No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Tiddlywinks In The Wild West

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Live from Bath, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss top tiddlywinkers, poking pork, and bathing in Bath. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode, a no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you live from back. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunts of Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Anna. My fact this week is that the reason you can no longer bathe in the Roman bars at Bath

is because they contain brain-eating amoeba. Wow. So that I was, I don't know, doing like D-rate horror film or something. But yeah, it's true. There are amoeba in the bars that will eat your brain. I must say, Anna, since you told us this fact, and we got to our Travel Lodge or Premier Inn or whatever it was today, thinking, can I drink the water in bath?

I know. Oh, yeah. And we need to address it. I have a question about this, which is that I have drunk the waters of bath. And I don't know exactly which ones I drunk. I imagine that... Just some random bath water. Actually, that's the problem with this fact.

When you try and research it, if you Google bathwater, all you get is someone called Bell Delphine, who is apparently an adult influencer who was selling her bathwater for $30 a bottle. Oh, wow. Okay, well, you shouldn't be bathing in Bill Delphine's bath water or bath's bath water, and it's not all the water in bath, is just directly from the spring.

So this was, this was discovered in the 70s. I hadn't realized that until 1978, you could bathe directly in the spring. You know, when you're in the baths in the museum, there's that bath. How many times when I say the word bath? And I hadn't realized that people used to swim in it until 1978, and then they realized that coming

direct from the spring was this amoeba called Nigelaria Fowleri, which is also known as the brain-eating amoeba, and you get it in warm, fresh water, it's very rare, and like I said, it's just this one spring, it's not in any of the rest of the water, and it burrows into your brain

through your nose, so it goes up your nose, and then burrows straight into your brain, and it's 100% fatal. But that's okay, that means it's fine if you drink water, you're not going to get it. It doesn't, if you drank the water, if you jumped into the... And don't do this,

but if you did jump into the bath spas and you just took down a lot down your mouth but kept your nose out of the water, you'd be fine. But then if someone made you laugh halfway through and it accidentally went up into your nose. Oh, yes. It would murder you.

It came out the other way. What is great murder mystery, though? Yeah. What did I pay 50p to drink in about 2006? That was just Evian. They siphoned it into a... No, it wasn't. It tasted horrible.

It tasted sulfurous, and it was strong stuff. So sorry, what's the story, Andy? What's his story? I went to the bath pump rooms in 2006 and paid 50p to drink a glass of... Frank, I'm sorry, guys. Horrible water. Very clever.

Seeing it's magic. It was nasty. I think this is the bit that doesn't have the amoeba in it. So it's borehole now. So basically, you still get the really curative, brilliant waters of bath that feed the Roman barns

and they feed... You guys have probably been to that hotel with the swimming pool on the top that's fed direct from the spring, which is very lovely. And that's just all... through boreholes so it's not coming straight from the spring. So this

amoeba is filtered out. Why did you drink it? Why was the thing to do? Was it? It's advertised. If you go to the bath, you know, the beautiful, beautiful tea room at the bath spa and they say this is the water that people have been drinking for hundreds of years for its curative properties.

This is the water that hasn't cured anyone for the last 2,500 years. Right. What? No, dare you? It did. It cured a man called Bladud, who was the whole reason for the bath being founded. And bladded, he had an infection, basically. He had a bladded infection. And he was... He had leprosy. He had leprosy. He had leprosy. He was exiled by his family. He went to Athens, got leprosy, and then came back to England, was exiled by his family

for having leprosy, and became a swineherd. But then his pigs jumped into the waters of the bath, which were coming up through the Bohol. And they froliced and they got better and their leprosy was cured. So he built the city of bar. So that's, and that's what happened. And that is a true story. He was, he's like a semi-mythical, probably actually mythical king, isn't he? But he was like the father of King Lear, Bladdered. They first wrote about him, the first person to write about him with Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century.

And he wrote that Bladder died when he constructed some wings for himself and flew into a wall. Nice one, mate. That's so good. Oh, waste. Because it sounds like the wings worked, but it was a directional issue. It was his sat down, yeah. He was like, he was a necromancer, supposedly,

and so he kind of, he got the devil to make him wings and stuff like that. Wow. Right. That's cool, eh? Wow. So, just very quickly, because I think a lot of, you know, we're in Bath, and so everyone here knows what we're talking about, but we do have a lot of overseas listeners,

and I know it is famous, but these were Roman Baths. These were built by the Romans, and they used to go in every single day. They used to swim. And in this city as well, there's been festivals. It's a big deal that off the back of the 70s, no one can swim because of this amoeba, because the city is literally named for it. It's called Bath for it. And apparently, the reason that this amoeba came around is because there used to be a roof over it.

And the roof has gone now. And so the sunlight has caused for this amoeba to find itself. This is what I read on a tweet. And... Wow. But it's from a tweet from someone who felt like they knew what they were talking about. You know, there was a solid hashtag next to it.

And it was a historian. But supposedly there was a big roof that was over it. So what did the roof... The roof... Stop the sunlight, and the sunlight is what was attracting the amoeba. Wow. I see. Well, they say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, don't they?

But except in this case, when it causes a fatal brain-eating amoeba. It's always the second half. Yeah, yeah. He's in the small print of sunlight. There was a guy who, in 1990s. a naked man jumped into the baths in Bath, he was claiming to be Julius Caesar. He jumped into the bars and he refused to get out

and there was a big standoff because... Well, he's the emperor. You can't just drag him out, can you? Exactly. And they didn't want to go in, maybe because of the amoeba thing, but they had to unplug it and then wait for it. It takes three hours to drain. Really? They drained the whole thing. Mate, just drag him out onto the steps and murder him. Do it the Roman way.

It sounds so fun. I don't know if there's anyone listening. Maybe there is who remembers this, but they used to hold things called the Roman Rondevous, and they were held for four nights during the Bath Festival, and this was in the 60s. You'd pay five shillings, and it was a huge party, and you'd all just jump around and swim in the baths,

and then you'd go and dance the night away in the pump room. It sounds so fun, like 1, 1,400 people will go to this big old bath party. Someone remembers it? That's a scream that's 40 years too young to remember that. Oh, the baths are so rejuvenating. Well, that's the thing, Anna. You said that no one was cured from it, but I've checked some local newspaper archives

that apparently there was a guy called William Toop of Frum, who suffered from paralysis after getting into cold water to gather watercress, and he was cured. There was someone else who was bottling wine in a cold, damp cellar for several hours, and they were cured of their palsy, and there was someone who got colic

after drinking stale beer in hot weather and he got cured as well so, you know, that's evidence for you. Yeah. I'm not even sure you can get ill from bottling wine in a cellar for seven hours, let alone then get cured by a bath. But maybe.

It definitely does actually have some curative properties like things like arthritis. Sorry, is that how you get watercress? You have to go into some water to get it. That's the name. Huh. Huh. I'm very interested in that.

Did you think it just grew naturally on the painted clay heads of those things you make in year seven? It's like Cress. Cress doesn't grow in water, does it? Well, why do you think they called it? All those years ago, why do you think they called it Watercrest? I've never given it even a second's thought in my life why it's called Water Cress.

Well, I'm a busy guy. Where do you think seaweed's from? Just out of curiosity. Okay. The baths used to be prescribed on the NHS until pretty recently. Really? No. Yeah, yeah, they actually had a deal. Bath did this bath.

Buxton, which, for overseas listeners, is another big spa town in the UK, had deals with the NHS contracts where people get prescribed water treatments and you'd go in and be sent there for back and joint pain and stuff like that. And actually in World War II, there are really cool pictures, if you look it up. No, sorry, I think it's after World War I. They decided that sitting soldiers, wounded soldiers, in bars for long periods of time would help them recover more quickly.

And you can see hospital rooms where instead of lying in beds, there are just lines of men who were submerged in bars which they had to stay in for up to 42 hours. Wow. Wow. Imagine how wrinkly you go. Serious bruns. So the... I'm sorry,

bars to mention a rival spa town, but Harrogut has a spa as well. Boo. I don't know, guys. It sounds pretty good. So some of the treatments that you'd have, these are from the 20s in Harrogate Spa the sulphur electric bath sounds pretty good

there was the peat the old combining electricity with the bath that's fine does it well I don't feel quite right chucked enough a toaster in will you there was the peat

which used fresh peat from the Yorkshire moors in P-E-A-T you know Pete that you put on the garden yeah I didn't think you meant P-E-T someone called Peter gets thrown

in the bath Fresh peat. Room for another? What about a bit of... But there was also electric peat where they put you in a bath full of peat. That just ran a current through the peat. Every patient got a fresh peat, okay?

Because you don't want to have someone else's peat. That would be disgusting. Imagine some peat that someone else has been in. So, they used 25 tonnes of peat a week. 25 tons. That's a lot of peat. That's so much. Wow.

Yeah. Do you think all the people who are, called peed together, weigh more than the amount they used in a week? If it's 20 tons, yeah. Yeah. Like, quite a considerable amount. Okay. Yeah, probably, yeah, probably the math doesn't stack up.

I've been to a rival spa as well. I've been to one in Budapest. Budapest has the most thermal spas in the whole of mainland Europe. Some more in Reckievich, but in mainland Europe, they have it. Unfortunately, when I went there, I'd left my swimming costume in the hotel and so I thought, well, I'll just buy one when I get there, but they only rent them. Oh.

So I had to rent a swimming costume in Budapest. But the good news is that the bats are very good for skin diseases. Right. So it just balances out, doesn't it, at the end? But can you request size, or is it like a school's lost property box when you forget your swimmers? I think they just looked at me and went,

Pete! Get the extra large. Have you guys heard of the Bath curse tablets? Oh, no. This is very cool. This is a collection of 130 Roman-era cursed tablets, and they were discovered in 1979, 1980. The idea was if someone stole something from you in Bath,

you could go to these tablets, which were connected to a goddess, and you could say, I want you to take over the investigation, goddess, and you can smite the person. So the idea was if they went to that, the person who stole the thing might return it because they were freaked out that, you know, suddenly a goddess was on the case. It was a very low crime-solving rate back then, wasn't it? That was their method.

But it's amazing because there's one thing, and they're not too sure yet, but it's written in sort of, you know, Latin is how they wrote on these tablets, but they're also written supposedly in British Celtic. And if it's the case that it is, and they still don't know, if it is the case that it is, it's the only example of British Celtic that we have that has survived on tablet form. Yeah, so historians are trying to work out whether or not that is

the case. Because I know some of them are, and this is a really amazing discovery, which goes to show that Bath is the bitchiest place known to man, because the only things that were found here when everyone excavated the Roman bars was all these tablets saying, I don't like

Sam and so they stole my hair clip, I want you to kill them. It was all such disreported. stuff like dosi medis has lost two gloves. So this is dosi medis referring to himself in the third person, so already a bit of a dick. Dosehmedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their mind and eyes

in the goddess's temple. Come on. That's disproportionate. It is. Doseemides. It's probably thought, no, after he died, everyone's going, no one will ever meet him. mention that guy again.

Poor thing, we've got to move on, guys. Try next fact. I've got one little adventure that someone had in a bath recently. Great. Save your personal stories, Andy. This is... This happened in 2017 in Texas.

This is amazing. This has happened to a woman called Charlottetta Williams. She was in the bath. She's 75 years old, and a tornado hit her house, and it ripped the roof off the house, and then it ripped the bath

out of its moorings. And she was in there. She was in there. Wow. She was actually, she was in the bath with her 40-year-old son at the time. And it was... Sorry, how old? How old? 40? 40?

Well, they were sheltering from the tornado. They weren't. It wasn't. It wasn't. I presume. Unless her son was called Pete, in which case, completely normal. When they learned, the tornado ripped our clothes off, it must have. How did that happen?

This is very upsetting. They were fine. He was tossed out of the bath by the... Okay, come on, come on, come on. The wind speed was about 130 miles an hour of the tornado. They didn't end up that far away from the house. It wasn't like I ended up miles away. They were in the garden at the end of it.

And were they... I mean, does it have a happy ending? It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that there is a Spanish firm which has six official ham sniffers. Their job is to poke pork loins, sniff them and make sure they're good, and at most, they smell 800 hams a day.

Well, I have a question. Don't they all just smell of ham? Well, that's to you and me. they absolutely would. But to these amazing experts, so you may have seen this, you know, did the rounds a bit online before Christmas, but it's such an incredible fact.

It's this Spanish firm called Sinto Hottes, and it's a company that they sell hams, and they're 150 years old. They're very ancient lineage firm. They produce very traditional Iberian ham from, you know, pigs which have been fed on special acons, this kind of thing. And they have trained workers whose specific job exclusively,

it's not like I do this for a couple of hours a day, their job is to smell the hams to make sure they're good before they go on sale. And they have little kind of pipettes or little jabbers to jab the ham in four specific places. And then they have to smudge it over, right?

It is the most amazing jobs. And some people will be qualified to sniff some types of ham, but not other types of ham. Yes, what? There's more than one type of ham? There is a guy who is really good, but he is not qualified to sniff a particular bit of ham. Wow. His father is

He hasn't yet qualified to sniffing that particular bit of the ham. So they have five seasonal workers at Christmas time, but there is one guy who sniffs year in, year out. And you have to do each ham in four places. So he sniffs 3,200 times a day. Yeah, but that's in the high season. Like on a usual day, he'll do 200, and going to 800, so 800 loins a day,

he'll do 3,200 sniffs. And he says even that is pushing him to the edge, to the limit. That's one sniff every nine seconds. Yeah, it's insane. Assuming a standard eight-hour working day. But if it's only doing nine seconds per sniff, that says to me he's not really doing a very thorough job. Well, he...

Accusation leveled. Yeah, he's very proud. He's called Mr. Vega, and he says the job that he is doing pushes him at the limit of human possibility. It's just, it's an amazing... It was in the Wall Street Journal. It's just such a good piece. It's so interesting. And they do say that if you can't tell straight away,

then you're not doing it right. So they say it's really got to be an immediate instinctive thing. Okay. So, you know, really should be doing more. Yeah, they do tests where they take a smell and they put it into, so let's say they'll take five milliliters per liter of a smell and pop it into some water and then they'll put it into plastic cups. Oh, yeah.

And you'll have to then sniff the cup. And because a plastic cup, the odor of the cup itself will take over. There's a sort of time limit of about an hour or so where that starts taking over. So the younger... I thought it was a little... a couple of minutes of the smell of plastic. Oh, wow, really? Okay. Probably it doesn't take it an hour to smell plastic.

No, because some of the smellers, according to the Wall Street Journal article, they take ages sniffing it, but Mr. Vega, this guy who pushes himself to the limit of human possibility, he says, if you doubt yourself, you cannot do the work. And then, according to the article, taps himself on the chest, and he says, if you doubt one, you have to doubt all of them.

So he's like, you've got to make your decision now. He's an amazing guy. Yeah. Yeah. So was this also in the article? about Christina Sanchez Blanco, who's the first woman to be head ham sniffer at Chinko Yotas.

Because I read that she has such a good sense of smell that whenever her husband buys her a gift, she knows what it is before she unwraps it. Wow. He keeps buying her calpats, though, isn't he? Apparently, if he buys her perfume, he has to quadruple wrap it so that she won't be able to smell.

That's so funny. I thought, yeah, I didn't realize at first that you were talking about things like perfume, and I thought she'd be able to say... This is an Xbox. It's a book by George Elliot, I think. Hang up. It's one of the earlier ones. But the accuracy of the nose

depends on their exterior life as well. So Mr. Vega, talking of perfume, he says he wishes and hopes that his wife never changes perfume, because if she does, that alters his no sense. Like he went through a bit of a chaotic time when he swapped to a new anti-bolding shampoo. and that absolutely messed with his nostrils

because he was like, it was so potent, it threw him off and he couldn't do his job well. Quite difficult people to be married to, really. So this poor woman either, you know, A, can't change her perfume, and B, her husband's now bald. And then Sanchez Blanco, Miss Sanchez Blanco, who you mentioned James,

she said that her husband's a policeman, and then at the moment he comes home, she tells him every day about the day he's had before he can say a word. Oh, my God. Because she can smell it. on him. What?

Whether it's like gasoline from a car crash, she says, soot from a fire, dander from a rescued pet. God, you wouldn't risk having an affair, would you? No. Well, you might, if you had an affair with like a butcher or something, then that would be okay, wouldn't it? Because all they get is the smell of the meat and just assume it was off their own clothes and stuff.

Also, his, in this quite small town, it sounds like he's having a much more action-packed police life than you should. Are we sure he's not just dousing his? himself to cover his affair with soot just before he gets home, and smothering himself in sausages to catch the sausage band. Do you know that wafer thin ham has up to 25% water? They've recently done a study of this,

and they found that when they get this wafer thin stuff, most of it is actually water, or not most of it, but like a quarter of it can be actually water. And so that means that if you have a hundred gram pack of wafer thin ham, which costs about 90p, that means, and it's 28% water, say, that means you're paying 25p for just for the water. water, which means you're paying the equivalent of like a five pounds for a very small bottle of water. That's the equivalent. It's only eight times less expensive than Bell Delphine's bathwater.

Gosh. You know Linda McCartney who makes vegetarian, which doesn't anymore. But veggie, yeah. Veggie stuff. Someone sent us ages ago, and I just remembered it. She, the factory that makes her vegetarian fake meat is in fakenham. What? Fakin ham. No. Yeah. So, I don't know.

Did she choose it specifically? Did she... That's amazing. Where is it? Where's fakenham? Do you know, I actually... Does anyone know where fakenham is? Norfolk.

Norfolk? Yeah. Great. Right. Yeah. Wow. That's why we've never heard of it. That's really good.

And how many... Pro-sniffing things? Oh, yeah. Professional sniffers. This is a thing, and there are lots of different kinds of professional sniffer all the way across the world. So there are people who sniff armpits for a living. There's a man called Barry Druitt, who genuinely works for a firm called Princeton Consumer Research, and he's spent 20 years smelling armpits.

You haven't explained why. Great point. Cosmetics companies send this firm, Princeton Consumer Research, all their products, which have different active ingredients. So he smells armpits of volunteers, rates. rates how smelly they are and then they use the deodorant or whatever it is and he will rate how well it manages to mask it.

So a firm might have six different kinds of potential new deodorant and he will assess which one is best. But he doesn't like smelling armpits, he said. He says, he thinks they're disgusting. Well, you know, jobs are job, isn't it? He should have said it in the interview, shouldn't he? When they said in the interview, do you like smelling our pits? He should have gone, no, I don't actually.

Well, if you liked it, that would actually be bad because you wouldn't want a deodorant to mask the smell of an armpit. That's a good point. It needs someone who hates the work. Yeah, yeah. But he doesn't have to do it nose to pit, as it were. He has these smell cones that he sniffs through. You get specific smell cones, which are for sampling smells.

And you put the pad under your armpit, don't you? I think. No, no, he goes into the pit. He goes into the pit. But he has got a cone, kind of cordons sanitaire of little paper cone. I see. Because sometimes they do it with an armpit pad, I think maybe if they've got a bit of extra budget.

And there's a company called Kavin Care, which is an Indian cosmetics company. And they say they have a real problem with women's deodorant, as in they have a shortage of volunteers to donate sweat because women, in particular, in India, women is a bit taboo to donate your sweat to be smelled. I actually thought that was sort of taboo worldwide, but apparently particularly in India.

In lighter news, there was a great... story today, which Andy showed me, which a dog that was lost in the forest, was taken out of the forest, rescued, because a drone held off a string, a sausage, for it to sniff and chase. And I think it must have been its sense of smell that was helping guide it, not just the visual. Obviously, it was its sense of smell. Well, you can see a sausage. You can see a sausage in the air. They held the barbecue on the beach to lure the dog towards a particular bit of the marshland to keep it safe.

So it was definitely a sense of smell thing. Hang on, I thought you said they were hanging a sausage from a drone. They did a lot of things to find this dog. How special a dog was this? It's a very loved dog. It wasn't the queen's dog. It was, yeah, but it was... Speaking of dogs, actually, they have...

Obviously, you have sniffer dogs in airports quite often, and there was a report in 2015 of the sniffer dogs at Manchester Airport, and apparently in the previous 12 months, they had failed to spot a single person carrying heroin or cocaine over the border. But they had found 100. 181 kilograms of illegal meat. Wow. Small amounts of cheese,

but no drugs. That's so good. There's a Dustin Hoffman quote that I always think about, which is to do with dogs as well. And it's attributed to him, and I really hope he said it. But the line goes, if a lot of dogs are on the beach,

the first thing they do is smell each other's ass. The information that's gotten somehow makes pacifists out of them all, I've thought, if only we smell each other's asses, there wouldn't be any war. And I don't know why, but I think about that all the time. I actually think that is not one of Dustin's best. No?

It's not up there whether you're trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson. Yes, you are. That's a cut scene from the movie. Dustin, stop sniffing her, please. Okay, it is time for fact number three. and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that until it was identified by an art dealer

in 1975, Donatello's bronze, the Madonna and Child, was being used as an ashtray and a tidley wink bowl. So, yeah, this was Donatello, one of the, maybe the greatest sculpture of the early Renaissance,

and he made this kind of bronze roundel. And these days, it's like one of the best things you can see in the VNA, one of the most expensive things. But we think, basically, it was given to this family, and then it was taken by a guy called Lord Moulton, when he was on the Grand Tour. He bought it.

He brought it back. And then generations and generations and generations of people in his family just kind of saw it as a little bowl. It's kind of, it's like a candy bowl. It's quite small. You might not know it was from Donatello if you didn't know. But then one day, they brought it to the VNA on what they call an Options Day. It's a bit like Antiques Roadshow

where you say, how much is this worth? and they went, oh yeah, it looks like a Tiddly Winks bowl. And then a few years later, sorry, the head of the VNA was seeing this person and said, you know what, that's a Donatello. And they brought it back and it's completely priceless. But they were just using it to play Tidly Winks. It's so funny. It's so weird that you say it looked like a sweet bowl.

Yeah. Because it sort of was. It was a thing called a Desco da Pato when Donatello made it, which is called a birth tray. And it's a tray that you fill up with sweets and you bring to a mother when you She's just given birth. Because a birth story sounds like a tray, you would give birth on. If someone showed you that tiny little thing, you'd think.

Actually, I just thought we could talk about Tiddly Winks. What do you think? Yeah. In all the different countries, got lots of different names. In France, it's called the Game of the Flea. In Croatia, it's called Jumping Flea. In Danish, it's called the Flea Game. In Dutch, it's called the Flea Game of Flea.

In Russia, it's called the Game of Fleas. In Spanish, it's called The Game of the Flea. In Ukraine, it's called Game of Flea's. And we call it Tiddily Winks. and it appears that we got the word tidilywinks from an unlicensed alcohol shop really yeah what what do you mean as in the word tidley wink used to mean a place where you could get beer but it wasn't licensed and then we kind of stole that name and used it as a game instead should we say what tidly winks is sorry for the benefit of any listeners who are not familiar with

tidly wings okay yeah it's a little game where you have plastic counters and you have to sort of flip the plastic counters using other plastic counters into a bowl and and you shoot a wink, and you have a special plastic which you shoot with, which is called a shooter, but it's also known as a squidger. You shoot your wink, and if you get it in the target, great, but you might fail to do that,

but cover an opponent's wink, which is good, and if you've done that, you've squapped their wink, and they then can't wink anymore with that. Well, this all sounds very clear. Yeah, I'm glad you've cleared. It's full of a lot of really silly... But actually, that thing where, if you tittle your wink onto someone else's wink, and they're not allowed to tiddle that wink.

That used to be really, really looked down upon, and that was really bad form if you did that. Now it's part of the game, but it used to be, you know, if you did that in the Wild West, you'd get shot. I'd love to walk into the salute bar where there's a poker game at one table, blackjack and another one, and then the Tiddly Wink Corner. And everyone's dead. You know, you can also perform a boondock, and a boondock is when you're free a squopped wink by sending it all the way away.

So that's a boondock. But how do you send it? So that's a squapped wink is a wink that's covered by another wing. Yeah. So you, yeah. So you, how do you free it? You free it by using your wink to fire at your squapped wink

and you knock the squop away. So you free your wink. However, there's another move then, which is a simultaneous boondock and squop, whereby you boondock someone. So your wink has been squapped. But you boondock it free. You boondock it free, but then your wink lands on top.

You squop someone else in the middle of boondop in your wink. Yes. Fuck! And that, for some inexplicable reason, is called the John Lennon Memorial Shot. There are so many versions of it. That's what I love. So it's a big craze in the 1890s, and then it fell out of fashion. But there were all these sort of late Victorian abhorian versions of it.

So there's Tiddly Wink tennis, Tiddly Wink's Golf, Winko Baseball, Battlewinks, which is battleships with Tiddly Winks. It's Pedro, where you have to get in... There's a clown's mouth that you're trying to wink your winks into. In 1992, there was Widdly Tinks where you have to... There's a toilet and that's the target. Ah. It is clever.

Yeah. Well, it started as Tiddledi Winks, of course. And then no one knows why the D's fell out. But as I'm sure you all know here, it was Kristen Tiddly Winks by Joseph Ashton Fincher or As Heaton Fincher. um, A-D-S-H, I don't know. Um, and he invented it in 1889 and got the patent for Tiddledy Wings. And I was trying to point going through the British newspaper archive

trying to pinpoint the moment that we definitively lost the D. And I think it's roughly 1920. Okay, so you're interested. But it really took off again with Oxford and Cambridge competing against each other in the 60s, didn't it? And it became a real source of pride for Cambridge. And they had this notorious match. And it was in,

It was in 1958, and it was this guy called Peter Downs, who was head of the Tiddler Wings Society at Cambridge, and he wrote to Prince Philip, saying, Prince Philip, have you noticed there's been an article written in The Spectator claiming you cheat at Tiddly Wings? There was a satirical article that been written. And he said, would you care to defend your honour by playing us? Cambridge University at Tilly Winks, and Prince Philip wrote back,

saying very politely, I'd absolutely love to, a bit busy. but perhaps I could nominate someone in my place and he nominated the Goons. So there was this bizarre match. The Goon Show, which was Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seekam. It was the biggest thing on radio at the time for a comedy show and the Royal Family were big fans. So yeah, he sent them along to do it.

Yeah, which apparently they tried to get the Goons to play them at Tiddly Winks, Cambridge had before. And so it was so great they managed to get to the Royal Family and they had a royal instruction to go. So they had to, and they played Cambridge University. And I was watching the video of when the umpire kind of launched the big match. And he read out a letter from Prince Philip, which I still don't know if Prince Philip wrote it himself

or if it was a bit of satire from the umpire, but I hope he wrote it himself. And the letter said, give my best wishes to both teams, but try if you can to do it in such a way that you convey that I wish the Cambridge team to lose. I had hoped to join my champions, but unfortunately, while practicing secretly,

I pulled an important muscle in the second or tidily joint of my winking finger. Ah. And then in the end, unfortunately, Cambridge did win, didn't they? They did. They did. Yeah, 120.5 to 50.5. A walkover?

Yeah, it really was. The students were in full evening dress all the way through. The goons were wearing yellow night shirts with a royal tidleywink tie on that. And the game finished with Harry Seekam singing a special Tidley Winks anthem. And it was a big deal. Like this was the big moment

for the Tidly Winks community in the UK. Not for the Goons. They had bigger moments. No, they were the big ones for the Tilly Wings. Or for the UK. Or for the University of Cambridge. Yeah. It was, but Tidly Wings got a big moment there.

And interestingly, so that was on the 1st of March, 1958, on the 10th of March 1958, Spike Milligan in the time since the match, and the next Goon Show being recorded and going out, wrote an episode of the Goon Show called Tidley Winks in which, after the hands of the defeat at Cambridge, Nettie Seagoon, who Harry Seekin played,

seeks his gameful revenge. And the whole episode, so again, broadcasting to millions and millions, Tilly Winks became this big thing. And there's a Facebook page, which is the official Tidley Winks organization in the UK. They have a Facebook page.

There's only about 400 people who follow it. Really? Only 400. Yeah, but they thought it would be in the low hundreds of thousands. The content is slamming, and there's a guy on there called David Lockwood, and he says, this is from his post, he says, Prince Philip did more to expand our noble game of tidleywinks than anyone else in the world. I tell people that his sponsorship of the Goons match of 1958 created extensive publicity, and by the early 1960s, there were more than 200 clubs in the British Isles. Prince Philip continued to support Tiddly Wink

through the establishment. He made a silver wink trophy, and he backed the 50th anniversary in 2008. So he was big. It's one of those sports that I'm afraid America has trounced Britain at consistently for a couple of decades now. Yeah, they're much better at Tiddly Winks

than British people now, the British players. I'm really sorry, there was an article in the LA Times in 2019 about the kind of Federer and Nadal of Tiddly Wings. He were called Larry Kahn and... Oh, I think it's David Lockwood as the other one, yeah. Yeah, Kahn and Lockwood are the two. Anyway, 2019, they reported on this match

that Kahn was playing in Cambridge. And I'm quoting directly here. He'd flown over from Washington, D.C. on economy. Nobody asked for an autograph or to pose for a selfie. Khan's privacy hasn't been invaded by being the most successful Tiddly Winks player of all time. The man who was officiating the match he played in Cambridge, quoting here,

emailed the members of the English Tiddly Winks Association to encourage them to come and watch. in the following five hours of play, nobody did. And that's him emailing the English Tiddly Winks Association. If they're not turning up, I know. That's sad. I think one of the reasons is because it used to be illegal to play Tiddly Winks in the UK, in a pub, without a license.

What? No. In the UK, in a pub without a license. Wow. So there was a Tidly Winks match. In fact, it was a marathon. The Tidley Winks Marathon over 15 yards at the York Bay. Beer Festival on 3rd of November 1970.

And this was supposed to take place. This was an article in the Daily Mirror that I found. But it was cold off because the police rang up and said, no, it's illegal to do that without a license. Was this a gambling thing? Or is it dangerous? It was for money. It was for charity.

They were doing it. And they said, there's certain games that you're allowed to do in pubs if there's money involved. And Tiddly Winks wasn't on that list. And so they weren't allowed to do it. And so they replaced it with a marathon. of blowing peas through a straw. Hang on, and that was on the list of things you're allowed to do.

Wasn't counted as a spot. I see. Actually, there is a genuine crisis in the world of tidly winks happening now, and it's that there is a massive wink shortage, and it's a problem, because most of the winks that are being used these days were made a long time ago. There are not firms making tidily winks these days. So even the Cambridge match, I just mentioned, from 2019,

they'd be using 1980s winks. No. Yeah. Really. What were we using with Tiddly Winks? My Winks went from the 1980s when I was using them. The supplier has gone bust, so this is a problem. And there are hopes that 3D printing will save the day.

Right. Fingers cross. Well, I don't know if it is as young and vibrant as one might want it to be. Because if you look at the list of Tilly Wings champions, I think you mentioned Lockwood and Kahn. I would say they are more the Djokovic Nadal, and the Nidal Federer are Khan and Patrick Barry, So who's the guy who doesn't like vaccines?

Look, they're all very well vaccinated and it's socially distance matches and I have no idea. But basically Patrick Barry is a British chemical engineering lecture at Cambridge and he has been playing Larry Kahn on and off since they first met in 1995. Right.

So that's a good 26 years. Even in 1995, Kahn had been going for 15 years. So he's basically been going for 40 years this guy. They need fresh blood, I think, in the Tiddly Winks game. Yeah, maybe. Patrick Barry is sponsored by a type of whiskey,

isn't he? Yeah, basically the whiskey company have decided that they don't want to sponsor Cristiano Ronaldo or Federer or Nadal or anyone like that. They want a real person who is passionate about their sport. And so they found Patrick Barry, who is the world's singles champion

at Tidley Winks. Is it possible they looked at the cost of getting Federer to be sponsored to sponsor the whiskey. If you look at this 24-year-old whiskey from Cameron Bridge Grain Distillery, it has a picture of the Tiddly Winks champion on the label. Amazing. Awesome. Apparently it has waves of vanilla, peppery spiciness,

and the taste of pencil shavings. I think it's really exciting that this exists, and I think there should be, like, because when you read the Facebook page, and if you ever get a chance, I encourage everyone listening, to go and check out newswink, the newsletter by the official Tiddly Wings. Have you read Winking World?

That's another one. No, I haven't even gone near Winking World. Winking World is another very good one. They recently ran a 12-page biography of Alan Dean. No. How did they confine that to 12 pages? Winking World 101 said, most of your comments on WW100 were broadly the same.

This is all very well, but why isn't there a 12-page biography of Alan Dean? Well, dear reader, I aim to please. And there was a 12-page biography of... It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there is such a thing as bendy rocks.

But this is... I mean, it sounds bullshit, but it's true. There are genuine bendi rocks in the world. So there is a sandstone. It's called Itacolamite, and it's not found in many places in the world. You get it in Brazil. You get it in North Carolina, you get it in Georgia.

There's a town in India, you get it. I'm sure it's other places, but they've only been found in sparse areas around the world. And this is a rock where basically you should watch videos online. It wobbles when it's held on either side in a way that rocks don't. And it's because in the inside of the rock, there's quartz, and there's these interlinking bits, these interlocking sort of bendy bits,

side that hold the quartz together and there's voids in them, which means there's bits of space where they just find themselves having a bit of flexibility, but there's enough of them that the whole thing can bend. So it's not like if you're walking along the mountain, you're like you're on jelly the whole time. It's not like that. You have to get quite a thin slab and then you can see it wobble. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's just, you know, if there was one thing we were certain of in life is that rocks don't bend. So I was fascinated to learn that they actually do. And actually, interestingly, it turns out all rocks bend.

They just don't do it as quickly as old bendy mate over here. What they do is if you see, and you can see rocks all over through, like even on the side of cliffs where you notice that they have this kind of bend in them. Over many millions of years. Exactly, but over millions of years, a pressure, if there's a pressure on the side of a rock, it will slowly bend to the pressure. Yes, it takes thousands, if not millions of years.

years, but if you've got the time, you can bend any rock. Yeah. Is there a use for this bendy rock? I'm sorry to be all practical. Bouncy castles? Like actual castles? What? Well, you have that are bouncy? Awesome.

I'm not sure we have enough of it or if it's been studied enough to know if it's useful for practical things like building or so on. So the example that I've got on the screen here, for the audience tonight is from Leeds University. That's in their archives. So they obviously send it to universities around the world going, look a fucking bendy rock. So it's obviously a new...

That's very cool. Do you want to hear about another magic rock? Yes, please. There are magic rocks around the world which are the opposite of seismometers, okay? So they tell you when there's not an earthquake. Bingo. Bingo.

I have a feeling I can do that anyway. You probably could. You probably could. Is it when they're not moving? That means there's no earthquake. Yes, yes, but they're even more magical than that. Imagine, they're called PBRs.

They're precariously balanced rocks. Oh, yeah. They're rocks that look like they should fall over any minute now, but they're still standing. And if you know how long they've been there, they're reverse seismometers. They tell you they haven't fallen over. There hasn't been an earthquake

in that set period of time that they've been balanced. So this is really, useful because if you want to build a nuclear plant you want to build it somewhere but there hasn't been an earthquake for a very, very long time, or a bridge or whatever. So you build it right underneath a precariously balanced rock. Exactly. Yeah.

And so these are really useful. That's amazing, but are that many of them? No, they're not that many. It's not that useful actually. No, I say it. I can think of one, this isn't a rock so much as a virus, but there is a thing called a medusa virus. I think it might be useful in Bath

because it can turn amoebas into rocks. Oh, really? Isn't that clever? Yeah. So when the virus goes into the amoeba, it kind of makes this kind of rocky shell over itself and turns itself into a rock. That's incredible. Isn't that cool?

But there's an amoeba still inside. The amoeba still living inside yet. Oh, yeah. What a horrible way to go. Yeah, that's great, though. So Bar-Smark could become a rock pool, which would be awesome. Is that thing here?

It's in Australia, yeah. Yeah, we have rock pools in this country, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, but we've also got watercress. It doesn't mean we've all thought about these things. I've got a magic rock to accompany yours. You can get rock that is so... I think we actually mentioned this once

on no such thing as the news, the long-lost TV show we once did. But you can get rock, that is as soft as butter that you put your finger in it, and it bends like clay. And this happens, it's quite rare, but it happens, for instance, cavers are told to look out for it. It happens when people are making big quarries,

they come across it. And it essentially happens when rocks being dissolved, so limestone can be dissolved by very salty waters around it or acidic waters around it. But sometimes a bit of rock will be dissolved, but then it will be surrounded by other rocks. So the rock doesn't dissolve and then flow away. away, it just gets trapped, this soft, dissolved bit of rock inside another rock.

And so apparently when you're caving sometimes or when you're quarrying, you'll tap through a bit of rock, and then suddenly you'll think it's rock solid, and you'll put your finger in, just penetrates all the way through, like magic. Why is that dangerous? Sorry? Why is it? Why is it? Yeah, yeah.

It's not? Oh. I thought you said that people were told to look out for it and stuff. Oh, no, it wasn't like... Look out for it, like, you know, look out for that adorable squirrel. Oh, right. It's not, look out! Right, sorry.

Look out. Look out. Wow. Do you want to hear some rock-related words and maybe guess what they are? Yes. So these are kind of mining-related, I would say. So can you guess what a bottom steward is?

Bottom steward. Bottom steward. Is Dustin Hoffman played this role, actually. Someone who looks after the lifts in the mine. Pretty close. It's someone who looks after the people who work at the bottom of the pit. Oh, okay. Yep.

Back ripper. Back ripper. No? It's someone who removes the old support. So when you're going away from somewhere, you get all the supports from behind you, and then you put them in front of you. So you're ripping them away from the back. Oh, okay.

Do you know what a glory hole is? Yes. Well, I think I thought I did. Surprise they've got time for that sort of business down the bottom of a mind, though. Everyone's got to let off steam at the end of the day. No, I've no idea. If you have that rock that you could just put your finger in, then maybe now.

Is it a way of seeing from different mining tunnels to each other? No, it's just what miners call an extremely impressive excavation on the surface. They call that a glory hole. Sure it is. Can I just quickly tell you something about glory holes? Oh, yeah, go on. Finally, we're on that subject, are we?

I remember, so when COVID first kicked off, the EU had a bunch of recommendations for how to avoid getting it. And there was, and I was on the EU legal side of the website, a recommendation that you take advantage of glory holes to stop yourself from contracting

the disease. Wait, that is a whole... That's a whole you have sex through, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's in the EU law. It feels like there might be other diseases that you're leaving yourself open to you. You just saw people walking around

with a dar, didn't you, with a hole? I know that the oldest glory... We're just on glory hole facts now, but the oldest glory hole in Australia is in a museum, I think, in Perth. And there was a big argument about whether this should be allowed to be in a museum because, you know, it's a glory hole.

But they were saying, well, it's a really important part of the LGBTQ community in Perth and in Western Australia. I mean, how old is it? Is it like cavemen? And is it an interactive exhibit? Have you seen, Dan, have you seen those things at the seaside where you put your head through and you get a photograph?

It's like that. I know it's my fault, we're on this, but let's go back to your wrong vocabulary. No, no, let's move on. I was going to say, oh, do you know that the word boogey? Oh. It was a particular fast-drying type of cement that you would pump into the bottom of a mine to give you a floor. Cool.

That was known as boogie. Yeah, isn't that cool? Mining is so cool. Some minds are so deep that the lifts can't go all the way down because the lift cable is so heavy that you have to stop because the lift would snap under the weight of the cable. So you have to go down to a certain level and get into a new lift and go all the way down to the bottom.

The technology that they have is just crazy. So that's taller, like it goes deeper than the Bejal-Kalif, for example. Well, no, I think they have to have more than one lift as well. Oh, there's more than one lift there. Right. Yeah, and same issue with skyscrapers. Oh, wow. Tracy Emin, the artist, married a rock a few years ago.

The rock. No, just a rock, sadly for her. She found a rock in her garden, and she said, I'm marrying this rock. She was 52. She wore her father's funeral shroud for the marriage. And she said, it's not going anywhere, it will be there waiting for me. And she said, the stone I married is beautiful and dignified. It will never let me down.

They divorced two years later. Do you know what's mad about that? Is that I'm pretty sure I was reading an interview with Tracy Evin recently and her mum wanted to call her pebble. I'm fairly certain that's right. And her mom really wanted to call her pebble. And I think the doctors at the hospital said,

we can't let you call your daughter pebble. Because she'll be fucked up if you do. Why would they say that? The doctors... They said it's not a good name. Said it's not a proper name. Well, tell that to Fred Flintstone. Okay.

that is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all 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 a podcast at qI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. And I just want to say, Bath, thank you so much. That was so much fun. We love being here every time. And we'll come. come back again and everyone else who's at home listening right now.

Thank you for listening. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you all then. Goodbye!