The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 108: The Wee Free Men Pt. 1 (I Crave The Incline)

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 1 of our recap of “The Wee Free Men”. Nae Queen! Nae Laird! Nae Focus!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:The delightful surprise of “new” Terry Pratchett stories - New StatesmanThe Wee Free Men - Colin Smythe Paul Kidby Paintings WFM Promotional Interview - L SpaceWee Free - Wikipedia A Glossary of Provincial Words and Phrases in Use in WiltshireJenny Greenteeth - Oxford Reference Folkdays: Silbury Hill – Nellie Cole Dragon Hill — British Folklore Rock of ages: how chalk made England | Geology - The Guardian  A history of hedges - The RSPB Why We Think Outhouses All Had Crescent Moons in Their Doors - Atlas Obscura Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree - YouTube Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com 

I've had so much coffee for a while, I'm looking forward to this already. So we've got actual Pratchett news this week. We have stories. The what's it called a stroke of the pen. A stroke of the pen is a collection of heather to unfound undiscovered short stories written by Pratchett under a pseudonym Patrick Cairns, Cairns, Cairns, something like that from the old days back when he was a PR at the nuclear plant. Was it a plant plant? Whatever, at the nuclear place. So this is pre full-time author, but still fairly accomplished writer by this point. And yeah, I mean, it'll be very cool. It's cool to have something completely new to look forward to.

Yeah, it's very exciting. There are still a few Pratchett short stories. Here's a two release that I haven't read yet, but an entire book. No, I definitely haven't read all of them, because I quite like knowing that they're sort of lingering about and I can read an odd one and have some new Pratchett every now and then. Yeah, yeah. Well, friend of the pod, Mark Warwick has put an article in New Statesman yesterday, today, today, along those lines, didn't he? He's put it's called the delightful surprise of new Terry Pratchett stories and I will link to it. He was saying how like when you get to the end of

an author's material after they passed away, it kind of seems like a new set of grieving. And that's why a lot of people haven't read The Shepherd's Crown and maybe coming on a journey with us, for instance, but he didn't put that in the article, oddly enough. But yeah, this gives us like another, what's the famous quote from Reaper Man? No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. I need to go and see more live things. I was feeling that the other day, I had lots of fun at the Weird Al gig and then was like, I don't go to, I used to be at a gig like every weekend. A bit like they were

local gigs and I can't say they were all good. Also, I sound so old when I say gig now. What do they sound like? What are they meant to be called? It is gig still, isn't it? It is gig. So I just feel like when I say it, I sound like a parent sort of asking a recalcitrant teenager, have you, are there any good gigs on? Any good gigs at the moment? Maybe we should just lean into it and start calling them concerts. Yeah, so let's go for concert darling. Where is this concert? It's the back room of a part that's very sticky.

Gig live event. Yeah, no, gig. I think gig's the only one we can say. I understand your insecurity there, but I think it's still our best bet. The show, but show is a bit too broad a term. Yeah, yeah. Especially when a lot of the people we like do many different things. Exactly, like show could be theatre, it could be improv. I promise not to make you go to improv again. Oh, while I remember, I also have a massive lack of plans, including no one else around next weekend. So I was thinking maybe of doing something that requires very little organisational cooking on my part, like a maybe night with pizza or something.

Okay, let me know. I'll bring Hermes and Diet Coke as always. We're just to everything listeners. The traditional gifts, Hermes and Diet Coke. It's very annoying. I turn up to work every day, no laptop. I'm very popular with small subset of the office, not the people I meant to be reporting to. It's also really awkward at funerals. I'm sorry if you're lost. Check these. Can you really tell me you wouldn't have been pleased if somebody gave you some Hermes at any of the many funerals you've attended in the last few years? No, I would have been fucking delighted. Exactly.

Fucking love a bit of Hermes. Waitries have stopped doing my favourite Hermes, which I'm aware is a really fucking middle class complaint, but... Well, maybe it'll be somewhere else instead. Quite possibly. But then I have to seek it out. And I am a lazy person who is not willing to seek out Hermes. Like, if I really want Hermes, I can just invite you over. Yeah, yes. I watched one of the very few influences I can be bothered. Watching at all as a woman called Tamzin, something, but she's very posh. She's a West London mum, like, and your childless godmother sketches. So I followed her sketches, but I'll

actually watch her influence of it as well. And she had like a food haul from Fortnum and Mason the other day. I watched that. And she's so charming that I will watch that and enjoy it, whereas for most people, I'll be like, I'll fuck off. Fuck off with your 20-pound cylinder of biscuits. But I don't care because she's very beautiful and nice about it. So whatever. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying some extra fancy biscuits every now and then. There is when I feel like there is. Okay, no, that's fair. I respect that. I would never say it to their face, but I will sneer at the phone, of course.

Of course. I've had an odd little craving lurking at the back of my brain for shoe pastry, which is a really fucking annoyingly specific craving to have. Is that anywhere good in town to get like eclairs and things? Like nice pastries. No, not really. We don't really have like a patisserie in town. Patisserie Valerie did do quite some nice stuff, but I don't mind saying this. We're a fucking terrible company and maybe still are. I don't know if they still exist. They certainly closed here, but they made waitresses pay for walkouts out of their tips. So go fuck yourselves, Patisserie Valerie. You could afford that 20 quid more than I could.

They were absolutely fucking awful. But when you worked there, you used to bring me cake. Oh, it is, yeah. Boxes of cake. It's insane what places throw away. Now I'm sounding old again. We've had a very like, oh, God, are we ancient day today? We have, yeah. We were discussing slang in very old people terms. We looked at the Glastonbury line up and went, oh, we don't know any of this new music and tried to be humorously grumpy about it and then looked something up and it was quite cool. So we're like, all right, mission successfully failed, I guess.

Yeah, maybe we should just actually listen to music. Maybe we should not give up on ourselves at 30 and 31, respect. Please, I gave up on myself in my 20s. Do you know what the thing is? I'm so used to feeling just like a little bit old and uncool because I genuinely have since I was 21 years old. And so at this point, I'm very secure in that. And it's fine. Obviously, I'm still a friend of teenagers, but I just never went away. That's not a new development. I've been frightened of teenagers since I was 10. As an infamous band once said, they do scare the living shit out of me.

I love that song though. Probably we might get snow early in the week, but I swear that was meant to be this week. Don't you just love spring? I will when we get there. Every year, my brain fucking tricks itself. We get that little bit of sun in February and we get the fall spring and I go, oh, maybe my seasonal depression could fuck off a little bit. I'll go for a nice walk. And then the next week, no, it's freezing. There's going to be snow, but it won't be good snow because we live in England. It's never good snow.

My old boss gave me the advice that you're always going to be tricked by the fall spring, but just don't plant anything that's going to be killed by frost until May. Because you will be caught out. There's not massive frost every April, but if you go out and plant your plants that you don't want to die, it will be. May is when you are not going to get frost. And if you do something that's gone so dreadfully wrong with the climate, you're probably not that worried about your flowers. Yeah, I feel like if you've got frost in May, it's not the plants you need to worry about. It's the fact you've possibly ended up in Australia.

Well, see, it's the old folk saying, isn't it? Frost in May, end of days. Frost in March. Yeah, that seems right. That bit doesn't rhyme, which is about never caught on. Why the fuck not? I'm not sure how to transition this from the end of days into the podcast. This would have been great last week when we were talking about the science of discworld and the end of days, but... Yeah, it's like such an idyllic start to a book and everything. Yeah, end of days, start of episode. Francine, do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, all right, let's make a podcast.

We've made a stupid saying about it now. Hello and welcome to The True Shall Make You Freight, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one us time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is our first episode on The We Free Men. It is. The 30th book in the Discworld series. I'm so excited to be here. It's very good. It's a proper landmark moment, isn't it, at the start of a new arc? It is. I've got those maps. They're late on in the series. Exciting times.

And a favorite arc of mine. Note on spoilers before we crack on. We are a spoiler light podcast. Obviously, heavy spoilers for the book The We Free Men, but we'll avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series. And of course, we're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. Flating down a river in a makeshift boat and making obscene gestures, as we do say. Marvelous. So, do we have any follow-up? I don't have any follow-up this week. I don't think I do either. That's cool. Do we have no emails or anything like that? No, no, I checked it all before we...

Yeah, okay, cool. Cool, cool, cool and good. All right, I'll introduce this book. Could you introduce us to the book, Francine? Yeah. So, The We Free Men is indeed the 30th Discworld novel. We like a round number and we've got to one. And it's the first in the Tiffany Aking Arc, which is the first series of young adult novels, I suppose, practically done. It's called A Discworld Story, which is how you can delineate the young adult novels from the adult novels, I suppose. It was published in 2003. It won, among others, the W. H. Smith Teen Choice Award 2003 and the Locust Award for Best Young Adult Book 2004. It's a bit of a change of pace from The Amazing Morris and from Night Watch,

as Pratchett himself noted in the alt.books.pratchett group. One commenter said, We Free Men was more like a small smile, like Granny Aking's. I liked it a lot in red in one evening. I'll reread it in a week or two and no doubt I'll find a lot more food for thought then. For now, I'm just content. Terry Pratchett replied, To be frank, that's pretty much what I was aiming for. The Amazing Morris and Night Watch were fairly intense and highly tuned. In The We Free Men, I just wanted to get out in the fresh air for a while. Oh, that's so lovely. I thought so, yeah. There were a lot of nice reviews and things, so I just picked out one that was mildly amusing. The latest book in Pratchett's

internationally popular disc world is good, solid storytelling done in a style that reads like Celtic mythology fused with the girl power of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with dialogue by Robert Burns. And two of the other reviews in Colin Smyth's usual list also mentioned Buffy, and I guess that's just very 2003. It is very 2003. So try and draw parallels between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Terry Pratchett. So in 2003, Buffy would have just ended, and I think the final season would have just been airing in the UK. So it was very much like present in the cultural lexicon. It wasn't at its height, but it was there. Cool. And I suppose you've got a female character hitting... Yeah, I do remember there was kind of a phase where like... Every female, strong female character,

and we know how much I love that phrase, was Buffy for a while or drew a Buffy comparison. I think before Buffy, it was Lara Croft. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like if you don't have a tonne of representation. Well, thankfully, we're all getting over our Hermione Granger phase. Yeah, but she wasn't that one, was she? She wasn't a strong female character. She was the nerdy one in the background. Looking around like I might have a clue around me. I mean, there's like Lara from the normal white slot. Yeah, but they were like more around this time. That was the early 2000s. Yeah. I guess Ellie from The Last of Us is very much got that vibe. Oh yeah, Katniss. That was a big thing. Yeah. I actually reread the Hunger Games

recently. They hold up. Yeah, I was a few years now since I read them, but I read them in like my 20s, late 20s, and they were good. Yeah. It was all the ones that were kind of inspired by them, cached in, that were a bit of shit. They all had a black cover with some kind of symbol on the front. God, yeah. They even infected the adult books. I've got loads of those in that style. Yeah. Well, they even kind of, there was a series of like additions of Discworld that had like the black cover with the symbol on the front. I actually really like those. Shall I tell us what happened? Yeah. So section one is chapters one through four, as I tweeted already, I think. Oh, well done. I saw it on Facebook as well. Get you. All sorts of places you can find out at

the end of the episode where to find us in all of those places. Wow, what a hook. Now people will stay. Spoilers for the end of the episode. In this section, Ms. Tick explores the universe during a summer shower. There's a ripple in the walls and her elbow predicts a witch. Tiffany's tickling trout at the river and sees little blue men before a brief appearance from a big green monster. As Ms. Tick watches from a distance, Tiffany goes home, looks at a book of fairy tales, measures a soup plate and heads back to the river with a frying pan, using her little brother as bait to take out the monster. Ms. Tick struggles on the chalk and joins the roving teachers just in time as Tiffany goes for some education and sees the promise of a lesson

she won't forget. In chapter two, Tiffany accuses Ms. Tick of watching and Ms. Tick takes the time to explain witching. Tiffany remembers another old woman and the magic of granny aching and Tick inquires about Tiffany's brother. Ms. Tick's off to fetch help and Tiffany tells her the story of Mrs. Snappily. Tick tells Tick about a witching school and Tick doesn't mention the weefrey men. Tiffany stops at the big hill on her way home but doesn't see magic. Small eyes see her, though. In chapter three, Ms. Tick and Toad talk Tiffany and thin walls of the world. Tiffany lies awake in a summer storm and hears small voices fighting toy soldiers. She takes to the privy to read about fairies but there's a disappearing sheep at interference amongst the hens. The teagulls take

flight. Tiffany's chores do themselves and a sheep flies in backwards. She goes for a walk only to find herself in sudden snow running from the headless horseman. The knack-mack feagal help as she faces the horseman down. She's too late for the teachers, though. They've travelled on. Luckily, the Toad stayed on to help hand out helpful hints. Ms. Tick's gone for witches and monsters are coming back. In chapter four, back at the farm, little Wentworth's gone AWOL. According to the Toad, he's been stolen. Tiffany summons the knack-mack feagal with the help of some special sheep laminant. The queen's taken Wentworth and Tiffany remembers her grandmother's cause to break the law for the baron. Tiffany leaves a note and packs up to find her brother as the feagles carry her on.

Cool. I've just realised before that I've never tried to say the word laminant out now before. Linament. Linament. Yeah. I've spelt it wrong there. Mike Linmanwell. I've spelt it wrong there, and therefore I'm going to say it wrong for the entire episode. Laminant it is. Like liminal instead. Linament. Anyway, a helicopter and loincloth watch. Any? Backward zooming sheep. Obvious helicopter. Yeah. Obvious helicopter. And I'll tell you why that's even more correct later, actually. Excellent. Ooh, horse. We're really setting up the end of the episode, aren't we?

And I debated this or not, but I am going to go with the knack-mack feagal's kilts for the loincloth. Why are you debating it? You've much more tenuous bits of cloth. Because now I've used it for this section, and I don't know what I'm going to do for the next two sections. I was really thinking I should try and hold on to that, but... Oh, yeah. All right. I'll give you a hand if you need it. I really appreciate you helping me with my loincloth, Francine. Quote. You've got an iconic discworld quote. It is an iconic discworld quote, and I honestly could have sworn we'd had it already,

because it's so iconic. It sort of lives in my brain. Miss Tick giving advice to Tiffany. Now, if you trust in yourself, yes, and believe in your dreams, yes, and follow your star, Miss Tick went on, yes, you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye. Well, I'll tell you why it sounds so familiar. It's a reworked granny weatherworks telling off magra about stars. It is, absolutely. Not really much kinder, considering the... But Tiffany, I suppose, is the kind of child that

will take it well, as I said, despite the previous conversation. Miss Tick sort of has this vibe of prodding herself on being good with children, but when faced with a child, she finds quite irritating, and she clearly does with Tiffany's, yeah. Yeah, no, I'd be like that. I get it. Oh, no, it's very relatable. Anyway, sorry, what was your quote? I've gone a little bit later when Tiffany is remembering Granny Aking. She says, against the rising moon, the downs were a black wall that filled half the sky. For a moment, she looked for the light of Granny Aking's lantern.

Granny never lost a lamb. That was one of Tiffany's first memories of being held by her mother at the window one frosty night in early spring, with a million brilliant stars glinting over the mountains and on the darkness of the downs, the one yellow star in the constellation of Granny Aking zigzagging through the night. She wouldn't go to bed while a lamb was lost, however bad the weather. And it's just, it's a great example of what I kept thinking throughout this book, which was this is such a well-realized landscape, and obviously it's based off real ones, but it's written so well that I can just see it far more clearly than I can.

Almost any other, almost any other location I can think of written about in a book. It's so like beautifully open and vivid, like the book almost makes me nostalgic for a time and place I've never been to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, characters, we start with our protagonist, Tiffany. Big Boots. This is such a fun sort of like refresh of the Witch's Ark as well, to put us in someone like Tiffany's Big Boots, considering we haven't had like a, the, the, the, the, the, the, the considering we haven't had like a, the last time we had a young female, which I guess was

Magrat, but that was very much more like, I'd say, teenish. Magrat. Do you mean Agnes? Oh no, we've had Agnes since then. Magrat, I put in her 20s. I put her like late teens, early 20s, like she's still got that kind of, no, drippy romantic-ness. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, we have had Agnes since then. Of course, I feel like Tiffany is mostly reminiscent of Esk.

Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's Esk reborn, I think. Yes. So it's a really fun refresh. I love the words obsession. Yes, absolutely. It's very us. I felt quite called out at times. She'd read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you weren't supposed to. Yeah. Payed, paid attention to the moon just so she could say to herself, oh, I see. It's very give us tonight. That I felt personally attacked by. Ah, yes.

I just like that that little bit ends with this possibly tells you more about Tiffany than she'd want you to know. Yeah. How do you feel she stacks up to militia? I was thinking about the difference between them, and I'll talk about it a bit more later in the episode as well, but I do like the, they kind of share this common understanding of stories, but then come at them from a very different direction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think a lot of Tiffany being more, for one of a better word, likeable character,

they're both know-it-alls, but Tiffany is so much written to be the hero and so much this is from her perspective that you can't help but really admire her know-it-allness. And she's underpinned by this kind of practicality, and it probably helps that she's brought up on a farm, not locked in a room reading books all day. Yeah. Yeah. But because when we see militia, it's almost always from someone else's point of view and those people are varying degrees of irritated with her. I don't think we'd get a chance to kind of enjoy her in the same way we enjoy Tiffany.

Yeah, for sure. Oh, but it was nice that she also has an adventure bag. It's an important thing to have. Agreed. But I love the description of her like starting from the boots up with these heavy boots that she feels like she's just moving around the world. And it's great. I know she seems vaguely irritated by them, but I feel like wearing overly heavy boots is kind of very stabilizing. And it is psychologically as well as physically. There's something.

Regals wobble, but they don't fall down, not even mentally. And she's got her sort of patched dress, and it makes the point that she likes it. It's not, oh, God, I have to wear this thing and it's been patched. It's this nice thing she has and it's been attached to. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And again, yeah, I can remember having a dress fit like that. Yeah, no, I Tiffany's very would be a very self-insert character for me if I'd written this, if that makes sense. And if I had read this like at a younger age, I would have made Tiffany aching like my entire

personality. I would have dressed up as her. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'm still tempted to make up my entire personality now, but I went off quicker than I thought it would. I'm less of a dab hand with a frying pan. So far. I can flip a pancake, but I'm not sure I could though. Are you sure? Because you've never had to, as far as I know,

actually hit an eldritch being with a frying pan. You might be good at it. Tiffany has great observational skills, which is very handy in a way she's got her first sight and second thoughts, as the toad describes it, but we don't have like a full definition of first sight and second thoughts yet. No, but it's exciting to get to the books while we will because practice clearly been playing with the idea for several books now. Yeah, it's really exciting with the Tiffany books in general.

And I don't think it's a massive spoiler to say that it, especially with someone like Miss Tick here, it kind of brings a little more structure into the world of witches. Yeah, absolutely. We get to see outside of our normal three witches who are very chaotic. Yeah. And we get names for things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They very much go in their own orbit and have their own little dramas. And yeah, you can forget almost that they've hinted at a whole society of others. Yes, some covens and such. And Tiffany's enough of an understanding of a witch to spot Miss Tick as a witch immediately from all the things she's done to make herself not look like a witch is really lovely. Oh, gosh. Yeah. And just how the answers and things like the, well, how can I stop it?

And the personal responsibility. And she's just really, yeah, really likable character and not enough. Oh, you've Mary sued this kind of way. No, she's not Mary sued. She's really flawed. Not really for like, oh, God, she's a shit. Yeah. But you have other characters acknowledging like, like Miss Tick kind of being like,

she's a know-it-all and clearly kind of annoyed by her. Uses her brother as bait. I don't know what it says about me that I didn't really clock that as a bad thing until she told herself off. Same. I mean, I don't have a younger sibling, but... I do. I've got a little brother.

Have you ever used him as bait? No, but I do have. I'm not sure if we still have it anywhere, but a home video of when he was very new baby and I was two of me just being horrible to him. Not horrible, horrible, but just singing fat baby out him. Fat baby, fat baby, shut up. Stuff like that, yeah. I was very jealous for a little bit and then I could over it.

Oh. Well, yeah. So let's talk about Wentworth and Tiffany's kind of issues with jealousy over him because she's really determined to sort of not immediately acknowledge it to herself. Yeah. She's enough. There's enough of an age gap there that she was a baby for a long time. Yeah.

And it sounds like the baby of all the grandchildren, not just of her family. Because she's number 20 and she doesn't mention any younger children. And so, Wentworth. She has been the baby of the family and so she's been maybe not spoiled. Like she clearly works as hard as anyone else on the farm and she's found her little niche at the farm working in the dairy. Yeah, but you get it as part of your identity, don't you?

Oh, very much so. I'm the youngest of the family. Even though I'm the youngest, I can do this, this, that and the other, right? Yeah. Speaking as the baby of my family, very much so. Yeah. And it's got to be like massively magnified and big families like that. Well, especially as she's sort of forced into the role of caregiver for him.

Now he's old enough to wander around. So she's sort of frustrated that she has to have this sticky thing, trailing her, complaining about sweets and wanting the toilet. Which, you know, fair. Yeah, absolutely. Because it sounds like the other girls are definitely like out and about socializing by now. Tiffany is the age where she would have been spending more time in the family. Yeah, within the family home.

Just got accidentally saddled with a toddler. Which must be incredibly frustrating. But the moment where she starts blaming herself or went with disappearing. And is it the thought felt like a piece of ice in her mind? Yeah. And it does when you're a kid, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. There's a kind of magical thinking that you still get as an adult that you can talk yourself out of.

There's a very, it's much harder to convince yourself that you weren't part of it just because you thought that way. Exactly. And I guess that part of your brain is not developed yet. But despite that, she, or maybe partly because of it. I mean, just her immediate reaction is to go, all right, well, I'll fix it then. Yeah. I don't think she quite manages to get to a point where she acknowledges it isn't her fault,

but she is very willing to fix what she perceives as her fault because it needs to be done and she is the best person for the job as much as anything. Yeah. Yeah, she doesn't sit there panicking about it or crying or feeling bad. She might feel bad, but she just channels it into getting up and going. Yeah. And when it does sound very sticky.

So I am, you know, I get it. There is like a weird age around like toddlerish where children just are sticky. Poncho. Poncho. Sorry to reference some of our listeners might care. Your life is disgusting. Catherine Hannah's never been more relatable than in that episode of Parks and Rec. Right.

Who else have we got? Mystic. Mystic. Love Mystic. One of my favorite representations of a little show don't tell moment perfectly done was when Pratchett's saying about how witches would never be seen running, witches would never be seen disheveled, this, that and the other. And then Mystic is almost joking.

Mystic is this, that and the other. And it's kind of A showing how desperate she is for something that we don't know yet and B showing she's a little outside the norm. Yeah. She is a different flavour of which maybe. She makes a reference to the fact she's got a swimming certificate from Querm College for Ladies. What is that where Susan went?

That is where Susan went. And I'm kind of wondering like could they have been in class together at the same time? How old do you think Mystic is? I think she's quite young for a witch. We think 30s. Yeah. I think 30s. And if you think Susan around the same age, like they're both teachers.

Okay. Yeah. So I feel like there's definitely a sense they could have, Mystic has some Susan-ness about her. Yes. I think so, yeah. The kind of aggressive practicality. It does sound like.

I feel like that's a Querm College thing. So if you think like Sybil went to Querm College for Ladies as well, obviously she's a bit older. So I think Precious kind of created, he's almost retrofitted the school onto this little incredibly practically confident archetype he's created. Yeah. I have a feeling that a lot of the women practically knew and admired were aggressively practical.

But they're like. It's what I've always wanted to be. Unfortunately, in reality, I then fall over a lot. Well, luckily, I guess in emergencies, I do become that person, which is apparently a common trait of ADHD and that your brain panics in normal day-to-day life and then settles down when everything's gone horribly wrong. Oh, that's handy. Yeah. Well, it kind of is in the moment, I suppose.

I am very good at like making lists and organizing things during a crisis, but I think that's just because the other option is feeling emotions. And so I've learned to not do that and make lists and lists instead. Yeah, you put that off as long as possible. That's the way. Yeah. Anyway, moving on from our terrible mental health. She's quite a sneaky witch, is Mystic.

Yeah. She's doing her hidden witching. I think it's a pretty cool set of skills to have ended up with. I wonder which emergency led to each of them. So she's learned how to escape handcuffs. She's learned how to breathe through a reed. She's learned these sort of carrying lucky charms. Because if you didn't carry lucky charms, you were definitely a witch.

Like she's learned these little details. It's a good bit of headality. She also has an interesting moment. Like the first thing she's doing in the entire book on page one is exploring the universe with a couple of twigs tied together with a string, a stone with a hole in it, an egg, one of her stockings, which also had a hole in it, a pin, a piece of paper, and a tiny stub of pencil. It's a little divination tool anyway.

Yeah, yeah. That's very cool. I like it also compares to wizards because obviously wizards doing the same thing. It's like the rice of Ashkent where they're getting all the candles out. Yeah. Yeah. And she's making a little divination tool like a random ship from her pockets. And was it scrying with, is it ink in a saucer?

Yeah. With rainwater from her hat. There's also one of the things in this sort of device is a stone with a hole in it specifically, which we've talked about before, obviously, the whole hagstones thing. Hagstones. So I like that that's a handy divination tool is using her hagstone as part of it. Absolutely.

And she might find a few of those wondering around the talk, you know? Yeah, it's a sort of spot you might. And then we've got the toad, who's not a familiar, is just a bit presumptuous. Oh my God, it's so good because we were just talking about when we were doing Science of Discworld, the whole Morphic Bounce Theory, and what it meant to turn something into something else. So yeah, but he's like not sure, like that whole bit about like, he's not sure if he's just a toad who's really fucked in the head,

or whether he was actually a man or whatever. I'm like, I don't think I absorbed that properly the last time I read this. And this time I'm like, that is dark. And you can imagine it just having happened because the toad pissed off Nani Argos. Well, yeah, he says he's not sure if he's a human being that was turned into a toad by a fairy godmother, which is what he thinks happened, or if he's a toad that's just been made to think he was once human. Yeah.

But like, I was trying to remember if like there was a passing reference to it, and which is a broad one, my godmother, but I don't think so. I don't think she turns anyone into a toad. Or turns a toad into a person. But there is kind of a little fascinating side thing of, you know, it's cheaper to make a toad think they were once a person than to turn a person into a toad.

Yeah. Yeah, depends. But then again, fairy godmother, if it was a fairy godmother, they've got this kind of excessive power in the wand, haven't they? I don't think they're as cautious with it as your average witch. Very much so. Also, I know somewhere in a witch's book, and I actually can't remember if we've had it or not yet,

but there's a whole bit where someone explains like, actually, there's quite a lot of work to turn someone into a toad because of mass and things. So it's easy to just make someone think they're a toad or a frog. Right. And I feel like it might have been witches abroad, because obviously we have the whole frog print storyline in that. And it was like, oh, and he was hopping in and out of the pond all morning

that was very cruel as me. I think Granny, yeah, it was Granny Weatherworks, and Nanny Og was telling her off or giving a side eye. Yeah, for humanising a frog. We like mistook. And then the Wee Free Men. Yeah. Wee Free is a term that I've not...

Well, it's a term for something else that I've not been able to connect to the Knackmack feagles. I wonder if it's just something you like the sound of, because the Wee Frees were a type of Scottish church or a couple of types of Scottish church. Yeah. Denominations other than the Free Church are also regularly called Wee Frees in the press,

used by the Free Presbyterians and even the United Free. But yeah, it is a Scottish thing. So maybe that's where it's from. But yeah, Wee Free is a thing. Yeah. So we met the first, the Knackmack feagle in Carpe Jugulum, which I somehow forgot that part of the story. Like we talked about so much in Carpe Jugulum.

Oh, they've got a little island. They've got a little island. They take King Varence. The only reason they remembered is because there's a couple of references to the Shepherds' counting language in this book, the Yantan Tethra. And I was like, I'm sure I've explained what that is and where it comes from.

In a podcast episode, it was in Carpe Jugulum. Oh, I was remembering it as well, but I thought it was one of the equal rights or something because I just couldn't remember it at all, but I knew we'd talked about it. Right. It wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that long ago, but again,

there was just so much to talk about in Carpe Jugulum that apparently my mind's blurred over some of it. Cool. But yeah, I like the explanation that they're picked sees. Yes, me too. I had another look at the folk laureate disc world book, just about the chalk stuff in general, and the Yantan Tethra stuff was explained again.

I can't remember if you said it at the time, but there are words like bum fit in that in there. And the explanation in the book is like, and of course, it's memorable in several ways, but let's not forget part of it is probably that some of the words sound a bit rude. And that's why children remember it. Which is fair.

Yeah, yeah. Because I like the little detail about having to get it. Yeah, I really love that. One of the things the figures show is, and I'm not going to do my best Scottish Broke here, apologies, but I feel like otherwise I'd have to issue a very formal apology to all of our Scottish listeners. But it's there, no queen, no lord, no master.

We will not be fooled again, which I checked this time. I'm assuming that we'll not be fooled again is partly a reference to the won't get fooled again by the who. Won't be fooled again. And I checked this time that that's the title of the song because we're not having another Barbara Riley, teenage waistline moment. Okay.

So that's the problem. See, other people can hear us. I'd have never been able to call you out on that. Yeah, unfortunately, our listeners very much could and did. So yeah, the who song is called won't get fooled again. Cool, cool, good. No king, no queen, no master. I think that's an actual, that's a reference though itself, I think.

Yeah, I think, well, I think a lot of the people stuff has got like references to Braveheart and things, but I haven't seen Braveheart because Mel Gibson freaks me out. Yeah, I just haven't seen it because I don't watch movies much really. Yeah. And now I probably wouldn't, you know, I've just googled no king, no queen, no master and all that's coming off his practice. Maybe not.

Possibly. Also, the, so the quick sidebar that SteelEye Span did, the folk band that did lots of stuff with Project, they did a concept album called The Winter Smith. It's mostly based on that book, but also has stuff from the other Tiffany Aking book. So if you're a completely new reader, maybe avoid the album because it's a little spoilery. But if you're not a completely new reader, the We Free Men song from that album has been stuck in my head all day now.

It's so catchy. I didn't actually get to listen to it in the end because I was working and then I forgot. So I'll listen to it later and then go to sleep with it in my head, I expect. Enjoy the earworm. Anyway, Granny Aking. That's a good album. Yeah.

Granny Aking. Fuckin' love Granny Aking. A very good, if absent character. It's amazing how incredibly, like, well-developed and clear cut that character is considering. Obviously, we don't meet her. Yeah, absolutely. She's, she's obviously such an influence on Tiffany.

And I love the, I love the way the flashbacks are done. I love the way the kind of, the lines are drawn from why Tiffany is this way, that way, or thinks this and that. And just drawn to this very quiet, practical, well-respected woman. Very much so. There's a beautiful line about Granny Aking wrapped this silence around herself and made room inside it for Tiffany. Oh, isn't that lovely?

Oh, yes. Oh, later. I've got a quote that actually works much better here, actually. And this is from an interview that Prattia did. And he says, Tiffany comments the way she lives. There are a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn't enough time for silence.

And I think that's the same bit, isn't it? Yeah. Would this be a fair comment? Would this be as fair a comment from you about life for all of us today as it was for Tiffany in the talks, this interview? Prattia says, More so, I think. We've banished silence from our lives.

We seem to fear it. We fill the world with noise. I'm sure it makes us ill. The silence stuff on the chalks that I mentioned in the book, well, we get that where I live. It doesn't mean no sound at all, though. You hear the buzzards and the wind and the head prose and tractor sounds a long way off.

And all of this gives the silence a kind of texture, makes it richer somehow. Oh, that's such a good quote. Yeah. And there's a bit in Rob's book, Life With Footnotes. Where he's talking about when they used to sit up in the shepherd's hut together. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Ah, lovely. A lot of the stuff Rob writes about sort of wheelchair in the chalk area where Prattia lives is really beautiful. Yeah. Like that man's just a really good writer, which not surprising, I guess,

if you work with Prattia for that long, you're going to kind of absorb a bit, aren't you? Yeah, absolutely. I've got a bit, I've pulled a bit actually, but that probably makes more sense for locations. Well, like that. Yeah. I'm getting over excited and scrolling all the way down

through my notes. I've got the obscure reference track. Give us a minute. I think it's very sweet we do get Granny Aking's maiden name as well, Sarah Grizzle, written in this Flowers of the Chalk book. And this idea that, you know, this quite intimidating old woman who has become almost

something more than human in the eyes of Tiffany was once this young girl writing her name carefully in the fly leaf of a book. And colouring in the flowers. That's a real book. Prattia had a copy and I can see copies online that I might maybe get a hold of. Also, that bit about the book and the little shelf of books

reminded me of what Prattia had written about his grandmother. Oh, yeah. About how she was very clever, but at the time women didn't go to school, but she was a reader and had just a little bookcase of books. And then as soon as Prattia was like, here's many more books. She was like, thank you.

Oh, it's really lovely. I love the character so much. Yeah. And Thunder and Lightning, The Dogs. Oh, yeah. No, that's great, actually. Yeah, because it wasn't long ago we read the bit about the witch, the witch trials, the short story.

Oh, In the Sea and Little Fishes. Yes, that's it. Yes, thank you. And when she's, when Thunder and Lightning are mentioned here, she's at the sheep trials. The sheep dog trials, yeah. Yeah, the sheep dog trials. And I just thought there was a nice parallel

between her and Granny Weatherwax, but Granny Aking is much more secure in her role of being the separate watcher. And I think she doesn't have that tinge of people of friend of her like Granny Weatherwax does. There's a kind of, there's the kind of respect that has a bit of fear of retribution maybe in it, but it's not the same kind of maybe she'll go mad

and push us in an oven. Yeah. People seem to insist on thinking about Granny. Yeah, so I think it's quite, and her willingness to step back and not be a part of the trials because she knows she's somewhat above it, I guess. Yeah, and that's what Granny does, isn't it? And then, but then when she's asked to step back entirely,

has a bit of a moment in pink. I think Granny's got a different kind of intense pride than Granny Aking. Oh, it'd be nice to have them meet. God, it would be. Oh, and I also, I just really love the moment where young Tiffany's using the dogs and shouting the commands to round up the flock. What they do exactly what they're meant to do.

It's so sweet. Oh, oh. Again, made me nostalgic for a time and place I've never been. Absolutely. I also went through a brief but very intense obsession with Border Collies and sheep farming because I was really obsessed with those Jester Border Collie books that were.

Oh, gosh. Wow. I haven't thought about those for a very long time. Yeah, I used to have those. I was. So because I bought them because they were the same author and I was still upset to find out they were ghostwritten as Animal Arc. Yeah, no.

But yeah, I was obsessed with Jester Border Collie. I think we had very similar bookshelves. Oh, it's a shame we didn't meet much younger. We could have probably saved our parents quite a lot of money by having a book swap thing going on. Yeah, oh, God. Yeah, we actually would have. But the sheepdog stuff, I didn't go through a brief

obsession, I must admit, but I did. I do enjoy watching those videos of the ones that are really good at it and that tells me about like sheepdogs and stuff he's seen. I quite. Yeah. I remember watching and I can't remember because it was when I was very, very young, but watching on television, some cheap herding stuff with sheepdogs.

And I don't know if it was like that show that was about that or whether it was like a real life competition. Oh, it could have been. You know what I mean? The man is dog something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I have vague recollections.

Anyway, before we go off on another rabid tangent. Oh, but it's such a lovely landscape to rambling Tandon Dover. I think this book really lends itself to rambling Tandon's because I can't, those crutches sort of get out in the fresh air. It feels like I'm thimbling about a lovely hill, doesn't it? Yeah, it's just kind of an undulating plan today. Anyway, there is a dark, where we get the full story of Mrs. Snappily. That, I must say, has stuck with me almost word for word since I first read this

out of many years ago. And I hate it and it's stuck with me always. And as I've said, I can't even remember what I said that before about in a practice book, but I know that's the point. And it's done very well that you're meant to remember it and hate it so that you are never part of that kind of thing. It's the moment where Tiffany says that she buried the cat that gets me. Because I had to.

But the whole thing, yeah, it's horrifying. And again, it's something that Pratchett does really well. We talked about this a lot with Amazing Morris, but putting something that is genuinely very dark and very hurtful to read in a book that is obssensibly aimed at younger readers. Yeah, and again, as we talked about in the Amazing Morris, it definitely hits harder as an adult, in some ways, because although that, I must say, did stick with me. This, reading it again now and just thinking about the kind of experiences and things you've read

and just knowing how people get sometimes. And there's something in the matter of fatness in the delivery of the story, the way Tiffany explains it kind of almost so rapidly. And the oven was not big enough and I measured it. And there's a sort of underlying sense of guilt here as well. This is before Wentworth's gone missing, obviously, but this kind of, could I not have fixed the problem in a bigger way? This anger and injustice side to it.

Yeah, and just the really admirable kind of direction she's taken it and not in a, I'm going to be the kind of person who tells off everybody else that, I'm going to be the kind of person they would try and do it to, and they're not going to do it again. I love that. I'm going to strike fear into the hearts of men, an admirable goal. Always. Speaking of a man who should have fear struck into his heart,

that sort of sentence, the baron. Oh, yeah. Who we don't meet in this section, apart from in a, one of the sort of flashbacks, I guess, the granny aching story where he's sort of asking for the life of his sheep-wearing dog. Are you going to look at the rule of three there in your talking point later? No, I missed the rule. Oh, the three visits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that was great. The first visit, you know, the golden, the this and the that, and the second visit, and all the gold you could eat. And the third visit is when he sits meekly, and that's the rule. Yeah, fucking, that's very, very, very storybook. I loved it. It was a really, it was a storybook.

No, but it's great because we have these like granny aching flashbacks. We have these stories within stories and we get the other one is the story of the lamb being placed in the oven and coming back to life. Yeah. And the story of the sheep attacking the dog. That's how they punished the dog. And they all have the feel of fables. Very much so.

It's a really. Yeah. I mean, it kind of like vaguely skipping back a bullet point. It really underlines what a force granny aching was that we're shown in, you know, a society because it's our society changing way, how she changed the baron. Yeah. And he's gone from a normal feudal baron to someone with, you know, a bit of fucking empathy. And the sort of the way Tiffany's father reacts to it, this kind of, he sort of learned that

he has to, you know, earn the respect, even if he does technically own our land. Yeah. It's a two-way thing. And yeah, practically it went into that in detail in night work. So I think this is quite a cool opportunity for him to take that concept and put it in a, you know, a way that worked. Absolutely. And it's very.

With the old, if you can explain a concept to children, then you can explain it well. Yeah. This quiet consensual ruling and the baron's reminder that he does require the consent. Yeah. Mutual consent. There we go. Ruling by mutual consent. I can see both of us going, that's a fucking phrase for this. We're so good at words considering we're talking professionally.

And just before we move on, Tiffany's thought when she's deciding, you know, someone's got to do something. Maybe the baron should be informed and she thinks herself, I think I can be clueless in more sensible ways. Yes. Which is a very good description of why she'd be the best person for the job. Yeah. Oh, it's very good setup of all the characters anyway.

It's a, it's a very good build to what, to where we go next. Locations. Locations. We're in the chalk. We're in the chalk. The little extract from Rob's book that I picked out here was because he talks about that reasonable length, I think. Practically getting the shepherd's heart and spending time off in the chalk.

And we talked about with Mark and when we chatted about a life with footnotes for them, it was very much our influencing life, life influencing art type thing. But I just thought this was a lovely paragraph. Those hours always felt magnetic somehow. And these are the hours spent in this shepherd's hut. On top of the chalk with the horse horn and the willow nearby, the sound of the river running, the occasional bright blue flash of a kingfisher flickering into your peripheral vision like a macknack feagle whom Terry made blue for this reason.

Those times were as close as I came to being on discworld with him. For Terry, the words would flow like the water of the river Ebel when he was down in that hut. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. There's some very nice little pratchet like val reflections in there. Kingfisher flickering. You can't, I guess, be pratchets typing hands for that long and not become super duper poetic. There's a really beautiful description of the chalk really early on that's very cinematic as well.

Oh, cool. Oh, this one. Yeah, yeah, read that. Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun. From up here, the flocks of sheep moving slowly drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there, sheep dog speed over the turf like comets. And then as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound lying like a great whale on the world surrounded by the inky rainwater in the saucer. More meta. Very meta. And this book has gone through some development hell and cinematic stuff, and I still hope it does come to the screen eventually. And I hope if they ever do,

that moment in exactly as I'm imagining it, which obviously they will because they'll take it straight from my brain. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah, by the time they get to it, we'll probably have that technology. But I also love Mystic. This calls us back to what we were talking about with Science of Discworld last week and these geological strutters and Mystics trying to explain the chalk as the shells of billions and billions of tiny, helpless little sea creatures that died millions of years ago. Yeah. Her kind of the repetition of the concept of the witches can't be grown on soft land, I think, is one of the kind of science of the city kids book in that that will obviously

become very relevant later in this book. And I think he wouldn't he would have said it once in one of the adult books. He can't grow witches on soft land or something. And I think he's like really getting that into like a foreshadowing repetition. Yeah. And that makes sense. Like for kids, it helps to say it more than once. I mean, for us, it helps to say it more than once. It's taken us very deliberately going through these to catch some and I'm sure we missed many through lines. But yeah. Sidebar that I also love the description of the mountains as brides of the sky. Yeah, that's very sweet. Yeah.

And that's one of those lovely things that you just know you got passed down generations as a description. Yeah, there's a thing that's bimbled about and come down and he's written it down and it's yeah. And now we can all think it when we look at mountains, not I don't look at mountains very often, but when I do, I can think about brides of the sky. I want to see mountains getting can't off. Yeah, we're very much in the flat lands here. We'll go find some landscapes soon. Yes, we'll go and get some landscape with a bit of texture on it. Well, we had a thought, didn't we, about going to see the white horse that offered a third

whatever it is. Yes. But it's a very fucking long way away, but there's a smaller one a bit closer that maybe we'll have a look at. We can go in the LinkedIn one or something. Yeah. It's a little bit easier to get to. Excellent. Okay. Little bits we liked. Yay. Tell me about art. It's just exciting for me. So this isn't the first book like with a cover by Paul Gibby or and this isn't the first Paul Gibby illustrations. Terry Pratchett, which was a lot about the other work he's done with them, but it's the first young adult book with Paul Gibby illustrations. And it's so Night Watch obviously was the first Paul Gibby cover,

but that was very much an homage to another painting. This is just him. And I love his design for him. I love that he had a new character to work with as he took over this kind of mantle. And I feel like it became pretty iconic, like his Tiffany illustrations, what I think of when I think of Paul Gibby art. Very much so. And like just in my copy, at least, there's obviously you've got the amazing front cover. There's a beautiful sort of piece of Tiffany like coming out of a frame that's got this beautiful, beautiful Celtic knot work around it right on like the first page. You have the little illustrations all of the chapter headings. So we get like a Ginny green teeth and we get close ups of the feagles and things and the

feagle designs or something else I think of as Gibby as well. I'm regretting my e-book decision now. It's got illustrations, but it's much harder to see not on the page. Yeah. And they're just little black and white illustrations. I'd love to see the originals because I know Gibby does a lot of his work like in color and on canvas. So I don't know how many of these illustrations might have been originally color. It made black and white for the book. I'll make a note to try and look it up. If I can find them, I'll link them for you listeners. If he did do them in color, I wish they'd do like a big full color version of this book. I'd love to own something like that. Yeah. But yeah, so just a little bit. I like that we have all that

Gibby gets the chance to do all this extra little detail in the book. It brings me a lot of joy. Yeah. Joy. I absolutely cannot segue from that to your next... I was trying as well. So Sheeper Suicidal Idiots is the next bullet point I put in, and it really does not match the tone. And for that, I can only apologize. But that is mentioned when we're talking about Granny Aking again, actually. Granny Aking had been an expert on sheep, even though she called them just bags of bones, eyeballs, and teeth looking for new ways to die. And that reminded me of many stories that my darling husband has told me. And so I thought I'd sit him down and ask him to remind me of some of their stories about sheep being idiots.

I did actually ask him if he wanted to be a guest on the podcast and talk about it. And he said, no. And I said, why? And he said, people might listen. I said, that is a distinct possibility. Yes. All right. Just tell me and I'll write it down. Amazing. It did have to start with a disclaimer, which is, as he said, the problem with stories of sheep being stupid is that the stories usually end in miserable death. So they're not like, they start funny. Cruising death. Yeah. Yeah. So we try to pick some of the more like hard ones. The first one's still kind of grim. As Jack put it, sheep are quite forwardsy animals, which I like as a descriptor. If they meet danger, they just keep walking forward. And they're built to run things. That's

their only physical advances. They're quite good at running things. But that doesn't work out all the time. So for instance, there was quite a rain one year. And as an old pond or something like that, that dried up and just became this like very deep mud. And a couple of sheep went into it and thought, oh, no mud. I'm going to keep walking through this to get out of it. And drowned. Unsurprising. Yeah. There's also a fun thing they often do. You need to keep any brambles very sure because sheep will just get caught in brambles. If there are any brambles like hanging from trees, they will get caught in them, run around in circles, which kind of tightens their fleece and then ends up spinning them around until they're running with their feet just above the

ground. And then they get stuck there. You need to go and get them down. That's the helicopter bit I was saying. Oh, excellent. Apparently a very well known one, anyone who's ever worked for the sheep will tell you what they always do is put their head through a fence to eat something and then get it stuck. And then you help them back out. And then they immediately put their head back through the fence because the thing they want to eat is still there. And they haven't learned that lesson. And the one I've referenced before on the podcast is that they will trust themselves up in twine. And so if you leave twine on bales of hay, which they now no longer do ever, because it turns out that they'll get their head in it and then try and kick the twine

off, and then get the leg stuck. And then they'll be like, Oh, no, my leg stuck and try and kick the twine off with another leg. And then they'll try and kick the twine off. And so Jack is rescued sheep with fully three legs tossed up by their head. Amazing. So yeah. And then I said, is it true about the, about all the various diseases, like they're very diseasey animals? And he said, Oh, yeah, no, they just die. So that's that. I didn't ask for details on that. Sheep fucking terrify me. I mentioned this on the podcast before. Part of it is the forward zinus, like, especially Yorkshire sheep. Yorkshire sheep don't like me. Oh, no. So like, there've been multiple times I've been walking around like the North York Morts, but there have been

sheep coming the opposite direction on the path and they will just fucking go. There's something fairly elder it. So near us, there's like big, beautiful manor house with acres and acres of grounds, which occasion you can kind of walk on to at night and which I've done. And I did that once and had like a little picnic on the steps. There's like an old church. Yeah. So I was already having a creepy night because I swear that church struck 13 at midnight. I believe you. And then walking back through, because it's so dark, there's no light pollution around there, which is beautiful for looking at the stars. But it does mean it feels like the fields on either side of you when you're walking along these parts are empty until you turn a

torch onto them and realize that they are full of sheep with their fucking reflective eyes. Yeah. And they've woken up to watch you. Yeah. So you just see hundreds of reflective eyes looking at you and you can turn the torch away from the fields because you need to see in front of you where the path is. But you know, those eyes are still fucking there. It's terrifying. They're very confident sheep around there as well. They're the only ones who ever terrified deer, my little dog, because she would, she was good around sheep because she worked on the farm or didn't work on the farm. She went to the farm. She did not work. But she would go right up to the sheep or rather, because she wasn't allowed to go right up to the sheep, she was on the lead,

they would go right up to her. They would approach her and she was terrified. She loved sheep mainly, but not those ones. They are confident sheep. But they looked after by the same shepherd as visit Jack's flock because at his farm, there's only a few sheep. And so there's no point in having a full-time shepherd. And so they freelance and so come lining the shepherd comes for a week or two and then that's it. It delights me that freelance shepherds are a thing. I know. It's really cool. Anyway, sorry, I'm just talking about life now. Regional and rural pronunciations and slang, Francine. Oh yeah, more of that. So I thought it was love. I'm charming the way Granny Aking talked,

just Siller and Gilt. Oh, I love that one. Siller and Gilt. When the Baron had come to beg for his dog's life. And I was like, oh, I wonder if that's like how you pronounce it around Wiltshire, where I seem like a lot of Granny Aking's phraseology came from. And I never actually found out if that was the case. But I did find a really cool book called A Glossary of Provincial Words and Phrases in Use in Wiltshire, which was published in 1842. And I bought a fucking ebook version of it. And then I found the free PDF, so I'll link to that listeners. Because obviously it's public to me. I just wrote down, I was very conservative, I think. I wrote down four that I particularly

liked. Perfect. There's one, Nummett, which is a luncheon, noon meat, Nummett. Oh, lovely. On Possible, which is a corruption of impossible. Listeners will understand why I haven't tried to do this in an accent, having heard me do accents in the past. Salgrove is a word for the month of February. And that was obsolete, even in 1842, when this was written. But apparently the shepherds and vulgar people in South Wilts call February Salgrove. Do we know why? I couldn't find out why very quickly. I'm willing to go down that rabbit hole in the future. But I was determined to actually finish doing my notes today. Listeners, if you know. Yes, please. Answers on a sheep. It'll get to us. They're

very forwardsy. And then the last one was tablish, which is tolerable. So someone might ask how you are and you'd go, tablish midlin, thanky. Amazing. I might start using tablish. Tablish midlin, thanky. Thanky also is lovely. We're saying thank you. Thanky is one of those weird ones, where like in the right accent, it's delightful. In the wrong accent, it sounds a bit oo-woo. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's got to be a rural. Yeah. Now, tablish midlin, thanky. There we go. Sorry. That's just general mama sat. But yeah, that's okay. Whereas thanky. It makes me want to rip my own eyeballs. You can't say tablish midlin in an oo-woo. Tablish midlin. Oh, okay. You can. Fuck.

Look, I can't sound rural, but apparently I'm good at the oo-woo voice. Terrible talent, let's move on. Between us, we're unbearable. Right. So in normal accents, what's coming up? Oh, the roving teachers. Oh, yes. Roving teachers, who I'm sure would tell us off much later if they're trying to speak like that. Absolutely. It's a small bit. I just really enjoy it because I like the idea that probably is there is some historical context of people wandering around and educating, obviously. But not in quite this way. Giving them their own kind of structure. And again, that SteelEyes Bandwood Spith album has a really good band of teachers song on it.

Oh, I'd forgotten that. Yeah, guys, been ages since I listened to that all the way through. I've just got like two songs from it on my folk playlist. So. Yeah. I'm not going to guess which ones they are now. But the way they advertise themselves, my favorite, and I'm assuming yours as well, as the wonders of punctuation and spelling with absolute certainty about the comma, I before E completely sorted out the mystery of the semicolon revealed. See the ampersand, brackets, small extra charge. That was the only bit I highlighted. Fun with brackets. I love that whole bit, but literally the only sentence that I highlighted

was see the ampersand, small extra charge. Like it's in a little cage. I want to draw that. Oh, I want to draw an ampersand, the creature. Okay, I'm putting that on my weird little things to do. Excellent. But I feel like fun with brackets was also like Patrick being a bit pointed at himself. Because I remember in Rob's book somewhere, they mentioned like they had a strict rule about only using parentheses once a day. I very much sympathize with Patrick on that one. I'm a huge parentheses over user. And to the point where I've even done what I assume he ended up doing, which is using footnotes instead in a tweet.

I didn't realize I was a parentheses over user till I read that in Rob's book and just became a bit conscious of how often I was using them writing nonfiction. And now I... Yeah, parentheses and end dashes for me. I've got to be real careful. I'm very into sub clauses. You get sub sub clauses, you get fuck it. It's because we're very, we like the meta. We do like the meta or we just talk a lot of bollocks. We do that as well. I think it helps. Right. And quick mythology bit. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I didn't dive too deep into mythology because we've got a whole book to get through. So Jenny Green Teeth, who we meet early on has origins in genuine folklore, Lancashire, Shropshire type area. So you know Shropshire,

yeah, yeah. There's like half the lakes in Shropshire are said to have Jenny Green Teeth. Yeah. So Jenny Green Teeth is a river hag that pulls children into water and drowns them, but it's also a name given to Duckweed, which creates quite a misleading mat over ponds and things that children can actually or people can accidentally walk on to. Yeah, I was warned about those mats in very strong terms by my mum, but she never did the whole making up or using the monsters as a reminder of a concept. She just told me about the fucking, she was a science teacher. Yeah. There's also a similar figure, generally known as the storm hag, but occasionally referred to as Jenny Green Teeth, although that's a more obscure name,

that appears in North American folklore, specifically urban legends around Erie and Pennsylvania. And it seems to be like something that's kind of explains the dangers of shipwrecks around Lake Erie, which is a huge area. Yeah. Yeah. It's like sea-sized, doesn't it? It's fucking massive. Yeah. But obviously, there has been a lot of immigration and well, colonisation between like, especially some certain parts of England and that area. So I assume that name at least came over with English people. Yeah, definitely. Well, last Neil Gaiman, if we ever see him, I'm sure he knows exactly. Oh, that's great. Love that, though.

Ask Neil Gaiman about Jenny. And then the other thing I quickly looked at, page 44 in my copy, when Tiffany goes to the top of the hill, Arkan Hill. Oh, yeah. There's a tall hill with a flat top, and there's lots of different stories about it. So there's two different things this could be referencing. So the story about a king being buried under that with treasure and stuff. Yeah. It seems to be a reference to silver, and I got what these are probably referencing from Anastasia Pratchett. Silbury Hill, which is in Wiltshire. So that's that right area. Yeah. Which is an artificial chalk mound that appears to be prehistoric constructed around 24 to 2300 BCE. So like

Neolithic era. According to a lot of local folklore, it's the last resting place of a king's sill. And underneath there lies a big gold statue and a big golden horse. There's no archaeological evidence for that, admittedly. There's another local legend which was recorded in writing in 1913, which the devil was carrying a bag of soil to drop on the citizens of Malbra, but was stopped by priests of nearby Avery. Avery. So this is the big bag of soil. I can love geology folklore. Oh, talking of Shropshire. I'll lend you my poetry book. Everything's made by giants. Amazing. Love it. Anywhere with hills in England. Giants did it.

I want to go somewhere with hills. This book has made me crave hills. I crave the incline. That might be the worst thing I've ever said on the podcast. Anyway, the other mythology bit with Arkham Hill is Dragon Hill in Oxfordshire, which is a chalk hill with an artificially flattened top and has a bull patch. And it's repeatedly where St George fought the dragon and the dragon's blood was spilt, which is the legend reference in the book. But the interesting thing about Dragon Hill is that it's a small hillock immediately below the Uffington White Horse. It's part of that same landscape. You're right. You got it right. It's in the Folklore of Desquale book.

Yay. Good. I was like, I'm sure I remember reading Dragon Hill today somewhere, and that's the only folded over bookmark I've got. Again, we can't really judge on folding over pages when I've done this to my books. For non-video listeners, I'm demonstrating the vast numbers of Post-it Notes. She always is. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So the Uffington White Horse is something we're going to talk about in another episode of this podcast, for sure. The only thing that I thought of with Ark and Hill, and I don't think it comes up later in this book, please don't make it does, is that it, to me, read a lot like a variant spelling of aching, because there were a lot of aching spellings there. So let me find those. Hold on. But sometimes her father insisted that

there had been aching brackets, or achings, or arkans, or akans, or ekans. Spelling had been optional for hundreds of years. And yeah, so I was wondering if there was like a very subtle connection with, you really are in the bones of this place. Oh, that could be actually, I like that idea. However, that might just be fortuitous considering there are obviously some etymological connections with the real ones. So I don't know. Yeah, possibly. But there's no reason it couldn't be, which is better than my brain, which went to Ark and Stone, because there's mild other, like Lord of the Rings references in this. Oh, yeah, possibly that as well. Yeah. Anyway. Oh, do you know what? Just the word Ark and Stone makes me so nostalgic, because I just,

I was so into the draw floor and the Solitude and that when I was a kid. God. I want to read the Hobbit again. I haven't read the Hobbit for too long. But not right now. Right. Okay. Come on. We can do it. We can do it. All right. Let's not subvert ourselves instead. Let's talk about how this book subverts stories. Okay. I'm trying really hard not to repeat myself with things I've talked about, Pratchit, with fairy tales and things on the podcast before. So we have these other books that do engage with stories like you brought up militia earlier and the way that she, in Amazing Morris, she sees stories where there aren't any, you know, the mystery of Smuggler's windmill, which turned out to be

you'd torn his trousers and on an air and she was repairing them. That's where they were there. Yep. And then you have Susan. And I think there's lots of Susan-ness that's fallen up and down the ways and into mystic and to Tiffany. Yeah. Tiffany is very different from the young Susan we meet in soul music, but there's definitely a shared DNA thing that maybe just comes from the quorum, ladies' college education. Yeah. Although it's not like such a deliberate rejection of everything. It's just, no, that doesn't sound right. Yeah. So Susan sighs at monsters made real because she knows the reality behind them. So that's why in Hogfather, she's frustrated. She has to get the poker.

And then it's death who has to show her the necessity of stories that we have to believe the small stories so we can believe the big ones that's the culmination of Hogfather. Whereas Tiffany here is very willing to accept quite quickly to find the stories are real, but that doesn't mean all of them have to be. Yes. And so she gets frustrated with the stories. It's a different direction to Tiffany, but still finding the reality in them when she's thinking about how annoyed she was with the fairy tale books. Like, well, is the prince really handsome? And what does it mean to be beautiful in the day as long when a winter the sun barely comes up? I love it. It sounds like they're kind of

just like refuting corporate nonsense kind of thing. Like you're saying words and they mean fuck all actually. Yeah. I think she'll grow up to be a bane on the life of PR people. Don't let influencers know Tiffany. And one thing she thinks about is you were told that the old which lived all by herself in a strange cottage made of gingerbread or which ran around on giant hen's feet. I misread that as and or the first time I read that. So I was picturing like a Baba Yaga, but made of gingerbread cottage type thing. Oh, tasty and frightening. I love it. Yeah. So I just I want us all to take a moment and enjoy that mental image of the gingerbread cottage. Gingerbread or is it a gingerbread cottage on chicken feet? On chicken feet.

Yeah. Otherwise it'd be on hygienic. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Because otherwise there's nothing on hygienic about a gingerbread cottage. Seriously, we were talking earlier about like hating having sticky hands and the gingerbread cottage always really grossed me out. And I read like canceling Gretel stories because just stickiness everywhere. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, that was a fucking diversion. She's frustrated with people who read too much into stories. And we go back to this Mrs. Snappily thing. Mrs. Snappily had died because of stories and that's made her determined to not take them at face value. And she's decided that just as stories have become a very real part of her life as she's met Jenny Green teeth and the Knack McFiegel have turned up.

Yeah. So despite this, sorry, sorry, despite this kind of conflict she's living through, she's still a child. So she does still get excited when Miss Tick tells her about the magic school. Yeah. And she's asking if a unicorn's going to take her there. She's not cynical and jaded. She very much has wonder in her. It's just now she's figuring out what direction to have it in. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. And it's nice that she wants to grow up to be a witch, not just, and you know, it's obviously she's got the, she's got the like soul for it as Miss Tick is realizing, but she doesn't want to become a witch because she knows she's practical and get a Hedology and this and the other. She wants to become a witch because

they're cooler than the princesses. And she is going to make sure that the stuff she doesn't like happening is not going to happen anymore. And she honestly, I think a bit of her just wants power. You know, she is the youngest in a really large family. She has very little control over her own life. She's having to look after the sticky thing. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing like inherently like evil about wanting influence. Yeah. And especially if you are a powerless person, like a child. Yeah. With a lot of responsibility and not a lot of control. I think it's something we've talked about a bit on the podcast before of how powerless is to be a child and how frustrating that is, especially when we were talking about Amazing

Morris. So when Tiffany's imagining- Yeah, we didn't even have to make cheese. No. I would like to make some cheese. Anyway, when Tiffany's imagining becoming a witch and she's gone to Miss Tick and she's saying, well, I do all that by magic. And she gets things sort of done for her by magic. You know, her chores do themselves. The, the feagles fill the buckets, fill the logbox, chair in the butter for her. I'm not sure where they got the sprigs of parsley from. I'm assuming they've got some growing in the garden. I like that she does immediately, oh, like, leap over the expectations of Miss Tick. And like the toad of Miss Tick, obviously, we never think she'd get the feagles on side. And, you know, she'll never get chores done by

magic. That's out of the other. And like, immediately, she's like, no, I'm better. Yeah, I'm built different. You don't need to underestimate me, but you do then get a chance to return to something that's been the topic of entire witches books in the past, which is a mystic explanation of once you learn magic, you learn when not to use it. Yeah. And B, it doesn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done when Tiffany's thinking about how granny handled things, especially with the Baron and his dog, and with bringing the lamb back to life. Yeah. She learns very rapidly that not using magic is all well and good, but also sometimes the magic you're using doesn't feel like magic to you. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, she knows the buckets filling themselves and the logbox filling itself isn't magic, it's pyctoses. Yes. But that doesn't stop it being a little bit magic. Yeah, for sure. The thing about the like, not using magic unless you've done the thing about magic is knowing when not to use it. I love, it's a very kid thing that she learned at like that day and then said it to the knack-backed feagles. Like, don't you know that? Like, we immediately are forgetting about how you didn't know that a minute ago. It's like, very know all little girl again called out. Yes. No, I definitely did that more than once. Like, as soon as you learn a thing, then you are on top of the world. Come and leave. You don't know that thing that I only learned

like yesterday. The kids are the worst, slash the best. A tiny little side tangent, when she goes to the Arkham Hills, she's opening her eyes a second time. She's trying to find the magic school. Yes. There's something so specific about, I know, like I said, it's inspired from real bits of folklore in our world, but there's something so specific about there being stories about places you go about folklore existing in the bones of land. Yeah. She might know some magic is real. She might just be learning what is real and what isn't, and when to use magic that she doesn't entirely have or know how to use. But the magic of these stories being built into the bones of the land is something that's always

been there. Yeah. It's some, it's kind of a, you forget almost that it's a disc world book a lot of the time because it's very set in a landscape we recognize now. Yeah. And it's ever so meta, isn't it, to have the structure of the story where the child is in their own world and step and try and find the next world within it, or then eventually do. But it's already within a fantasy world. Yeah. That's kind of amazing. It is amazing. And just like the folklore in the bones of a place we don't, like the disc world has folklore. That's really cool. Yeah. And I guess we knew it already. But have we ever like said it like that? That's pretty cool. I mean, there's literally a book called The Folklore of Discworld. So I feel like we... Well, okay, yes. That is literally next

to me. And now you say that, I feel a little silly. But I don't think I've ever said it in that order. No, I don't think we've said it like that before. But it is a beautiful thing. And the only time we really experience something like folklore on the disc world is around witches. So I think it's something incredible here where Project's gone, all right, shiny new witches arc, entire new character, new stories to tell, new place to tell them. Because so far, which stories have been, you know, well, obviously, we go on a whole bit of this January. It's been, it's been Lanker, it's been mountains. And it very definitely, but it definitely sets the places not too far away. So you can see the mountains, the brights in the sky. And we can assume those are the same mountains where

Lanker and everything is. Yeah. Yeah, we know, because we've got a map behind Joanna's head, that even if you didn't know, you can... I'll get the corkboards and string out for it eventually. So yeah, I think it's really beautifully and definitely done to find another direction to interrogate stories in after 30 fucking books. Yeah. And well done. I don't think you repeated yourself. I probably did. Well, I can't remember. And that's the main thing. I forgot the... Who else are we talking to? It's just me here. I forgot the feagles turned up in fucking Carpe Juggernaum. I'm hoping our listeners forget what bollocks I've said week to week. Yeah, we can, but I hope that's basically, I think,

how we keep long-term listeners. We're big fans of yours. People binge listen to this podcast. I can only apologize. We don't know what we said three years ago. I don't know what I said three weeks ago. We actually had a listener tweet us the other day based on a conversation we were having about wasps and things last week and said, have you seen the golden syrup tin, the lion with all the wasps around it? And I saw it was like, I feel like we've explained the origins of that tin design on the podcast, but I could not tell you where or when. It was in one of the Patreon episodes, The Rabbit Hole, when I was talking about bees. Okay, there we go. Lions and bees. Anyway.

Bugonia. Before we go on on Rabbit Hole, would you like to... Oh, no, I can't go back down the bees. Yeah, okay. Let's go a bit higher up and talk about chalk and sheep. Okay. Okay. Fine. Very well. So, I just thought I'd look into the background, just in the history of the landscape, because it is so, so heavily based on round world landscapes that were surrounded by, I thought it was probably worth having a little look see. And so, it's based on the chalk downlands of England, downlands. They're most prevalent

in the south of the country for its geological reasons. And the largest is Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, where Pratchett is from. They're also known as chalk wolds, as Granny Aking mentioned. And it seems kind of quintessentially English, doesn't it? Even to those of us who haven't lived in that region, it just seems so fairy English. And I don't know if that's just because of all of the media we're bombarded with from very young age or what, or just maybe because it's such a soft, rounded version of what you see everywhere else. If you think about the opening shots of the credits of Vicar of Dibley, the way the camera rolls really slowly and lazily over all of these green fields while the Lord is my shepherd's being

sung. Yeah. It is so English. As on Discord, the round world chalks are and have been for a long time, good, cheap country. So the chalk downland is often unsuitable for agriculture, because it's kind of shallow soil. They're difficult slopes, even though they look like gently undulating hills. When it comes to trying to plant some crops, it's a little bit fucking much. And there's always been a bit more rich soil right at the bottom, because it gets washed down. Literally, it just gets rained off the top of the hill. And over thousands of years, it gets a bit better at the bottom of the hill. So that's where you grow your stuff. And then you've got all the sheep grazing on the top. And a lot of the biodiversity and the flowers that they were talking about here,

because of a mixture of these, of sheep and of wild grazing animals. Sheep stung also helps enrich the land, which has helped like the wildflower effusion, stuff like that. Obviously, lots of bees like it. We like bees. And it's one of those interestingly English things. And I'm sure they must have equivalents in other parts of the world, but where something that is very man-made becomes such a part of the natural bones of England. And so hedges are another good example. Something that's been around for hundreds or thousands of years and are now a really important part of the ecosystem. So it was thousands of years ago, those hills first got deforested. And some of them have now been reforested. And that started some discussion about,

is that like rewilding at this point when they've been chalked down lands for thousands of years? That's a really interesting discussion, I thought. But despite all of that, despite it being just very good sheep country, the kind of changing economy over the last couple of centuries. So will is less of a profitable business than it was. It had a big boom at one point. And then obviously, so simmer down again, meant that agriculture, even if it was pretty sparse agriculture and quite difficult, suddenly became the more profitable option. And so a lot of it got piled and whatever way you need to make it arable. And it was progressing like that in an alarming rate before luckily, quite a lot of organization went, no, no, no, wait, no, stop, stop that. And now

they're protected. How strong those protections are at the moment, I don't know. But you know, yeah, just the whole place, the whole place just seems to inspire poetry and people. So this is from natural England from like a paper on the different types of landscape in England. But this is like a from a scientific body. It sounds so poetic. It's like the chalk world's landscape character type has a strong unity of character with a simple and recurring palette of features. The repetitive rhythm of the folded rolling landform of the open plateau is particularly distinctive with the regular pattern of the extensive arable fields further emphasizing the simplicity. This is a landscape of large scales where the wide expanses of the large fields

meet vast skies and afford extensive and exhilarating outward views across the plateau as well as to adjoining areas. And like you can hear the scientific information in there, but it's written by someone who saw it and was like, I fucking love that. Yeah, there's a beautiful, like soft rhythm to it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it just, it just does seem to like mirror it. And the history there is very deep. As you said, the artificial hills and like the old pretty, what do you say, Neolithic period. Yeah, yeah. It was quite important in formative years of Christianity in the country, that whole area. It was really heavily populated area for a long time that apparently changed during the plague because it was very densely populated. A lot

of villages became very quickly depopulated. And there are now a lot of abandoned medieval villages around there, very archaeologically interesting kind of stuff. The last bit I've kind of pulled out is like almost a foreshadowing for next week, because this is from a book called A Shepherd's Life, which I will come back to at length next week, but I'm feeling a bit smug about because it was like written in 1900, something like that. And I came across it during my research on this. And then about an hour later, I was reading a thread on one of the AltDot groups that Pratt used to contribute to. And he recommended the book in there. I was like, fuck, yes, I found the right one. But this is in the introduction. And he's saying,

it is indeed only on the chalk hills that I ever feel disposed to quarrel with this English climate. And he's talking about how all of the weather is just kind of amplified by the fact there's no fucking, there's nothing there to stop it. And he likes rain usually, then the wind or whatever. But it's like, out there, it's just unending misery. You are constantly blattered, by the way. I'm paraphrasing hugely there, obviously. This author didn't use the term blattered, did he? He did not say blattered, no. He said, through the revolving year in all places and all weathers, there's pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills because of their

bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for you, but against you, and may overcome you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monotony and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it's not wet. Here I recall an amusing encounter with a bird scarer during one of these drew response. So that's how he then goes into his interviews with people from the area. And so very cool. Anyway, he loves the place, but he's talking about like how like desperately difficult they are to live in sometimes. And I think we come into that more as the book progresses. But we've already seen it was brandy aching out there, trying to rescue lambs from the snow. Yeah, it's lovely in August. But when you're transported into midwinter,

as Tiffany was briefly, it's not an easy life. It's terrifying. Bleak nakedness, title of your sex tape. Wow, okay. Okay, title of my sex tape. I just realized it sounded really hard to hit someone else. Oh, no, that's brilliant. Well done. Sorry, now I've lowered the tone from that beautiful discussion of the incredible short kills. Francine, do you have an obscure reference for Neil for me? Sure, I do. So this is kind of a debunking of an obscure reference. Oh, but I've not debunked it. I found someone here. But Tiffany lit the candle, made herself comfortable, and looked at the book of fairy tales. This is when she's sitting in the house, the moon gibbished at earth through the crescent shaped hole cut in the door. And I was reading

that. And as I said, this is very visually clear in my head. The crescent moon in the outhouse, yeah. Yeah. And the crescent moon in the outhouse, I was like, why are the crescent moons and outhouses in my head? That's right. That's the correct shape for there to be. Is that a thing? So I googled it, and apparently the long held truism is that the crescent moon is there because that used to be the symbol for a lady's toilet. Like it would be a sun for men's and a moon for women's. And then that translated into just being the symbol you got in a toilet. Okay. Like an outhouse door. Outhouses weren't fucking gendered, were they? No, no. Maybe they were at some point, though, because I'm guessing there must have been like

public ones. Oh, yes, please. But I don't know if any of that has any meaning in reality. The things carved in the doors, like shapes carved in there, that's a thing that's always been a thing. It's a bit of ventilation, like it's a little ornamental thing. It was used as a handle. Let some light in. Yeah, all of that stuff. But the crescent moon on the outhouse specifically, there's a historian who wrote a whole thing on it in 2007, but he's saying basically he couldn't find a single example of it on an outhouse that was pre 1960. So it's one of these very interesting bits of retconned folklore, which he finds very interesting themselves, like he's a folklore historian. He's not saying like, Oh, this is boring. This is not worth it. He's like,

this is actually very cool. Here's a cool case of folk practice being picked up and made iconic by mass culture and then sent back down to the folk. So it got used a couple of times in various prominent media and then people associated it as I do with the correct thing to be on the outhouse. And then people went, Oh, maybe it was this and then that became what people were told it was. Yeah. He's just a parallel example of the yellow ribbons tied around something to hope that somebody comes home. Yeah, I think you told me about that before. It comes from the song, but then people like retroactively created folklore around yellow ribbon to justify the existence of the yellow ribbon around that old oak tree.

I'm not going to sing it for the listeners. Don't worry. Yeah, retconned folklore is a favorite. So I thought that was fun. It's not really reference at all. So I'd note that I was once in a man's house who had an indoor outhouse, like so it was he was this comedian in Vermont and I got to go around his house because like my cousin's friend's mom was his publicist or something and I was really obsessed with this guy. Have I not heard any of this? Have I not told you this whole story? Anyway, so I got to go walk around his house like with like he took us all around his house. Yeah.

And he had like this giant loft space like this is a huge beautiful house in Vermont. He had this giant loft space that he used to use for like recording and stuff sometimes. It was like about a recording studio. So he got really annoyed of having to go to the loo somewhere else. So he had an outhouse built into the room and it had like an honest to God. But like it sealed. No, it was like properly plumbed in. So it was basically just an indoor loo but built to look like an outhouse. Okay, that's cool. I like that. And it had a little crescent mean like carved into the door.

There we go. Sorry, that was totally irrelevant. No, it wasn't. It was relevant. It was relevant. It was an in house, out house. Right. Before I have a total mental breakdown, I'm going to say that's probably everything we should say about the first part of the We Freepen. Yeah, I guess. I could talk about it. We better save some for the next two episodes.

Yeah, I'm going to save some of the talking about this book for next week. The amount of time that I've said. But later in the book, we'll get to this has been a bit alarming actually. On the plus side, next episode is planned already. It's not. Sorry, we'll be back next week with part two, which we'll cover chapter five through chapter nine. So ends at the end of chapter nine until then. Any recent listeners join us very clear about that, not for your benefit, but for mine because of the time I stopped reading a chapter early.

And I had to do an entire, I had to discuss an entire chapter by myself. Anyway, until we're back next week with part two chapters five through nine, you can follow us on Instagram, true shall make you fret on Twitter, make you fret pod on Facebook at the true shall make you fret. So yeah, I told you I'd tell you where to find us. Just as the prophecy portal. You can join our subreddit community, r slash ttsmyf. You can email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks, and preferably not disease ridden sheep, the true shall make you fret pod at gmail.com.

And if you want to support us financially, please don't send us sheep. They're quite expensive to keep. Instead, you can go to patreon.com forward slash the true shall make you fret and exchange from your hard and pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. Francine just did an incredible rabbit hole episode on invisible and disappearing islands. And you can go back a bit and find the one about bees as well. We've got I think 19 up now rabbit holes plus all the other bonus stuff, which is pretty cool. It is exciting.

And until next time, dear listener, don't let us detain you. Did you know Elie has an annual eel festival? No. That's very Elie. Well, that's why it's called Elie because there used to be like abundant eels. Oh, really? Wait? Yeah. Like it means like Isle of Eels.

Follow Surprised Eel historian on Twitter. Okay. I don't wait before I forget I'm doing that now. Hang on. Let me find. Do you want to go to an eel festival? I totally. I think it's like end of April. We should go to the Elie eel festival. Is eel throwing and a parade with a giant eel? Wait, can I go there as a vegetarian?

We talked about this before. Eels are vegetable. Absolutely.