No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Finger Fish

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Dan, Anna, Andrew and James discuss Brontes, Bergs, Bugs and Big Ol' Boulders. 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 Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin, and 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, and that is Andy. My fact is that There's a theory That the Bronte sisters all died young Because they spent a lot of their life Drinking graveyard water

You said graveyard water as though We're all familiar with it as like spring water You've all seen it on the show There's still sparking Yeah Yeah Well no you're right It's not a thing anymore

But I think graveyard water was a much bigger thing In the 19th century Before proper No it wasn't No it wasn't No I just mean There's a lot of crazes Before hygiene standards and before proper, you know, water piping.

So this is water that has happened to go through a graveyard. It's filtered, yeah, it's filtered through. Whenever you buy a bottle of water and it says filtered, that's what it means. No, so they lived in this town called Haweth, which is in West Yorkshire, and it was an extremely sickly place, very low life expectancy, ex-grant running down the streets. I mean, you know, bad ventilation. You said it was Yorkshire.

Sorry, yeah, okay. And also, the Bronte family home. the personage they lived in, right next to it had a graveyard. And there is a... And there... It was very overcrowded as well. And there is a strong theory or a strong suggestion. It's possible that decomposing matter from the graveyard would have filtered into the water supply.

And that might have really banjacks the town's overall health, those who were using kind of public water sources. Yeah, it definitely would have gone into the village, which is in like a... valley. But yeah, and presumably there weren't taps back then, so they must have been collecting water from somewhere. So they lived in the parsonage and they had their own well. Yes. And what I find really interesting is that the well was cleaned in 1847 and that was the first time it had been cleaned in 20 years. And the father of the Brontes wrote that they'd taken eight yellow tin cans out of it. That's how polluted it was. But it was in 1848, and 1849 that Bramwell, Emily and Anne all died so the year afterwards.

So the year after their well was out of use, perhaps. Right. So maybe they stopped using the well for a bit and then they started using the more common water that everyone else was drinking, and then that might have made them sick. Did they not think when they were drinking something that looked like Gatorade that maybe... Maybe that wasn't going to be good for them. Well, if it's the only thing you can drink. Yeah, really.

What do you do? We actually say the Brontes died young, but, you know, they lived at ripe old ages, by comparison. Did they? To be, well, I mean, not really. They lived to 29, 301, 31 and 39. Exactly.

The average life expectancy, obviously, one has to account for the 40% of people who die in early childhood. But yeah, it was 25. And I reckon Charlotte at 38 would have seemed like an old hag by the time she copped it. But yeah, all the others did die pretty young,

except their dad, who lived at 84. Wow. It was a very sickly place. And the town was inspected in 1850 by a man who was called Benjamin Herschel Babbage. And his findings basically were that it was just an extremely unhealthy place. It was poorly ventilated. Some people were living in cellars. And it was their dad actually who got this guy in to check the water supply. So it was the year after three of his children had died. And he said,

we need to do something about this. Do you think after the first child died, he was like, oh, I must get this water checked? And then the second kid dies. He's like, damn it, I really must get this water check. Well, the first one was Bramwell who died of alcoholism. Yes. Actually, He had two daughters who died before that. So they had two daughters who died like 14, 15, didn't they? Which is very sad. And they were in the school, which was right at the bottom of the hill where the water definitely would have been pretty rank.

But Bramwell died of alcoholism. But the pub where he drank in is the first place you get to after the, if you look at the map, it's house, graveyard pub. And apparently they used to make their beer out of the water. No way. So is it possible then that we've maligned. him and he didn't die of alcoholism. Well, he definitely wasn't alcoholic as well.

I think people, people do say that he might have died of TB and he was an alcoholic, but, you know, he might have died of other stuff as well. So we might have unfairly maligned him. There was opium involved as well, I think. Yeah, isn't there? It was a concoction of stuff. He wasn't a very healthy guy. But it's always said that alcoholism, you know, not the graveyard water.

No, you're right. I'm with Dan here. I actually think that the Brownwell myth may have been, you know, taken to the extreme of like this killed him. And actually, I'm not sure we totally have evidence. But Babbage's report was funny. He was particularly appalled by the toilet set up in the village, which was consisted of two toilets that were shared each by like 12 families.

So they were out in the street. And he was appalled by the public view of them, which I don't think contributes to people's ill health. You mean that people could see you while you're poo in? Yeah. He basically said there's, oh, in fact, he said there's two toilets that are just on the public street in view of the houses and of passes by, whilst a third is perched upon an eminence,

commanding the whole length of the main street. Have you ever been to like a restaurant or something that's on the top of a really high building? And then sometimes they put the toilet and they have pretty much a window because there's nothing else can look in and you can poo and look out over the whole city. No, I've never seen that. I can't remember where I've been and done that. But it's really, it's something. It's quite something.

That sounds quite uncommon. You said it as though it might be a standard thing in high buildings. But I'm not sure it's normal. No, actually. No, my local Greg has. one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could sit in Greggs and as an eminence of the whole of South London.

Yeah. So the Bronte's in general, they're putting them back together in a way. Are they? Like Abba? Pretty much. So basically, all the contents of the house was sold off after Patrick, who's the father, Pop Bronte. He died in 1861. And all the contents were sold off because, you know, you have a new person who comes in and the furniture changes.

Because he was a... It was a curate, vicar, priest-y guy. Not a priest. because he had six children but the Bronte Society they've been putting the house back together which is very exciting and they've been slowly slowly buying an auction various bits of Bronte paraphernalia so there was a table that they wrote at

one kind of normal medium-sized dark wood table 580,000 pounds it's been bought for but did they all write at this table I think a lot of them did I don't know if any key works were definitely pinned on that table but it was the writing table that's a big table yeah do you think like as a writer that you are and you all are really. Do you think that really now

we should get actually quite a nice or innate table because in the future they're going to look at it and go on that table from IKEA was like, yeah, what's the point in a museum? Exactly. I like Terry Pratchett's table where he wrote most of his novels. As soon as he passed away, his assistant Rob put a glass plate over the table

so that every single scuff mark, every single mug, you know, mug, uh, wear and yeah, is there now for all time. It's a great idea. I think like chewing them underneath it. Yeah, bogeys. Another really cool item.

I don't know if it was at auction that they had to buy it back or whether they just still have it. But Charlotte Bronte was given a bit of Napoleon's coffin, which is really cool. How did they get his coffin? He was dead. Oh, yeah. Because he had about seven coffins, I think, Napoleon. He was inside multiple layers. Like a Russian doll?

Like a Russian doll. Yeah, yeah. He's a small coffin. It's quite awkward for Napoleon. It's a poor guy. Do you mean like a French pastry or something? Come on. Did you say Charlotte got Napoleon's copy?

Yeah. Yeah. From her sexy Belgian tutor, who she was in love with. Really? He was a married man. So I don't think any impropriety ever occurred, but she loved him. They had quite a good friendship as well. Because she wasn't the big Napoleon fan.

This is the great thing about the Brontes. When they were younger, they actually wrote more words than when they were adults, because they wrote these amazing books together, these fairy tales. And they were. They created worlds. They created the world of Angria and Gondool. And I think this was based on some toy soldiers that Brownwell got given by their dad. But they all played with them and they all claimed a soldier.

And Emily claimed Wellington. And then Brownwell claimed Napoleon. And they'd sort of like fight each other and stuff. And then the other two claimed a gravy boy and a waiting boy. But I think they upgraded them at some point to the Antarctic explorer, Parry and Ross. A gravy boy? A gravy boy, yeah. Again, just like I said graveyard water like it was a thing.

Yeah. I don't think a gravy boy is a thing. You know, in American football, they have a water boy who brings on all of their drinks and stuff. What I do now, yeah. Well, gravy guys, the same in cricket. On your cucumber sandwiches. Yeah, yeah.

She's bringing some gravy. Was she quite obsessed with Wellington, Emily? I don't know how obsessed she was. She probably was. I think she was, and I think she met him later in life in, like, his late life. Napoleon was buried in a lot of coffins like a beef Wellington. Yeah. Wasn't he?

That's even worse one It doesn't make sense of people Wellington doesn't have multiple pastry layers I suppose it is It is layered It's got a layer of mushrooms and stuff Yeah he was covered in duck cells Yeah

What just on their on their writing as kids And the cool stuff that they had I don't know if any of these remain But they wrote in tiny books sometimes So some of their stories they wrote in books That were small enough for their dolls Or their soldiers to read Which sounds so cool

the writing is microscopic. And I think there was one book that, in fact, we do have some of them because there are photos. And they're about like the size of the thumb, a human thumb, really. So. We know there's one because actually the Bronte house has bought one of them back. Have they? For a million pounds. The tiny book or the tiny book is got.

I don't know. I have no idea where, how they're funding it. Oh, actually, I do know how they might be funding it because the actual Brontes themselves were funded indirectly through piracy. So, wait. Grandpa Bronte, he was a trader, but also he had plenty of dealings with Cornish pirates who committed actual murders. And a lot of his money, a lot of his estate, would have come from his nefarious activities. That's cool. And the Bronte sisters paid for their novels to be published, and they did a lot of that, thanks to money they got from their aunt on that side of the family.

So basically they were pirate-funded. So you saying that the current Bronte estate has some sort of treasure chest that they're still taking book liens out of it? Where are they getting these millions from? They pay for anything in Dubloons. If you noticed that, at the auctions. I read an article about the Bronte Society who I run the museum. I don't know if it's the same people. But apparently they made a loss last year of £100,000. And actually, because not many people have been visiting, I think possibly due to COVID,

they've been asking firms in the UK who use the name Bronte, they're saying, well, you know, okay, fine, you're allowed to use it. Nothing we can do. But can you not give us a bit of money for it? And Richard Wilcox, who's the chairman of the Bronte Society, he said there are dozens of companies who are selling Bronte stone, cooked chicken, outdoor clothing.

Have you never had a Bronte chicken? Bronte fried chicken. It's lovely. It's been, has it cooked? It's sort of they leave it on a moor for three days. It's very moorish. And also spring water. And what I found is that there is Bronte water that you can buy from the springs in Howarth.

No. Oh, no, we've ruined their industry with this point. And I just want to kind of balance it out to say that they are part of a company called WaterLogic UK. And they recently announced the world's first COVID-secure range of drinking water dispensers. Actually, weirdly, the Bronte Society themselves, just on Bronte merch, they do. They sell a Brantle Bronte, I think it's a wine bottle super or a corkscrew. But given that he died of alcoholism, I mean, it's amazing. It's on the nose.

I wonder if they get a cut from all the companies then that are in. this town where they grew up. Well, that's what they're saying. They don't. And at the moment, there's no legal reason that they should. Because they've really gone for it, haven't they? They're like, all the salons are like Jane Hare, you know, and stuff like that. They've all.

That's really good. That's really good. I love that, so Charlotte Bronte was a teacher. And in 1836, she started writing about her experience as a teacher. And she's just so mean to the students. It's amazing. There's one extract, which says, am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage?

forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oats? Wow. Like, she did not like her kids. Teachers listening to this and nodding us all right now. Emily? That was Charlotte.

Charlotte, sorry, sorry. I have a theory about Bramwell Bronte, which is that he inspired a very famous film. Okay, give us a clue. Okay, it's to do with his... Okay, no, no, I'm going to give you a clue first. Did he want to stop someone and his mum shot someone? Yeah.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay, you only know two films between you. Oh, Andy knows. It's Avatar. It's Avatar. It's not, yeah, yeah. He was green. Yeah, yeah.

Blue. Blue. I was thinking of the Hulk. No, so he basically had this affair, we think. And this is partly based on the biography of Charlotte that was written by Mrs. Gaskell, very interestingly. So Patrick the dad commissioned Mrs. Gaskell to write. Who we should take? Who is she?

Famous author, famous British author. Did she have a first name? Elizabeth, but she always goes by Mrs. Bizarrely snobbish about that. Like when she wrote to George Elliott once, she said,

I love your stuff, George, but I wish I could be addressing a misses rather than a miss. Given that she was writing to someone trading under a man's name. An insane thing to say. Also,

don't upset George Elliott because you're going to get a big right hand. She'll help like you. And you will not come back from that. But anyway, what we think is that Brownwell had an affair with this much older woman. He was 25 and she was 43 and he was working as a governor, not a governess. A governor.

A governor. Mrs. Doubtfire. Exactly. I really thought you were going to get it there. You know it. So she's called Lydia Robinson. And that's Bramwell Bronte as initials are BB and in the film, the very famous film, the graduate, obviously, when Mrs. Robinson is the older woman who's a

juice as a younger man. It's Benjamin Braddock, initials, B, B. And the author of the original book, I don't think ever commented on whether it was inspired by that. But it was a famous affair between a young man and older women. Charlotte had a superpower, by the way. She could see in the dark. How cool is that? Well, in the absolute pitch dark. Yeah, basically. I mean, that was, there's stories that she was short-sided, so short-sided that if she was trying to even play piano, she couldn't read the sheet music. It was that. It was that, there was that, for her. But as soon as the lights went out, soon as it was night time, her students said that she could read perfectly what was on the page when no one else could. Right. Okay. It's good

fact. That's a great fact. Thank you. We don't acknowledge each other's facts that often on the show, and a truly good one comes up. I'm glad to do it. It sounds like she was an inspiring teacher who, you know, taught her kids an imaginative story. No, she could, she could do. I think actually I do by that because I know that Anne, the youngest of the sisters, she could hear things over 300 miles away. She could breathe underwater. And then their green brother, Bramwell, only when he got angry,

destroy everything. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that if you swim too close to an iceberg, you can get sucked in. Not in danger of it. Not one of my top worries, I don't think. it's worth remembering you never know

when you might find yourself in that situation Anna you're right on Titanic 2 or something how do they do that do they generate their own currents near them they do not in a way they generate their own currents they're moving around a lot they're changing a lot icebergs are melting all the time

lots of changes inside an iceberg and I'm especially talking about very big ones and when things are moving around currents get formed and that's what happened and I read this in I was basically going through some old archives of an NPR radio show called Only a Game. And I found this article from 2001 about someone called Jill Heinath.

And she is one of the most remarkable people I've ever come across in the 20 years I've done this job. She was the first person to swim inside of an iceberg. There was a massive one that carved off from Antarctica. It was about the size of Jamaica. And she and her partner went to National Geographic and said, we'd like to do this article about diving through the caves of icebergs. And they said, wow, really, there are caves in icebergs. And they went, we think so.

And sure enough, they got some funding and they went and did it. And the story of her going through this iceberg is remarkable. My wife's gone to swim in an iceberg the size of a Caribbean island. Jamaica? Yes. Extraordinary, she went of her in a court. Completely bizarre decision. Yeah, it sounds absolutely incredible, isn't it?

And some are quite dodgy moments in there. Every moment. Every moment is dodgy in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So first of all, they are next to this massive iceberg and they jump into the water. And the first thing that happens is you're jumping into ice cold water. And I don't know.

I'm sure some of you might have done that before. It really hits you hard and it can really take the breath out of you. But in her case, she said it's like an ice cream headache, like the worst. Like the worst ice cream headache you've ever had is the first thing that you feel. And then you go down and down and down and you see an entrance and you enter this iceberg. And it's all blue. Like she says it's like a robin's egg. The floor's red and orange and yellow.

All these amazing colors. And then everything goes wrong. And so she and her partner, they're swimming through it. And after a while of taking lots of video footage, they turn around to go back out. But because it's a melting iceberg, because it's a little. living beast that's just changing shape all the times, their exit shuts. And they're stuck inside the iceberg. And she's going, I'm trying not to panic because if I start breathing too heavily, every breath I take is a precious breath. Every move you make. Every movie I make.

No one's watching her. So frightening. And so she, they just wait. They patiently wait. And then a new opening happens. It's like a weird mirror labyrinth, you know, like something you would see in a weird fantasy movie, a new opening happens and they manage to get out. And then they just have to wait a while to acclimatize, don't they? You can't just go straight back up. So the people on the boat are thinking, well, they're gone. Yeah. Because they've heard all these changes and this carving and bits have fallen off. And the people on the boat are like, well, that's the end of them then. Yeah. But then they come back up. They go up. They tell their story. It's all going nice. You'd think that's enough. We've explored it. They go, let's get back in there. Let's do it again. So they go for a second time.

Well, what are the chances of that going wrong again? I mean, it's not going to happen twice, is it? Yeah. It sounded like even there was a scary moment at one point on this expedition when she resurfaced and the boat, I think, had drifted and she came up through a hole in the ice, but the ice around her was so high. She couldn't see anything. And you're in the middle of the Antarctic and her boat has disappeared.

And I think the boat just happened to swing around and she just glimps the stern. It's because they had to take the anchor up and so it drifted while the anchor was up. So they're nearly lost at sea basically in this moment. So they get back on the boat. And you think, all right, let's get back to home. Don't go back a third time. They go a third time. And this time, they get stuck inside.

And in order to get out, she basically got up to a point in the iceberg where there was a gap at the top for them to climb out. But it was 130 feet above their heads. So you're looking at a climbing wall, basically, that's unclimable, except. Yes, and I couldn't quite get it because she's out of the water by this time. Exactly. So she's just climbing up the iceberg. So she must be inside of the iceberg where there's a hole on the inside that leads to the triathlon kind of thing, you know.

You do the swimming bit and then you do the climbing bit. When do you do the cycling bit? There's a bike at the top of the iceberg. But this is where the story genuinely turns a bit Brian Bleserty for me because I just think this is impossible. So she climbs up 130 feet. But here's the thing, right? This is solid ice wall, right?

So how do you climb ice wall? And she thinks to herself, hang on, there's little animals that burrow themselves into the ice wall, which are creating natural handholds for me to do. And apparently there's enough of these that she could scale off. So it's a little fish exactly the size is her finger, which makes a little hole where it lives. The fish finger finger, yeah. Well, the finger fish, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they make holes in the iceberg and she can use them to grip onto and pull herself up. So she climbs a, yeah, I know, it's blessed. This is suddenly, all the way up. All the way, 130 feet. The fish living 100 feet up on this iceberg. 130. How do they get up there? Who, no.

I guess if the previous fish have gone up there. Icebergs flip over all the time. Yeah. Don't know. do we think as well as there been cracks in the iceberg, oh, there's some cracks in her story. And they all climb out this way, 130 feet up, and then they're back on the boat.

And then they slid down the iceberg, didn't they? And so they're sitting on the boat, not long afterwards. I think they're having some drinks and some food. And then suddenly they just hear screaming from other people on the boat, and there's huge cracking noises. And basically, there's been such a melting point on the iceberg

that it cracks in on itself. And they go, well, if we were in there, we'd be dead. we'd be squished in a second. So then they go back again. No, they don't. But what a story. Yeah, it is quite an odd thing to choose to do with your life.

You must have to have a very unusual personality not to panic in all of these circumstances. Yeah. Like she did one other dive, which she described. And it was into a really, really small cave. So she's a cave diver, basically. So underwater cave diver. And she was taking a scientist down there with her, who obviously had been trained properly how to dive, but the scientist

got wedged in this tiny cave and panicked. Luckily, a tiny fish came nibbled her out. And it was a really nice story because earlier in the dive, she had found that fish and it had a thorn in its fin. Yes. And she pulled the thorn out

and then the fish came back to help her. It's not a Bronte novel. It's this in real life. So she's wedged. She's wedged. And they have a guideline, which is the only way you can find a way back to the entrance of the cave. Because, you know, it's full of other channels and tunnels and stuff. So you'll never find your way back otherwise.

The guideline's broken, which is the only thing to lead them back to the entrance. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how Jill does this, while she's trying to fix the guideline, she loses her partner who was previously wedged in Iraq. Yeah, seems careless. A bit of an oversight. So she spends 73 minutes desperately looking for her partner

while trapped in this cave. No idea if she's going to escape. Six or nine. And also thinking, oh God, I've killed this scientist. How awkward. But imagine the moment. and maybe it's all worth it for this, when finally she realized she has not only found her way to the entrance,

but she sees a little glimpse of light, but there is wasting at the entrance, the scientists, who apparently her mask is just full of tears because the scientists have assumed that Jill's dead and she's probably going to die too, waiting at the entrance for her. That's amazing.

She was all right, and she said the weirdest thoughts go through your head, like when she thought she was going to die, you think things like, oh my God, I have to get home then. My husband doesn't know how to do the taxes. Wow. That's an amazing story. And also it's given me a new respect for the word guideline. Yeah. You know? We're so used to hearing about the conceptual guidelines, the theoretical ones. Government guidelines suggest that. Yeah, exactly. And actually, guidelines can save your life. Yeah. I was reading about what high-n earth studies in the other areas of a life, because loads and loads of cave diving, particularly. And have you guys heard of the Hallocline?

No. So she studies animals, which are. often found beneath the hallochline. And the halokline is a boundary between fresh water, which is higher up, and salt water, which is lower down. And she says, the boundary layer is as thin as a sheet of paper, but you can also see it when you're in the cave. So as you go through it, everything goes blurry for a second because you've broken the barrier between the two kinds of water.

Like going through a mirror which takes you to a parallel universe. It's exactly like that. It's exactly like that. And then as soon as you get down to the side, salt water, everything snaps back into perfect clarity of focus and you look up and you can see the halo-clined above you. But you meet the saltwater version of yourself. Yes, that's right. On the other side, upside down. Yes, yes, yes. And then you have to climb using fishy ice holes downwards. Yeah, yeah. Early cave divers, the first UK cave diver was in

1935 and potentially this is the first world cave dive dive dive. Quite late. That's what I thought, right? I read in a few places this was the world's first cave diving and then a few others it's first UK. It happened at Wookie Hole and it was a lady called Penelope Powell and she did it with a guy called Graham Balcom. I think that yeah, I think it is in the UK because you find lots of accounts of other people trying similar things around the world and usually just attach a hose to yourself and go deep in but definitely in Britain and it's thought of as the birth of cave diving. Yeah, as like a proper sport basically. Yeah. So Balcom actually tried going into a different cave first and he made his own massively long snorkel out of a hose pipe and a woman's bike frame

and he almost died because that didn't work very well. So they upgraded their gear in fact when he went down with Penelope Mosse Pau as she was called. Sorry, sorry, let's just go back to that a second. Penelope Powell, her nickname was Mosse. Mossie. And is she single? They put her nickname in the 30s.

Mossie Powell. Mossie. Do we know why she had the nickname? She had just hair on the southern side of her body. I'm not sure, but I know that you would have got along very well, really. Anyway, they then at that point would have a hard hat, and that would be attached to this hose called the Divers Umbilical, which is basically a combined breathing hose and phone,

so that you could communicate with the surface. So they went into Wookie Hole, and they went, you know, many, many chambers in a long way, 170 foot they went in, and the air pumps have to be manually operated at the surface. So they were actually broadcasting on local radio. Don't know why they didn't make this national. Only local. We'll be right back with Wet Look Wet. You can tune in in the Cheddar Gorge area.

It was an exciting time. Anyway, so they were broadcast, but their air would only last about 50 seconds. So they'd be saying, and it was mostly Graham, who did the talking to the surface. And then about every 50 seconds, he'd have to say, actually, could I get some more air, please? And then the people at the surface would have to pump air in. Just one more. thing on the Wookie Whole expedition, you can actually see a painting that was done 84 years after the actual event occurred. And it was done by a guy who's called Philip Gray and he's an artist.

And he went down into the place where she went. So he dove down with his painting equipment and a light. And he did the painting down there. It's the first of its kind. You have to explain how. So I'm guessing this is because it was a bit odd. I'm excited to hear your guesses. Do you know the actual answer, rather? He went 19 feet down. So either he went down and there's a cave system where he could pop up into dry bit and he could illuminate it. So he had everything, let's say, in a plastic bag, zip block. And then he painted the painting there, put the painting in the bag and then came back up, which I'm guessing must be the way.

He definitely painted it there. He didn't go down and take a photo and then painted it. No, he painted it down there. If you were to use water paints, right, but you use salt water and you're in the, you're above the hallow climb. above the hallow client, might it still work? Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be pretty blurry painting. Is it possible the painting is just absolutely dog shit?

It looks pretty cool, actually. I think it looks good. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was looking at the world's deepest dive in scuba, this is, and it was by Ahmed Gaba in the Red Sea in 2014, and he went 1,090 feet down. The dive took 13 hours and 50 minutes. What? The thing is, 13 hours, 50 minutes, how much of that do you think he was going down?

Oh, not very much because you have to slowly come back up because otherwise you get the decompression stuff. So he was coming back up for 10 hours of it. He went down for 15 minutes. Amazing. And then had to come back up for 13 hours and 35 minutes. It's like when you're driving along the motorway and it's incredibly clear the way you're going and you can see the other side of the way. You can shock a block. You think, I've got to come back.

I'm going down to the station. I've got to come back through that. And obviously, if he went quicker, then he'd get the bends. He'd die. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know another thing that you can get from diving, which isn't the bends, and isn't as dangerous as the bends, but is nitrogen narcosis, which sounds actually quite fun.

It's basically getting drunk. And it's also known as the martini effect. Divers compare it to drinking one martini for every 10 metres that you descend after 30 meters. It doesn't really seem to cause much harm except to your judgment, which can be. So let's just work this out. So after 30 metres, every 10 metres it's one martini. This guy went 332 meters.

It's basically like he had 30 martinis. He was absolutely hammered. He was seeing some weird. My limit is two. As in really nicely made martini's great. I think genuinely one of them gets me pretty much. How do you like your martinis, Mr. Bond? Oh, you have a pot.

Oh, good. This is fine. Give me it. It's fine. Where's the fucking olive? Barber looks at an empty jar of olives. It came with 33 olives. Wow. That's incredible.

It is. So there is a way to get around it if you don't want to be completely pissed, 300 meters underwater. Oh, you drink a small glass of milk before you go down, don't you? That just helps to. Yeah, yeah. Big roast dinner and then pop down. No, you use helium instead of nitrogen.

So normally diving equipment, the gas that you have is oxygen and nitrogen combination and the ratio depends on kind of what kind of dive you're doing. But weirdly, you can replace nitrogen with helium and apparently we can kind of breathe that okay as well. They don't quite know why this doesn't give you the narcosis, but helium is less fat soluble and it seems like there's more soluble the gas, the more drunk you'll get. It's pretty bad though. If you're in trouble, it's like, I'm really, really struggling. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Could someone help me? I'm really stuck.

I'm getting sucked into his eyes back. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that every cup of mint tea you drink contains the essence of 100 insects. This is part of a study which was done by Trier University in Germany, a guy called Henrik Krehenwinkel. He's an ecological geneticist. And basically, what he was looking into is, How can we monitor invasive pests? How can we see if an insect is going endangered around the world?

One thought that came about is this new development, which has been around for a bit now, E-DNA. We mentioned it years ago in our book of the year 2019 where we talked about a New Zealand scientist called Neil Gamble going to Loch Ness and trying to look for the dandruff of the Loch Ness monster. Basically the idea is that you take a little scoop of something, whether it's like water, I guess, tea in this case, and then you look very, very closely at all the molecules in it

and you can find remnants of the DNA, can't you, of other stuff that once passed through that scene. And the E stands for environmental. So it's things that have been in the area, like you might have breathed on it and given some of your DNA to it or something. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that they thought they would test out

is could you tell from taking a sample of tea from an area? Could you look through it with the E-DNA method and work out how many different species have been landing on the plants, peeing on the plants, chewing on the plants, doing whatever it is on the plants. And if you could do that and you could get that information, then you could look to, let's say, plants that are hidden in museums

from the same area from years ago, and you would be able to tell, is there a decrease in the population? Is there an increase? So clever. You could look at other, it's an interesting way of then looking at how pesticides can travel across the world on boats and so on and become a pest somewhere else. You can then suddenly notice by testing tea leaves from, say, barley. You'd be like, hang on a second.

There's a sudden showing up of this invasive pest, which they don't have here, and they can get on top of it before it then takes over. Is it clever or is it lazy? Is it just a scientist saying, I could go to Bali or India and investigate this, or I could pop to ASDA, pick up to the baby tips? It could be both, can't it? Often the clever thing to do is the lazy thing because you're saving resources. Very good point, yeah.

But that is what literally they were doing. They were popping to their local grocery stores, and they were just buying teas from around the world. I think it's what's amazing because the Trier, this university in Germany, right? One of the reasons that this is such a good place to study this is that Trier has a specimen bank and the role of the specimen bank is just to collect leaves

from different trees across Germany and they've been doing it for 35 years. They've been doing it for decades. I'm not sure what their original justification was. Have they come to it in my garden? Yeah, they go for a fee. And they freeze the leaves in liquid nitrogen. So there's this German specimen bank

which is just a load of leaves in liquid nitrogen. I mean, it's insane. And they've just gone, We know this will come in handy one day. And it has. And it has. It genuinely has. It's unbelievable.

The reason the tea is so useful is that if you take a leaf from a herbarium, you know, it's a samples of ancient plants, what they do is they keep leaves dark and dry, basically to keep them in a kind of suspended animation. And that is basically the same process as making tea. Because you're drying the leaves out, you're shredding them up,

and you're just keeping them in kind of suspended animation in a tea bag. And so that it's perfect to test that, as opposed to herbarium was. Amazing. And a creme winkle, this guy, he says that probably... Straight out of hands Christian Anderson novel. Yeah, very weird. He said, little boy, little girl, come to my tea and pour him now. Follow the trail of tea bags I've left.

He said probably 99.999% or something like this of DNA, which we extract, is the tea DNA. And only a tiny fraction of what's left is from insects. And he says, which of course is good for tea drinkers because they want to drink for tea. and not the insects. I know I do. But he says that actually it's quite good to know that there's some tiny bits of arthropod DNA because that shows that they haven't used

really loads and loads of pesticides. Yeah. So that's kind of clever. Yeah. And if you want to try it yourself, contribute to his research, he claims that you can dry your own plants. Now, I don't know if he's actually accepting these specimens,

but he says if you want to dry your own plants, and I thought this is quite cool, you just need, you can get like a Ziplocet, bag sourced from some diver presumably and then you dry plants out by just popping in one of those weird silica packets that you get inside. Oh, I always eat those. That's really funny. E-DNA.

Oh yeah. It floats in air. If you take an air sample, there will be tiny, tiny amounts of E-DNA floating in it. So like if someone comes into this room later today after. that we've gone home and they took a jam jar of air they'd be able to get bits of our DNA pretty much

yeah it's amazing it's amazing but this led me on to another fact and this was actually sent to us by a listener recently called Andrew Ferguson so thank you to Andrew for this and you might find this fact familiar but it's that on a windy day in San Francisco Zoo

strands of giraffe semen can be found floating on the breeze yeah I remember that fact now that was posted on the QI boards by James 12 years ago and it's based on an interview with a zookeeper at San Francisco and I follow the link to the original interview with the zookeeper and it's no longer on the internet.

They'll have suppressed that like Billy, won't they? Because that will not do ticket sales any good. But I bet that's one of the facts that we must have posted a dozen times on the internet. I've tried out because it's amazing and it's just taking a life of its own. If you test the air in a zoo

with a jam jar, you can work out which animals are in the zoo by using E-DNA. How incredibly useful. I'm always going to the zoo and not being able to tell which animals are there. Well, you know, for instance, you could go to a zoo, get a jam jar, get a load of air, close a jam jar, take the air away, go to a PCR laboratory, and then it will tell you that they have giraffes there. Brilliant. That's really useful for when the sign is down, but the giraffe closure.

London Zoo's actually done away with the guides now. They just hand you a jam jar on arrival. It would be an incredibly good kind of like crap alternate zoo. It's just the jam jar. It's the cheap skate parents visit to the zoo. You don't cross the barriers. You just scoop it to the jar. Take it home with your kids and go, look, there's drafts in here.

Well, there are two studies that have found this, one in Denmark and one in England. But one interesting part about it is that you can not only tell which species are in the zoo, but you can get DNA from the food that's fed to the. the animals. So if you're feeding your giraffe like voles sausages, then it would collect the DNA from the voles as well, even though there aren't any voles in your zoo. Wow. And then you can get the zoo, I presume, shut down because it feels like it breaches some rules, doesn't it? A bowl sausage? That feels like it's an even better zoo now in the jar. Exactly. Because you're getting more, you're getting more animals than you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't

think, has anyone, does anyone eat vol? that there's not much meat on a vol, I don't think. No, no. You need to be quite desperate. Heston's probably done it. Yeah. Have you other EDNA stuff? Not good stuff.

Cool. Great. I got some stuff about voles. There was an area of the UK where they used EDNA in the water, and they found that there must be some water voles there by looking at the EDNA. And then a bit later, they put a kind of video camera up and found that. that there was water bowls there. So it just shows that it works.

Okay, I thought you were going to say it was just drafts having a picnic. Sorry, come on. I was looking at the relationships between tea and animals, you know, like tea pests. And there's actually certain types of tea which rely on tea pests to be made. There's the tea green leaf hopper, which is one of the main attacks of the tea plant. It has lots of other names. It's called the tea jacid or smokeboy or jumping boy. and actually you get special tea

which waits for the tea green leafhopper to attack it because then tea releases these chemicals it releases very specific chemicals depending on what it knows is attacking it and the chemicals it releases when it's attacked by this creature actually make the tea taste quite nice so if you get it at the right time you get for instance something called Dongding Oolong

tea which actually I think it's pronounced Tung Ting but I like the idea of changing the phrase ding dong dong Dong ding. It's like, you know, what's he called? Leslie Phillips. If Leslie Phillips goes through that layer of salt water, he goes, dong ding.

Dong ding. And if you need to know who Leslie Phillips is. If you don't know who Leslie Phillips is, then why are you listening to this? We can't help you. Yeah. That's very cool. Anyway, it tastes like honey.

Google HQ is going to freak their nuts when they see the spike on Leslie Phillips services later on. It's been a Leslie Phillips of them. The shot hole borer Is a tea pest Shot hole I said It's Latin name is

Uwalasia fornicatus Oh dear Do you know how it got the name Faunicatus Anyone can guess Was the only Was the first specimen Found in the act of having sex

Was it shagging the scientist As he discovered it? No, it's because the word Fornicate means arch-shaped Does it really? It does fornics in Latin means arch and so it's nothing to do with fornication

as you guys thought apart from that the word fornics also meant brothel because brothels were often found in vaults. Oh wow! And that's why we get the word fornication. That's so interesting. So if you're not actually in a vault it doesn't count as fornicating. I'm here in a legal loophole here.

Your Honor. I present the flat roof which exonerates my client One of the guys responsible for tea Particularly Assam tea Was Robert the Bruce Specifically a Scottish man

Called Robert Bruce Oh come off Sorry Middle name there I don't suppose no He's just Robert Bruce He was a Scottish man He was in India in the 1820s

And his story is quite boring Actually No spiders involved No, battles. He does share a moderately common name with a greatest goodish hero. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not the same, but similar. Similar.

Similar, similar edge. Yeah, yeah. Great. I was reading. I've just saved us all the minute of time, actually. No, thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it. I was reading about ways that farmers try to avoid using pesticides and use nature or whatever

they can in order to help their crops. And one of the methods that's used is there's an army of ducks that people hire. in order to eat all of the pests. So quite famously, in Cape Town in South Africa, there's a wine estate where they employ around 2,000 ducks that every morning they walk from their little duck homes all the way to the vineyard. And the ducks spend a full day there,

just eating all of the worms and all of the pests. Why don't they keep the ducks next to the vineyards? So they don't need to walk all the way from their duck. It's the cost of accommodation, isn't it? You've got to commute sometimes. And you want to separate work from personal life as well. well. They get up at 7 a.m.

They all march, as one, to work at 10.30. They spend the day eating the snails and the pests. Legitly. Back home by 4 p.m. 10.30 till 4?

Yeah. Oh, bloody. I know. I think they should actually the bosses should be cracking the web a bit more. Well, they're back home by 4. They leave at 7.30.

No, no. They get up at 7. Right. They go to work at 10.30. They're back by 4. So they're knocking off at 2.30, I'd say. But here's the thing as well. So these are runner ducks.

And so what it means is that they've got great speed on them. so if they see a snail going for a leaf, they could get there before it does. An ordinary duck, there's no way it can catch a snail. You need a special runner duck. So here's the thing, though, they have to hire, along with the ducks, to come with them, a bunch of geese

who act as bodyguards to the dogs. Oh, my God. Because this is a cartoon, you know, this is something of CV-bees. This is the old woman who's wanted a fly, some warped version of it. Who's guarding the geese? The old woman who hired a duck.

What the first? fuck she hired a duck. So the problem is, is that the ducks get spooked really easily if they're eating the snails and so on. Let's say an owl comes by. The geese's job is to scare away the owls and all the other animals that come in that, because apparently as soon as a duck sees an owl, it just freaks out and they all go scattering and running away. It causes chaos. So yeah, but here's the thing. It's used for many different kinds of fields and farms, but the one thing it's not used for is for tea leaves. And it's because you have to pick something that the ducks themselves aren't going to want to eat.

And they apparently love tea leaves. I cannot believe the climax of this story is that tea is the one thing that does not involve this very convoluting bruises. And the really interesting thing is, this is nothing to do with what we're talking about. It is. This is a pest control, but they can't use it for tea leaves. You know what I saved us a minute earlier by not talking about Robert the Bruce? Oh, my God. It's a pest

It's tangentially related. It's completely related. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna. My fact is that the first railway in Greenland was built to transport a meteorite. First and one of the only I think. Lots of places to say the only

but James I think you might have found some other rogue railways in Greenland. Oh yeah, I found all sorts. So there'll be the Greenland Railway section later. But this is a really interesting story, which I found after some seriously in-depth research, actually, I took ages to get there, but eventually on the back of an innocent smoothie bottle. Anna, why are we getting our facts from innocent smoothie bottles?

Look, I read this and I thought, Christ. Because Anna's clearly got a side hustle advertising deal with innocent smoothie. I'm not saying that it's any better or worse in other smoothies, but it wasn't where the fact came from, but it led me to it. said in 1894, an explorer found a meteorite on the sensibly named meteorite island. Funny, bit of humour from Innocent. He decided to take it home because it's the biggest ever. But weighing 58 tonnes, it took three years and a new railway to get it back.

While it got there in the end, this guy's story has taught us a lot, mainly that it's better to stick to the lighter things in life. Innocent smoothies have 30% lighter on natural sugar. This smoothie is a lot easier to carry home than a meteorite. That's a shoe hard, isn't it? Rock on. That's a shoe. Oh, it's an amazing fact that the Brontys all died from drinking graveyard water.

What that reminds us are innocent, is that actually life is not never-ending. And you should enjoy every second of it. And why not enjoy the next few seconds by having this delicious innocent smoothie? I thought it was one of the best crowbar of ever seen. Actually, have you tried the innocent graveyard smoothie? It's an acquired taste. A lot of body. Anyway, so I thought

What the hell are they talking about? That's absolutely loopy. But then they looked into it. And this was from an expedition in the 1890s into Greenland. It was by the explorer Robert Peary. And he was led by Inuit guides to a meteorite that people have been hearing about for almost a hundred years

but hadn't quite been able to track down. So the Inuits knew where it was and used it a lot, as I'm sure we'll talk about. And other Europeans had got there. tried to find it. Eventually, he found it. And the biggest piece, which is called Anigito, was so heavy that he had to construct kind of a little railroad by laying down lots of timber and then putting steel rail tracks. I think it was sort of two mini bits because he had to build one bit of railroad road to sort of push it up the hill. And then they rolled it down the hill to the

harbour. And then once on the coastline, then they had to build another railroad over a bridge that they constructed to get it onto the boat. Wow. It's amazing. He went to enormous lengths to steal this quite important art of effects. That's one way of looking at it. And it's not a quick heist, is it? It's quite noticeable.

He took all three, I think. Yes, he did. Are they still, to this day, at the American Museum of Natural History? Yeah, one of them is. The biggest one is in the American Museum of Natural History. And it's tens of tons. And his name means tent, didn't it? And it took the other two slightly smaller ones called Dog and Woman.

Yeah. And the people there, they had hammerstones and they would chip off bits of the ore and that would allow them to put tips on their spears and that kind of thing. It was the sole source of metal, right? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, he did. He did steal it. And when he got back to New York, he made a lot of money off of it. He sold it for $40,000, which is roughly 1.3 mil in today's money, the equivalent.

But before he did that, when the boat docked, he'd set it up as like a circus thing where you would come and visit to see, come see the meteorite. and he would charge a quarter for every person. It's just looks like a rock. It's moderately more exciting than your jar of EDNA at the zoo for the kids, but still, it's a big rock. But 20,000 people went to see that, and he charged them a quarter apiece to go and touch it or have a look at it. And so that's about $5,000 at the time, which again is about $150,000. So it became very rich off his stolen item. When he sold them, he was selling them to raise the money for another journey north.

That's what he was using the money for. Yeah, he was desperate to get to the North Pole, really, wasn't he? He was desperate to get to the North Pole, basically. there were claims for a long time that Piri was the first guy to get to the North Pole. Yeah. And those claims are not true. He did not make it. Well, you're not categorically, Howie.

I mean, I am on your side here. Yeah. Well, okay. All right. Let's put it this way, right? His triumphant expedition to the North Pole, as we're called it. Yeah. It was in 1909.

And the evidence is as follows. The only people who witnessed him are for Inuit people who were all sworn to secrecy and his manservant, Matthew Henson. His diary was inconsistent. He didn't record the readings that would have proved where he got to. He also was a 54-year-old man with no toes due to frostbite. He would have had to manage three times the average speed the expedition had achieved earlier on under less difficult conditions. That record has never been equal to the history of Arctic exploration. He would have had to travel 70 miles a day.

No explorer has ever covered this ground over the same number of days. He just didn't get there. If he had got there, it's not even him who really did it. It was Matthew Henson. who was his partner who is sort of got shunned from history and from that trip to the point where he was sort of seen as a man servant. They were partners and they were, he was an amazing explorer himself, Matthew Henson. It was because he was black that he was sort of not given the credit. There's lots of thoughts about whether or not he got there, but Wally Herbert is the

British expedition leader who went there to try and use the calculations to see if he managed it. He claims that he didn't, but in the process of doing it, Wally Herbert then claimed to be the first person to do it. But do we leave the me there? Wally Herbert is definitely a legit explorer. Whether or not his claim that Piri didn't make it is true or not is different. I think he definitely made it. But what's amazing is when you travel and you're trying to get to the North Pole,

the problem is that you're on a moving body of land, aren't you? The ice is just constantly moving. So when Wally Herbert was trying to get there, you would take a reading of where you were after an hour and suddenly you were eight kilometers further away than you were because of the way the ice was shifting. But the thing is, like, he was what, at the very end, remember reading, he was something like, was it like 130 meters from the North Pole? And he was

kind of on his hands and knees. But luckily, some small fishes had made holes. He could drag himself. So one of the amazing things with Wally is that he, I think they even passed it at one point and not realized like when they were having a sleep. They sort of just, they just like the drift took them over it. Yeah. So they woke up and they realized that it was achievable to get to in the day. So they sent a telegram to the queen saying, Your Majesty, we have got to the North Pole and the first British to do it. Risky, if they haven't actually done it. Because they hadn't actually done it.

And the rest of the day became a chase to get there so that the telegram wasn't alive. And they managed it, but just. They only just managed it. So it's good to set yourself these challenges sometimes if you've got a deadline. Yeah. I often say, yes, I've researched three of the four facts for this week's show. That's all fine. But it is in America.

It's very controversial because they, you know. Well, Peary got there in a lot of people's opinions. And to say it. Opinions don't count. He didn't make it. Well, you're going to be getting a lot of email. podcast at QI.com. Bring it on.

I'll be surprised if the emails make it to my inbox. I imagine they'll stop about 70 miles short. It was all kind of unedifying, I think. It was that real desperation

for fame and glory and it was so competitive and like you say with Henson. Henson probably, if they did get there, Henson claimed to have got their first. So Henson went for a stroll,

I think, when they were at what they thought was roughly the North Pole. And then Henson came back, this is according to Henson's diaries. Henson came back and was like, Oh, wow, it's so cool. I'm pretty sure I just wandered over to it,

and I was the first person to be sitting on top of the world. What a dick move. Just going to go for a troll. She's going to go for a quick. Well, then, so Piri's like, what a dick move? And so he snuck off, took two of the Inuit guys of the four, snuck off and found his own way to what was his own North Pole. How do you sneak off in a completely featureless environment?

That's more impressive, actually, to find a way of sneaking. There's one big tree, just in behind it. Peiry doesn't seem like a great guy in a number of ways. Because I haven't got that from you that you think that. So one of the other things he did. And this really is the truly shabby thing. So he persuaded, in 1897, which was his, that was the meteorite, Knicking trip, heist.

He persuaded six Inuit people to return with him to America, kind of so that they could be put on stage as part of a lecture series. Four of them died shortly after arriving of TB. And the youngest one was called Minick. And he was adopted by an American family. Minnick was given an American name He was named Minnick Peary Wallace And several years later

Many years later he was at the American Museum of Natural History And he came across some bones In the ethnographic department Which was his father's skeleton Which Peary had simply sold to the museum As a kind of display piece Minnick obviously wanted And fought very hard to have the skeletons

Return for a ritual burial The museum refused And Peary eventually paid for Minnick to go home, but the family's skeletons weren't released and buried in Greenland until 1993. Yeah. But did you see that they gave him a fake burial first?

Yeah. So when Minnick came over and his father died, and Minnick said, I need to bury him with the proper Inuit rituals. Right. They gave him a bit massive log wearing sort of big furs, disguised as his dad. Disguised as?

Sort of shoved a head on his foot. Yeah, yeah. They pretended it was his dad. They were burying. I guess maybe you don't get up too close. Yeah. So he thought he buried his dad, and it was.

It was a few years later, I think, when he was like, oh. Can I tell you about another railway on Greenland? Because this is all going a bit dark. Yes, good idea. Good idea. There's basically a few that have been built, and they're mostly like small ones just to transport fish from, you know, the fishing place to the place where people live. They're not very big, you know, it's not like a huge railway going through the country. But it's not a tiny one where, like, carriages for fish. The fish sits in a tiny fish chair.

Yeah. It's not that. But there's a coal railway in Greenland, and it's on. Disco Island Which Disco Island is the second largest island in Greenland after the main one It's one of the hundred largest islands in the world But I'd never heard of it until this week Disco Island

Can any of you guess How Disco Island got its name It's in Greenland I mean this feels like another Fauna Cairn's trap, doesn't it? I mean Disco It's completely circular It's shaped like a disc

One theory The people there They do the Macarena That's where we got the macarina. Yes. That's not a common theory. The light bounces off the snow, much like a disco ball.

Very good. Not a theory. Rounded is a theory. Another one is that it's short for Discovery Island. Another one is that the mountains are quite flat on it, so they look like desks. Desco Island. Excuse me. Desco Island.

But the most common is probably that it was named after a guy called Marmaduke. He was an English explorer and whaler And that it was originally called Duckies Island Oh, my dearie. Duckos Island and then Dicko's Island and then Disco's Island and eventually Disco Island. Wow. Okay. So it's not the next Magaloof.

If anyone got it on a map and put the tickets. I got one more fact on Peary. Explorer Robert Peary brought Vaseline to the North Pole to protect his skin from chafing and his mechanical equipment from rusting. Oh, yeah. And I found this fact on a Twitter site called At Vaseline Fax, which is, yeah, which is a great handle. Unfortunately, it only lasted for three tweets. Have you got the others?

Yeah, but they're not really that interesting. So the word Vaseline derives from the German word Vassa, water, and the Greek word allion, olive oil. Did they do the one about how in South America, the movie Greece was called Vaseline? Oh, they should have. They should have, but no, they didn't. They kind of just ran out after three. And the only interaction that this Twitter account at Vaseline Fax had was just one response to their tweets, which after the one I just told you about how it got its name, someone just

wrote back saying, didn't ask. And that was from at fuck Vaseline Fax. Wow. To be honest, if I'd set up and then instantly got a reply from at fuck Andrew Hunter M, I would have stopped immediately. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing, or you can go to our website, No Such Thing as a Fish.com.

All the previous episodes are up there. There's links to our upcoming tour dates. Do check them out if we're coming to a city near you. We'd love to see you. Also, if you don't like the adverts that you heard, over the course of this episode. Guess what? There's a new option

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