No Such Thing As A Fish - 450: No Such Thing As A Deep Drawer

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Dan, James, Anna, and Andrew discuss kissing, queuing, losing your head and losing your platoon. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. Once again, we have gathered round 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 James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1910, the World's Health Organization tried to ban

kissing. Wow. You think that would be a bigger story given such a huge organization, right? Especially as it happened 30 years before they existed. Yes. You would think so. Thank you. If you listen very carefully, you will have heard me say the World's Health Organization

as opposed to the more commonly known World Health Organization. This was an organization, and when I say an organization, I mean really one woman in America called Imogene Rectin and she decided that everyone should stop kissing and she got all the newspapers and invented a load of badges and pledges and stuff like that and really thought that if people stopped kissing, then maybe we could stop the spread of disease, things like consumption, typhus, all that kind of stuff. She can't have been completely wrong. If everyone stopped kissing everyone else, we'd have fewer diseases.

Yeah. Well, we did try it for half a year in 2020, if you remember. No one got a cold. So, you know, I'm just saying maybe the cost is greater than the benefit. Yeah, but I feel like she was almost ahead of her time understanding then about exchange of possible germs. I mean, our mouths are rank, we've got like billions of bacteria in them. I know a lot of them are probably good bacteria, but I think there was a study done that had

people drink a like a yakkel or a probiotic drink and then had them snog their partner and they found 80 million bacteria transferred from one face to the other. Bacteria is tiny though. Yeah, 80 million. 80 million. We don't know how much that is, do we? Is there everything where it's like, oh, three bacteria transferred. It's going to be big, right?

I think even if three bacteria transferred before long, there's going to be more than there's going to be four, five, six. That's true. They are rampant. She does sound amazing. Yeah. Imogene as well. Imogene.

Weirdly, some newspapers call her Imogene, but I think they might be misprints because most of them say Imogene. She's got a lot of support. She's got some support. She's got a thousand acolytes, which I think is a good hit rate for this slightly dramatic campaign. It's got a number of acolytes. Including 70 brides who declined to be kissed at their own weddings, which I think, yeah.

You may now kiss a bride. No, you may not. Yeah. So in the article that you sent over, James, when you found this, there was a nice little thing that she, it starts off by saying that she convinced her husband of the risks associated with promiscuous kissing, which sounds like she had a bit of a dog in the race to begin with. Yeah.

She had a husband. So he was a big kisser. I think what it sounds like of reading further into the article is that kissing on the lips and kissing generally was much more what you just did. If you had parties at the house, everyone would kiss each other on the lips. Women would kiss each other. Men would kiss men. In 1910.

That's my party. That's what her husband was telling her anyway. First of all, the keys go in the bowl. Then we start kissing and then we'll see what happens. Yeah. I don't think men were snogging each other that much. By 1910, there have been phases when the kiss has been in, but I think her husband is spinning it on.

I did just throw that in. I have to admit. They definitely said women were kissing women. I thought, what? Men should be kissing men. I was in France recently. I saw, I was in the south of France and I was in a particularly kissy region. Oh yeah.

It varies from region to region. Yes. I think I saw some people kissing four times. Yeah. But there's more. Way more. I think you do get, there are fives, definitely. Way more.

I've had a good five or six. Tell me whether there's a way, you've had a six kiss. Yeah. I lived in France for three months with my grandmother in 2003. I've had a six. You start counting. Six. Six.

I've had a six. Maybe she wanted to give me six. I've seen a five. Your grandmother. No. Her oldie mates. All the grandmothers at the retirement. Maybe they forget.

Maybe they forgot. Halfway through. They're like, ah. What am I on? I'm going to start again. You can be stuck in the old people's name for hours. Go on. Think about older people kissing.

This was actually one of Imogen's theories and she thought that if she could stop older people from kissing each other and actually more like stopping them from kissing children than eventually when the older generation died out, so kissing would die out because the children wouldn't have got it into their system that it's a thing that you do. That was her plan. That's interesting. Probably would have worked if she'd, again, if she's got more than a thousand acolytes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a cultural thing. You know, it's a learned thing. We assume it is. Yeah. I think there's some debate, isn't there? But I think we assume it's a learned thing largely because about just over half of societies

don't do it. Yeah. So the number is 46% do do it of cultures that were looked at to see whether lip to lip kissing was a thing. But what's a culture? As in is Britain one culture? No, no, no. It's not like Britain.

It's obviously tiny minorities of people because the vast majority of people on earth do kiss now because we're a globalized society. But if you go to an Amazonian tribe or Papua New Guinea or something, I think it's particularly uncommon in parts of China, parts of Mongolia, that area is quite uncommon. So it was 168 cultures from around the world. This was a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which I assume is a serious university. Yeah.

I just associate it with gambling. I don't know why. Las Vegas. It does do all the stuff. That university is a very wealthy one, actually, because one year, a few decades ago, they put everything on red. Yeah. Exactly.

And the first person who kind of observed that a lot of these cultures don't do mouth to mouth kissing was a guy called Paul Denjoy, so it's de-apostrophe and then enjoy. Paul Denjoy? Yeah. Such a good name. He said that some people considered it an abomination and a form of cannibalism. Oh, come on. That's someone kissing too hard.

It's a step on the road, it's a step on the road of cannibalism, it's a slippery slope. So just back to Imogen very quickly, I read a lot of newspaper articles about her because in 1910 and 1911, she was everywhere. Obviously the newspapers saw this story, they're trying to ban kissing and they loved it. She was known as the foe of oculation in the press, oculation being another word for kissing. And in August of 1910, she tried to organize a no-kiss August, which you know what it's like, you know, no drink January or whatever they call this in November. I reckon this might be the first of those, you know, 1910, it must be.

But then by 1912, there were no more mentions of her on newspapers.com. So after two years, the press weren't interested anymore. Do we know any more about her story at all? Like do we know when she died or? I know when someone with her name died, but I couldn't tell if it was definitely her. So I'm not really sure. She kind of went away. Two Imogenes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 13% of people, so they've been accidentally kissed on the mouth at work. Oh yeah. How does that? Dan says, oh yeah. Dan goes around kissing people on the mouth all the time. And sometimes the turn comes too sharply. An air kiss to another air kiss.

Especially when you're doing seven. I found someone else who has an anti-kissing rule. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And it's Champion Whistlers, specifically one Champion Whistler who's a guy called Christopher Ullman, who I think has won at the International Whistlers Convention and you know, lots of different kinds of whistlers. And he says he has a no-kissing rule for 24 hours before a performance.

Yeah, well he must have a lot of whistling groupies. He sounds great. He says it makes your lips mushy kissing before a performance. So he doesn't lick his lips, which I'm very impressed by. God, that's amazing. Now they must be dry, parched and dry by the time he's whistling. But then they must be like a solid whistle, right? Have you got dry lips?

I think it's very hard to whistle, isn't it? Is it? What does he say, Andy? I don't actually know how he moises them. I've only got other details, like he can do Mozart's oboe concerto, the oboe part, but whistling. Okay. I think most people can do any part, right?

Yeah, most people can whistle any tune. If it's a tune, it's whistle-able. The problem is none of us knows Mozart's oboe concerto. That piece, that's a good point. That's a very good point. So when his stooge in the crowd goes, I bet no one here can do that. And then he does it and everyone's like, is that that? Is that that?

Better to do a plane engine though, or a drill, or something that doesn't sound like a whistle. Yeah. Exactly. What was the point? What was that? It was a drill. That was a Beethoven... All right.

Well, we've just currently driven by this guy's whole career. No, but it's interesting because I... Sorry, it can't be his career. It's unclear. It's unclear. I know he's got all these groupies, but really, you make it look like that. I asked him in this interview if his family gets sick of the whistling. And he said, I actually don't whistle around the house very much.

Random idle whistling is very annoying. Wow, that's... Someone's told him that a lot of times. In 1921, in the newspapers, there was a worry about people kissing freckled girls on the cheeks. Can you guess why that might be dangerous? This was in the newspapers. Freckles come off, they go on your lips. You get a lip covered in freckles, can't eat you stuff.

Yeah, would they thought to be contagious, I guess, is the... Freckles. Yeah. In the 1920s. Was this a justified thing, or was it a great... Okay, so it's justified. Freckled girls. Because, because, because they are out in the sun,

so they are wearing what back in the 1920s was radioactive sunscreen. You're so close. Yeah, so the sunscreen had chemicals in it. No, no, don't carry on with the wrong guts there. Okay, okay. Radioactive sunscreen, which meant that to kiss them would give radiation and you'd become... How's the radioactive part? Oh, okay.

It's the being outside part. No. Poisonous makeup? Almost. Basically, there was a anti-freckle medication that people were using to try and get rid of their freckles and it was toxic if ingested. Amazing. And so there was a danger, according to the newspapers,

if you kissed a freckled girl on the cheek, you might get sick. Wow. That's awful because the girls are going to think that their medication isn't working at all because still no one's kissing them. Yeah. There are alternatives to kissing, which people have had to come up with. These poor societies that don't have kissing. Darwin, who met a lot of people in his life, different peoples,

listed a bunch of alternatives to kissing in cultures. And he listed rubbing of noses, which lapplanders he's known as do, rubbing or patting of the arms, breasts or stomachs, or one man striking his own face with the hands or feet of another. Like a slap, proper slap. It's like, why are you hitting yourself? Oh, right. Well, actually, it's not you hitting yourself.

It's me grabbing your hand and then hitting me in the face with your hand. You are actually hitting yourself. Why are you hitting me? Why are you hitting me? Yeah. Was that a game? Why are you hitting me? That was a cat phrase, you could say.

Can I talk about very quickly some other public health stuff? Yeah. Especially done by American women. So this is a group of middle class women from Manhattan called the Ladies Health Protective Association. And they basically there was a huge pile of manure in the middle of New York. Okay. It covered two blocks and stood 30 feet tall.

I was picturing much smaller when you said there was a pile. That's incredible. Like the Godzilla. So what they would do is obviously a lot of horses in those days, right? Yeah. They would collect the manure from stables and they would sell it as fertilizer to farmers who were just outside the city, but they needed someone to keep it and so they just kept it in the middle of the street.

It was this guy called, weirdly enough, he was called Michael Cain. But Cain as in Harry Cain with a K. But anyway, Michael Cain had this huge manure pile and he was making loads of money. He was making $300,000 a year, which today is about $8 million from this manure pile. Wow. And his brother-in-law was a New York state senator, so everyone thought there was nothing they could do about it. Right.

Anyway, this Ladies Health Protective Association came along and did a court case and amazingly they won it. They basically called it a nuisance and by the law, there was no way that he could get around it because of this technical thing they called it. And not only that, the Board of Health denied any permits for any manure dumps in the whole city. So that's why if you go to New York now, there's not a 30-foot pile. I've always wondered why. And this group then turned to spitting.

Sorry, they turned to stop spitting. Oh yeah. And that was when New York became the first city in the world that banned spitting. Isn't it true that in the middle of the Central Park there was a massive reservoir of spit? Disgusting. Okay, on with the podcast. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that after King Charles I was decapitated, he was recapitated.

He just made that word up. Yeah. So King Charles I, only King who's ever been executed. I guess loads of them have been killed in battles and things like that. But it was in 1649 and it was just after the English Civil War. And obviously huge move, you know, big old move. Big deal. Political chaos, yeah.

But the King's body basically had to be seen and the authorities, the sort of Republican authorities wanted to say, look, he's definitely dead and he's not coming back. So they employed a surgeon after the execution to stitch the head back on. And I would have thought that if I'd have seen his body without the head, that would be even more proof that he wasn't alive. What a good point. It sort of looks like he was kind of coming back.

That's meant to be off with suddenly back on. Anyway, I should say quickly where I got this from. I've been reading a book. It's actually from a novel. It's called Active Oblivion. And it's all about the hunt for the regicides. Is it by Thomas Harris? Robert Harris.

And so basically, and it describes in incredibly gory detail, the death of the King and also the death of the regicides, who the people who signed the death warrant and all this, and who really, they really put through the ringer. Yeah. This is, we should say for internationalists, they didn't put them through the ringer as soon as they'd killed the King. It wasn't like you've executed the King and now we're going to execute you.

It was when the restoration happened. So there was a brief period where everyone was pro-killing the monarchy. About 10 years. And then sadly, yeah, after a decade, monarchy came back and then all the regicides got and hunted down. Sadly. Sadly monarchy came back.

From the perspective of a round head, I was adopting the character of Oliver Cromwell. So I didn't know anything about Charles I, having not grown up in this country. So I am one of these, these foreign listeners as it were, that you mentioned Anna. And it struck me that what a big deal it was to kill the King off the back of a trial,

because there's all this stuff. And Oliver Cromwell is a name that is very much part of the decision to bring him to trial and have him executed. A key player. Yeah. And the story gets quite gruesome when we talk about what happened to him and the others some 30 years later after the death. Only 10 years later.

Sorry, 10 years later. Okay, so 1649, Charles was killed. Yeah. And then recapitated, right? 1650, I think it was eight, Oliver Cromwell died after less than 10 years in office. And then two years later, the monarchy is restored, 1660. Then at that point, Oliver Cromwell is dug up.

Yeah. And decapitated. Yeah. So both Charles and Cromwell had a head altering situation. They should have switched the rounds. They should have. It's Ricky Friday. Ricky Friday.

It was his son, was it King Charles II, who was a direct son of Charles I, who then was the person in charge of the monarchy once, yeah. The person in charge of the monarchy or the king. Well, it's surprising that it disappeared for 11 years. I mean, that is a pretty big deal. He wasn't just overthrowing the monarchy. It was overthrowing all of the monarchy.

It was a deal. It was one of the biggest things that's ever happened in England's history. I was just saying as a foreigner, you don't follow. Sorry, good up to date on Charles the first. You are looking at it for about 20 years now. I feel like you should have some point. Yeah, it should have been as I was coming into immigration.

Did you not have to do an exam to get into the UK? No, a British one. Well, do you want to know something really interesting? It's not in a lot of the citizenship tests. Or at least a couple of years ago, there was a really good article on... I should be question number one. There was a really good article on history today about how the...

It wasn't in the test for new immigrants. There was nothing about the Civil War, anything like that, and missed that whole period. And someone asked immigration why isn't this included? And they said the wounds are still too fresh. So I spoke first and said, the assumption is that we are all anti-cromwell. Obviously parliamentarian didn't believe in the divine right of kings.

The reason that Charles the first was overthrown was because he really went hard on the divine right of kings as well. He loved it, didn't he? He prorogued parliament for 11 years, didn't want to ask them anything, and then told them to give him loads of money. He was into absolutist monarchy. And when they put him on trial, he was like,

well, you can't put me on trial because God put me here. Yeah. And now I think Cromwell is a bit of a villain to almost everyone. But in another country, he would be a hero. And in fact, in America, he's remembered quite heroically. He's still got a statue outside of parliament. Yeah, which is surprising. And that wasn't toppled in the old topples of statues period

that we went through quite recently. No, it wouldn't be. After he died, or rather after he died, was dug up and then posthumously re-executed, his body and a couple of comrades, they were hanged beheaded and then the heads were placed on spikes. His head stayed on a spike for 25 years. That is the most amazing.

For me, the most amazing thing about this whole thing is that for 25 years, whenever you came to London, you could go and look at a head on the spike. And if you came back 25 years later, it would still be there. It's amazing. It's amazing. I think about all the shops near my house. Most of them are less than five years old

because they just all got turned off. The turnover. It was much less than those days. You got a lot of custom in the same place for a head. Amazing. But one person who lived through the whole thing was Oliver Cromwell's son, Richard. So when Cromwell died,

it happened so often with rulers, tyrants, newly established raids anyway. Let's get rid of the monarchy. It's ridiculous that someone could have the divine right to rule, but when I die, I want my kids to have it. Actually, do you think Napoleon II is a good name for an emperor? And anyway, so Richard Cromwell resigned. He was not up to the job.

I mean, he was not, you know, as zealous as his father and he didn't have the authority. So he was kicked out in 1659, one year later, and he just lived out his life. He died in 1712. I think he moved overseas. I think if your dad's head was on the spike in London, you probably would move out of town.

You wouldn't say London, would you? But get this. He died in 1712. He lived an incredibly long time. So he saw the whole thing. And he was the longest-lived British head of state until the year 2012, when he was overtaken by Queen Elizabeth II.

No way. Really? When she was 85. So that's the age he lived to. So for a long time, the longest-lived head of state was Richard Cromwell. That's really funny. Do you know where Oliver Cromwell's head is now?

Oh, was it reburied with the rest of him? No, this is interesting. It was buried in Cambridge University now. Okay. So I read this in a Giles Brandrith book, and I tweeted him to ask him if this was true, and he tweeted me back. So I said,

my memory of it goes like this. There is a relic of Oliver Cromwell kept by the chief whip or prime minister. Have I made that up? I probably have. He wrote back, it's in the drawers at Checkers. So my memory is that the skull of...

The skull of Oliver Cromwell is in Checkers. In the drawer. In the drawer. And I think I've read it in Brandrith's autobiography, his diaries of his time as a politician, and in it he says he goes to Checkers, and the drawers open and they let you see and stroke the skull.

No. Stroke the skull. So what I have in my notes is that one day there was a storm and the head blew off the spike. Yeah. And they thought, you know what, it's been here for 25 years.

We probably don't need to put it back up again. Everyone's seen it now. They get the idea. Yeah, they get it again. Exactly. And then the skull was sort of taken away and it was just kind of sold in auction after auction and went through a load of families.

But then it was buried at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960. Interesting. That's what I've got. But I mean, probably like with these things, there's probably 20 of those skulls around there. Exactly.

Yeah. And I don't specify what relic I mean. He could have thought it might have been a finger or something. In my head it's his head. Oh well maybe it's not the head. That's more normal if it's a finger. Because I can't think of a drawer that could even fit a skull.

Oh, I think you can't think of a drawer that could fit a skull. I can't imagine. Are you going to pull out of that? Sure. I should pull out of that. I suppose I'm imagining a desk drawer and all those old vessels, tiny drawers. But often they go off in the bottom drawer.

A universe standard wooden desk will be a bit bigger. But even if that didn't exist, it doesn't take much imagination to take a drawer and make it slightly deeper. My head, ironically, my head is not big enough to get around this concept. Have you ever seen a filing cabinet? Because...

Oh no, don't. It's too much. You're going to flip your lid. I can't take it. Anna's amazing Freaky Friday idea, which I actually think is a brilliant idea. Thank you. Maybe it could have been truish

because when Cromwell's head got put on the spike, there was a big rumour around that actually it wasn't his head and that they'd mistakenly got on the wrong one and it was probably some old King of England. They didn't specify which one it was because he was originally buried. Was it in Westminster Abbey, I think? So there was loads of other kings there

and they thought that they dug up the wrong thing and just put an old king's head there. Surely you just pick the roundest head. Brilliant. Round head joke. It's a round head joke. I love it. They did used to toss them in altogether a bit.

Like actually there was obviously a conundrum after Charles was decapitated because they don't want to create a martyr of him by having it either be a big thing bearing him or not bearing him at all. So I think they took him away to Windsor and they interred him in Henry VIII's tomb, weirdly. Wow.

And then in 1813 they decided to dig him up again. I think this was to check. Again, again. He was there again. Just the first time again. This is Charles first. And it was George III's physician, Henry Halford, who was kind of leading the exhumation

and he ended up with Charles's vertebra and some beard and some of his teeth which is, yeah, some beard. I'm surprised the beard is still extant after all that time. Yeah. Yeah, that seems weird, doesn't it? How many years did we say? Yeah.

Well, this was 1813. So it's 160 years. What? So he says that they went, oh, it's not worth opening the coffin again. Do you mind just keeping these? And he kept them. Other people who were there say that he went in

and nicked all the stuff and hung onto it. But then his grandson returned it. It was the 1890s and he went to the Prince of Wales and said, well, we've got this bit of Charles the first. Do you want them? The story, the QI facts that we always say about this is that they used the vertebrae as a salt holder. Oh, really?

Yeah. So if you ever went for dinner at Sir Henry Halford's house and you wanted some salt, it would be a little dish. But when you looked at it closely, it would be part of his backbone. Wow. That's creepy. No, you can fit that in a cupboard.

The eventual outcomes for the Regicide, who were the people who'd signed the death warrant, basically, were bad. So I think a lot of them were disemboweled. So bad. They were not good. Everything gone and quartered. Yeah.

Hanged until not quite dead and then had the genitals removed and then were disemboweled. Still alive. While still alive. Got to lie. But if you got away, then it could be okay. And interestingly, if you live in Connecticut, near, I think in New Haven,

then there are three streets called Dickswell Avenue, a Wally Avenue and Gough Street. Dickswell. Dickswell and Wally. Wally. And what was the other one? Dickswell, Wally and Gough. They were the worst surveyors that I ever had for life.

But Wally and Gough are the two that are in this book, Act of Oblivion. They're the two that happened. Dickswell was knocked out apparently. Well, they all ended up in this place and they liked them so much in America, obviously, because America aren't that pro monarchy, that they named these streets after them.

Yeah. They were very, very religious, puritanical communities, which were already very unsafe about monarchy and wanted to... It was kind of a place where they could go, wasn't it, when they were safe. There was another place in North America named after someone connected to this story.

So the wife of Charles I was Henrietta Marie. She was a French Catholic princess. She got married by proxy, which is quite cool. So Charles I wasn't there when she got married. So he had a proxy who was George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. But George Villiers wasn't available either. So they got another proxy and he was Charles de Lorraine,

who was the Duke of Chavres. And basically, they got married with this guy pretending to be the king. And in those days, you could do that. I think we've said before, haven't we? There were various rituals, if you're married by proxy, like you, as the proxy, would maybe have to touch the person's thigh.

I think that happened. You have to lie in bed and touch the thigh. Lie in bed and be witness with them, yeah. So the king only met his wife three months later at Dover. They'd been married for three months when he met her. And one of these areas in North America where Catholics felt safe where they could go was named after Henrietta Marie.

And it was Maryland, or Maryland, or Maryland. And we always say this name, and we always pronounce it wrong on this podcast, and the people of Maryland always write to us. But now I actually think that because it's named after Henrietta Marie, it should be called Maryland. So that's what I will be calling it from now on. Excellent. Very nice.

Especially because she didn't like Mary, actually. She was, because she was French, and she was very French. And she was beginning English. She didn't like being called Mary. So the English used to call her Mary as like a nickname. And she said, no, I'm French. Mary's not my name. I don't even like the name Mary, fair enough.

Marie is about to name the Mary I-M-O. Can we talk a bit about the execution itself? Why is it so interesting? I mean, what an extraordinary, I mean, one of the weirdest days ever to happen in English history. You know, it was on Whitehall. It was not far from here. So when it happened, the executioner had to wear a disguise

because the execution has never been identified for sure. Do you not just mean like a hut? No, I don't. I mean a wig, a fake beard, a sailor's costume. Yeah, confusing details here. Unclear as to why and fishnets over the face. After the restoration, there was a big manhunt for who was the exact executioner

because we're going to kill him. There must have been a lot of sailors getting rid of their fishnets just in case. The executioner was never properly identified. One guy was sentenced to death for it, but then the sentence was overturned. One guy claimed to be and then wrote that they can't remember about that.

There's a museum in London that has a few of these relics from the execution, including a shirt that belonged to Charles. The first that they believe, you know, they can't actually work out properly, but all his bits of clothing was sort of torn off him and handed round. That's the museum of London, isn't it? The Museum of London, yeah.

Among those items, they have a patched leather shoe of a man called John Big, and they believe that Big was the executioner. At least that's one of the theories. Mr. Big. Mr. Big, yeah. That's what that whole thing, it was an analogy. The Sex and the City character, Mr. Big.

It was an analogy for the English Civil War. Yeah, that's very interesting. I can't believe you didn't see that. So I guess, what's her name? Is it Carrie? Carrie Fishnet, but they thought that would be too obvious. I don't think it's Carrie Fishnet. Is she called Carrie Bradshaw?

Oh, Carrie Fishnet is a different person, isn't it? She called Carrie Bradshaw. Well, interestingly, John Bradshaw was the parliamentary commissioner who tried Charles I in Westminster. You're joking. I can't believe we're actually blowing this shit away. This is huge.

I don't think any of us have ever probably watched Sex and the City. We've been all over it right now. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in World War II, a Finnish soldier got tired in the Arctic, so took the entire platoon's rations of methamphetamine and subsequently skied 400 kilometres to safety.

Extraordinary. It's the power of uppers. It's insane, the story. It's a really insane story. So this is a chap called Aimo Koivernen, and it was a time when Finland was at war with the Soviet Union. It was mid-Second World War. Finland was sort of on Germany's side,

war with the Soviet Union, and he's fighting in this very cold area with his platoon, and he had been tasked with keeping his entire group supply of pervitin, which is meth, and it was so crucial in the Second World War, everyone was bloody taking it, and he was really, really tired, and I think the Soviets were coming and chasing them,

and he was told to lead them to make tracks and lead them away so they could escape, and he was at the front, and he said in his memory of it that, which is so implausible, especially because, first of all, he said, I didn't want to take them because I was kind of against that. I disapproved of drugs, so I tried not to,

but then I got so knackered that, look, I just tipped a pill into my hand, what I hoped was a pill, but I was wearing mittens, and so quite a few came out, turns out all 30 of the pills came out, and then because he wanted to hide what he was doing from his comrades, he just ate them all. You're being shot at, it's stressful,

I'm just, I'm so scared to see them all eat, have all the tic-tacs, basically, you know? If you pour a lot of tic-tacs in your hands, let's say you only want two, but accidentally rive come out, you're not going to put them back in the tic-tac. No, especially if you're being shot at. That's how I usually am when I need some tic-tacs.

Just drop them in the snow, anything. And then it goes Sonic the Hedgehog, because suddenly, he just eats this. I was thinking of Popeye, when Popeye had just finished, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and it suddenly turns into a mutant, absolute, like, yeah,

he basically, as it goes, he received the hit in one swoop, and the hit, by the way, lasts for a very long time. When you take a normal amount of meth, it can last a few days, so I think... He took an OD level of it, is what they say right,

and I figured that the OD level would come to you in one hit. This kind of just plays out over a number of days, and he goes speeding away, and they're trying to chase him, and they eventually collect all these rings, and they can't keep up, and the music goes really fast,

and they're chasing him still, and he's just going off, and then this is the craziest bit, which, presumably, you've got more on Anna, because I just couldn't believe it, so I stopped reading. He blacks out, he blacks out,

and keeps going. Basically, a few days later, he kind of was like, oh, where am I? And it turned out they've been doing it. And he's still... What he's drawn is that he said, he felt amazing for a bit.

Quite a short time, I think, where he'd speed like something the hedgehog, and then he said, something very unexpected happened. I completely lost the plot and started hallucinating and collapsing. I would say that's not unexpected if you have taken 30 pills a bit,

but then the mystery is what happened to the people with him, and I think, because what had preceded this was actually an argument between so one sort of suspect, they had a chat and said, this guy's been so annoying right now, he's a massive liability.

Post meth, post him taking all pills. Well, they took all his ammunition off him, didn't they? And his food supplies, so he woke up and had nothing. Then he started skiing towards them, he saw some allies in the distance and started skiing towards them,

much too late, realises they're Russians, but he's still got the drugs on him. He said they were so confused, they should have shot him, and they just moved their legs out the way to let him get past. Excuse me, he spent all night trying to get to a distant farm window,

which turned out to be the North Star. And then he survived, didn't he, by chewing on some tree, like a cactus style? He boiled pine needles at one point, so he still had... Delicious pine tea, had some pine tea,

at the very end, where he somehow had found a hut, finally, there's cabin in the woods, and first of all, it's so funny, he says, I lit a fire in the middle of the cabin, it's still clearly high, so didn't know what he was doing, lit a fire in the middle of a wooden cabin, and it just set fire to the cabin.

And he said, I just sat next to the fire and followed it around as it burned the cabin down, gradually, the whole cabin collapsed around him. How many days into the trip? Well, he just doesn't know. He only realised when he came out of it, it had been two weeks.

On his last day, he was about to starve to death, and a J flew past, and he whacked it with a ski pole, and ate a raw J. Again, not the actions of someone who's completely with it. I mean, the ability to beat a bird out of the sky is unusual. The stick, that's hard.

The ski poles are quite thin. People don't go on pheasant shoots with just a ski pole. And there is the reason. Was this before or after he got blown up? Sorry. That was after. So he was set on fire, and then he was blown up, and then he had the J, right?

Yeah, because he found another little building. It was a German post, but the Germans had retreated from it, and they had attached mines to it. So he basically shredded his entire foot in the first explosion. And then he sort of hopped around,

and he opened the door, and then that was also mined. And supposedly he came to about, you know, many metres away, he'd been blasted across, but he was still holding the door, not like in a cartoon. Yeah, it's the most extraordinary story. Do we think true?

I can't imagine any of it's true. I think he was sitting at home. Because we knew he was anti-drugs, right? Maybe he's come up with all this of his adult dude drug story. This is like a finished 40's talk to Frank thing. Yes. I think we know, because we know from his associates

that the first bit happened and the last bit happened. But I suppose the only account we have of him between bit is his. With a guy with a lot of drugs in his body. But he must have had a shredded foot, right? Yeah, yeah, the blown off foot. He must have been holding a doorknob. Must have had a bloody ski pole with him.

Oh, dead Jane. He just kind of looked at all these things and like, I'm going to have to make a story up about these. But anyway, somehow he made it. I mean, eventually he was found by his allies who were the Germans or the Finnish and taken to hospital and... Apparently his heart rate was still

200 beats per minute at that stage. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's incredible he lived. And then he drove to the ripe old age, you know, just a war ended in the 70's. Anyway, he was mad. But the use of meth was... It was big, wasn't it?

The Germans were particularly into it. But everyone did it. Well, I was reading you could get these pills called Forced March, which were quite common at the start of the 20th century. So they were a blend of cocaine and caffeine. I mean, I don't know why you need a caffeine at the point where you've had all the cocaine.

But it was basically... It was sold publicly. It was sold by The Welcome, actually, or by Burrow's Welcome, who was one of The Welcome family. It was a pharmaceutical family there, yeah. Yeah, they took them to the... On the Antarctic Expeditions, The Forced March. Yes, Scott and Shackleton.

But they took specifically Forced March, which I think they've got to market it in a gentler way. Or maybe that's what you want is Forced March. I think that's what you need, motivation, right? I can't march anymore. I've had some Forced March. And did they use that? Because they used that... The Germans used that in the war. Did the Brits use that as well?

And the Allies, generally? I think the Allies... I think there was meth use all around. Oh, yeah, yeah. The meth pills that were synthesized in the 30s. But maybe not for everybody, for people who... I mean, obviously not for everybody. But, you know, as in maybe it would be for pilots, rather than for standard...

There were pilots to stay awake. I think that's why the Allies used it, for sure. So interesting. So, off the back of this, I was just looking into supplies that you take in the Arctic. Oh, yeah. As in what you have to keep you going. And, I mean, it seems like it was either

cocaine or biscuits. As in, though, like... It sounds like a student's fantasy, doesn't it? Yeah, you're right. What's on offer today? So, get this. Captain Scott, right? There are loads of expeditions there. He took some special...

specially made biscuits, which were glucose enriched. And they were made by a firm called Huntley and Palmer. But he set off with digestive, rich tea, pity beer, fancy lunch, ginger nuts, as well as emergency, Antarctic,

and small captain biscuits. And later in his trip, he got resupplied with more biscuits. I actually think that they're some of the worst biscuits you've just named, like, digestives and rich tea. Rich tea, ginger nuts, jammy dodger, come on. Well, tragically, this was a pre-jammy dodger world. I mean, maybe he would have made it back

if he had said jammy dodger. On the first all-female expedition to the North Pole, every woman involved eight four penguins per day. Wow. They brought penguins from the Antarctic to the Arctic solely to mince them up and eat them.

Yeah, they were cruel, and that's why they haven't sent women back to the North Pole. This is, of course, biscuit penguins. They were sponsored by McVitie's, and so McVitie's provided them with a hard-to-nail-down number, but thousands of penguins, I believe, and one of the women said they were told to eat four penguins a day.

Interesting. According to the biography, Frigid Women by Sue Richards and Victoria Richards. So this was two of the women who went on it. They were given six biscuits per person per day for the expedition. Oh, really? Maybe the person who I read, they got their biscuits nicks before they gave them to her.

Yeah, that could be it. Interesting, because that many, it must have been loads of days they were travelling. It was, it was a relay, so it meant that four women at a time were going, and then they would be airlifted out, and the next lot would be airlifted into wherever they were. That's cool.

I was thinking you could wear the biscuits as a kind of extra layer of warmth, but maybe not. Wear the biscuits? Because they're quite flat, aren't they? You can have a waistcoat that was lined with penguins. And actually, they're two biscuits, chocolate or something, right? Insulation, I'm thinking.

It just sounds like you're one of the members on the trip who misheard wearing the biscuits. You've emerged covered in penguins. What year was this, by the way? It was 1997, and so I've got a question for you. Remembering that it's 1997, and they're British, and thinking what was happening in 1997 at the time,

what do you think the newspapers nicknamed them? The handovers. Blair's frozen women. Go away from politics. Oh, it's culture. The spice girls were big, and they were in the Arctic. Yeah, so... Frozen spices?

Wait, say it again. Say the ingredients. The spice girls were big. They're going to the North Pole. What nickname is the North Pole? Ziggazig Arctic. Wanna be the North Poles. To become...

16 become... Literally, everyone listening has got this. OK, OK. Well done, everyone. What do you get in the Arctic? Snow. As well as snow. Ice. Ice is spice. Ice girls.

The ice girls. Ice one. Straight away. Sonic. And one of the patrons of the ice girls was Dawn French, the comedian. And she told the press

and made the cuts to be on the expedition. But she decided to stay at home and comfort all the husbands. That's so good. I'm sorry. One of the husbands dumped his wife while she was out there. She's married a Dawn French now.

Was it Lady Henry? It was, yeah. This is Anne, who had triplets, and she'd never had an experience before. She's an amazing explorer now. And Daniels, yeah. In the expedition, all the other women had letters from home. And she didn't have one.

And it was a sign that her husband had designed it. Oh, my God. Let's hear about Rosie Stanzer. She's one of the Arctic, one of the frigid women, as the book has it. So she was on it. So get this.

I think she's quite posh. Like her grandma. Posh ice. Brilliant. She did one, the Snickers South Pole Solo and the Mars North Pole Solo. So these are all chocolate and biscuit sponsored. But her grandfather was also a wannabe,

thank you, explorer. He was the fourth Earl of Granville, right? And he wanted to be a polar explorer, but he was thwarted. Can you guess why? It was something about his body. He had the weird sort of inner ear thing, but whenever he wanted to go north, he always went south.

That's a very creative one. Better than what I've got. I think it's because he was too tall. Because you hit your head on the top of the earth. Because he wouldn't fit in the tent. He was too tall for the tent. So his feet would be sticking out. Yeah, and that would obviously kill

all the men in the tent. Could he not do like the kind of, the embryo position? He was, I mean, maybe this was an excuse and it was his personality, but he thought he was too tall to fit in the expedition tent. No, no, too tall.

Can you get a bigger tent? No, they don't exist. My cob knobs. I can't believe you just call the feet or position the embryo position. We've got a phrase for that. So I read a story which is that and Daniel's mother of triplets,

one of her things to keep her going was to just say her kids' names over and over again. How loud the triplets just repeat their names. Baby ice. But they had very near-death experiences. It was so hairy. Scary ice.

Jesus. Crossed off three. Done posh, we've done scary and we've done baby, so that leaves sporty and ginger. Wait, they didn't take ginger nuts. They took the penguins. They're all sporty, but

the daughter rung her mum to say hey, I'm doing this Arctic expedition and the mum says, her daughter invited her, the daughter says she definitely didn't invite her mum, but her mum decided to go. But they both fell through the ice at one point. So the Arctic moves.

They didn't quite realise how much when you're exploring it shifts and moves and the ice was creaking and they're wearing skis and they both fell through the ice and had to like swim in the skis and she said she just remembered while also towing these supply wagons they all had a supply wagon they had to tow behind them.

And they survived? It sounds like God was watching because they ended up, two of them ended up managing to climb out onto one side of the ice but their group was on the other so they were on either side of a river and they just walked either side of this river and they were getting more and more divergent

and they realised they were not going to be able to get back to each other and then suddenly the ice started moving and the river closed up and the ice joined together. But it would have been very precarious as in to walk across that is quite nerve wracking. Fred, you would have had to walk quite gingerly.

Spice. Ice. Ice. James saw that coming from such a distance. I know! What's that on the horizon? Is it the North Pole? No, is that this junk? Oh, it doesn't feel as good when you get there.

OK, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the crowd science expert who designed and mapped out the queue is called Professor Keith Still. Did you try and say keep?

It sounds like keep. So his name is Keith Still. It looks like keep still when you say it in a weird way. What's the queues do? They moved, I think. This one famously was a very long one that required you to Keith Still. It actually required you to keep walking for about five months.

It did, but what were you doing when you weren't walking? I suppose you would keep still. That's right. Keith Still. This is the queue for Elizabeth II. This is the passing of the Queen. There was this extraordinary queue that lasted somewhere between five miles onwards

and if you were in it, if you were someone who came to London to be part of it, you could be waiting between nine and 24 hours to eventually get to the front of the queue. Professor Keith Still is someone who helps. We can say his name normally now we've done the facts. We've explained the joke.

Now let's just call him by his name. He is from Burton and Kendall in Cumbria and his job is a crowd scientist. So for the last 30 years he's been doing this as a job and he was the person who was in charge of creating a line that was going to be one

that meant that people felt safe and that they had toilet stops along the way and he had to do a medical assistance and he had to devise it for something that was twice the length. Where would it have come from? Into the English Channel. Because they did stop it at one point

and they said we're at capacity so they didn't use the proposed route but then what they had was a pen where a sort of secondary queue started where you could then go from that second queue for the queue, exactly. Yeah, I remember that happened I didn't go clubbing very much as a student

but... I don't know, it's true but I think partly because one of the first times I went. Your friends said you were too tall, didn't they? Yeah, apparently the club had a very low ceiling They always do, yeah. I would have hated it.

No, there was a club called The Bridge which you'd go to and you'd queue up for ages and I did queue up for ages and then I got in and it turned out that the club I got into was actually a queue for the actual club. There was this whole...

and it had a bar and everything but it was basically the queue for The Bridge as in you'd get given a ticket and when they called out certain tickets you could go into the actual club but I'd queue for about 40 minutes to get into the queue club which was rubbish.

You must feel like an absolute chump I've been to The Bridge multiple times I don't remember the old double queue Anna probably walks up to the front and says I'm Anna Szczenski So I hadn't really thought about the fact that you would be actually standing up because you are constantly moving

so you can't really sit down, you were standing up for 24 hours and lots of people needed medical treatment 291 people needed medical assistance just on one day with 17 having to go to hospital It's a lot. Dehydrating and fainting, it is quite a lot. Of course they could have just not had a queue

I mean these days we do have systems to stop people from having to queue for miles and miles and miles What, like booking in? They could have just gone on the website said I'm going to come between one o'clock and two o'clock and then the queue would never have gotten longer than an hour. Why is the fun in that? What would the news have done for a week?

That's the point isn't it? The point is that it's like this ceremonial thing that they wanted to show how important it was Professor Still Keith Still He got into queuing several decades ago he was at a Freddie Mercury gig

and it was at Wembley and he and his friends they were stuck in the queue for hours and his friends were all quite annoyed and he was quite mathematically minded and thought God this is really interesting actually and so he got into queuing and he then his Interestingly queuing for the Queen

and queuing for Queen Oh my God! We've blown the shit wide open His next thing he did, he went to Wembley stadium and he got special permission from the grounds and he would spend his weekends for ages sitting above the players

tunnel watching the crowds The match was going on but he's not watching it I think he wouldn't have been paying any attention to the match You just see this guy sitting above the He can't he said of the queue he would not have been able to withstand the length of time it required

to get to the front He himself can no longer queue even the queues he decides because he's old He's got an arthritic hip That must require him to keep still more often than he'd like

It's funny because he's got a lovely website and he lists his hobbies on it It's a great website, he owns multiple motor bikes and he plays bowls It's quite a rare combo having a Harley Davidson and playing crown green bowls

Is it? No, you're right, in Hell's Angels they were famous for their bowls Sorry, they're the only people at motorbike I forgot that as well I associate both with real ale pubs I bet he loves a real ale

Some other animals queue I don't know this Hunts probably I reckon Fish queue There's small goby fish They have this thing where they have a mating queue

This is a bit sexy Only the top male and female mate and all the other females have to wait in a queue before they can have sex I think with the top male but maybe there's a queue of males I don't know To organise the queue

they do it by a pecking order of sexiness and sexiness is body mass for them The biggest female is the sexiest one and gets to have sex first and then the next biggest You know how in school you had to line up for fire drills and things with a height order?

We did I was always left to burn with it But the fish can tell their body mass So if the difference is more than 5% of their body mass between one female and the next they will queue neatly

because they know who's bigger they can see They've all got scales haven't they? But if the difference is smaller than 5% between two females in the queue the smaller one will try and queue jump and we'll sort of say there's enough there's a small enough difference

and then the bigger one will drive it out of the group will sort of force it out of the queue They'll have a fight When I finish that fight they both lose weight This is what they... Similar to that, smaller fish will sometimes adjust their own size They will lose weight to avoid presenting a challenge

that's bigger than them So they don't get in a fight and they don't queue jump They say, right, I'll just shrink my own body How do they do that? I guess they don't eat for a while Oh, in the lead up to the queue Not on the spot They can't do everything else

Famous queue When McDonald's opened in Moscow in 1990 People queued for 6 hours to get a McDonald's They served 30,000 people on the first day and one Big Mac cost 3.75 rubles

And a monthly wage was 150 rubles So that is the equivalent today of a Big Mac costing £52.78 Wow! People queued for 6 hours to get that Someone tells you it's that expensive

You think it must be worth it? There was 700 seats inside and 200 outside of this McDonald's in Pushkin Sky Square And 900 people That's about the same as a Globe Theatre It was the largest McDonald's in the world until McDonald's

left Russia In a sense, isn't McDonald's really the theatre sort of space for... I've got no idea where you're going I would be where you're going

Believe in him What do you see at McDonald's late night? McDonald's You go to a McDonald's All human life is there It's kind of like a theatre Macbeth is a Macbeth

So much there for you, Andy That was what you were going for I feel like I did a lot of work in the midfield there I don't have to slotted it at home The sheer of your jokes We did on QI once that the way we load airplanes is totally wrong

They say if you're in rows 50 to 70 please come forward now and they load from the back first which seems to make sense Well actually that's the least efficient way to do it It's way more efficient just to say everyone randomly get on the plane Close the door in four minutes

Go! You mean the easy jet system Leave the kids go! Well the great thing is if you have kids you get to the front of the queue Although that is one of the best ways to do it Slow loaders, i.e. people with kids do get on first But yeah, someone studied it

mathematically and realised that loading from the back is actually slower than doing it randomly because people bunch up and they block each other but you're not loading the empty spaces One really good way to do it is do window seats then aisle seats, then middle seats Oh cool! That's mad!

That's insane! Let's say you're three people going on a plane a family Now the four year old on their own Family's aside, i do think that is a cool way of doing it because then everyone's slotted, everyone goes to the end of their row where the windows are and no one's

faffing about in the corridor bit of the plane They're not doing it on purpose, Andy They just need to get their bags into the window I'm not sure the window seat knocks that out because you still need to get your bag into the top bit The key thing to do is everyone carries the bag with them and just holds it in their arms until the plane is taken off then you can put it up in the racks above

to hold the bags in your arms especially if you're on an emergency exit seat You've got to put that under your feet I'm afraid Don't fly! I was reading a website called LineLogic and they specialize in looking at public guidances and line management solutions

and so they go into businesses and try and sort out how they can best manage their crowds and stuff and they say that the word faffing directly relates to the idea of getting to the front of a queue and then waiting for that person who's just in front of you

who's paid to sort of gather their things together the faffing that they do of sort of like putting their wallet back and so on That's the first instance of the word faffing What is this website? It's LineLogic I'm back, that's great

But they say that faffing time takes roughly 3.17 seconds That's the average faff that you'll have because you can pride yourself on being a non-faffer once you're at the front of a queue Right, no, I've got my wallet I'm ready to put the card away I'm ready to grab the thing and go

Or you can faff I wonder which you are, I think I pride myself on my non-faffer You really are Oh, you guys are expecting that It's felt like a weighted survey when you explain the difference between the two Because they do say some people are absolutely awesome

and they always know exactly how to leave a checkout And you get these complete assholes Well, I panic I'm annoying the people behind me basically So I think time when you finish your transaction feels, you know, longer to you I agree, I often rush off without my shopping

I'm scared But I feel you're the type of personality that would want to make sure that was acknowledged and then so you would somehow waste the person behind you's time going No worries, get in out of your way there so quickly Oh, just don't worry Just another day being a hero

I reckon you just go Beep! 3 seconds 24, very good Enjoy that extra second, I'll say you do 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 have said over the course of this podcast

we can all be found on our Twitter account So I'm gonna add Shriverland, Andy James and Anna Yep, we'll go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website nosuchthingasafish.com, check out all the previous episodes up there, also check out

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