No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As George Clooney In A Blackcurrant Suit

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Anna, James, Andrew and special guest Athena Kugblenu discuss sexism for babies, an international coffee conflict, and a political Corrector gone mad.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Well, what can I tell you about this week's show? Dan Schreiber is having a very well-earned little breather. He'll be back next week, don't you worry? And Dan is such a behemoth of a podcaster that in his place we have not just one, but two people. Now, the first person that will be replacing Dan is Athena Kablo. Now, she is an amazing comedian, a really good friend of ours. You might remember her from our 20-hour comic relief special. She was part of the Guilty Feminist team in that. Actually, when we were on the Guilty Feminist, she was part of that show.

She also has a BBC Radio 4 show called Athena's Cancel Culture, which is out right now on Radio 4. You can find that on the internet as well. And she has a podcast called Keeping Athena Company, which is absolutely fantastic. I can't recommend that highly enough. It's such a brilliant podcast. Oh, I did say there was a second person. The second person is Athena's son, who you might hear in the background from time to time, really kind of coming in at the exact moments that you would want into.

So it's almost like we've soundscaped this episode, but I promise you, it isn't soundscaped. It was a tiny little human who was in the background of the show. I really hope you enjoyed it. We had such fun making it. We love Athena. And I suppose all that's left to say is on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four secret locations somewhere on earth. And specifically in London, my name is Anna Tyshti and I am here today with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and our very special, exciting guest, Athena Kowleno.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. And starting with you, Athena. What's your facts? So this is my fact. The 100 folds of a chef's hat represent that 100 ways in which you can cook an egg. Right. Wow.

Does that mean Athena, if you can only cook an egg like one way, for instance, then you can only have one fold? You get a beret, yeah. I was going to say you get a little cone, but that's not a good kind of hat to wear, a big white cone on your head. That's not a good hat at all. I mean, I always thought I was an amazing cook. I'm like, you know, you see my Instagram.

There's lots of food on there. But when I read that fact, I was like, I can't cook at all. I know three ways. That's it. Come on, mate. Even I know more than three ways to cook an egg. What's your three? Scrambled.

Omelet. Fry. Oh, boil. Boy, I know four ways. Oh, I was still short. Not tried pelching any time. Oh, God. Yes.

Okay. Fine. Five. It's still. We're a long way off. We're 5% of the way there. And the rest of this section is just going to be us brainstorming other possible ways. Now, I will say, have you guys ever coddled an egg?

No. Coddling an egg is lovely. It sounds like taking it to bed with you, like a teddy. I think you sort of, you put it in, is it like you give it a bath? You put it in a little glass ramekin and then you give it a bath and that slowly cooks with in there. And you mix it with spices and things. That's very nice. Anyway, six.

That's like a band Marie. Yeah. Seven. I think you can bacon egg. I once saw someone baking an egg. They put the egg in an oven and I thought, well, that's... I've baked an egg before. Have you in an oven?

Yeah, like hollowed out a pepper and then broken egg in it and just baked it. Nice. But I've seen someone put the shell. You can do this. You can just put the whole egg in the oven and bake it. Really? Which just for me feels like you don't really want the egg. So you're trying to wait as long as possible before you have to eat it.

Well, do you know something that takes even longer than your boiled oven egg? you can do it in the dishwasher as well. Very nice. Wrap it up. In fact, leave it in the shell and then just set the dishwasher running. Another longer way of doing it is the 100 year egg. Very long cycle in the dishwash. Sometimes it's called the 1,000 year egg.

And sometimes it's just called a really disgusting egg. Because I've had this egg. I had it in Singapore. And what they do is they put it in clay and salt. And they leave it for a few weeks. and it kind of turns dark black and really, really sulphurous. And sometimes they call it horse urine egg because it tastes a bit like horse urine, apparently. Yeah.

Yeah, this is one way of eating eggs. There is. Yeah, they've got a recipe for that in my Chinese cookbook, I think. It looks unappetizing. It's disgusting. It's really good. It looks like, I think they came out a recipe because somebody dropped an egg somewhere and they found it five weeks later and they're like, waste not or want not.

And they said, well, we'll make it a recipe and then no one puts me in prison for being disgusting. And that's how that worked. If only we hadn't dropped it in this puddle of horse piss. If life gives you horse piss. Well, that is the story. It was like a Chinese guy who had like dropped some eggs, duck eggs in a muddy puddle of water. And they had a load of calcium in the water.

And then he pulled them out and he thought, well, I might as well try them. You know, I might as well try that. And he's like, these are delicious. I need to come up with a way of making them. That is my approach to eating. much every encrusted ancient bit of food on the back of the fridge. I might as well just have most of it and see if I die.

This is great because when you've got a toddler, you find food everywhere. So now I'm just going to give it a banana that's at the back of the couch because it's just cuisine, isn't it? It's just a new recipe. Exactly. It's a delicacy. I have a slightly exciting advance on the hundred pleats in the chef's hat, which is, this is from a book called The Culinary Guide from 1903, and it's by George Escofier, who was a very famous, he was an early,

celebrity chef, not the earliest, but yeah, 10 of the century. Anyway, his book lists 202 ways to prepare eggs, excluding omelets, and omelets is another 82. And he also says that if you use the basic recipe for omelet Norwegian, it is possible to produce an almost infinite number of variations of this type of omelette. Then he says in brackets, omelette surprise. Nice. Wow. Yeah. Sounds gross. Do you know where the word omelet comes from? Oh, gosh, I'd assume from the word for egg. Does it come from the om sound of meditation? Yes. Shut up.

No, no. No, no. I think no. No, no. It both isn't that. And I think I've just lost hearing in one of my ears. It comes from the same word as you get amulet, omelette, and also where you get laminate. So it means something that's flat, basically, an old French word for something that's flat.

And that's where we get it from. You know, apparently we've been boiling eggs wrong, according to... According to who? We've been boiling eggs wrong. Was it this whole time we've been boiling them wrong? I love these headlines. I once tried to search for all that you've been something wrong your whole life and they love it. I want to say, it's always like you've been tying your shoes wrong the whole life.

And then you look at it and some guy on the internet has come up with a ridiculously stupid way of tiny shoes. Although you shouldn't say that because we actually did a fact about three years ago about how we had. have actually been tying your shoes wrong your whole line. Oh, no. Was that us then? That was us, idiots, on the internet. Yeah, we've been boiling eggs wrong and doing everything else wrong. But I tried to do it the right way. So this is, according to MFK Fisher, who I think was this amazing food writer in the 20th century.

And she was very influential. And she said the key to boiling eggs is you shouldn't boil them. And because that cooks it unevenly. So if you boil it really hard, you drop it straight into boiling water. it cooks the white really fast and by the time the yolk inside is cooked and the white is massively overcooked and it's all rubbery.

So I tried her way, which is you put it in cold water and then you let the cold water boil and as soon as it hits the boil, you take it off. Oh yeah. Was it good? Well, it was the most frustrating

45 minutes of my life. You should have put it in the oven. It was, should have. It was 45 minutes because it basically super glues the shell to the white. So, you know, normally if you peel a hard-boiled egg, then obviously the shell comes off. And this, it doesn't shock the white away from the shell when you drop it in boiling water. And so it took, I mean, I'm not kidding. It took 45 minutes to peel the shell off.

Wow. I lost most of the white along the way. Don't do it. MF.K. Fisher was pretty amazing, wasn't she? She was the one who W.H. Arden said was the greatest writer of any style in the whole of America. She was a food writer. And she was the one who also said the perfect way to make a sandwich was to sit on it. So you make your sandwich and then you have to sit on it for half an hour just to kind of warm it up and squash it. And then it's going to be a perfect sandwich. You're going to get a lot of customers returning their sandwiches to the kitchen. That's why I was fired for my job at prep. Just on eggs and sort of how they're laid,

you know when you've got an egg and you've boiled it and you peel it. And you know there's that gap between the white and the shell, there's like a little air pocket, yeah. Do you know what that is? I don't know what it is, but I know it makes it really easy to peel them. That's my... It's really handy, isn't it? It's really handy. If you find that and you crack the egg there, you can peel your eggs really easily. Top tip. That's what it's for. That's evolution for you. It's evolved to help us peel our oil eggs. No, it's a little airhole for the chick. So in case the egg is fertilized, the chick will be in. side and then it needs to practice breathing to inflate its lungs before it cracks out. So the way it does

that, about a day before it cracks out of the shell, it pecks its beak into that little airhole and uses it like a snorkeler mask and just practices breathing. Every day I take a step closer to veganism and I know, sorry. I mean, how adorable is that? And we're here making omelets out of it. Yeah, it's beautiful. I'm so cute. I'm probably going to upset you now because I've eaten Ballot, which is a Vietnamese thing where the egg has a semi-fertilized chick inside the egg

when they cook it and I must admit when I tried it I couldn't I could only eat the bit of egg around the I'll just eat around but it's a real fertilised chicken but yeah and it's like it's a real delicacy

in Vietnam and sometimes used as a way of getting over your hangover as well. I mean, you can't criticize it, can you? If you eat eggs, then there's no, it's not really that much different. But how do you time that? Do you get like an old ultra scanner? You get like an egg ultrasound.

Then you go, right, it's three weeks. It's good to go. Oh, no. Oh, I don't know if I could. There's something about the idea of it. So, obviously, you know. Well, if we're anthropomorphising eggs, and we are now, all eggs in America have had a little shampoo before they go into the shops. That's they? Yeah. It's so.

weird. So they love, in America, they love to wash their eggs, but that creates a problem because they have this natural bloom on them. They have this sort of bacterial layer, which we can't see, but it's, or rather it keeps bacteria out. It's a way of kind of protecting it. So, you know, if the egg gets a bit of poo on it or whatever as it's being laid, it's fine, it doesn't matter. And so in America, they love to give them a little shampoo, but then the problem is you shampoo them and then there are the high odds of bacterial invasion. So then they have to refrigerate them and spray them with oil. It's a nightmare. So we don't do that in Europe. It is illegal to wash an egg before you sell it to people. Wow. Yeah. I always think if you kind of get an egg and there's a little

feather on there, I always think that's a very probably a fresh egg from a chicken who had a very good life or something. But I reckon there's probably a person in a factory just putting feathers in the occasion. And the poo, yeah, bits of bono because if you get a bit of chicken poo, you think, oh, that's literally just come out of its ass. Hasn't even had time to lose the poop. You're right. I bet someone's just taping it on. Because they do that with yolks.

What color yolks do you guys want? Orangey. You crack your egg into the pan. Yeah. Orange, yellow white. I want a bright yellow yolk. Like literally like the sun, but like really deep rich yellow. Yeah.

Rich, that's it. Yeah, I go with that. I want one that's more like Donald Trump's skin color. Like really deep, dark orange. You want to go orange? Well, people do seem to. to prefer orange and it's because they think the chicken's healthier. So yeah, if it's like really rich yellow or deep orange, they're like, that shows that it's had a better diet. And so producers

have realized that people prefer that. And so they just feed them dyed food. So whenever you get an egg and it has a rich orange yolk, it does not taste better and it is not more nutritious. It is probably in like 99% of cases, it's that the farmer has basically put usually an additive or some dye in their food. Sometimes if you're going organic, apparently they'll feed them marigold petals or red petals to help the carotenoids, you know, the stuff that dies carrots and stuff orange to help them get into the egg. I think that is a good sign though. If my farmer is willing to pick marigold petals in order to feed them to the chicken, something's going, right? Throwing the petals around so that the chickens have a really romantic evening.

You're right. Valentine's Day in the hut is a huge deal. very quickly on the hat itself, the 100th cleat hat. So invented by Marie Antoine Carame, who was probably the predecessor to Escofi, who Andy mentioned earlier on, probably maybe the first celebrity chef, I would say. I'm not sure. I can't think of anyone earlier. But he had these big hats because he wanted to have authority. And he thought the bigger and more erect your hat is, the more people would take you seriously.

And so the better as chef you were, the talk. it was supposed to be and his was 18 inches in height. Yeah. I mean, this is a man's like invention, clearly. This is like, how can I make people respect me? 18 inches, that's respect. I kind of think it was a bit of that. Alexis Sawyer, who was around the same time,

he was the chef at the Reform Club. He wore a big black velvet beret with a huge tassel. And the whole point of that was, he was too important to cook with it. He was like the head chef. Everyone else, the sous chef and stuff, did all the work. he was the big, like, head chef. And if he wore a hat that was too impractical to do any work,

it showed that he was really important. That's brilliant. That's so clever. So, yeah, it was just too difficult for him to cook, therefore he's the boss. Pretty much. You should try it in the office, Andy. Come into the office wearing sort of mittens and a ball of cloth.

And sunglasses, so I can't see any words in front of me. Gaffer tape your mouth. It's like, I'm too... This is sounding better and better. Okay. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that when men are played the sound of a baby crying, if they're told it's a boy, they'll think it's in more pain than if they're told it's a girl.

Wow. So what men think male babies are matro? Is that? Yes, you've kind of got there, Andy, almost. So this is a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex, a university of Leon, Santetian, and Hunter College City University in New York. And what they did was they played a load of cries to men and women, parents, actually. And they asked them whether they thought the child was in pain or happy or sad or how much pain it was in,

et cetera, et cetera. And the thing is that before puberty, the voices of boys and girls, especially babies, the cries of boys and girls are the same. There's no difference in pitch. But people, especially men, think that the male baby will have a deeper, cry. And so when they hear the cry, if it's high pitch, they think it's in more pain. And because they expect the male baby to have a deeper cry normally, they think that the difference means that it's in more pain. I think that's really funny that it's like, what's wrong with this child?

And they expect to like Barry White to come out of its mouth. And it's a high pitch, high pitch, squeal. It's like, oh my gosh. No, it's a baby. There's nothing wrong with your child. That's the beard. Why's his beard? And yeah, it is quite funny. The thing that the researchers say is it could have implications for the welfare of children because it means that if a female child is crying, you might give it less attention than if a male child is crying. Oh, this is why we have man flu then clearly, because boys are so used to being given attention they don't need. Or, you know, then they grow out to be, oh, got a little cough. Oh, it's a

flu. It's the flu. Whereas girls are like, yeah, girls are going to work with like headless because that's fine. It's just a scratch. Oh my God. I think you might be hit on something there. That feels right, doesn't it? Yeah, I thought it was that male parents say, you know, they'll listen to the crying and they'll think, well, my baby boy wouldn't be making a fuss unless it was something really serious. It wouldn't be disturbing me. Well, that might be true as well, but

this study was specifically about the pitch of the sounds. Wow, so we just have to start complaining in a deeper voice in order to have people take notice of us. No, you have to complain in a much, much, much higher voice to make up for the fact that you have a higher voice already.

Oh, sorry. Yeah, we have to, or we to speak in deeper voices all the time and then the contrast to our high complaint. Don't go too high because then it will just be dogs that care. Dogs are pretty comforting. I think that might work for me. It's weird the response to babies crying, right, that you get, well, I'm always told that once you become a mother, I guess, specifically, you have a very instinctive response to babies crying. So I hear babies crying and I think that's a really horrible noise. And I think actually there was a study on the noises people find most grating and babies crying was the worst. But, like, is there a difference? Do you find

there was a difference once you had children, Athena, where, like, you hear a baby crying and, like, a bit of you dies? Yes. Or does it sound lovely? Does it suddenly sound wonderful? There's only one difference, and that is when you hear the baby cry, you lactate. That's the only difference, really. It never gets more or less annoying. It just, you just start leaking. But, yeah, there's definitely, I think, I mean, I would speculate its evolution, isn't it? Because what's really funny is babies have unique cries. They all do. But sometimes you go out in public and there'll be a baby that sounds like your baby.

And that baby will make you lactate because it will just have a similar pitch or a sound. Right. And I'll be like, oh, that sounds like one of my kids. And then it's, oh, dear me, here we go again. I've got my pads. That's incredible. Sorry, I can only apologise to any listeners who can hear the baby in the background and have spontaneously started lactating. Lactation is so weird though.

So there's tons of stuff I didn't know. Like people can lactate when they're not mothers. And this is really, really important in loads of societies. And it seems to be quite under-researched. So they're like hunter-gatherer societies where there's a lot more aloe parenting, where it's parenting in groups. So there's not even really one specific caregiver. Your baby will be cared for by maybe 12 different people.

And grandmothers will be able to lactate. So they'll, and it's just by like having the nifference. people stimulated very often, women who have had a baby before at some point, they'll just lactate again so they can nurse their infants or your friend who's had a baby once can nurse the infant. And the idea is that if you live in like society, then it's useful for more than one person to be able to do that, right? Is that the idea? Yeah. I think it's a little bit of survival wasn't as guaranteed. So if your mom dies, then you can just latch on to someone else. But also, I guess it's just a different way cultures develop. Like the ACA people who are,

in Central Africa. I don't think we've talked about them before. They're the ones who have fathers who spend as much time with the babies as the mothers, and they're totally interchangeable their roles. And they're always holding their kids, so they're in contact with kids up to the age of one and a half for like 97% of the time. They're either touching or holding. And the fathers, when they're doing it, which will be about 50% of the time, they will let the baby suckle on their nipples. So when the baby needs comforting, it just suckles on its father's teats. At least there's a use for male nipples because they have no other function.

Exactly. That makes a lot of sense. There's a great fact about bliss freedom as I found out with the first baby. If you do it continuously, it's a form a natural contraception. Did you know that? So useful.

Because you can't, the idea, you don't want to conceive children one after the other really quickly. That's quite bad if you're like a woman and you've gone through pregnancy. You want to go in a weight. Give yourself a bit of time. You know what I mean?

And the lactation helps you do that, which I didn't know. That's really interesting. It's smart. I feel like it's not guaranteed. No, I wouldn't bank on it. I'd give yourself a safety net if I was used. Anyone listening, like get yourself an insurance policy.

However, when I had my first, I didn't have a period for like a year. Nice. Yeah, it was brilliant. I was like, I'm going to breastfeed forever. It's kind of in the child's interest then to carry on breastfeeding because then there aren't any more children to kind of like use up the. Oh, yeah, resources. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't want any bastard siblings. That's why they want to keep latched on. So, Athena, you were saying that you can really tell the difference between the cries of your baby and someone else's baby. This is interesting because lots of animals and even lots of mammals can't tell the difference between their young and other animals. So this was an experiment by someone called Susan Lingle, where she played a deer through a speaker, the noise of other mammals' babies crying. and, you know, making a noise. And the deer cannot tell the difference.

So they will react very strongly to a baby deer, but also to a baby bat, a baby marmot, a baby eeland. It will just run. It's like, oh, no, there's a young mammal in trouble. And this might be because, I mean, the reason is because mammals have the same larynx, or really similar larynx is until puberty. And then the difference between all the species kicks in.

But before puberty, basically, it's like spread betting. you know, parents need to respond to a cry which might be their child just in case it's their child in danger. And so if it turns out to be a baby marmad, then, you know, well, such is life. And it's useful for the child because then you might get something,

if you're in trouble, you might, you might be a deer, Bambi, sort of getting in trouble because there's some people coming, trying to shoot you. And then a friendly bat might come along and save you. Well, you don't know for a bear. You'd be like, oh man, I hope the bear would come.

That'd be really useful. But this does imply that if you know you're walking past a certain fox cub or something, Athena, then you might start lactating. I would have thought that certain mammals could induce lactation in the same way that certain babies could, right? I hadn't considered that. The neighbours have just got a new puppy. You're in trouble. So stock up on paths. I'll have to go outside and I'll just say, get your dog out of here for a second. Let's see how that works.

Babel is a weird thing. Baby's babble, right? and that it kind of starts to imitate language, I guess. And I think people can tell if babies are babbling in their own language. So if I heard a five-month-old making nonsense noises, I should be able to tell whether it's an English speaker or a non-English speaker. Because, again, they imitate the, call it the tone, the timbre of the voice in which they're speaking. But it's really interesting because babies of deaf parents who speak sign language babble in sign language.

So whereas like you'll have like a voice. five-month-old baby who doesn't know any sign language, has never seen sign language, they'll just randomly clench their fists and, like, splay their hands out. Sign language babies will kind of babble, so they'll make signs a little bit like words, but that don't specifically mean anything yet, but with like quite deliberate, like they're practicing trying to learn it. But baby sign is a thing, that you can teach your babies how to sign by, like, from about six months onwards, you can get them to tell you when they're hungry, you can get them to

tell you when they need to go toilet. It takes, like, time and effort, but basically, is a true story. And I keep, I didn't do it with my first song. It's couldn't be bothered. But this one now. I was like, right, we're having such a hard time potty train in the first one. I'm like, right, we're learning sign. I'm doing it. I'm investing 20 minutes a day. Just tell me when you need the toilet. That's all, that's the only thing I want. That's the only thing you need to say. Everything else is fine. But it's instinctive as well. So their babies, a lot of the time, it's, you just have to learn what they do instinctively. So apparently they, if a baby brings their fingers with their mouth, really easy one, I'm hungry. And there's

another one which means I need a poo, which I've forgotten. But it can be done. I've been told. I'm going to interview you in six months' time and see if you have actually seen through. You'll be interviewing the baby. How about that? I think you mentioned over email, Athena, and I've read this thing as well about potty training babies. And I actually forgot to go back to it, but there are definitely people who don't believe in nappies at all. And there's a way of potty training babies where you just kind of let them poo whenever they want to. And you learn when it looks like they're going to poo and then you run them to the loo and you never have to use a nappy.

Which sounds great. There's a bunch of New York mothers who kind of do that. And they say for the first month or two, you do get some poo on your carpet. Sounds like a lot of jeopardy. Yes. But then you sort of train the baby to give you a sign when they're going to go to the loo. Like you say, there'll be a sort of sign they use

where they point at their balm, I don't know, do a little heart. And then it's like you've got to run them to a toilet. Yeah, lemon floors. That's what I'd say for that one. that's the real key. If you haven't got laminar, I'd probably just get some pamphers. But nappies are really wasteful.

Like I think a baby goes through, well, first of all, in the 80s, babies used to potty train at around 18 months. Because, you know, up to that point because people used to use terry towels and things like that. And terry towels get wet. So babies are like, oh, this is horrible. And they're like, you know what?

Let me get me on a toilet. This is disgusting. And they're also harder to crawling. So they're not as mobile, so uncomfortable. But now we use kind of these nappies that are really comfortable. so I understand a comfortable, they're really dry, they make, they allow babies really mobile. The average age for potty training now is about between two and three. So you're saying they've been indulged.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, indulge, obviously to make more money for companies that make nappies. But that's incredible, right? Like babies that used to train at 18 months and now train at three years. That's the super villain plot line. Do you want a company that's investing in making nappies so good that people never take them off? I know. That's what I was thinking.

There's new smart nuffies. that have just been invented by Pampas. They're called Loomy, and I reckon once these are in, you're literally until you're in your early 20s, you're going to be wearing them. Is this where they text you, James? Well, they tell you, yeah. They tell you. They text the parents saying, I have.

I have. If I'm so far from my baby that I need to be texted, that means someone else's job. What do you text to me? I've paid the sitter to deal with that. What are you for? He should just text the nearest phone, shouldn't it? to the baby.

Yeah. But then everyone, of course, because it's a smart thing, everyone's worried about hackers and that someone might hack. What possible data can the hackers get that's going to help them on this? Unless they're working for big pamper, and maybe. Well, all it can really do is tell you how often this individual child shits themselves or pisses themselves. But the idea could be that it might be attached to your phone

and then using your phone, they might be able to get your bank details, maybe. It feels like a stretch. If I was a hacker, this wouldn't be the first thing I would hack in order to get to the purse strings, you know. Yeah, getting bang details through a baby's bottom does feel like roundabout way. Okay, it is time for fact number three,

and that is my fact. My fact this week is that traditional Ethiopian households can spend up to nine hours a day on coffee ceremonies. Wow. Now, I know what you're thinking. Oh, come on. I know. This is a lie. That's what I'm thinking.

They wouldn't get anything done. So I should specify, I asked far too many people about this. I actually ended up interviewing four separate people who have lived in Ethiopia or Ethiopian. And basically, coffee ceremonies are a massive part of life in Ethiopia. And they can last up to three hours. So the first hour is roasting the coffee. And then you kind of grind it and make it. And then it's all about sitting around having a chat, debating politics.

politics, what have you. And so you'll do that. And then, particularly in rural places, you might do it three times a day. So breakfast, lunch and dinner time. Now, you probably aren't doing it three times a day, every day, for three hours, because you wouldn't be able to hold down a job. Maybe they have like a Nespresso machine for day-to-day stuff. And then for the special occasions, they do the three-hour thing, no? Yeah. Yeah, very possibly. Maybe it's a lockdown thing. You know, it's a lockdown. You might as well spend nine hours a day. You're right.

It's a good idea. How do we fill our time? Let's drag this out for a while. The queues at Starbucks in Ethiopia must be absolutely enormous. Can you imagine if there's one person in front of you, that's your days of myself. And after all that time, they'll still get your name wrong. Three hours. Come on.

I spoke to one guy who runs this place called Kaffa Coffee, which is actually this really nice Ethiopian coffee, would like van in Dahlston. Anyway, he was great. So I was asking him about it and holding up the queue behind me. And he was saying that actually how it would work where he was from anyway is that you'd be in your village

and you would hear the first person to get up and start roasting the beans because it makes a really loud noise. You've got a very, very hot pan and when the beans crash onto it, they really crackle at first. And once you hear that person, you're like, okay, someone else is doing the coffee today.

I don't have to. And you'll bring your leftovers from the night before, from the meal, if you've got some bread left over, and you'll sort of swap that for some coffee and hang out doing that. So that makes more sense, like it's not every single household is doing that many times a day. Cool. Kaffa actually is the name of the region, isn't it, in Ethiopia, where coffee originated, I think. And actually, it's where we and almost every country in the world gets the word for coffee is from this place, Kaffa. Wow. Makes sense. We have said before, just in case there's a pedant out there.

there that coffee originated in Yemen and there is some hot debate between those two countries about it and you can engage with that if you want. What I think, and I don't want to get into a conflict with the Yemenis or the Ethiopians, but I think the coffee plants was really found in Ethiopia, but then modern day coffee, or actually not even modern day coffee, but, you know, early modern coffee came from Yemen to drink. So that's that right? Well, it sounds like you're determined to not pick a side in this conflict. Quite cool in this coffee ceremony as well.

The traditional ceremony has three rounds, and the first round is where you get your strongest cup, and then you re-pour the water, so it's a weaker cup for the second round. And then the weakest is the last round. And they're called Abol, Tonner and Bereka. And that is, according to their legend, the name of the three goats who invented coffee, according to Ethiopian legend. Again, I did ask this guy, and he was like, yeah, yeah, the goats.

They're the names of the goats. And the idea is that like over a thousand years ago, a goat herders or his goats acting all jumpy and twitchy and weird. And then he saw that they'd eaten these cherries sitting next to them and they were the coffee cherries. And so he brought them to some monks. See, this is just like the eggs. It's just like the thousand year egg being discovered completely by mistake. No one is ever willing to admit. I grew a plant and I experimented with hundreds of ways of cooking it and this is the one I discovered.

It's my work that's done this. It's always, oh, there's a magic plant and the goats happened to be spry. What makes me laugh about that story is that he saw his goats were dancing. He was like, I want what they're having. I wouldn't go near it personally myself, but thank goodness that person did. Exactly. The mind of a great inventor always wants to mimic the dancing goat. Have you guys heard of the women's petition against coffee? This is a, it was a pamphlet that was published in England in 1674, and it was at a time when coffee was quite controversial, because, you know, it was at a time when coffee was quite controversial, because. Because coffee houses, as I think Anna said, they allow discussion of all sorts. Politics is one thing. So, you know, you might be discussing politics and you might decide that you don't like the king very much or whatever.

So political discussion was dangerous. And anyway, this women's petition against coffee was published in 1674, which claimed all sorts of stuff. It said coffee makes a man as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought. So it sort of damages men's fertility. or that when a woman approaches the nuptial bed expecting a man that should answer the vigour of her flames, why should she only meet a bed full of bones and hug a meagre useless corpse? Strong stuff about coffee, but yeah, I know. The weird thing is it probably wasn't by women.

It's written in a way which implies that it's written by a man sort of ventriloquising women. Like, oh, it makes men so gossipy. They're more gossipy than us women who are writing this petition. It's in that kind of vein. And also, was it in the petition the thing about meeting an old skeleton corpse in bed? That was in the petition, yeah. See, that doesn't sound like a woman to me. That feels like a relief if what you're meeting is sort of skeletal mess.

He doesn't want to do anything. That sounded very much of a man. And also, coffee's supposed to make you live longer, so you're less likely to meet a skeleton. He'll be full of life. These are all arguments against the women's petition. I also thought if you drank lots of coffee, you turned into George Clooney. is that that's what TV's tart be. Yeah, that's correct.

Keep drinking it, James. Keep going. You're nearly there. Is that right? I'm doing nine hours a day, so I should think by now. That or Anthony Head, do you remember his old adverts? Oh, yeah. Of course.

Tony Head, is he the guy from Buffy? Yeah. Yeah. But he's the guy from the Ness Cafe sexy couple flirting adverts, really. Yeah. That does rebel. He was quite an anxious character in Buffy, so bad person to advertise coffee. Whereas George Cleveld.

is much more chill. That's true, but why do you think he was anxious, Anna? That's that delicious Ness Cafe, isn't it? He was off his head on Ness Cafe all the time. That's what it was. All withdrawing. So coffee withdrawal is a thing, which I don't drink enough coffee, I don't think, to get serious withdrawal, but you've quit before, Andy, haven't you?

I've quit. I'm currently quit. You seem like you've got the shakes. You've been out very old. Is that why? You've never been properly on it, though, have you? No, I was. I was for years and years.

I was just drinking several. a day and then when you stop you just have a headache for two weeks and then and then that's that. Yeah, I can vouch for that. I quit drinking coffee. It's very inconsistently advice. Some people say you can have, you can have coffee when you're pregnant. Some people can say you can't, but I just quit anyway. I thought I'd quit and then my teeth would stop being yellow because that would be advantage. And I got a headache. Yeah. You feel well when you stop drinking as much caffeine as you used to. Absolutely. Did you feel less awake or less alert or less focused or anything? Yeah, but that's probably due to the fact I was growing up human.

You know, like, to be honest, I started drinking coffee again recently. And I think it's all a bit of mythology really. I don't think it makes you any more alert or awake. I just think you just get a bit attached to the kind of your brain getting a bit wired. But I'm not more productive when I'm like, I'm not more productive when I'm shaking like a leaf. If anything, I'm less productive. Well, some people, it does seem to work for some people. I kind of agree.

It makes me twitchy. endlessly sort of Google weird health symptoms wrong with me rather than do actual work. But Michael Pollan, who's the brilliant food writer who wrote a book called Caffeine, which is an audio book actually. He is a huge coffee fan and he quit while writing the book and it almost ruined the actual book, which I like a book on caffeine was almost destroyed by caffeine withdrawal. But he basically said that he felt like he wasn't even writing in its first language anymore. Everything was so like words didn't hang together properly.

There was this fog between him and reality. He lost all confidence and he thought this whole book's a completely stupid idea. I'm going to stop writing it. I mean, that is a symptom of writing a book. Yeah. I think he might be blaming the coffee so that he can plug his book about coffee. Yeah, that literally sounds like imposter syndrome. That's what he described.

You old cynics, I felt sorry for him. No, I didn't. But he did tell me why coffee apparently does keep you awake, which again, I've always thought it sounds me to sleep. But I didn't know that it was that we basically have a neurotransmitter, like a chemical, which sends your body a signal, which is called adenosine, which is what tells you to go to sleep. So it slots into a little receptor in your body, which is just the right size for it, and tells you to go to sleep. And caffeine, the chemical, is exactly the right shape to fit into that receptor. So when you drink caffeine, it slips into there ahead of the sleep chemical. And so it stops the sleep chemical getting in. So it just doesn't tell your body to go to sleep. sleep. That's really clever. Yeah, it's so cool, isn't it?

I didn't know that. Do you think, okay, here's a question for you. Do you think you can flush out caffeine by drinking decaf? No. No, no, no. Well, you can't. You're all right in your assumption. Is that a thing?

What? I was just checking. I read this online and I thought, well, that seems very obvious and basic to me. But I was hoping one of you would fall into my incredibly obvious trap. You haven't. Well done. Did you ask? Like, so somebody would drink a cup of like caffeinated coffee and then drink a decaf and think that balances that out.

That's like having a gin and tonic and then having a Coke and being like I'm fine to drive. No, no, no. Don't worry, officer. I've had 15 coaks. They make a lot of coffee. They grow a lot of coffee in Mastinik, the island. And the story of how they did that is really interesting. There was a naval officer called Gabrielle de Clure.

and he decided, why is that funny? That's a funny name. It just sounded like you'd seen a long name and you'd given up on it. Maybe I was doing like some French babbling or something. Gabriel de Clure. And he decided that he was going to take a plant from Paris because they had some in the Royal Gardens there and he was going to take it down to Martinique

and grow some coffee plantations down there. But the king didn't really want. want to give him any of his coffee plants because they were really valuable. So he kind of sneaked in and stole a little seedling from the Royal Garden. And then he decided to go to Martinique, which is a long, long way away from Paris. First of all, he was caught in a storm. And then they got attacked by pirates.

And all the time, he's got this tiny little coffee plants that he's looking after. There was a spy from the Netherlands who went after him and tried to kill his seedling. Just one seedling he had One little seedling, one little plant That's so funny And this little plant Like the spy came and tried to kill him They because he was at sea for a long time

They didn't have much rations And so he took his tiny bit of water That he was allowed to drink And he would share it with his seedling To keep it alive And then he got it to Martinique And 50 years later There were 18 million coffee trees on Martinique

I can't even look after my yucker And even after a coffee plant Good for him. I think that has the makings of a great film where it's one man and his seedling. And, you know, he's on the boat and all the other sailors are looking hungrily at the seedling and they look at it, it turns into a big leg of hand before them or whatever.

I can't believe you didn't even bring a spare. Take two. I can't believe that Andy, when he becomes a film director, his kind of film will have people looking at things and then turn it into massive hums. It's strongly based on the cut, the Looney Tunes. I can't see you getting many Oscar nominations for that kind of movie. We'll see, we'll see.

When the Best Ham category is launched, thanks to my extensive lobbying campaign. And the winner for 10 years in the row, John Hamm. One more thing, the coffee filter was invented by a woman called Melita Benz. And she, according to her son, you'll love this, Annie. because I know you love your origin stories. She was trying to come up with a way of making coffee and she just got really frustrated and ripped out a page of her son's notebook from school

and stuck it in an old tin pot and it just happened to make this perfect coffee and she decided that go on. I like that story because it's an innovator thinking of looking at her environment, coming up with a thing and adapting it. If it was going with the classic format, it would be she was trying to pour her coffee

and unfortunately her son dropped his notebook book and a leaf was torn out and landed on top of the cup. And when she poured it, it caught all the grounds. And you go, oh, my God. So I applaud Melissa Bens for this. Okay, fair enough. Well, during World War II, the company stopped making any filters and started making supplies for the Nazis.

Oh. Okay. When I said I applaud Melissa Bens, I'd like to clarify. What? To a point. Wow, you don't applaud her, Andy, because after the war, she started a program that compensated victims of a Nazi's forced labour policy. All right. When I said I didn't approve of her, I'd like to clarify, again.

Coffee was officially blessed in the 17th century by the Catholic Church because the Pope liked it. And you could do that. So it was kind of thought as an evil drink. It came started in Africa or in Yemen somewhere and they were all drinking it around there. Then it got up into the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Everyone's drinking it. So then it came. over to Catholic Europe and everyone went, well, it's the drink of the infidel. And then Pope Clement the 8th tasted some and thought, right, I love this. What am I going to do? Because everyone's saying this is the invention of Satan. It's awful. So he said, look, it's so delicious that it would be awful to just let the infidels have use of it. Let's trick Satan and bless it. So we turn it into a

Christian drink. And he did. And that's why you go to heaven if you drink coffee. But that's really Interesting. Something I really realize this is how popular coffee is. There's only one thing that's drunk more regularly than coffee and that's water. It's literally the second most popular drink in the world. Wow. Which is incredible because it doesn't taste that nice. I thought it might be ribena. But it's the second which means that human, we're doing something wrong in life for us to need so much caffeine in our life. We need to introduce siesters all around the world basically. This is what we need. You're right. Because it doesn't taste nice. whatever anyone's claiming.

We are just doing it in order to keep ourselves awake. Let's just start sleeping more. The idea of a Ribina-based society, I think it's less sexy if Anthony Head from Buffy is knocking on his neighbour's door at night saying, have you got any beena? But he would be dressed like a massive Ribina berry, wouldn't he?

Why is that not sexy? His little arm sticking out. I don't know. George Clooney and that's still sexy. I think we can all agree. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the week, and that is Andy. My fact is that the 18th century grammarian, Alexander the Corrector, carried a sponge wherever he went just in case he spotted any offensive graffiti.

He sounds great. He's my hero. He was a Scottish author. His name was Alexander Crudden, C-R-U-D-E-N. He was an author, proofreader. You could see why he sort of changed his monics to the corrector, kind of you. He, yeah, he was a bookseller. He was a stationer.

He was eccentric, definitely. He was famous for having written a concordance to the Bible, which is an index of the Bible. We'll get onto that later. But also, he carried out of... Let's get onto it now. Yeah, come, okay. He wrote an index to the Bible. He wrote a verbal index of the Bible, so he took every single word of the King James Bible,

apart from, you know, the and of and, you know, really sort of nuts and bolts ones, every single other word, you know, shoe or ham or whatever, he made an index. Ham's a good one because the son of Noah was called. Son of not. I knew you were going to bring it up. I don't know if ham and ham would have different entries. I suspect it would. He knew what he was doing.

Yeah, it's three times as long as the actual Bible. And it just tells you which words appear where in the Bible. That's like only the really hardcore fans read that one. It's like people who've read the Silmarillion over Lord of the Rings, isn't it? Oh, you might have read the Bible, but... Have you read it in alphabetical order? Yeah. Such a weird thing to do.

It took them 12 years, isn't it? Unsurprising. And it was like all of the word all, for instance, he recorded. So he includes some pretty irrelevant words in there. But the thing is, the Bible's already index. It's like proverbs, Mark, John, Luke. Like, it's already in sections. Yeah.

It's in chapters, you're right. You're making the classic mistake of confusing contents and index. And Alexander, the corrector, would be turning in his grave right now. You'd be corrected. Dan wouldn't have done that. Dan wouldn't. It's taken this long to feel he's lost. Yeah, he was weird.

So he didn't like grammar mistakes either. He didn't like grammar mistakes, and he didn't like offensive graffiti. And he had his own very idiosyncratic interpretation of what offensive was. So he didn't like the number 45. which at the time lots of people were writing. That was the main one, wasn't it? The number 45 was the main thing that he hated the most. He only liked LPs, didn't he?

He didn't like... Maybe he predicted... Did he predict Donald Trump's presidency and hated that? That's exactly it. He hated that. It's nothing to do with that. It's because of John Wilkes, the radical. John Wilkes was a radical author at the time,

and he had written a work attacking the monarchy, which had been published in issue number 45, of a magazine called the North Britain which published, you know, exciting political content. So 45 became a bit of a rallying cry for anti-monicists at the time. People would write 45 on walls and doors and floors and things like that. But if Alexander the director spotted it with his sponge, he'd get rid of it immediately.

What do you think he would do if like just your house number was number 45? I don't know. And you've got 45 when you're wheelie bin. And just love you from looking at it. And he keeps coming around. and like taking it off. It's such a good point. It's such a good point.

Also, the Jacobite raising was 1745, which was another reason why they used this. Yeah. That's why he did it in that issue. He waited. He printed 44 issues of this pointless magazine, so he'd get to 45 and make an obscure reference. He was an Iliest.

Do you guys know what an iliest is? Oh, no. You want to guess? Oh, did he like the Iliad? I would guess that. Yeah, that's a good guess. Did he like Ily coffee? That's a coffee brand.

That's actually closer because that's the correct spelling. So you're definitely getting warmer, but still quite cold. So I'm going to tell you. An Iliest is someone who always refers to themselves in the third person. So it's like Ilae. Okay. I hate him. You've said it all.

He's a grammar police, which, you know, he'd be good on Twitter. He keeps getting my really bins nicked. And he speaks in third person. No, I can't stand. man. Yeah, he's not likable. He wasn't popular at the time either, to be fair. You're matching the opinion of him then because he was institutionalized several times and there's lots of debate over whether, you know, was he really ill, hence him being put in an institution, or was he being put there by his enemies? And there's a biographer called Julia Kaye, who argues that he was

put away not because he was ill. I mean, he sounds pretty eccentric, so that's pretty out there. but on one occasion he was put away by I think the brother of a woman he was trying to propose to or trying to marry but he had discovered that the woman he was trying to propose to was sleeping with her own brother and he raised

a big old stink about this and then was putting an asylum for it yeah that was the first time but then later on he was putting an asylum for unwelcome attentions to a widow and then another time for attacking a man with a shovel and then a third time for he formed an emotional

attachment to a woman without even having met her first. And he then called himself instead of Alexander the corrector, Alexander the Conqueror, and decided that this woman was his predestined partner in life and tried to get together with her, even though she didn't know who he was. Okay. All right. I mean... But that first time, it was just interesting. But there is, like, in the Oxidixir of National Biography, they think that that, they say that that first time is what kind of threw him over the edge a little bit and from then on. Yeah. Well, he wanted to regulate private madhouses and supposedly the fact he didn't manage to improve

private madhouse regulation made him very depressed, which then meant he was sent to bedlam again. Although, as James points out, hitting people with a shovel and forming unwelcome attachments to women will also do it. That'll do the trick. So he was complicated. He wasn't an unproblematic fave, is what I'm trying to say. Fair.

Fair assessment. But I'm impressed that in those days you were able to form attachments to people you hadn't met romantically pre-intern. How are you doing that? I see what you mean. It was the daughter of Sir Thomas Abney of Newington, who was the Lord Mayor of London. So basically he'd heard of the Lord Mayor's daughter, possibly seen her in some periodicals, decided that that was his future wife. He called her Princess Alizabeth, and said that her home was a place called Cilesia, which he would besiege.

I have the same thing about Daniel Craig So I think that's That's fine You're planning to besiege Daniel You're planning to besiege Daniel Craig's house Because it's probably a public service we're doing No it's not his house It's our house, we live together

It's right, yes It's been our happy spousal home for a few years now actually It opens the door Dressed as a massive black current Trying to make Ribina for you Yeah, so that's Alexander. So I should say he's an illiest, sorry, just to go a long way back to him, referring to himself in the third person. Because I wouldn't want you to think badly of him.

I don't know if he did it in speech. He just did it in the book he wrote, which I read a decent portion of, which had the catchy title, The Corrector's earnest address to the inhabitants of Great Britain showing that the late earthquakes and the fact we are at war with a powerful nation are allowed. A loud call from divine providence for speedy and thorough reformation. And it actually goes on. But it was basically saying, look, with hazard earthquakes, we're at war. This is clearly because you guys aren't abiding by my grammatical correction.

And that whole thing, he refers to a lot of stuff that's happened in his life, but he always calls himself the corrector. He would write pamphlets as well called things like Mr. Crudham greatly injured or The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, which is practically a comic book, writing a pamphlet about yourself and calling it the Adventures of. Yeah, it is. And then I think that was just about how his sister tried to have him sectioned or had him sectioned. So it's disappointing if you think you're getting an adventure book and you get an annoying sibling rivalry.

Yeah, imagine if the Avengers were like that. It was just Iron Man's brother stealing his trainer. It's like, that's my, you know, get your own shoes. Captain America turns up with his sponge. Yeah. So on graffiti, some stuff on that. I was going through my old files and stuff on graffiti. And the ancient Roman graffiti seemed to so often be about discouraging public excretion.

So Roman graffiti includes the phrase, anybody urinating here will incur the wrath of Mars, to the one defecating here, beware the curse, and shit with comfort and good cheer so long as you don't do it here. Wow. And so it seems like graffiti in those days was doing a public good. Yeah, it's like no ball games kind of thing, isn't it? It's just trying to stop people from doing bad things around your house.

Exactly. No turning in this driveway. That's my favourite one that people put up. This gate permanently in use. Permanently in use. If it was permanently used, I couldn't read the sign. Get out of here. I was in a really beautiful place in Cotswold recently,

going for a walk on my own in a wood, and there was a massive tree. And it's Cotswolds, you know. It's like David Cameron territory. and like Bluebell Wood and someone had carved in giant capital letters into the tree, Millwall. I just saw that is so great.

I'm so glad Millwall fans are going that far afield to make their stamp. Underneath it, it said, get your parliamentary favours here. Call Dave on 01. Will that still be relevant when this goes out? Definitely. We'll keep it relevant.

We'll keep it in the news. I've seen some celebrity graffiti graffiti, which is very exciting. I saw something at Lord Bible. wrote. Really? There's a place in Greece called the Temple of Poseidon, and he carved his name really big and florid into the column of this 4,000-year-old temple,

which is pretty disrespectful. But it's surrounded by other names because it was just the thing you did at the time. So, yeah. Byron does it. It's kind of okay, isn't it? I bet the council got really pissed off with all the other people who did it for when Byron. Yeah, he's like the Banksy of the 19th century. You're right.

You're right. Yeah. that Banksy he did a load of graffiti just in Waterloo and that tunnel in Waterloo I don't know if you remember it was like one of the first things

yeah and then I went to see it when it happened and then within we started filming QI and I saw it right at the start and by the time we'd finished filming it had already been covered I think three or four times by other people putting graffiti on and that was kind of the point he was like this is now a graffiti place

and just put whatever you want here but we've come up with a new way of using hydro gel which is like this amazing kind of substance. And you put it on the wall and it just sticks to the top covering of paint and it can take that off and you can see the graffiti

that's on underneath that graffiti. No. So in theory you could keep going taking layers and layers and layers off this I think it's called Leaky Passage or something isn't it? Leaky tunnel or something in water. I think you're right. Yeah. You'll be able to get to the Banksys again.

That would be awesome. Cool. I used to work for Camden Council and Banksy put, did some graffiti on the side of a shop and I used to work in the street team that used to do with waste and street cleaning and obviously our guys cleaned that off right

and the shop owners tried to sue Camden they were like, you got rid of a banksy we were going to cover it with glass and like make loads of money. I don't know why that's so funny. I find it really incredible that the point of graffiti is that it sort of lives out in public but now because it's because of capitalism people are like, no no, we're going to preserve that

and we're going to get prospects on it and we're going to make it get rich off of it which is hilarious. I can't believe you were at that's always reported on i can't believe you were one of those people who cleaned a bouncy off it always creates this massive controversy doesn't it and banks who's just there in the sidelines chuckling away but whenever banksie does anything Athena goes along with her sponge doesn't she yeah well not just banks you everybody can i correct some just correct some grammar broadly yeah before we finish um which is who's grammar are you going to correct this thing that i'm pointing

to here. Bice. What is it? I'd say bicep. Yeah, I'm basically incorrect, guys. This is not a bicep. This is A, biceps. And whenever you hear someone refer to us, think of a bicep, you can correct them and stick that s on the end. Biceps literally means two headed, two biceps headed. There are always two heads. It's never just unicep. Wow. And it's just because the muscles got two like connecting it. James, you've just been pinnoned. I can't believe it. That was an amazing moment. Well, if Anna didn't have such impressive biceps, then maybe I wouldn't have done.

Yeah, I threw you off your game with that. You said bicep implying that you think they're so small, it only qualifies as one. Good point, yeah. There's only one on each side. So you have to say I pulled my left biceps as opposed to. Exactly. Even if you pulled your right one. No, that's not true.

I just call mine guns. I've won't have that. Okay, that's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. We will be back again next week. If you're lucky, you might get another guest. If you're unlucky, you might get Dan Shriver back. But until then, you can find these guys on their Twitter accounts, James.

At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Athena. Athena, have you got Twitter? I do at Athena Capprenu. Athena Cablenu. And you can contact me by emailing podcast at QI.com.

You can also go to our website, No Such Thingsoffish.com, to listen to all our other episodes, pick up a hoodie or a cap or a vinyl, whatever bit of merch you like. And you can also book tickets to the podcast stop festival show we're going to be doing. So go to QI.com slash fish events for that. Okay, thanks so much for listening, everyone. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.