No Such Thing As A Fish - 460: No Such Thing as Proust's Sausage Roll

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Live from the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Popeye, Proust, Hankies and Spankies. 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

Hi everyone, Happy New Year! We have a little favour to ask you before we start with the 2013 episodes of No Such Thing As A Fish. 2013 episodes? Is that not... oh, what year is it? James, oh my god, this is so sad. You've just woken up from a coma and you haven't realised that ten years have passed. No, no. You mean this is an episode two of No Such Thing As A Fish? I'm so sorry, but you're going to be delighted with how far we've come in the interim. Wow. Well, what have we done while I've been in a coma? Have we told the world? Have we made some books? Have we won any national comedy awards? Well, do you know, it's funny you should mention that. That's the one thing we haven't quite done yet. And

we're delighted to have you back. We've had to simulate your presence for the last decade. Delighted to have you back to help us win them, because that is what we're supposed to be talking about right now. It is the National Comedy Awards and we are on the long list. No Such Thing As A Fish for Best Comedy Podcast. We would absolutely love to get to the short list. If by any chance you like this show and you're here, so maybe you do, if you could go to qi.com slash vote and vote for us, we'd be hugely grateful. That's right. We would love to get on that short list, so please, please do vote. It'll take no time at all. You can click through all the other bits. Like, we're quite near the end, so if you don't

know who was the best supporting actor in a foreign sitcom this year, then it doesn't matter. You can just click past it, get to the podcast bit, click on those who sing as a fish, put your email in, bish bash bosh, job done. And we might get nominated for an award. I'm going back to sleep. Enjoy the show. I'm with the podcast. I'm with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular

order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact, my fact this week, is that originally Popeye, the sailor man, got his powers not from eating spinach, but by rubbing a lucky magic hen. I love the fact that you need to specify Popeye the sailor man. So this is Popeye, we obviously know the great guy. That was the chicken. So Popeye the sailor man, and he was a cartoon back in the early 1900s. And also beyond, if you're remembering Popeye and thinking, shit, am I that old? He lasted even beyond the early 1900s. I don't know if he's still on TV. He might be, but we all still know him. He's such an iconic character. And obviously he derived all of his powers from spinach. But when the comic strip

that he first appeared in was happening, he wasn't a main character. He was a sort of peripheral character who was introduced to the series. And there's an episode where he finds himself hired by Olive Oil, who becomes his girlfriend and eventual wife, by her brother, who's called Caster Oil, who sails a ship to Dice Island, where he intends to make a lot of money in a casino by rubbing the head of a lucky hen. And when he gets there, Popeye gets shot by someone. So the first time we ever see him getting supernatural strength is when after he's shot, this little wiffle hen comes by and he goes, wow, wiffle hen. I don't know how he talks actually. I can't remember. There's something like that. Yeah. And he, and he rubs the hen's head, and then he gets

the supernatural power and he takes out the shooter with some punches. And that's the very first moment. It was a comic strip, right? Yeah. So we wouldn't have known how he spoke, I guess. It's just whatever's in your head is how he spoke. That's a very nice thought. Isn't there an American restaurant called Popeyes? Yeah. Isn't there a chicken restaurant? Oh, yeah. I go in there, rubbing their chickens. You've been told. Spinach didn't come in until quite a lot later, did it? It was a few years later. I think it was 1932. Yeah, yeah. And Popeye, like you say, I think this comic book series started in the mid teens, 15 or 16, but I think Popeye became the main character in the early 20s. So until then, I think he was just relying on normal strength.

Well, he's very strong. I mean, he's very strong normally, but when he has a spinach, he gets extra strong. That's the whole point of those forearms, you know. Yes. Well, wait a minute, because your biceps are what make you strong. This has always been the bewildering thing about Popeye. So he's got massive forearms, and the muscles in your forearms are the ones that control your fingers. So he's just a brilliant pianist. Don't do a thumb war with Popeye, that's what you're saying. I did not know that Popeye is Jewish. Is he? Popeye is Jewish. So LZ Seagal was the original cartoonist who drew Popeye. He was Jewish, and there were a lot of sort of very, very subtle Jewish references and sort of jokes in the in the strip. Yeah. And to such an extent,

that in Fascist Italy, because the cartoon was popular across the world, it was so, so popular. When it appeared in Fascist Italy, the creator's name Seagal was taken off it, because they were back as a medic. And so, you know, so, yeah, yeah, but they still had to have the Popeye. Are you saying Popeye the sailor was Jewish or that Seagal was Jewish? Well, Seagal was Jewish. And there are lots of references. It's a very sort of Jewish inflected and influenced cartoon. There's no, there's no actual scene of Popeye, you know, having Yom Kippur or whatever. That's amazing, because weirdly, later on in the Popeye run, there was a thing where the original animators were no longer animating it, and it was outsourced. And it was outsourced to Prague,

in order for them to make the cartoon. So there was a whole series where Tom and Jerry was made in Prague and so on. And none of the animators out there had seen it. And this was because there was no money to do it. So there was a run of 13 episodes, which are often called the worst 13 episodes of Tom and Jerry, because no one had really seen it. But Popeye was done there as well. But the thing was, all of the, all of the people, this is a credits thing who animated in Prague had to have their names changed to American names, because they didn't want audiences thinking a communist country at the time was infiltrating communist ideas into their Popeye and Tom and Jerry cartoon. Also, isn't it landlocked, Czech Republic? So like, how would you have a sailor

man there? Oh, I guess in, I guess inland waterways. Oh, the Danube. Yeah, canal-based. Mongolia has a navy, doesn't it, as well, despite being landlocked. It does, yeah. And Bolivia as well. And Bolivia, yes. I mean, Captain Von Trapp is a, in the sound of music, he's a, is he an admiral or something? Or a captain in the navy of the landlocked Austria? It makes more sense if you're going to have a sailor man to have him on the coast. Completely, completely. It's weird. We've, you know how we normally try and blow shit wide open? We seem to have closed shit wide shut there. Yeah, I like it. That's what we should do. Close shit wide shut. Just on chicken rubbing specifically, there is an Orthodox Jewish ritual called kapparot,

where you wave a rooster over someone's head, and you say a particular prayer, and then you slaughter the rooster, and you get the slaughtered rooster to charity, and it's an atonement ritual for whoever's having the chicken waver over them. Do you rub it on their head so you're... I don't think you rub it specifically, you just sort of waft it around above them. But maybe, maybe the Wifflehen is a very subtle reference to the traditional Jewish kapparot ritual. Yeah, could be. It's almost certainly not. There's also, there was an old English bit of folklore where if you wanted to stop your baby from getting chicken pox, you would rub it with a chicken. So it could have been that. Right. Yeah. I'm so glad we're on chicken rubbing stuff,

because I actually did quite a lot of chicken, chicken rubbing work. I can feel a personal anecdote coming up. So chickens will sometimes flirt with each other by rubbing themselves on the ground. Okay. So like, yeah, yeah. So there's this thing called preening oil, which comes out of a kind of gland above the beak, and it contains lots of information about the bird's genes and about it, you know, how suitable it is as a mate and things like that. And so sometimes a cockerel will, will wipe itself on the, on the ground, for example, to just show, to leave it sent for a prospective mate. Like a genome sequencing act. It leaves its genome sequence on the ground for the male to look at and say, oh, you're not prone to sickle cell anemia. Thank God.

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. The Etruscans used to rub chickens. So glad we're doing all this chicken rubbing stuff, because this is great. Go on, go on. So the Etruscans and then the Romans after them, but they used chickens for divination. They thought they were kind of quite holy. And for good luck, you would get a chicken. It was always a dead chicken that you would rub, but you would rub it for good luck. And that's probably where we get the idea of the wishbone from these guys as well. You know, like, if you cook a chicken, you get the bone out, they used to rub those little bones for luck as well. And that's why we do that. Now we just snap them. Now we just snap them. Well,

rub it too hard. You don't, you don't want that to happen in most rubbing situations. Snapped. The hen in Popeye. Sorry to stop us. I've just got one more chicken rubbing paste. No, no, please get it out. I'd hate for the listener to miss out on your golden research. Appalachian chicken rubbing rituals. And I just thought that would be a nice thing. So there are lots of Kentucky waltz superstitions. You know, when you have a waltz. I don't know what Kentucky waltz is though. It's deep fried, isn't it? There are so many traditions or superstitions about what you do with your waltz to make it disappear in Kentucky specifically. Yeah. So, I mean, it's mostly rub something on it. So,

you know, it might be a chicken gizzard or a chicken intestine, but also bacon rind or beef steak or one bean or three beans. Just don't accidentally rub two beans on it, whatever you think. Then you come out and you get double waltz. Killer cat, bad start. Take it to a graveyard at midnight and then rub the cat on the waltz. It also gets rid of the waltz. It feels like you go with the one bean. It's a sort of step change process. You know, you try one bean out of three beans, then you kill a cat and take it to a graveyard. Anyway. You were going to say on Popeye's chicken. Sorry, Popeye. I wanted to drag it back to Popeye apparently. No, no, no. That's fine. Let's do more rubbing chickens. What else you got? Oh, sure. Thank you, Dad. Well, sorry,

my mistake. No, so in the in the cartoon, we've got this mystical chicken, but it's not the only in the comic strip. Sorry, in the comic strip. And it's not the only animal in the comic strip that had these sort of paranormal mystical powers. There was also a dog called Eugene the Jeep. And this was in a 1936 Thimble Theater comic strip. And that's what Popeye was part of. I don't think he was a dog per se. He looked like a dog. We don't fully know what he was. And it led to one of the most existential brilliant comic strips that I think the creator ever wrote. The headline of it was What's a Jeep? Eugene the Jeep. What's a Jeep? And this is what the comic strip for kids said. A Jeep is an animal living in a three dimensional world, in this case, our world, but

really belongs to a fourth dimensional world. Here's what happened. A number of Jeep life sails were somehow forced through a dimensional barrier into our world. They combined at a favourable time with the life cells of the African hooey hound. The electrical vibrations of that hooey hound cell and the foreign cell were the same. They are a kind of kindred cell. In fact, all things are to some extent relative, whether they be this or some other world. Now you see. For what, for six year olds, that is. He was based on a Polish person, wasn't he? Which I imagine, Popeye was, which I imagine they had had to cover up when they wanted there to be none of these communist influences. But this guy sounds like a bit of a legend. Frank Rocky Fiegel, who was from Segar's

hometown. So he lived in Chester, Illinois, which is where Segar came from. But his parents were Polish immigrants. And there's one remaining photo of him. And he does look like Popeye, but it's very hard to tell because he's basically got a pipe and he's bald. I think he definitely looks like Popeye. He looks like Popeye and he was constantly getting into fights. And which basically is what Popeye does, right? He smokes, he gets into fights. Well, he was a boxer, wasn't he, I think? He was a boxer and a nice guy, though. Constantly starting fights, but a nice guy and always protected the children. We're talking about the sailor now, right? We're talking about Fiegel, the sailor. And apparently, according to his biographies. Sorry, that Popeye is a sailor as

well. Oh, sorry. He did actually say at the very start, Popeye the sailor. Quite specifically, you see why I added it now, Andy. And actually, this guy wasn't a sailor. The Polish, what? No, he wasn't a sailor. He was just a down and out guy. So just a guy who liked getting into fights is the inspiration. Maybe he didn't spend so much time checking out rubbing chicken. But he used to get sent money, apparently. Segar's assistant said they used to send him a little bit of money to say thanks for inspiring the character of Popeye. Segar said this to the Randolph County Herald newspaper that it was based on this guy. And there was another person in the town called John William Shushett, who was supposedly what Wimpy was based on. So you know

Wimpy, the character who's, I gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today and all that. He's always in debt and he's always eaten hamburgers. And according to this historian, John William Shushett also liked hamburgers. Interesting. Open and shut case. We've shut this shit mind closed. His name means joke, sweetly. Fiegel or figiel. His name is prank or joke. Oh yeah. Which is kind of what Popeye is. It's pretty funny. A comic strip. There is a serious point behind Popeye. So there was a psychoanalytic piece done about him in an American paper in 1932. This is a paper called The Post. This batch was really, really famous paper at the time. You may not realise it, but Popeye is a suppressed desire. He personifies the desire most of us

have both to be strong and to sock some of the unpleasant people we encounter. A desire suppressed because we lack Popeye's muscles. Although Popeye himself says he would never hit anyone as hard as he could, because it's wrong to kill people. There's actually quite a sweet... Wait, the cartoon character now. Yeah, the cartoon character, yeah. The cartoon character wrote a letter to a paper in the 1930s saying, and I suppose Siegel probably helped him write it, saying he'd never hit anyone as hard as he could because it's wrong to kill people. And he said he's been shot 120 times, but when bullets go through him, it doesn't bother him at all, except that he always has to block up the hole with a cork because he doesn't like drafts blowing through

him. Beautiful. People complained about the fighting because he was teaching kids to fight. So after that, he carried on fighting, but only for the honour of old ladies and children. Later, later strips. Did children have honour? Yeah. I guess so. Original honour. All right, yeah. Old babies have. But he was really, he was really positive for spinach eating at the time. Yeah. There were reports and I don't know how accurate they were, but during the Great Depression, they said that the uptake in children who were interested in eating food like spinach, well specifically spinach, was 33%. And that bumped it up to sort of like the third most requested food or favourite food of a child during that time.

Yeah, the insane claim is that there was a survey done which asked children what they liked to eat. Their first thing was turkey and their second thing was ice cream. And then they claimed spinach. So it seems very important. And then Popeye later on in the cartoons, he stopped eating the spinach directly out of the can. So you know, he would like squeeze the can and the, but apparently they were worried that children might copy this and might get a can of spinach and eat directly from it and cut their mouths. So he stopped doing it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, that's the kind of thing I would have done, actually. I think that's fair. I need to move us on to our next comment. Can we just, can we mention very quickly the madness of the film,

Popeye? Oh yeah. The Robin Williams movie. Which is just one thing about it. So there's the Robin Williams film, 1980, and it's not very good apparently. I haven't seen it. It's absolutely brilliant. I've seen it five times. It's really good. It's a classic. So there you go. Robin Williams' first film. It's amazing. Yeah, agreed. It's great. It's mad. All right. It's too against one. It's insane. But I have better taste. No, I haven't seen it. So it might be great. But anyway, the crazy thing about it is what it was like to film it. So the producer was a guy called Robert Evans. Everyone who worked tonight admits that they were basically rolling in cocaine the entire time. And at one point, and they were all bringing cocaine on set, they'd open up like

camera packs and just cocaine would fall out of cameras. I haven't seen this film either, but is that why he does it instead of spinach? Yes, it is. Yeah. And Robert Evans had some luggage that was full of cocaine that he was bringing with him to the set. And it went missing at the airport as bags sometimes do. And he thought, oh, shit, A, we're not going to get our coke. And B, if someone finds that luggage, I'm in trouble. And so what he did was he basically convinced the Maltese prime minister at the time, a guy called Dominic Mintoff, to do an exhaustive search of basically the country to try and find his bags. And so Mintoff said, why on earth would I do that? And he said, oh, well, I'm very good friends with Henry Kissinger.

And Kissinger has written you a personal note, which is inside that luggage. And I'd really love to give it to you. So it's really important that we track it down so you can read his lovely letter. So he did. His ego is flattered enough. He tracked it down for him. And then immediately, as soon as he'd done it, Robert Evans had to fly back to the US, meet up with Henry Kissinger and say, look, Henry, I'm so sorry, but you have to write a fake letter to the leader of Malta, saying what a great guy he is. Long story short, cocaine luggage situation. Do you mind? And Kissinger was very reluctant because Mintoff was an ally of Gaddafi. It would have been very weird for him to write an affectionate letter. But he capitulated to save the shit slash good film.

He wrote a fake letter. Did he really? Well, it sounds like he just wrote a letter. If you're Henry Kissinger and you are writing a letter, that's a letter. I guess it's fake. He backdated it. Oh, OK, that is fake. It's mad. I've just got a few more facts about chicken rubbing. We don't have time, Andy. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Squarespace. Yes, Squarespace is what you need if you have a brilliant idea that you want to transform into a brilliant website. Absolutely. You might have something to sell. You might want to sell yourself by which I mean, you might be a content creator. You might want

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to his house to play a specific piece for him. It's such a cool thing to be able to do. And this is before he was even really famous. How did he do that? I mean, how did he do it? He just, I guess, people were more willing to do shit back in the day. It was sort of pre-telephones, right? This period. Not everyone's got a telephone. Yeah, no one's calling them. Yeah, he's going around to their house. Yeah, so four individual houses in the middle of the night. Yeah. Wake them up. It's 11pm. He loved chamber music. It's crazier than the Kissinger letter, I think. I don't know how you would organise that. Basically, at 11pm, he thought, I'd love to listen to César Franck's string quartet and D major, and nothing will stop me. And so he knocked on

the door of the leading French violinist in Paris at the time, Gaston Poulet, who was in his pyjamas and answered the door. And Proust said, I've got a taxi waiting downstairs. We're going to pick up your freemates and you're going to play me this piece. And so, yeah, he went around all their houses. One of them, the violist, was sceptical, apparently, because Proust was, he was wrapped in a big blanket and he was eating mashed potato the whole time in this cab. But they all got in. Proust had a very weird life. Should we just say, Proust is one of the greatest, certainly, one of the longest novels ever written, Alasherst de Tumper do, In Search of Lost Time, and, you know, that's about it. That was his main thing, because he spent a long time writing it,

and then he died. A huge eccentric in that his eccentricities were sort of half-born out of the illnesses that he had in his life, but he famously wrote all these books in bed. He rarely went to sleep. He was allergic to dust. He was allergic to so many things. He had cork walls on his room at home because he tried to keep out any allergies from getting to him. He had really bad asthma, didn't he, which he took cigarettes for. I heard it. I already had up to 10 asthma attacks a day, each one lasting up to an hour. Yeah. It's unbelievable that he wrote one of the longest books ever written, considering how much time he just spent having asthma, basically. Yeah, but that was the thing. By then, you would get

these cigarettes, and they would have opium in them and stuff, so they weren't that bad, but they were going into your lungs. And you said about telephones, Dan. So they did have telephones, then they weren't obviously super popular, but it was a time to remember we talked about this music that used to play through the telephone. Yeah, that's right. In America, it's like the most Spotify in a way. Exactly. They had this in France, and Proust had it, because he was in bed the whole time. Wow. So he had this kind of wires set up to an earpiece, and he would listen to music. So hang on, when you woke up the members of the String Quartet, he literally had functioning opera coming into his room. It wasn't that functioning, to be honest. Like, there was one time when there

was a really loud crowd, and he thought that that was the song, because you couldn't really tell what was happening. So everyone was cheering. He was, oh, that was beautiful. And they were like, no, no, that wasn't the song. But this was called the theatrical phone, and it was very popular in France at the time. Also very popular in Budapest. And there was Harper's Weekly said that this system in Budapest had made it the city that was full of illiterate, blind, bedridden and incurably lazy people, because they were all at home just listening to this music. That feels like quite a personal, that's a bit of a sub-tweet on Proust himself, isn't it? I mean, that's what he was a little bit like. Well, it was a little bit, yeah. I think they were more slugging off the

entire city of Budapest. So Proust's sort of habits when he was writing. So he went to bed in 1909, and he basically stayed there until 19, I think, 22. 22, I think he's 19. And he wrote for 13 years, and one of his, and also he couldn't get a publisher. He wrote the first volume, really struggled to get it published. No publishers were interested. He had to self-publish it, you know, at his own expense. I think he inherited quite a lot of money, so he was quite well healed. And there was one person who believed in him and championed the work and wrote a lot of brilliant, you know, reviews saying, you have to read this author. He is changing the face of literature. And that person was Marcel Proust, under an assumed name. He paid for his own early

reviews in lots of newspapers. No way. Yeah, he wrote them in longhand, and then he secretly had them typed up by his publisher, so there was no paper trail. And he described his own work as a little masterpiece. He said, what Monsieur Proust sees and feels is completely original. I always think of it as the French trying to get one up on the British and Irish, because I feel like we have James Joyce, and there's this impenetrable, you know, thousand-plus-page tome that we all attempt to get through at some point and then mostly fail. And then they have Proust, where they just did that, and then he wrote six more volumes, exactly the same on top of it. Well, I think Proust came first, or certainly his first book was published before Joyce.

Because, like Candy says, it was self-published, but he went to a publisher to try and get it published, this guy called Gaston Gallimard. And Gallimard passed it on to a reader, and the reader just, it was really long, so he just opened it up on a random page, page 62. And what he found was a boring, an overwritten description of a cup of herbal tea. So he declined it, and then Proust had to do the self-publishing thing. But then, 10 years later, Gallimard got another novel. It was a very long Irish novel, and it was James Joyce's Ulysses. Because I already regretted it for years, like the guy who turned down the Beatles. He apologized, yeah. They did meet once. Proust and James Joyce. Yeah, 1922, it was the year that he died. But it was one of the few times

he actually went out, I think, and he went to a dinner party, and James Joyce was there. And then all I know is, I think James Joyce got quite pissed and tried to invite himself back to Proust's house, and Proust had to sneak away. But do you have more detail? Well, all I've read about the encounter is that they hadn't actually read each other's books. Oh yeah, really? One of the counter of two of the greatest minds ever, they have nothing to say. That's so funny. It was a guy, before he wrote his mega series of books, he translated a couple of books, and Ruskin, he was a huge fan of Ruskin, right? And when Ruskin passed away, Proust decided that he wanted to make French translations of two of the books, except he didn't speak any English. So he had to ask his

mum to translate it for him, and then he did a proper, better translation of his mum's translation of the book. Oh my God, he bloody loved his mum, my God. If anyone's a mummy's boy, yeah, because he lived with his parents until they both died, which is fine. And he used to write letters to his mum from bed, when he couldn't sleep saying, you know, mother, I'm so sorry, I won't be able to get up and spend breakfast with you, and nothing would make me happier. 2000 pages later. But his dad was quite strange, and subjected him to this quite strange experience when he was about 16, which was that he was very worried about his son, Marcel's masturbation. Too much, not enough, yeah, just didn't think he was doing it. Doing it weird. I thought you'd have this fact. Love the

rubbing cock facts. There were no, no chickens were involved, but he was, he was a doctor, Dr Adrian Proust, and it was a time when people thought masturbation was bad, and Proust, Dr Proust thought that it could lead to homosexuality, because Proust was gay, in fact. And so I think those parents might have thought, oh God, we think he might be gay. And so they said to cure him, when he was 16, his dad gave him 10 francs, sent him to a brothel, and said, here you go, have sex with a prostitute, at female, please, and that will stop this awful masturbation habit. 10 francs? Yeah. How much that is it? Well, back in the day, you're not going to splash out on the first experience, because he's got nothing to compare to. Well, speaking of which he didn't, it was a failure.

This is why we know about it, because Proust, Marcel Proust wrote a letter to his grandfather the next day saying, I'm really sorry, I need to borrow 13 francs off you. Papa gave me 10 francs, so I can get rid of this dreadful masturbation habit. But what I did was I turned up, I broke the prostitute's three franc chamber pot, embarrassing. And then I was so embarrassed that I couldn't perform. And so now I need to go back and try again, but I also need to pay her for her chamber pot. So, poor guy. We have this impression of him as very sort of ill and, you know, like, constantly retiring to his bed. He did once fight a duel in his life. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it was over something that mattered to him a lot. He fought a duel when someone accused him of being gay,

of having had a gay affair. And his accuser was a literary critic who was called Jean Lorraine, who was also gay. So, to be clear, this is two gay guys having a duel, because one of them said to the other, you are gay. Yeah. And they both survived, didn't they? Did they actually fight? They both shot, and they both missed. They both missed. My son shot first. He went in the sort of region of his feet, but didn't get him. And the other guy missed outright. But you kind of, I guess, have to think about the times. Of course. Yeah. He was outing him for something that might have got him killed anyway for being a homosexual. Maybe his dad, having written what he wrote was a, yeah, it's a tough show. He had a tough life, didn't he, Marcel? Or Marcel? Yeah.

He once diagnosed himself with a brain disorder and said that the only way to cure it was by drilling loads of holes into his skull. Did he do that? And so, he begged a doctor to do it. And the doctor, quite responsible for doctors at the time, said, I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Well, in fairness, that's around 1910, that was standard. That was, yeah, they were trapanning around that time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Someone won a Nobel Prize for it. That's right. They did. Yeah. The main, main character in Alarashesh to Tom Perdue was going to be the Madeleine. So the whole point of it is not the whole point, but I read the very start. He's kind of got this Madeleine cake, and he has a bite of it. And suddenly he remembers all the history and things that happened because

this evoked such a memory from him. So I thought I'd look into Madeleines. Apparently invented by a young girl called Madeleine, who stood in for the chef to the Duke of Lorraine. We're not quite sure why, but the chef wasn't there. And they were like, you in. And she only knew one recipe, and that was her grandmother's recipe for cakes. And so that's all she made. And so she just made loads and loads and loads of these, and they were named after her, apparently. And in 2006, there was a thing called Cafe Europa, it was an EU thing, where every country in Europe had to give their best cake or their best sweet thing. And then they would sort of celebrate them all. And France gave the Madeleines. Really? Because they're quite crap. Oh, really? Yeah, they're just, do you

guys know what they are? They're like a little sponge cake. I've not had one. You will have had one. They're just so boring. You idiot, Dan. Of course you've had one. Ironically, they're very easy to forget. They're like a tiny little sponge cake. They're shaped like a scallop, a scallop, a shell, you know, a seashell. The shape like that. Yeah, yeah. But in the original book, it was a bit of toast, originally. I thought this needs a rewrite. Yeah. I just wondered if you wanted to guess some other countries and what they did for their sweets. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, because France has so much France, it's the land of cakes. Exactly. You know, the Eclair. I would have submitted the Eclair. Well, you didn't. Have they didn't? Yeah. Did they win? Did they win with

the Madeleine? It wasn't a competition. It was just like... What's the point of it then? What is it? What's the point of anything if it isn't a competition? I agree. This isn't a competition, Andy. No one wins this out of the four of us at the end. Don't be ridiculous. We've been scoring for the last 450 episodes. I'm definitely confident. I actually can imagine Andy going home and having a little white bar when he puts that on. Another great win, Andy. Well done. The soul metric is a number of chicken rubbing references made throughout the show. Okay, so what other countries have made? I mean, yeah, just that. They're all relatively easy to guess. Belgium. It has to be a sweet thing. Croissant. Crassons in Belgium. Sweet chips.

Honey, honey-freete. Waffles. Waffles. A Portugal pastel denata, for instance. Don't give it all away. Don't give it all away. Well, I just thought we'd go straight maybe to the UK. Can you guess what the UK gave you? Bloody hell. Oh, that sort of pink Tottenham cake that you get in Greggs. It's very nice. It's so nice. I don't know what that is. I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Greggs. Okay, okay. Victoria's punch cake. No, no. Thick Norf. Oh, those buns. Fervent Norf. Scottish, Scotland roll. A Scotch egg. They misunderstood the category and they gave a a deep fried Mars bar. A haggis. A sweet haggis. And sausage roll was fine. It was shortbread. Oh, okay. And Denmark went for the Danish pastry even though they were

invented in Austria. Sneaky. And who won? I think the Madeleine bit is really only famous because it's so near the beginning. It's the only bit anyone's got to because I have to say I have read and intend to when I have a period of time off next year read properly. But I researched it on Purdue because I think people are really hard on it even at the time they said it was impenetrable. And I think it's really fun to read from the 40 pages I read. But the Madeleine does come up within those 40 pages and it's not that relevant after that. But he did. It shows how much he agonized over everything that, as you said, Andy, it was a piece of toast for a bit. It was also a piece of stale bread, which is quite, I don't know why you would eat that. It was a sausage roll at

one stage. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is Andy. My fact is that in the 1920s, a smart young man would have two handkerchiefs, a blower and a shower. It's disgusting. What's the difference between them? Yes, there is a difference. So I got this from, I was reading an old novel called Green Banks by Dorothy Whipple, which is great. She's great. And there's a scene in it where there's a young man waiting for his girlfriend and he talks about having his blower in his shower. And I just piqued my interest. And it's very funny. I googled it. And it's hard to google. So the shower is the one you have in your top pocket. There's a pocket square that looks incredibly neat

and jazzy. And then the blower is the one you keep up your sleeve with all the snot on it. And that's the difference, too. Could the shower become a blower if you needed to? Absolutely. But you couldn't make a blower a shower, could you? No. No. You can blow a shower, but you can't show a blower. As the old saying goes. I disagree. It depends on where you're blowing on the blower. If you blow on the blower in like a top corner and then you fold it down, half of it, it's like a nice burger shower. There's a lot of it below the surface area. Well, okay. Yeah, just don't blow on the show bit of your blower. But it could start to come through the pocket, you know, like,

What? How? If you've got enough, if you've got all that cold, then you don't want snot seeping out of the bottom of your pocket with the show proudly seeping out the top. No, that's true. Yeah. I say keep them separate. I say keep them separate. Dan's the one who's proposed this Maverick system where you can, but it's rare, this usage of these phrases, but it did exist at the time. It crops up in the New York Times in 1927. And it's a report about the handkerchief being something from ancient China, you know, originally, but that those handkerchiefs were only show as not blowers. And it didn't used to be for that, did it? We only actually started blowing anything into handkerchiefs in about 400 years ago. And it seems like a long time ago.

But we had handkerchiefs long before that, or kerchiefs, which are just, it's just a word for something that wraps around your head, in fact, a headkerchief. Well, this is what's so weird. A kerchief is literally a head covering chief head and then Kerr was covering. And so now we have hand head covering is the word is a head covering you hold in your hand, basically. Yeah, I always thought that kerchief, when people say it, as they often do, was an abbreviation of handkerchief. Didn't know it gone the other way. We know the first person possibly who blew their nose on a handkerchief. Kidding, really? Well, we know the first person who wrote about it. And this was a guy called Desiderius Erasmus, who we have mentioned once or twice before. The philosopher?

The philosopher and religious scholar. But he also, and we have said this before, he wrote a bestselling book on etiquette. And at one stage, it was a bestselling book in the whole of Europe for dozens and dozens, if not 100 years after the Bible, basically the Bible and then this. And in this book, it said stuff like, do not be afraid of vomiting. It is not vomiting, but holding vomit in your throat that's foul. Politely disagree. Okay. Well, let's see if it's a bit of having been up and down some high streets on an early Sunday morning. Sometimes you do wish people had held it in their throat a bit. He also said, if you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn around discreetly and throw it somewhere. Oh, that is good advice. That's good. And finally, do not

move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind. So yeah, just America. I think it was him, sorry, who said, because this was just about the time when handkerchiefs were starting to be blown noses on, have noses blown on them. And so some didn't, some didn't. And he said, if you need to blow your nose, you can do it on the floor, not a table. On the floor? Blow your nose on the floor. Oh, right. So put your finger to your nostril and blow it in the direction. Sorry, sorry, you don't have to rub your face against the floor. Yeah, exactly. But he said, if it is visible, you do have to keep stepping over it and on it until it's gone away. Yeah. And he was basically, because people were doing that or

wiping out on their clothes, and he said, this was an improvement, which I think even Andy will admit. Yeah. Well, the handkerchief, definitely an improvement. No, no, no, blowing on the floor compared to blowing on your clothes, because I would say blowing, I'd probably do a subtle blow into my cuff rather than onto the floor. Wouldn't you? Depends on the scale of the blow. Yeah, it just think it's immediately sounds like with your leaking handkerchiefs is a dangerous manoeuvre. There was a thing that I read, which is that there was a period where people weren't carrying two handkerchiefs on them, but 30. This was actually as part of defense against I guess bullets. So what this was is in the in the late 1800s, there was a physician called George

E. Goodfellow. He lived in Tombzone, Arizona, or certainly was there at the time. And there was a postmortem that was done on a man who'd been shot. And there was a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. And they realized that the silk handkerchief had significantly helped for the bullet to penetrate less. It was like, wow, that dented the force of which it went. So he thought, what if we dressed in lots of handkerchiefs, then we would never die. So he invented what was such a chaotic premature bulletproof vest, whereby you wore 30 layers of handkerchiefs on your body. Yeah. And I think it worked. I think people were shocked. It did until he got a really heavy cold and he just having to keep pulling up became less and less safe. Do people actually

wear it? Was it just him trying to market his? It was him just experimenting with the idea of bulletproof vests didn't need to be metal plating, which is what everyone was using at this point. The problem is 30 handkerchief vests weighed much more than a metal plating. So it's impractical. It is why no Morris Dancer has ever been shot, because they've got the skills to move the handkerchief into position at the right time. So handkerchief, the word hanky-panky. Oh, okay. Is it related to handkerchiefs? It has nothing to do with handkerchiefs. It's not short for handkerchief, pankerchief. No, it's not. Can it be now? I just imagine Andy going back home to his life, little bit of handkerchief, handkerchief.

I'm only wearing 27 layers of handkerchiefs tonight, darling. Not really. It's that hanky-panky has nothing to do with sex. It's just completely originally meant juggling or trickery. It's still nothing to do with handkerchiefs because you would think... Still nothing to do with handkerchiefs. It may be related to hocus-pocus. Hocus-pocus, hanky-panky. That's a very sleazy magician, sorry. Hocus-pocus, hanky-panky. Have you guys heard of the valsalva effect? No. The valsalva effect is something that we probably all done. We must have all done this, which is when your ears are blocked or you're on a plane and you get descending, it's that action of holding your nose and holding your

mouth and blowing to get your ears popping. That's what you do to equalize as well, isn't it? Yeah. So it's the opposite of blowing your nose. You're sucking in, you're basically, you're using the pressure that's shooting inwards. So that's used for a number of things. It's for, yeah, for relieving your ears. It's for people with abnormal heart rhythms. They use it to relieve chest pain. They say if you do have abnormal heart problems that you should always consult a doctor before doing that, just to make sure that you don't make the situation worse. But another thing that it's used for is for people who suffer from premature ejaculation. Oh, really? Because I have very bad sinuses and have...

And literally do that valsalva effect, I would say about 20 times a day. Right. I don't want to know what person or link you're making to what bit of your first one is. I want to know what's coming. Not you. You manage it. Yeah, so pretty exciting, isn't it? So you're supposed to do that mid to sex? I think, I couldn't see where they said if it was before or during, but I imagine it's during, and I'm not sure how you can disguise that as a sexy thing. So next time you're having handkerchief,

handkerchief at home maybe. Try it out and let us know if it's before or during that it's required. They are sexy things though, aren't they? They were used for sexy purposes back in the day. In the 19th century, there were another one of these things where there was a whole language behind handkerchiefs that lovers could use to convey messages to each other. And there's actually a book, because we've talked before, I think about the language of flowers. If you sent flowers in a certain arrangement, it meant different things. Fans. Fans, the language of fans, if your fan is three quarters open, it means I'd like a handjob but not a blowjob or whatever. There's usually the woman with the fan, so actually, anyway.

You're an absolute menace in the summer, aren't you Anna? Question one, if you just want to keep cool. Being pounced on, there's a book published in 1879 called A Complete Guide to Glurtation, containing handkerchief, glove, fan and parasol flirtations and a complete language of flowers. So we have to assume everyone memorized this at the time, so they understood what each other was saying. But drawing a handkerchief across your forehead, do you know what that means? Sweaty. Yeah. It either means you're sweating profusely or it means we are being watched. Don't jump me. Across the cheeks was, I love you. Face cheeks. The face cheeks, yes. It's worth knowing, yeah. This is where the problems can come, if you don't

know. I didn't actually note down the ass cheeks one, so you'll have to just decide for yourselves. Through the hands, if someone, you're talking to someone, then we've a handkerchief through their hands. Oh yeah. I hate you. Oh, really? It's horrible. There was another one later in the 1970s, which was in the LGBTQ community, and you might wear different handkerchiefs or bandanas, and the collar might tell you what your fetish was. So if you're in a club with like-minded people, it would tell them what you're thinking. Also cartoon characters tend to wear handkerchiefs and bandanas around their necks because necks are quite hard to draw. Oh, really? And so... Oh, no. Fred Flintstone wears a light blue sort of cloth around his neck. Apparently he's into fallatio.

I'll rattle through these. Fred from Scooby-Doo, red, fisting, and Captain Pugwash light cream rimming. So it's just if they happen to be in a club, then that's what will happen. Wow. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi Anna, would you like to learn French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, any other languages like that? Uh, we, but I don't need to because that's yes in French, so... See, it is indeed we in French because C is we in sp... Anyway, we've got to stop saying we. And we've got to stop saying we because this week we are not sponsored by we, we are sponsored by Babbel. Babbel, the incredible app and website that helps you to learn a second, third, fourth,

or fifth language. Yeah, it's really good. So I had such a great time trying to learn Polish through Babbel. It has little 15-minute lessons which are designed to be the most efficient and effective way to learn a language. There's been lots of research done. It's based on that. You get to have interactive conversations with native speakers. I mean, they're not there live in the moment. They've got lives to lead, but they've got recordings from native speakers so you can have a sort of fake friend, a fake Polish friend, if you will, helping you out. Yeah, it's amazing because other apps, they might just have robots talking. So for instance, I did try and learn Italian from one of those apps and all I learned was, can someone please change my oil? Wow. And now I want to challenge you

to say that. Absolutely not. But I'm not going to. I really do recommend it very highly. And also, if you go to babbel.com slash podcast 22, that's 22, and use the promo code no fish, you will get an extra three months for free on top of the purchase of a three month subscription. That's right. So for listeners of fish, you can get three months free with a purchase of a three month subscription by going to babbel.com slash podcast 22. That's numbers two, two, and use the promo code no fish, babble language learning that works. Okay, on with the podcast on with the show. Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week, is that in the 1960s, owners of a theme park in Pennsylvania had guards with plastic bats in

the tunnel of love ride, who were instructed to give an admonishing thwack to any bear bums that they saw. Cover that with a handkerchief now. So this is a true thing that happened. In actual fact, it didn't just happen in Pennsylvania, it happened in a few different places. And when you're saying plastic bats, I'm thinking of table tennis bats. I'm not thinking of a plastic winged mammal bats. I have seen them. They are table tennis bats. Nice. Some of them were actually almost in the shape of a hand, you know, like one of those big sort of foam hands, plastic, and they would whack the bums like that. Oh, because they didn't want people making out all worse in the tunnels of love. No handkerchief, handkerchief. No. So this is an article. Originally,

I read this in Mental Floss, which is an online magazine. And I followed it up and found an article in the Pittsburgh City paper. And this is about a place called Kennywood Theme Park. And there is a ride there called the Old Mill. It was constructed in 1901. It's their oldest roller coaster in the whole place. And it's one of these, you know, like, like a log flume, where you're going in the water, but there's no up and down bits. You're just kind of slowly going around in the water. And there's like things to see on the, on the side. So there might be scary things. There might be skeletons or there might be sexy things or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. And then I found this YouTuber called Defunctland. And he's done

a video on this. And it's one of the best videos I've ever seen in my entire life on YouTube. It's all about this place. And he found an article from 1934 saying that this tunnel of love was a really good place for people to make out. And he found other tunnels of love where people whacking bear bums. And he asked people, have you or anyone you know, ever kissed or had sex on the tunnel of love in Kennywood? And he tweeted saying that I have received the most explicit, disgusting and shocking emails I have ever read. So this was really, and there are newspaper articles from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even all of them saying this is the place to go and make out. This is where kids make out. This is so famous for

that. It's only six minutes long, the ride. Yeah. Four minutes more than I need, buddy. Well, I've got a technique with the nose. And I wonder how for how many people who got slapped on the butt by the ping pong paddle, that turned into a sort of exciting new fetish that they didn't realise. I think there might have been a bit of that. There must have been so many Christmases where like the partner was going, yeah, yeah, I bought some ping pong paddles. I don't know, I just want to get into the sport, you know. There's no reason. Can I say something incredibly boring about this theme park, Kennywood? Yeah. So it was a trolley park originally.

And a few weeks ago on the podcast we mentioned trams. Yeah. That episode hasn't gone out yet, but we will have recently mentioned trams. And what's a trolley park? I'm so glad you asked, Dan. What are you doing? A trolley park is a miniature adventure park or a park with rides that's put at the end of a trolley line. So trolley is just an American word for a tram, basically. Yeah. And it was to encourage people to use the trolley car network at weekends. So you normally use them to get to work, but at the weekend they weren't being used, so they put something to attract people. Exactly. And so I'm sorry, I just thought we were all having so much fun and I just wanted to talk about tram infrastructure.

No, it's a good pallet cleanser. That's a good idea. Yeah. Any more on this? Well, just one other ride that there was at Kennywood in the early days, which was, sorry, not a ride, where there was one thing, an attraction called the House of Mystery, but no one knows what it was. Did no one ever come out of it? I just, it's been lost to history, unfortunately. And there was one thing called Spring Water, which was just a water fountain. It was the stream of water coming from a spring. There was a tin cup you could use to get a drink, but they had electrocuted the water, so that you would just get an electric shock every time you tried to have a drink.

Oh, that's pretty clever. That was entertainment, yeah. Anyway. These rides are tunnels of love, which you don't really see much anymore. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one myself, a fairground ride or a theme park or whatever. I don't know if there's a few like in the UK. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, they're basically the equivalent of rides that we've all seen at parks, where you essentially get on them when you can't be asked to queue for one of the good rides again. And so you just sit on this really slow, boring boat. And so they were often haunted rides that were converted to tunnels of love,

or vice versa, weren't they? So I think this one at Kenneywood went on to become hard-headed, harrowed, horrendously humorous, haunted hideaway. That's right. It sounds like a worse ride. They also branded it as a Panama Canal. So you would go down here, and it was this few going along the Panama Canal. That's great. It is, but the Panama Canal is literally just a canal. There's no fun stuff on either side. No, you're right. And then in the end, it was rebranded as Garfield's Nightmare Ride.

All of these. The cat. Yeah. Or President James Garfield. Who wastes everything through his anus for the last three months of his life. Weird ride. But yeah, I want to ride. The guy, this guy from Funkland who did this amazing video, he said that he thinks after getting all these emails that there are at least two people who were conceived on that ride. Oh, great. Really? Yeah. And Kenneywood Theme Park now uses the slogan, welcome to the family. But that's just a coincidence.

The tunnel of love, really. I think I've read something saying there used to be hundreds, as in maybe 700 across the USA. Yeah. The USA is big, but that is a lot of tunnels of love. But it all sort of sadly came into an end because of the sexual revolution. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Society became liberalized. Yeah. So basically you could snog in public. You didn't have to go into a tunnel. And because they were such a shit ride, that was really the only good thing about them. Right. Yeah. Another strike against the sexual revolution.

Do you guys know what was the fastest way to travel in the entire world in 1880? I'm going to say tunnel of love. That is a ridiculous thing to say. I don't know if everything was slow at the time. Maybe there was a point in 1880 where all trains broke. All the horses in the lane. I'm just kind of, because I know, I know this sneaky man. I'm still sneaky.

Was it an underground train system that was one of the first of its kind, underground in Paris that led to the Louvre? And so it was the tunnel of love. To love? He's sneaky. He's not the Riddler. Okay. I'm going to have a pun. Okay. Fastest trains at the time. I'll just say in America, they were only about 30 or 40 miles an hour.

In the UK, I think we had up to about 60 or 70 miles an hour. I'm talking about something that was going at 112 miles an hour. And this is public transport. In 1880, something you could travel on. Oh, it wasn't like you'd jump off. Because if you jump off the Eiffel Tower or something. I wouldn't say jump off the Eiffel Tower is transport. And in 1880, definitely not.

Another bad commute, darling. Yes. Okay. No, no, no. But I think, so the tunnel of love is a kind of boat ride that you go on. Is it something like a log flume? It's exactly a log flume. So I found an article in the Chicago Herald in 1886 that told of a group of loggers, right? So they're at the top of a mountain

and they created these flumes. They were kind of metal flumes, which they would send the logs down and they would all go down to the bottom and that's where they would process them. You cut them at the top, you would send them down. Really, really steep. Now, at the end of the day, all of these workers would get on one of these logs and fly down.

Oh, my God. Okay. So cool. There was a quote and they said, we all looked at our watches. We had made 16 miles in eight minutes and 40 seconds. So that is an average speed of 112 miles an hour. A average.

Bloody hell. They did go down there. It's so terrifying. It's absolutely amazing. There was a journalist in 1875, I think, who went to report on the Nevada log flumes and they looked so cool and there is video footage of the logs going down them

and they could be, you know, like, they were built really high on scaffolding into the air, like 70 feet in the air and they were these channels which they zoomed down. And yeah, this journalist said, does anyone ever go down it? And they said, yeah, yeah, you can totally do that. Now, I still don't know if the loggers on this one

actually did go down it or they were pranking the journalist because the journalist said, okay, I will. The two owners of the log flume said, all right, well, if you're doing it, I guess we'll do it. And none of the loggers agreed to get in with them. And as they pushed him off, one of the loggers shouted, a flume has no element of safety.

You cannot stop. You cannot lessen your speed. You have only to sit still, shut your eyes, say your prayers and wait for eternity. Bye. Smile for the camera. And that's what the log flume rides are based on those, right? Right, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. I think they've all shut down other log flumes, but I think there was one operating relatively recently in Washington, in the state of Washington, which took an hour to go along. So it might have been a bit slower.

Yeah, yeah, they weren't all really steep, just the ones on mountains were. Lassie went on that one. Did she? An episode of Lassie where Lassie went on a log flume. OK, great. Nice. She deserves a break.

Is Lassie a she? Yeah, I didn't know that. Lassie, yeah. Oh, Lassie. It's in the name. Yeah, it is in the name. Jane Austen could have gone on a log flume. That's the exciting...

It's one of my main interests, is whether Jane Austen could have done any of the tech we talk about. So she was alive when... But not the ride, the log flume, the actual log flume thing. A tunneled boat ride. So this was a ride, actually.

Oh, cool. It was in France in 1817, which is the year Austen died, so she wouldn't have had a great time on it. What a way to go. What a way to go. She died of something completely sort of ordinary and sad of it.

She died on a log flume. It would have been perfect. It was called the Soot du Niagara Falls, and it was a boat which fell down a slope into a basin of water. I mean, it was pretty much a log flume ride. Anyway, Jane Austen... I have a Red Mansfield Park.

Is that about a theme park? I can't believe you thought of Mansfield Park. I was going through sense and sensibility. No, that doesn't work. Have you guys heard of... There's a sex theme park in South Korea called Love Land. Have you seen it? No.

It's amazing. I mean, we say it's a theme park. It's kind of like a sculpture park, and it's just lots of penises and lots of people in positions of sex. So it's not what... You can't ride them, as it were. There.

No, I don't think so. You can just... Just looking. Yeah, you can... Well, they do say there's a few hands-on exhibits, such as the masturbation cycle, which is you basically spin a thing and you move their hands for them

as part of this little exhibit. They're like a statue kind of thing. All right. Right. And then there's this really weird thing, and I couldn't find anything more about it. I searched quite a bit. It's this giant...

It's like a five-foot tall see-through penis with sort of like computer workings all inside of it, and it's just got a little plaque next to it, and it's got a lot of words in Korean, which obviously I can't read. But then there's only one English word on it, as far as I could see, and the word is terminator.

And that's... I don't know if they're saying that's his particular penis, or if it's a penis of the future, coming back to our time to... What he have donated is penis. I haven't seen terminator. Is that the sort of thing that the character would do? Yeah, I'll be back.

Until I'm back, have this. Yeah, that's Hong Jeju Island, isn't it, Korea? And originally, Jeju Island was like a honeymoon destination, but it was... After the Korean War, there was a lot of arranged marriages, so a lot of the couples had never seen each other or really met each other before, and so they would go to this honeymoon destination,

and they were really inexperienced. They didn't really know what to do, and so they had... All the hotels had professional icebreakers who would kind of sit next to you if you're having dinner at a restaurant, and if you're being a bit awkward, they kind of start the conversation and get you going.

God, that's a great idea. Sorry, you would be the worst human on earth as an icebreaker. Did you know there was a trolley system on there? Where are you going? Come back. I'm saying I need one, not that I could be one. I don't want to talk about trams any more than you do. It's all I can think of. Wow.

This really is a cry for help. Okay, that is it. That is 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? Trams, trams, trams. James? I'm James Harkin. And Anna? You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website,

nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. You can also find the link to Club Fish, which is our very exciting behind-the-scenes membership club. There's all some things on there, extra episodes of behind-the-scenes, sort of correspondence episodes and quizzes. There's also access to our Discord,

where you can discuss all interesting things, like how Andy would make a great icebreaker, whatever it is you wanted to chat about. And also, there's a lot of really fun merch up there. So do go there. I want to thank you so much, Bloom's Reef, for this great show. Thank you so much for having us. And we'll be back again with another episode next week for everyone at home.

We'll see you then. Good bye!