Off Air... with Jane and Fi - 'Jane, get your dad to call me.'

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Jane and Fi make cultural comparison and dissect the perplexing nature of a Boots...Also, they're are joined by Roma Agrawal, the structural engineer who helped design the Shard, to consider the seven small inventions that changed the world. Her new book ‘Nuts and Bolts’ is out now.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Eve SalusburyTimes Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Right, let's do it, let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. Let's do it. Well, go on then, assertive Annie, get started. You've been a little... I know that you find it difficult on strike days because you've got to move around the capital in a different way. But you've been particularly touchy today, I would say, Jane. It is... It does... It's really weird

because people not listening in the uk i have to say that public transport around the uk is quite patchy um but in london on the whole public transport is truly a miracle i mean it's brilliant it's properly efficient and you can get from one side of a huge city to the other relatively easily, can't you? It's very true. Sometimes I have a bit of a hissy fit if there's a ten-minute delay on the Jubilee line and I have to check in with myself. We are so fortunate. The buses are great, they're 24 hours a day.

Some of the tube lines are 24 hours a day as well. And it's joined up. You can just hop from one form of transport to the other relatively easily. But not today. But not today, because the tubes are on strike. Nobody outside London gives a shit. I am aware of that. But I think it has changed your underlying equilibrium, hasn't it?

Well, I had to get... I tell you what, the day got off to a bad start because, you know, sometimes you just sort of press buttons and I'm a frequent offender here, serial offender of just pressing buttons. And I think I pressed buttons on my bedside radio and it just came on at five to six this morning. I must have set an alarm and it was just something

I didn't want to listen to at five to six this morning and it wasn't my normal wake-up time and I've been discombobulated. I'm so sorry. Yes, thank you. Well, look, thoughts and prayers and we hope for a quieter night. Party Girl Cats, Fi was right. Can I just get this one out of the way? Yes, it is true that female cats can have

a litter with kittens sired by different dads. I fostered many nursing female cats with kittens fathered by different dads. In this litter there were at least three dads, possibly four. Good grief. I know, think that through. Poor cats, poor lady cat.

The kittens were three white, two chunky long-haired, two smaller bullseye, one mackerel. They were born in Ealing, fostered in Richmond. Well, that's it, Ealing. I mean, it all goes on there. I'm not very funny, but it looks suburban. There's a lot of stuff going on behind those neck curtains in Ealing. Well, yes.

No, there is. Juliet gets to that point herself. Oh, does she? Okay. And all were homed in the West London area and would have been available to potential adopters in East West Kensington, but out of the area for trendy East London, I'm afraid. Heidi, the tabby and white one with long white black socks,

I adopted. She was the smallest and naughtiest and she's now living her best life in New Zealand. What? She's gone all the way there? Yep. In a giant litter box. Technically, it's a beach. And she quickly learned it wasn't for her convenience after being pursued at great speed by a dog.

Heidi added aerial flying to her CV that day. In case you're thinking, have I had too many drinks? What's happening in this podcast? You haven't at all. It's just a very detailed one from Juliet Juliet which is backing me up on the theory which you laughed at that a lady cat could be impregnated by different tomcats and therefore have different cats with different dads in the same litter okay I think I found that easier to comprehend than the rather sweet story you told yourself which which was that...

Barbara's dad had come to see her. Your kitten Barbara had been visited by her father. Yes. I'm going to stick with that. I'm going to stick with that because I'd never seen that enormous great big cat in my garden before. And he was at the door.

He was looking through the window. Barbara was terrified. I think he's a member of Fathers was terrified. I think he's a member of Fathers for Justice. We haven't heard much about them lately. We don't want to encourage them, I don't think, necessarily. Now, Fi, you read an interesting story

actually today, when we were chatting through other news stories about Botox and some horrible stories about stuff that had gone on in Turkey. So there's a bad batch of Botox doing the rounds in Turkey. So poor people who've gone over there to have various procedures have begun to get really unwell. And some of them have come back, you know,

because they're thinking, I don't feel great, I need to get home. It's not got any better once they've got back here. And, of course, it's not easy for them to be helped here because the treatment they had was elsewhere. Yeah, so they don't any better once they've got back here and of course it's not easy for them to be helped here because the treatment they had was elsewhere yes they don't quite know what they've had okay so uh there's just to try to redress the balance a little bit although it's not directly linked but it's from julie who says i had really bad urinary incontinence which i've had treated twice here in the uk as a last resort because all else failed. And I had Botox, a fantastic result and restored freedom. I now feel safe to sleep away from home.

It has to be repeated every six months or so, but I'd recommend it to anyone, says Julie. I have heard that before, that Botox absolutely has some incredible uses and can be quite brilliant. Well, it was, and I'm very glad to hear that, because obviously that's just such a terribly debilitating complaint to have. But Botox was never invented to be used as a cosmetic procedure

was it? No. It's botulism isn't it? Yes. So maybe we should revert to what it was meant for. I don't want to start something too terrible but Di has joined in about how often we should launder our bed linen. Oh yeah I enjoyed this. Fortnightly for duvets, says Di.

Weekly for sheets and pillowcases. Well, we're 73 and 80, and we've survived very well using a simple scientific formula for washing or not washing the bedclothes. Dive under the sheets, take a deep breath, and then try to sit up. If you've survived, then they can wait another week before you try again.

I think that's fair enough. Yeah. I don't quite understand it. Does she mean if you take a deep breath and it's just so overwhelming and terrible you can't sit up, then you should wash them? Or there's something in the sheets that would be so dirty you actually can't sit up? Combination of the two, possibly.

I don't know. I mean, none of that applies to students, by the way. I mean, God knows how often. I think a whole term. Tell me about it. This is Rachel, who would like to be set up with Olivia, who's our listener in Brisbane. So there we are.

Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, ding dong. We might be able to do that. Is there anything to stop us doing that? I think quite a lot of GDPR and stuff like that. But I think we'd have to investigate. Well, I'll pass this email on to the relevant authorities, but Rachel says, at my school, this is a conversation

we were having about getting girls into sport at school, and Rachel says, at my school the boys did sport every afternoon, and the girls did sport four afternoons a week, but on the fifth they did needlework. This was in the late 1980s, incredibly outdated. It got me thinking about other stupid rules,

and I'd be curious to know if anybody can relate to this one. And I've got to say, this was new to me. We were not allowed salad until we were in the 5th year. Condiments were also part of the salad bar, and therefore they were banned. Jamie Oliver became famous when I got to the 5th year, and suddenly the whole school was allowed salad. We were so angry about that.

We also weren't allowed the veggie option unless we had a letter from parents stating that we'd be veggie, we'd been vegetarian for at least a term. I can't imagine that flying nowadays. Rachel, you're right right it absolutely wouldn't because everywhere you go there's a veggie and vegan alternative I mean I think Rupert Murdoch might be surprised

to see that there's a vegan option in the canteen in this building every single day How do you know that Rupert Murdoch is not a confirmed vegan? Oh I'm sorry he may well be He's lived a long time It's a secret to a long life I love Rachel's email

because apart from anything one of the things that absolutely amazed me was not too long ago when my kids came back from starting their secondary schools to report that there was such a thing in both their schools called a salad bar I mean the notion at school that we'd have a salad bar

we never had, even in the height of summer it was a combination of beef and potatoes. Yeah, yes. Just every single day. I don't remember there ever being fish. Oh, you must have had fish. We had fish every single Friday. I think we might have had a kind of,

well, I don't think we did have that fish and chips on a Friday thing. We might have had a fish pie or something. And I'm not knocking the food, because actually I ate it very willingly. But a salad bar at school, I mean, that was just the stuff of fancy. Absolute fancy. When I hear the word salad, I do think of a salad as constructed by my dad. And he would literally do two leaves of lettuce, a whole tomato and possibly a hard boiled egg. Nice. That was a salad

and still is in his mind absolutely difficult to have a whole tomato not a sliced one sliced? that was for foreigners whole tomato I'd really like to meet your dad sometime

I'm sure he's asked to meet me I think he's just trying to keep us apart deliberately in case we strike up a magical friendship and leave you out. Well, actually, no, he rang at a very inconvenient time. You know, older people, they have a sort of a... I'm going to say they have a little bit of time to fill. And he couldn't have been more inconvenient the moment he chose to ring me this morning.

I was trying to work it out. I was going to get to work. He said, have you got a moment? I said, no, no, I really haven't. Well, next time that happens, ask him to give me a call. I mean, I was happy. I was calm. You're much more understanding. Yeah, I was only half an hour away from work.

Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. Our big guest today was fantastic, wasn't she? She was Roma, well, she still is probably, Roma Agrawal, the structural engineer who worked on the design of the shard. And she had written a book called Nuts and Bolts, Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way. And I thought, that's one of those books I'm going to take home and flick through, and that's fine, absolutely lovely.

But I couldn't put it down, Jane. It's fascinating about why the nail, the lens, the spring, the pump. The pump, yeah. The magnet and I've still got two to go. You've said lens, haven't you? Yeah. Oh, it's just like Jim's game, Kim's game. Oh, no, I hated that.

It was not really good. Anyway, tiny things that have completely changed the world. And it's beautifully written, isn't it? with loads of anecdotes and loads of facts. And we really enjoyed her company. So, for example, if your surname is Naylor, that's because somebody in your family used to make nails. And you, of course, are called? Lover. Somebody in my family used to make love.

That's a good one. Okay, let's hear from Roma Agrawal, structural engineer and author of Nuts and Bolts. And here she is describing the incredible building that we're very close to here, actually, in London by London Bridge, the Shard. I think of it as a very stretched, elongated pyramid. I think that's the easiest way to describe it. But the idea is that there are lots of pieces of glass that rise up into the sky and don't quite come together at the top. That's the both frightening, intriguing and rather beautiful aspect of the shard. It does divide people, I've got to be honest. Is it fair

to say that it is a bit of an indulgent structure? Because there are parts of it, I think, I could be wrong, I think are still quite empty. So to be honest, I finished with my work on it over a decade ago now and I was mainly concerned with the engineering of it, how do we make it stand up, working with the amazing architects. So yeah, that was my main focus. But for me, career-wise, I kind of grew up with the building. So I started off, I must have been 24 years old when I started working on that project um as a graduate engineer going up to becoming you know an associate

director and so on so I mean I really grew with the building which is incredible yeah and it is it is a very very gorgeous structure but it is fundamentally is it an office space more than anything else and do we actually as as a human, as a species, do we require these spaces anymore? Because we were just talking about the desire to work remotely. Yes, the Shard is actually a mixed use building, which means it's got offices, it's got hotel, it's got restaurants, public spaces, and so on. And I think as far as these, you know, big structures and big buildings go, having that mixed use is probably the most kind of long term model.

But 100% we need to have another look at what we're building, why we're building it, and so on. And one of the things that I explore in my new book, which is called Nuts and Bolts, is trying to actually delve into the tiny bits of our engineering, trying to understand better what the origins of all our stuff is, because our stuff just seems so complicated. Like if you thought about the Chardon Wren, how was that built? And how does it work? It's just feels so overwhelming. But if we start small, I think we can tell really lovely stories and learn more about what's around us. Can we just hear a little bit about you and young Roma and the things you did and what you were interested in?

So I broke a lot of stuff. I'm sure my parents will tell you about that. So I remember breaking crayons, sharpening pencils, opening ballpoint pens, you know, stuff that I could get my hands on. My daughter, who's three and a half, is following quite a similar route. She had a phase where she just chucked everything on the floor and some stuff broke, some stuff bounced. And it was very fascinating watching her reaction to it. Less so mine, I think. But I was always interested in the world around us. I think all children are. I grew up in a very

kind of science engineering household. I grew up in India as well, where we love we love a bit of engineering and science and maths. And I moved here when I was 16 and kind of took it from there and became an engineer and started my work when I was in my very early 20s. So Nuts and Bolts as a book, it is a thing of beauty, if he was talking about it earlier. And it really takes apart those small things, as you say, that actually build our lives. So can we just start with the thing that I was most gripped by, which is string? String, yeah. Because if I'm honest, I honestly had never thought about where it came

from. So just tell us, tell us where it comes from. Neither had I. But again, it was just this idea of trying to break everything down. So I've got this crocheted glove in front of me, which isn't quite finished. It's got lots of strands sticking out. And what you can see, and I'll obviously describe it for the listeners, is it's the yarn I've used is made up of four threads. But each one of those threads is made up of a number of strands that have been twisted together. And we only found out two or three years ago, that this type of construction of string was actually a Neanderthal invention. So we found it's a tiny little piece of string stuck to a tool that the Neanderthals used many tens of thousands of years ago.

And the idea is that you're taking fibres, you're twisting them up in very particular ways to make sure that you get lots of friction between it. And so you're using stuff that would have been individually very weak, but then constructing it into a system that's really, really strong, but flexible. And that for me is what's really special about string. Yes. Are we sure it was Neanderthals? Because I say this because you do reference it in your book. Have you got other evidence?

We don't give neanderthals a lot of intellectual credit do we don't and in fact one of the people i was speaking to about this said that this does challenge our preconceptions about how smart our neanderthal cousins were yeah and will they have got it from looking at spider's webs um i don't think spider's webs are that you know constructed in that many sort of layers so it's it's a very interesting question but yes it does speak to something of the cognitive abilities it also may tell us a bit more about what their lives looked like and of course string led to clothing which completely changed the way we occupied the planet so now we could go to cold places hot places um we create music from it which is beautiful you know, what's the world without music?

And then I take it all the way to suspension bridges, which is, you know, familiar territory for me. And the exact construction that I described, you know, in the yarn for my glove, it's the same stuff that we use made out of metal wire to hold up some of our biggest suspension bridges in the world. Well, you were a part of the team that designed the bridge at Northumbria University, you just described that. So that is a little footbridge that crosses over the motorway. And it's got this big, inclined column, and it's got six pairs of cables coming off that cable and coming off the column. And each one of those, those are just solid rods. So you can imagine think of that as being just a simple piece of thread because it's not a very big bridge.

But then if you go to something like the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, and that was the first bridge that had steel wires used to make the cables, that has got hundreds and hundreds of thin steel wires that are bunched together to create these immense cables that hold the bridge up. And you were just talking about Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. And the fact that he had a sibling, didn't he? He had a sister.

And I'm told, you know, anecdotally, that she was smarter than him. And obviously never got the chance to study engineering. No. And I imagine you're probably a little bit sick of the question about what was it like to be the only woman in certain places in your profession. But I'm going to ask it anyway, because it has to be actually, I think it's probably an additional burden. Is that the right way of describing it? I think a lot of stuff happens that makes you think a lot. And then it's that energy that you spend, right? So about 15

years ago, when I was going on construction sites, there were still naked pictures of women on the walls, and I had to go in and have serious conversations about construction. And that stuff has become a lot better. There was a safety thing where there was never any steel capped boots that fit me properly. So I was always kind of wobbling around on site. And a lot of progress is being made. I think, like with most industries, the leadership is still very, very male. And, you know, that there's a lot of work to do to stop women falling out of the profession. I mean, I've fallen out of it, you know, in my mid 30s, after I had my child, I'm almost a stereotype in

that sense. But yeah, I think a lot of work needs to be done by the industry and how we can keep women there, people of colour there, people from other minoritised backgrounds. You do put into the book a lot of your own personal experiences and I did really enjoy and also felt for you the chapter which is about lens lenses, because that's a very personal story for you. Can you explain a little bit about how the lens has actually meant something to you and your family?

A hundred percent. So I start that chapter off as a letter addressed to my daughter, who's three and a half, and she simply wouldn't exist without the lens. And the reason is because she's an IVF baby. And so I trace the history of lenses all the way back to the Islamic golden age of science, scientists like Ibn al-Hitham, who understood how light works, how our eyes work, and so on. And what that meant, you know, in time about using the lens to look at stuff that's really, really small. So we started looking at cells, we started looking at sperm, we started thinking about how do they interact. And then this incredible scientist called Miriam Menken in the 1930s was trying to study fertilization outside of the body. And she was the first person to create an embryo in a lab.

And then it took a few decades before an actual child was conceived from that. And you know, Louise Brown, who's the first IVF baby to be born is only a couple years older than me. And so it kind of blows my mind that, you know, a generation out and I wouldn't have been able to have a biological child. Yeah, it's well, obviously very, very personal link to you that are you is interesting, because I was thinking back to that, you dismantle a ballpoint pen, you did that as a little girl. I mean, I did that. I did that too. But I have absolutely, I mean, I couldn't put it back together again. That's the difference between those of us who certainly took it apart

because I was interested enough to know what was going on inside. But you went very, very many steps further. So what distinguishes people with your capability from the rest of us? I'm not sure if I did go much further. I definitely remember breaking stuff. Did I mend everything? I'll have to ask my parents. I think it's just keeping that curiosity up. I think it's being in the system where you are encouraged to be an engineer, to study science. Whereas, you know, culturally culturally that's not always easy particularly for young girls now i need to talk about the nail yes um i actually had a really genuinely

interesting day out with my kids years ago at the black country museum it's a fantastic museum that if you've never been make sure you go i i couldn't go because i wrote the book in the middle of the pandemic and it was really sad that i basically couldn't do that research it's a great it's one of those living museums yeah and it's really interesting anyway the nail yes uh how well show me the nail you've got with you and then explain because you made this nail I made this now so this this was the one bit of thing I did manage to do is to go into a forge and and make this nail so it started off as a massive steel rod yeah which went into a very very hot forge starts glowing red goes into orange lots of whacking um hard work you know it took me probably half a day to make this one nail don't go into professionally roma i don't think i will i think i'm better at other things for sure

but nails were made like that by hand for thousands and thousands of years. And it was only really during and after the Industrial Revolution that we started making them en masse. And it's just incredible. But the reason the nail is so special, you know, in my mind, is that we used to make stuff out of one thing before. So we'd shape a stone to make a tool. We'd shape a log or, you know, to make a bridge or a twig to make a spear or you know stuff like that the idea of joining two things together robustly was only really possible with the nail and it says something about us as humans as a society that we could source metal we could put metals together like copper and tin to make bronze, and then fashion it to,

you know, create something that allowed us to make very, very complicated things. But some countries, just because of their natural resources, had a head start here, didn't they? Yeah, so it depended on where you were in the world, what minerals were available to you. So bronze had fell out of favour at some point, because we couldn't get the tin and the copper together because they were available from different parts of the world. Iron, you know, the world leading iron came from the Indian subcontinent where the Iron Age actually started in southern India and Sri Lanka. The Romans used to import that iron and they used that to make their very famous nails. So it was almost a very international trade. And nails were once

extraordinarily expensive and precious. And one of the great stories I talk about in Nuts and Bolts is that the Americans, when there was still a colony of the British, and the British refused to export nails, used to burn their houses down. And then they would collect up all the nails from the ashes of their home, because they were so expensive, and then they would collect up all the nails from the ashes of their home because they were so expensive and then take those nails to go off and build their new home wherever they were going. God, do you know what?

That really puts into perspective the way that we waste things now, doesn't it? It also, if you're called nailer, and I have another nugget in the book, that's where it comes from. Your family made nails. Your family made nails. And in the black country, this was a huge profession, particularly from. Your family made nails. Your family made nails. And in the

black country, this was a huge profession, particularly women and children were making nails. They were earning a little bit of extra cash by doing this. And one of the great stories that I was able to include is that of Eliza Tinsley, whose husband died leaving her with children and a business. And she said, you know what, I'm going to sort this out. And she expanded the business in the 19th century, you know know unheard of for women entrepreneurs to be running large businesses at the time and you know her company still in name exists and they still produce packets of nails with Eliza Tinsley on them which I absolutely adore I just love that kind of thing there's so much to learn about in your book. I had never thought about the connection between springs and guns, but there would be no guns if somebody hadn't invented the spring.

me how the spring was used in the bow, which is a kind of older version of it. And then it became a crossbow, it became catapults, it became trebuchets, all these, you know, quite deadly weapons. But then, of course, in the modern world, a gun, a pistol has got numerous springs in it. You know, when you push the bullets down into the magazine, there's a spring compressed in there, when you shoot it, there's a spring that releases the trigger, then brings the next bullet up into the slider. You can tell I don't know much about guns from the way I'm describing this. But the point is that because of the ability of springs to hold energy and hold power, you know, just a little flick of your finger can release this immense energy and destruction because of this piece of engineering.

I found that fascinating because the other things are static things, aren't they, that you're talking about. I suppose apart from magnets, there's an energy and a force there. Another thing I didn't know know roma was that we're magnets as people oh we are how does that work um so electrons have a magnetic property about them so just like they have a charge they also have magnetism so atoms can be magnetic groups of atoms can be magnetic and the reason we're magnetic is because we have iron swirling around in our blood so that's

similar to why the earth is magnetic because there's iron in the core of it and we're very very very weak magnets so it's not like we have magneto style powers or anything i'm quite glad about that can we just please just the last couple of minutes talk about the wheel because it's pretty important and like Fi I did not know that it came originally from pottery. Right so about 6,000 years ago the Mesopotamians invented the potter's wheel to make pottery to store their food more robust you know pieces of vessels that they could do this in and it took about about 2 000 years before someone thought let's turn this up on its side but from there we went into it just seems so obvious doesn't it but only now but carry

on yeah um in retrospect right but then we went to having these really solid clunky wheels we then created spoked wheels once our carpentry skills got a lot better we created wire wheels wire wheels were actually invented to help flying machines because flying machines needed to be as light as possible and again that's one of those funny moments where we didn't think that oh we've got two wheels kind of side by side connected by an axle but to put one in front of each other again took hundreds of years before anyone did that to create the bicycle so i feel like in retrospect it's really like wasn't that really obvious why didn't we do that but um i guess hindsight is a wonderful thing well it is and i was about to ask you what is it i mean

you say at some point in the book that um invention comes from springs from necessity so what an ingenuity comes out of, so what is it we need desperately right now to solve some of our situations and problems that we don't have? I think that obviously the energy crisis I think is a huge one, particularly around climate. I actually spoke to one of the laureates of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering on a podcast about solar energy. And it was such a fascinating conversation, because he thinks we have all the engineering technology we need to solve the energy problem. And it's it's politics, regulation, policy, that's the blocker in this case. So I think there are going to be new materials invented

that we don't know about right now, I think there's going to be new materials invented that we don't know about right now I think there's going to be new glues invented there will be nanoparticles nanorobots all of this kind of stuff and I'm sure all of these things will help but I think for me at the fundamental at the heart of all of this is having that connection and understanding with our technology making sure it doesn't just run away from us. And this is my little way of maybe starting that conversation. Roma Agrawal, the structural engineer who worked on the design of the Shard in London and the author of a book which I think would really appeal to the nerdy side of just about all of us. And if you have somebody in your family who is interested in a career in engineering or design actually, or anything of

that sort. It's a great book to give them nuts and bolts, seven small inventions that change the world in a big way. Now, this is about the Navy. The other day I was talking about how I'd sent off for a leaflet about joining the Royal Navy when I was in my teens. And the reason I didn't want to do it was because I didn't want the handbag that came with the uniform at the time. And another fee writes to say, As a serving member of the Royal Family,

I can confirm that there are a dearth of handbags, something which at times I'd be most grateful for, and perhaps can be addressed at the next Defence Spending Review. Despite this, Nadia, I have enjoyed a wonderful 15-year career exploring the world, albeit with nowhere to put my purse, keys, tissues, pens, etc. So thank you for that fee, and I'm glad in a way

to hear that the handbag has now left official Wren uniform. But it was very much a thing. It really was. We've had other emails saying I had one of those handbags. Oh, I think they'll be collector's items now. Yeah, well, absolutely. I would have been drawn to a profession that offered me a handbag. I don't know why you weren't.

Can we just go out on Beck's fantastic email, which is... Oh, no, we can't because I've got two more I want to see. Oh, OK. Penultimate one then. I'll do this very quickly. Do you remember somebody had emailed in about the things that her mother-in-law had said to her? Oh, yeah. I love these. So this one from Beck who says, When I went to meet my mother-in-law for the first time, I brought her some chocolates,

which she handed back to me as I left, saying she wouldn't eat them. In the early days of our relationship, I told her that my husband, then boyfriend, and I had gone to Paris for a few days. And her response was, he takes all his girlfriends to Paris. Backhanded compliments such as you look nice even from the back and you look nice I didn't recognise you and Beck is a very generous

soul and says I never found these insulting I always found them funny there was also an honesty that is to be admired and I was quite happy to take the chocolates back. Thanks for the laughs, says Beck. Well, thank you, because those are golden. Yes, and Tanya, or Tanya, I never quite know.

She is visiting England for the very first time. By the way, we'll also take silly things fathers-in-law have said, won't we, Fi? Yes, we will, of course. Yes, Equal Equalities Act passed in 1967. Go for it. Yes, quite. OK, jane Yes, we will, of course. Equal Equalities Act, passed in 1967. Go for it. Yes, quite. Jane and Fi at Times.Radio. Tanya of Tanya is visiting England

on a literary tour with her work. She is from, I think she's from Kentucky. So it's all new to her, and so she's really enjoying it. She has decided to visit all the stores that you talk about. So far, Tanya's been very brave and gone to Sainsbury's, Tesco, M&S, She's really enjoying it. She has decided to visit all the stores that you talk about so far. Tanya has been very brave and gone to Sainsbury's, Tesco, M&S.

I struggle with the connotations associated with those initials, she said. Don't, don't, don't. I don't even know what she means. I don't know what's going on in Kentucky. And also Boots. Now, Boots is a funny one because we just, it's such a staple of the British high street that we all know what you can buy at Boots. Now, boots is a funny one because we just it's such a staple of the British high street that we all know what you can buy at boots. But obviously, if you're not from Britain, you're not going to know.

I think you're well prepared if you come from America because Walgreens is really it's like boots on steroids. Oh, I love a walk. I haven't been to America. You can buy a parasol for your garden, some Wellington boots, a fishing rod, your perfume, any number of contraceptive items and your sandwiches as well. And laxatives. Laxatives in particular. Anyway, Tanya walked into Tesco's yesterday and she saw the £1 daffodils. A colleague took a picture of me for you as I told her the story about your concern about who's losing money on them. I'm attaching it here and there it is. There's a picture of Tanya hopefully not buying the one

pound daffodils we were so concerned about. But thank you for going as far as you did actually to stay true to the podcast. We appreciate it. Yeah I feel a little bit bad because maybe if we talked about slightly higher minded things that she would have had more fun. As you know we did mention the Tate, didn't we? The other day. And you've mentioned the theatre. Oh, I am. Any number of times.

You know what a theatre lover I am. Yes, absolutely. Theatre, art. I can't get enough. But also to be found just hoofing chili nuts on a sofa. Right. It's Jane and Fee at times.radio if you'd like to join in with this malarkey.

And if you want to join us on the on-air radio show, three till five, Monday to Thursday, all the fun of the fair, live guests, time checks. I mean, how much more do you want? Yeah, we give the time, don't we? No, it's a really handy thing because if you don't know what the time is or you don't have a clock,

listen to us, because we're there. It's one of the strange things about doing a podcast. You don't need your time checks. It's a whole skill we don't use, Jane. Give us one now. 523. Is it? Oh, no.

you have been listening to off air with jane garvey and fee glover our times radio producer is rosie cutler and the podcast executive producer is ben mitchell now you can listen to us on the free times radio app or you can download every episode from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this, but live, then you can. Monday to Thursday, three till five on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening

and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye.