when Franz was 15 and he he took pupils as a 15 year old prodigy And then had this incredible performing career until I think his late 30s maybe and then step back Yeah, because he had a lover a countess love hello who who encouraged him to compose She said look this before me is all well and good He's making a lot of money, but and he just kind of stepped back. He moved to Weimar and

And to start a composing who is the lover? Do you know? Yes? She was called countess No, sorry. She was a princess. He was married to a countess and traded up to princess Caroline von Sein Wittgenstein anyway She left her own marriage for him and there was this whole thing about whether they could annul the marriage so they could be her Marriage so they could be married and the Pope agreed to it and then he changed his mind It was a big old thing, but yes He so he took a really crap job as a couple meister at the court of Weimar and he had to wear Archaic clothes to perform. Oh, well because he was a rock star and then he went and so it was a bit like

Suddenly it's like a music beef eater or something I didn't think of ostentatious a bit and that you're basically dressing in stuff that was the hide-of-fashion 200 years ago And the pay was so bad it only paid for his cigars But we don't know how quality his cigars were to be fair Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he could have sold them on eBay afterwards Yeah, and Caroline de Sein Wittgenstein She was a Catholic princess wasn't she and she got him into Catholicism and then he went on to try and become the Pope's personal

He wanted to be the official composer to the Pope But he was turned down and the alleged story of why he was turned down is that apparently he was playing in the Cloisters one day and all the nuns in the nunnery ran to him and started kissing him and And the Pope decided well if he's like that if he's gonna have that effect on women, we're not gonna have him as the official How hot was this guy? I Was I think he was he was six foot two we've established he had big old hands Yeah, and he had a lot of mistresses in his life

He did he did in later life take holy orders, but minor holy orders. He didn't become a full priest I think maybe because it would have involved of our celibacy and he was just he wasn't quite ready He just did it as a hobby Basically Well, here's a weird thing in 2018 in Spain's got talent He didn't He did not show up itself However, he kind of did in a way because one of the competitors of that year was a guy called Michael Andreas

Who's supposedly the great great grandson of lists really? Supposedly and he said to be the son of not only list but of one of his prodigies lists prodigies Who was called Sophie mentor and Sophie mentor was supposedly the best his favorite and she did have a kid But by all the accounts she had it with someone else But this guy's claiming that he is the great descended from both lines Yeah descended from both lines So he's even picked like a mother that you can't trace it back to so supposedly we have a descendant who's incredible by the way I've seen him play. He was a prodigy as well. He was a child prodigy. He was winning competition since he was five years old

They're all prodigies Rachel because you're a classical pianist. I am I think I was prodigy I did like piano competitions when I was small and I was teaching when I was 15 really yeah Wow, we teaching what I'm saying is you don't have to be a prodigy to teach at 15 You just have to be willing Were you teaching smaller children or were you teaching? Yes more children So I was like grade eight and I was teaching grade one. That's really impressive. That's a guy that you're smoking at the moment I

Do think if you've got the willingness to practice and basic like strong musical aptitude and if you start young then you're going to be a child Prodigy Doing down like Wasn't that shit hot, but like, you know, that's so interesting. Do you hear how words? You get there. Do you guys know Lang Lang? Yeah, one of the big concerto players piano players of recent years And he's a global name. He only got into playing piano. He was a child prodigy by the way He was inspired hearing lists Hungarian Rhapsody number two by

From Tom and Jerry and that's how he got into playing the piano Oh, I totally grew up watching that. I can really understand that the cat concerto and it was Tom was playing piano Jerry's on the inside gets woken up and they start having a fight. It's an amazing piece supposedly a lot of piano players Began their love watching this one cartoon and then when you get older the the piece Yeah, it's the Hungarian Rhapsody, which is already a phenomenal piece incredibly difficult to play I can play the first few pages and then it gets to the really hard bit And I'm like, no, but in the cartoon which I had on VHS

So I watched it over and over and over again They mess with it They pull it around and they go into like the can can and they go into little jazz bit in the middle of it And then return to the piece. So when I got older and I started playing it I had I had be like, oh, oh the can can doesn't happen here This bit doesn't turn into jazz I've got one other connection that list made in his life Yeah, so we said before list had big old hands, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's someone else. He met who also had big hands

George Elliot George Elliot George Elliot We have a running fact on this podcast that George Elliot had great big head if you're one big one big head She could play right now for only the right hand She have different size hands. Yeah, but we don't it's supposedly yeah She she she was a dairymaid in younger life and she turned the butter and I got milk the cows milk the cows Okay, this gave one absolutely honking hulk fist And if you look at pictures of her they never show her They didn't have enough paint

But basically all big and so self George Elliot big hand In 1854 she visited List with her lover George Lewis They were fleeing scandal because he'd left his wife to be with female George Elliot and they made friends They had coffee together imagine the conversations. They would have heard Okay It is time for fact number two and that is James Okay, my fact this week is that the downhill skiing at the Nagano Olympics in 1998 was postponed due to snow

For too too much too much too much snow If you go on encyclopedia britannica about the Nagano Olympics It says the most memorable aspects of the Nagano games was arguably the weather Oh, wow, it said it brought heavy snow and periods of freezing rain. There was even an earthquake That's incredible. Where is Nagano? It's in Japan. Oh Well, that's it's prone to earthquakes, isn't it? Yeah You want to pick somewhere right in the middle of a tectonic plate if you don't want to yeah, it wasn't like a massive one Oh, okay, but everyone felt it who was there at the time. Yeah

If you were halfway through a ski jump, you'd be the only person who didn't feel it And you'd land and everyone else would have fallen over Maybe the earth moves to your advantage by about 50 meters But yeah, the la times um said um at the time they said we are seeing firsthand the fundamental problem of the winter Olympics They are held during the winter Yeah It's like the ski resorts often they often have not enough snow, don't they or they say oh the snow hasn't happened or it's fallen Do you ever get the wrong kind of snow? Yeah, I feel like that's a yeah. I've been dragged into the world of snow

Oh, you walked through that wardrobe, didn't you? My husband's a huge skier in snowboarder. Um, I am not never skied before Meeting him and I've get dragged to ski resorts now and keep trying to learn to ski really painfully But also yeah, the cancellations for snow happen at ski resorts all the time. They're like, yeah, the slope's closed because of snow Yeah, I think that skiing is something that you should be a child prodigy at right Yeah, because it's easier to learn when you're a child and you don't have the fear I learned when I was in my 30s, right and I say learned It's the worst thing I feel like for me at the moment skiing is simply trying to stop

All it is it's just I'm gonna deep plow all the way down. Why aren't I stopping? Deep plow. What's that when you put your Whenever I've gone skiing I've mastered the going fast and the spinning and the you know, not the spinning sort of the sharp turns Spinning I've mastered the roly-poly down the hill as well But I've never mastered the sideways stop. So no matter how cool I've looked. I've always had to go into the big v plow angrily Like spider-man trying to hold the train from falling off the track. It's a pretty cool way of describing what you're doing

I'm sure it looks that good That's going down doing his pizza. He's got spider With great power Oh, do you think spider-man's ever been skiing? Sorry, never mind But would he would he enjoy it spiders don't like the cold. Do they he's not a real spider. He's not a real man He's neither. He's a freak. He's just a boy I'm the only one who's never been skiing. I'm surprised you've never been skiing

Why not because because you seem like someone who would have been skiing because you're posh Yeah Like I think if people were to meet me and you they think I haven't been skiing and you have been skiing I see I see Just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover People would look at me and say he must be just eating pies and drinking blue wicked too much to be skiing What people and people look at me and see what like polo and croquet. I'm afraid so Yeah, sorry

Oh dear Maybe you guys all know this and it's all really common. So ski jumpers. Yeah They have to get a little friction on the bottom of the skis as possible Because I guess you get loads of ski so we got fast. Yeah, and the plasticky on the bottom And they drip hot wax onto it and then they iron their skis sometimes to get the wax sort of distributed Yeah, and um all the ski makers are really Secretive like like competitive ski teams are really secretive about the ingredients of their wax Oh, really?

Yeah, because and they have these, you know, like they give the bottles boring looking labels or code names and all this But the wax wears off right as you're going down. So that's a problem And in 2007 a pair of chemists who were called peter styring and alex ruth. They developed. I love this skis which wax themselves Self-waxing ski how so you pour the liquid wax into a little reservoir, which is between your Boot so sorry. You're not doing a lot of the work the skis aren't doing it. But yeah, exactly. Yeah Yeah, but it's just then then it's there. So you've got it like like an like air, you know that so you got a bubble beneath it Oh, okay, and then you're not allowed to have any means of power down there But the the wax feeds into this little tube which runs all the way along the ski surface

And as you go into a turn you put pressure down, don't you and it sort of pops a bit of the wax along the bottom of the ski Yeah, that's clever. I don't know if it was allowed or banned or anything like that. Yeah, it feels like it feels super off the books The the coldness of the winter olympics has it is a problem It's like a big problem for a lot of the events One of the early-day things that happened 1924 games Is that the guys who were having to use the stopwatches in order to monitor how fast you were crossing the line Their hands just got too cold and so they were just getting it wrong all the time So there was actually a gold medalist, uh, who won who was called charles jutral

Who was an american who won his event despite being utterly perplexed by the fact that he'd managed it because he'd never ever trained for this Event before he came in thinking i'm gonna come last of everyone and he ended up winning it He didn't even train for the event. He sort of just showed up and did it telling us that the stopwatch didn't work Exactly the stopwatch ran a bit too long. Oh, sorry a bit too quick the guys hands were freezing and it was a big problem So yeah, did you hear about remy lindholm in the beijing olympics quite recently? No He did the 50k cross country ski and the third well It was 50k, but it got short into 30k because the weather was so bad and at the very end He needed a heat pack to treat his frostbitten penis

Should have kept it in his trousers He forgot one of his poles And the thing is this is the second time that that happened to him in in less than a year Does he have an unusually frostbite prone penis? I wonder it feels like he must do there must be something there Or maybe he's not wearing a crucial thermal pant layer or something none of his mates have told him Yeah, what the thermal pants are available. He's still going on one thin pair of M&S briefs The article I read didn't presuppose what was going on. Yeah, I think now it's happened a second time I think we are allowed to ask the question. Yeah, maybe you're prone to it once it's happened once

Oh, yeah, the tip never really recovers. Yeah, bloody hell. It's just a guess. You know, I'm not an expert Anyway, that was the thing that happened I I found another Uh, quite funny cancellation of a sports event in 2016 the premier league match between Manu and Bournemouth. Sorry. I said Manu. That's Manchester United People who don't know And that's football So, um

No, I knew you wouldn't know. Um, so You don't look like a football Too busy too busy teeing up for another trucker That's polo polo 10 well half of it was So they had to cancel the match at the very last minute when a suspicious item was found in the gents lou at old trafford But the suspicious item had been put there by the security firm that was monitoring for suspicious items So they'd done it as a as a testing as a trial testing. This is what a suspicious item looks like. Yeah, like like can you see if you can find it? What's the drill? What will you do? But they accidentally left it there

And the match got cancelled. Wow. So funny. I wonder what it looked like I could have had like wires coming out and like a big big sort of black cartoon ball With a fuse coming out and bomb written in white on the side. Yeah, yeah Um, have you guys heard of the this is an amazing thing? It was proposed in 2002 as a british firm called snowdonia gateway limited They wanted to build a revolving ski slope. Okay. Okay So what it would be it would be 13 stories high Yeah, and it would be kind of like a record player but on an angle. Okay, if you can imagine that And you would start down the slope as the slope revolved and moved upwards

Okay, now the incline was going to be 300 meters long But the plan was if you skied slowly enough and if it got up to its full revolving speed Permanent skiing I the speed that I ski Which is really really slow like i'm going to be going backwards around that You fall off the top Yeah, and they would generate permanent fresh snow with snow guns. It's really clever That's extraordinary. Yeah, it never so it never happened. Sadly as far as I can tell

Because it's completely impossible to build Weirdly no, I think it was just too Ambitious an example of the thing. So these days. I think there is at least one rotating disc slope ski simulator In europe, I think it's someone like the netherlands, but it's quite small It's not 13 stories high and allowing you to like a sort of ski giant mountain thing. That's so cool It just sounds so much fun. Wow, it sounds incredible I can see the problem that if you were at a certain speed you would just be stuck like you would have to be rescued, right? No, they can turn it they can slow it. They can turn it at the end of the day

Like they're not going to stop it for every middle speed skier, right? No, no, no, you'd have to get down eventually It might be like the waltzes that you just have a one go and then you have to come off and other people go on Imagine the poor guy poor guy, right? It's my frostbitten penis twice. He's going to have one more ski and then a nice time Oh no Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is andy My fact is that the 18th century health writer william buccan told his readers that anyone suffering from persistent deafness might benefit from pouring their own urine into their ears each night

That's really good I'm just looking at my notes because I paraphrased what you'd said to us and I've written in 1772 william buccan told people to piss in their own ears Well, he pretty much pretty much right How do I just say it does seem possible that the first person who heard this advice Simply miss her. Oh, yeah They are deaf. Did they say, you know, I know a guy in touring or Do you want some tea? I'm pouring Are they a reliable source?

Well, william buccan was this writer. He wrote the book called domestic medicine Which was basically the beal and endle of health advice in the 18th century He was a proper doctor and he was I think it was actually pretty good as in he wasn't a quack He was you know, he was really trying and he had chapter on absolutely everything under the sun One of the chapters is on deafness and he writes a gentleman on whose veracity I can depend Told me that after using many things to no purpose for an obstinate deafness He was at last advised to put a few drops of his own urine warm into his ears every night and morning From which he received great benefit

He does say you could also use a salt solution Would it work? Yeah, would it work? Like let's say you've got wax in your ears. Would it moisten them? Perhaps I might do you'd need phenomenal aim. That's the problem It's a few drops. That's that's a good detail that I didn't know when I tried it That would have been very helpful But he also had advice in the book for putting onions onion juice in your ear in order to yeah in order to help with So is it just a sort of like any liquid that has some kind of I don't know acidic property or something? This is this is the thought slightly is that earache will eventually go and the thought is is that maybe what it was was a sort of

Pseudo thing where it was just making it feel a bit bearable And then you mistake in the fact that it that it happens because people still parents there's blogs all over on those mum blogs That book by the way domestic medicine there is an argument that it might not have been written by william buccan And might have been written by friend of the show willy smelly. Willy smelly. Yeah The original midwife midwife not that willy smelly the other willy Yeah, so there are two famous willy smellies from the 19th century and

And the 18th century one of them and this one according to smelly's son who's called curse melly He said that willy smelly might have entirely rewritten his original draft So buccan handed in his draft and then smelly sort of put all of his own bits in So it could be that his was normal and then smelly added the urea stuff willy smelly's urine in my ears Also the interesting thing about this book is that it was sort of a sort of equivalent to what i'm trying to say would be a Magician releasing all of the trade secrets of how to do tricks because doctors at the time didn't want patients to know this kind of thing They actually look down on this book saying you shouldn't be giving this information out to the patients

This is what we do and so he kind of put it all into it might you put like just one bit of advice in there that was wrong to try and trick people into You know or a bit like those Like internet spoiler things it's like Step one is this but for more contact your doctor He wrote a he wrote a lot of Medical advice william buccan. He wrote this book called advice to mothers, which again like quite democratizing of becoming a parent god i'm strapping in for this

well He wrote two mothers that and i'm quoting here in all cases of dwarfishness or deformity 99 out of 100 are owing to the folly misconduct or neglect of mothers Wow, yeah, which was i'm sure science at the time, but uh, it's just it's just nice For mothers to feel more guilt There isn't enough going around. Yeah, I think mothers didn't feel bad until he really advanced the form like that So, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah He was it was an amazing guy like he started young. He was um, it was a child prodigy actually

He was Pissing We're joking about but i do feel like as it goes on this is proving my point It's just like anyone who's like excels at anything probably excelled as a child. Yeah, that's true Yeah, no, he supposedly was the amateur doctor to the village when he was still at school So he was he was so annoying. Oh, it's not like you'd be so annoyed by him Wouldn't you the baby doctor not if he was helping you no you would be annoyed really Especially if he's helping you what doctors have to put up with particularly baby

Imagine a 12 year old boy coming to you when you're pregnant going. Oh, it's your fault You haven't been behaving right You know one of the things that uh buccan suggested that when you um, if you'd burnt yourself Kill was to hold it back near a fire. What? There was a few other things like you should put salt on it and you know, you can yeah It's like the old saying goes rub salt in the wound And everyone's a winner It does sound like he was like a child doctor, but he didn't go on to learn anymore

Just left the the knowledge he had at 12 um, one of the earliest records um for treating hearing loss Is from the ebus papyrus, which is an old ancient egyptian papyrus Uh, and that's specifically for wax build-up and they suggest that you put olive oil red lead Ant eggs bat wings or goat urine Into your ears. Oh, so they do go for the urine quite early and also olive oil use that now olive oil for

Blocked ears. Yeah. Yeah. Do you hang the bat wings out like a? Do they look like they're literally flapping out your ears Um, Rachel, you've just written a book of advice effectively based on based on older advice from strangers Correct. Is there any honkingly bad advice that you received because I saw some of the gigs where you collected Yeah, correct. Well, some of it. I just really didn't agree with some of it was very very individual like acquire as many guinea pigs as possible Happiness is bound to follow which I really profound as a previous owner of a guinea pig I don't think that's true. I don't think they improve in large numbers. Yes. We didn't try No, that's true. You only have one you didn't pass through the threshold, which is nine

In peru they eat guinea pigs, don't they? So if it was a peruvian person, it might be just a way of you know Stocking up before lockdown Give a man give a man a guinea pig and it'll eat for a day Give a man two guinea pigs as long as what is male and one's female and they're both of the right age Yeah, the sort of yeah, and they fancy each other and this consent. Yeah. Yeah, and he'll eat for the rest of his life I also, uh, I enjoyed and really disagree with the advice given smile whenever possible Which I think is a very old school idea of like

Wack a smile on no matter what you're feeling and it made me think of all those songs of like smile when your heart is breaking Smile when your heart is breaking Put on a happy smile, you know Like all the wartime songs about smiling through the war smiling through loss smiling through tragedy smiling through heartbreak Which was a very of the 20th century. It was very keep calm and carry on Bottle it in Don't let your smile ruin my day Bottle it up pour a few drops into your ears each night

Morning So yes, I I did not agree with that advice, but it's it's quite common advice. It's still given Do you know the first agony art was No, so far as we know No, I don't know Clarina plenty the elder oh no, okay, so I would say this is uh, james is closer in time Possibly the 1600s

It's probably probably really In 1691 there was a guy called john dunton and he had an experience where he was having an affair He needed some advice anonymously But there was nowhere to ask and so rather than thinking i'll just leave that he thought wow What if there was a place I could ask and so he invented an entire magazine the athenian gazette Which its job was basically to just answer questions So members of the public would just send in their questions and everyone on staff would write answers to And that is sort of like the modern version of the agony art

There's probably examples of things like the oracle of delphi and you know the original agony art So he this athenian the athenian gazette athenian mercury it was also called It was supposedly this group of a dozen of the best astrologers and mathematicians and philosophers in the whole of london Right and scholars and all this Actually, it was just him And his brother-in-law and two other blokes and they were like they were complete amateurs and they didn't know anything But people loved writing in the questions. So the questions included what is the cause of suction?

Oh, yeah, this is about love and Why do scotchman hate swine's flesh? Good questions I really like this one if I'm thinking of committing any great and enormous crime and sin as adultery But do not personally and actually commit it. Am I guilty of the crime and sin? That's a great question. Wow. I mean that's given to agony aunts today. Yeah, that's true. Here's a couple more Why does love generally turn to coldness and neglect after marriage? I would write it probably if you're listening. I was just reading it

They they it was a bit qi-ish actually So one of them was why should the putting of a man's hand in cold water occasion a sudden emission of urine? Oh, yeah, we have done that. Yeah, and they said and I have done that And they said it's not true. They said they pointed out it's a vulgar error. They said it's uh, what? It was a coincidence then that you pissed yourself. We did that to our baby last week Wait, wait, so he had a fever we were in hospital doing some checks And they said to check for a urine infection We really need a urine sample and obviously it's a baby

You can't just make him wait and he was a bit dehydrated from the fever So he was weeing not very often So they gave us like a test tube with a funnel and they said you've just got to sit here And wait for him to weigh and be ready to leap into action So bless him. I was just for like a good hour and a half He was just sitting there with like my husband holding him up me like staring at his winky Waiting waiting to leap for the wee And we were it got to like an hour and we're like, oh my god, I don't think we should blame parents

But she does have a complex Me just staring at it shaking a little tube And at the end we were like what about that thing of like if you put your hand or your foot in water Then it will make you we so we tried it So we got one of those Cardboard and bucket things that they had in the hospital and we filled it with warm water And we put his feet in it And it didn't work initially

But about two minutes after he'd stopped having his feet in water. He did then we But again, it's probably a coincidence That's science. Yeah, maybe it's taking your feet out of warm water that makes you do that Yeah, but people don't normally go to sleep in a swimming pool. So we don't know. We don't know One other interesting notable name from this period who was into agony arting Slash uncleing was Daniel Defoe. Oh, yeah, author of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, he would he would reply to members of the public And interestingly, you know, a lot of these replies are sometimes really crude So in one in one reply to someone he actually called someone even though he sort of blanked out the full spelling of it

But he um, he called someone a whore, you know, he he basically disagreed with what she was trying to ask in terms of illicit Sexual stuff and he said you were whore. I mean, it was really quite crude back then terrible Just going back to deafness. Yeah. Oh, yeah I got very into this woman called Jaipreet Verdi has written a book about historical cures for deafness Um, and it's also about the concept of deafness needing a cure It's very interesting. Uh, but she talks about ear trumpets, you know, like remember in alo alo Like the ear trumpet the sort of comedy item that is the ear trumpet, but in Victorian times they would be

Uh, customized so a lady, uh, say in mourning that the example they've got in a museum is it's been painted black and trimmed with lace That's her outfit and at first historians thought, you know, this was a sign of like she had to hide it, you know To be discreet because it was an embarrassing thing to have but actually This author is making the point that how cool it's really sort of owning Your deafness and it's customizing what you need. It's sort of the equivalent of like, you know Pimping out your walking stick or signing a cast in a way Surely it's pimping up. Isn't it not pimping out? Pimping out your walking stick you sort of put it put it in the street with a little sign

Daniel Defoe calls it home Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact My fact this week is that a tourist guide in Whitby got so tired of being asked where Dracula was buried That he commissioned a headstone just so that he could point at it instead of explaining that Dracula wasn't real Um, so this is apparently it's a big problem in Whitby Whitby is one of the great scenes of Dracula when Dracula makes his way over to England and It is where Bram Stoker spent a few months where he went looking around and he incorporated a lot of the landscapes A lot of the churches even some of the names from the gravestones into the story

Uh, and the issue is that when visitors come a lot of them don't actually realize that Dracula doesn't exist So one particular guy harry collet, uh, who's a tour guide and he does tours around Whitby about Dracula So sick of being asked this question He did get one commissioned a headstone which he can just point to as they're on the track and say look That's where he's buried. Do you think maybe he should give up his job as a tour guide if he's sick of people asking him questions about Dracula? Yeah, well, I guess I guess that is a very very good point. Hang on. What does the headstone say? Does it say Dracula's here or does it say Dracula's not real? No, it's it's It says Dracula and then I guess the dates of Dracula on it. That's a great idea for your headstone, isn't it?

Eventually you die. It's like Here lies James Harkin. Of course. He wasn't real Yeah, but I thought I thought he was just trying because the church has put a sign on its door saying Dracula's a fictional character So I thought you might be doing that because actually if someone tries to dig up Dracula. They'll find whoo. There's nobody there It's only gonna add fuel to the fire. That's true. Yeah, this church the st. Mary's church This is the church that appears in the book. Um, they constantly have people coming to the church who are Dracula fans asking about Dracula Apparently the pews are just quite often filled with Goths who are sitting there just enjoying the scene. Well, it's Gothsville Yeah, it is. They have a twice annual. In fact, they have four goth festivals a year, right? So they've got

The Whitby goth weekend which has been going since the 90s and then in 2019 a rival event was set up called tomorrow's ghosts There was a spooky schism in the Whitby goth weekend event The founder had set it up and there was a parting of ways with a venue And so now there's a rival festival this year called tomorrow's ghosts on the and I read their website about this year's autumn festival It says this our headliners for 2022 are fields of the nephilim who take the friday night headline slot and really need little introduction Topping the bill on saturday night are the loveless who needs some introduction They actually put that. Yeah, that's really good

It's got a cool quite gothic-y heritage this whole area. Yeah, not just not just Dracula like a bit of everything. I mean st. Hilda was Whitby, wasn't she? Yeah, st. Hilda was abbess of Whitby Did she like drive the snakes out of Whitby or something? That's a story That's a story. Well, she turned them to stone Is that not that's driving them out in a way? Yeah. Yeah, you're making it hard to drive them out You're making them heavier. Yeah, but they're less likely to bite you if they're made of stone Is that what the ammonite stones are all about? That's what they call them the snake stones of Whitby And they're ammonites. They're ammonites, but they and some people would carve little heads on to make

So ammonite is like a little fossil that looks a bit like a snake, right? Yeah. Yeah, especially if you draw her face Yeah, and she was she started a monastery which is on the Spot where this place you were talking about st. Mary's was it? Yeah. Yeah And yeah, she resolved the date of Easter Yeah, she was part of the team who did that There was a synod of Whitby and six six four ad Where they all got together in Whitby and decided when we should have Easter Because some people were doing it in the Celtic time and some people were doing it in the roman time

And we thought let's move down to the roman time. So she that was 64. She was probably still alive in six six six ad She was actually Um, she was like a teacher as well. Um, she's hot kadmon Um, who was the first english poet that we know the name of? She was his teacher The question though that we're all asking was she a child prodigy james? I know not I went to st. Hilda's college. Did you yes? And then they have a little ammonite on their shield. Do they? That's cool. I think that's called that species is called hill dosa wrasse

Really it was named in honor of her who was found in that area. Yeah, nice There's a um, there's a really cool set of stairs in Whitby. Um, oh, yeah sound pretty spooky As you as you head up to st. Mary's church. Uh, it's 199 steps to get to the top. That's intracular, isn't it? That's mentioned in track. Yeah. Yeah as you're going up them. There's little rest points little Benches So you sit on this bench and you think you're sitting on a regular bench, but actually it's not a regular bench It's not no. It's not a possessed bench either. It's uh, it wasn't built by yetis

It was because the graveyard with st. Mary's church was at the top You had all the pool bearers who were coming to carry up all of the dead bodies to get to the church And it's a very tiring business So what's now used as seats these planks of wood were actually pit stops to put the dead bodies on So that they could get rest Get there. It is spooky. They're spooky the dead men's Benches Another thing about Whitby is if you go to saltwick nav, which is just south of Whitby

You'll see where the cliffs are. There's huge chunks taken out of the cliffs and that's because they tried to get alum Uh, which is a thing you get in shale It's type of rock and it's really useful because you could bind colors to cloth by using it But it didn't work on its own. You needed ammonia as well And the way they got their ammonia was from stale urine Ah, urine again urine again. We come back to urine and so um in whitby They used to have barrels where you would go and wean to the barrel And then they would take the we to the alum mines and then they would color their cloths

And do they have a little trough of warm water that you could stand in if you're struggling to get yourself going Yeah, at what point does urine go stale? I've never thought about that Well, I would say if you don't drink it straight from the sauce You could put it in a cup first So point is and I think we mentioned this in a quite recent podcast is ammonia isn't naturally in urine And ammonia is made by bacteria Urine is generally more or less sterile So you get your urine the bacteria comes from the air goes into the urine makes ammonia and that's what it becomes stale

So it takes a you know a couple of hours Have you ever um forgotten to flush a toilet and then gone on holiday? Wow That's when it's stale Blimey, but Dan if you're bottling it correctly with sterilized bottles it last years Just got to visit Andy's urine distillery. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Keep it out of the sunlight Wacker label on it. It's bringing them on the plane. It's from my ears actually So you have to bring so many under 100 mil bottles though. That's the really annoying thing

Anyway, this urine they they couldn't get enough in Whitby So they ended up putting barrels in Newcastle and london to get enough You're a long way away. There's a lot of piss, isn't it? Yeah from a long distance. Yeah Well, there's a lot of people in london. So that was one reason why I went there And they always tried to get the urine from poor people So they put barrels in the poor areas and they would want poor people's piss Because it was illiterative. No, why do you think like why do you think it was? Something about poor people's diet or consumption of alcohol because he's got it

Did they want it they wanted it to be more? No, they thought that the poor people wouldn't be able to afford alcohol And so they didn't want alcohol in the urine because they thought it wouldn't set the colors properly Do you know where Dracula was from? He was from Transylvania. Well, exactly. But there is a minority theory that he was from Devon Is this theory put forward by Devon? There's a writer called Andy Struthers who claims that Bram Stoker was inspired by a load of different things But he claims there was especially an Exeter writer called Sabine Bearing Gould I think I'm saying all right who'd written a book about werewolves which Bram Stoker read

And a vampire story called Marjorie of Queather and was therefore Claiming that Dracula was effectively from Devon, which I think would make him less spooky Yeah, I'm gonna drink your blood Do you mind? All right, my lover Yeah, but the his descendant Daker Stoker Bram Stoker's descendant said it's just there's a mix of sources actually You can't just say yeah Well, one of the sources was about Drackel wasn't it?

Vlad the Impaler who was from Transylvania was he or Wallachia or somewhere like that in Romania anyway And he supposedly read about this guy while he was in Whitby So he went down to what was the coffee house end and the public library there He found the book there and that's what gave the inspirations You know, as you say, there's a lot of different accounts He was already working on a novel, but it was about a character. He called Count Wampire Sounds like a camp vampire I thought but I thought that was the original vampire was the original dramatic still sounds stupid

I am a vampire Rather I am a vampire I've been to Dracula's castle. How do you actually yeah, in fact, I've been to both of them There's one which is real and one of them which is fake The one which is fake is called Bran Castle And that looks really gothic. It looks amazing. It looks like it could be his castle, but it really isn't And there's another one which was his actual castle is about 100 miles away and that is just a you know, it's a semi-detached house I said it was like Vlad the Impaler's

Yeah, but it's just like ruins really and they have a few stakes with with dolls on them But in the Bran Castle is way better because they've got a proper, you know, gift shop Bran Castle, they've really made big on the publicity, haven't they? So so last year they that Bran Castle got a bit of publicity because they offered free doses of the COVID-19 Jabs With doctors wearing fang stickers And they put it in your neck. No, they didn't put it in Interesting fact. I was in Bran

Um on the day of the Brexit referendum You're gonna have a spooky loss of trade Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts Thank you so much for listening If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast We can be found on our twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Rachel at Rachel Paris And you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website

No such thing as a fish.com. All the previous episodes are up there. Do check it out We will be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye You