The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 149: Dodger Pt. 2 (Ah! A Snail Fork!)

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

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 2 of our recap of “Dodger”. Growlers! Percies! Firky-Toodles! Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Terry Pratchett: 'What keeps me going is the fight' - The Independent Pratchett audio interview from 2003 – one I'd not come across before - r/TTSMYF Music, Language, and Earworms | What Literature Knows About Your Brain The Balls Whistled Over Our Heads: Continentals and Cannonballs - Journal of the American Revolution Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I mean everything's covered in spider. I haven't looked at that link you sent me up. What's the burger drama? Oh do you not remember like ages ago there was a massive drama on the food subreddit because people were arguing over whether you call a fried chicken burger a burger or a sandwich. Oh yes. And then it like took over multiple subreddits including subreddit drama and it turned out the mod was also one of the mods in subreddit drama so people kept like getting blocked and kicked out of subreddits. It was great. It was a hilarious drama, but someone posted fried chicken burgers again.

And of course all the comments are arguing over whether you call it a burger or a sandwich. And it just delights me that the discourse might start again. It's beautiful. Because I don't know if that same mod is still in either of the, in the subreddit. Yeah. But because it turned into people commenting on like literally every post in the food subreddit. Like no, that's a sandwich. Yeah, yeah.

Like beautiful pasta carbonara knows a sandwich. Sushi knows a sandwich. I think that food drama needs more airing in the world. Like I follow a couple of like internet drama TikTok accounts. Yeah. Like I've definitely shared them with you. The literally historic and heiress girl or whatever. And I guess because they're mainly doing TikTok drama. And food drama doesn't seem to get as popular on TikTok, apart from that four bean chili thing, six bean chili, whatever.

And that was just really a few people being annoying and then everyone taking the piss out of them forever. Sorry, listeners, in case I leave this in. The drama was that some girl made a very nice six bean chili and a load of commenters were like, but I don't like beans. And it just kind of started this whole discourse about how not everything's made for you. I think what it came down to was these were teenagers who hadn't realized that the world didn't revolve around them yet.

So hey, it takes a long time to outgrow main character syndrome. So I've heard I've not outgrown I am the main character, obviously. Well, no, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Be on my favorite of my NPCs like I generally select you to be in my party. Oh, thanks. I'm not even like a side character. I'm an NPC. I'm thinking about this in the context of a video game where literally everyone other than the character is an NPC. All right. You're not an NPC to me. Not even a multiplayer one.

I don't play many multiplayer games to be fair. That's true. It's basically just Valheim. Anything in the world of nerdery we want to cover? I haven't really been watching the news. I've been watching the news, watching that news. Yeah. New series of Rings of Power is out. It's very good. I was about to say at the time of writing, I've been writing today. I've been writing a lot today. I have been

sat at this computer all day. It's fun. I'm very much looking forward to being in not this room. But yeah, they've done like a weird thing where they haven't done like a binge drop. They dropped the first three episodes and then the rest of it's coming out weekly, which feels like an odd way to do things. But yeah, the first three episodes were really good. I haven't watched episode four, which came out yesterday because... Well, that's what podcasts do quite a lot of the time. What, like drop three episodes? Drop three episodes and then go, yeah. I guess it's to get people hooked.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, but I feel like it's like the second season of something, how much you try to... Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that is good. And there was some weird pacing stuff where it feels like the episodes were edited because, re-edited because they knew they were going to drop all three at once. Oh, so make them more one episode-y. Yeah, I guess it was odd one. So rather than like trying, it worked though, because instead of trying to catch up with all the different characters and arcs in the first episode, you had like some in the first one, some in the second one. And then stuff started tying together in the third. But yeah, that's good. George R. R. Martin's been controversial.

Oh, what's he done? He posted a now deleted blog post sharing his thoughts on the second series of House of the Dragon, which is the current adaptation. Oh, I think I have a reference to this. Okay. Yeah, like for the slightly fuller context, House of the Dragon is based on a particular passage in Fire and Blood, which is a book he wrote that's written as like a history of Targaryens and it's based on this one civil war that happens in this history book. But obviously it's being retold from histories from lots of different sources. So the idea is that the book is possibly not completely accurate. In the first season they played on that a bit and said, ah, these are things historians couldn't knew. But in the second season they've literally just gotten away from the book and changed a bunch of stuff.

He went on a really big rant about how he's not happy about a bunch of the changes, including I've spoken to him and he's going to do this in season three and that will suck. So effectively spoiling the next season of the show, not in a spoiling like what happens in the book, but spoiling what the director of Sodom is going to do. So yeah, that got deleted. But I've read some other stuff saying, yeah, he's actually a lot more pissed off than he sounded in the blog. And that was basically a test of the waters of, can I make them fucking listen to me about how much they need to not fuck with it? Because if they listen to me, then season three could still be good. Which I feel kind of bad for the people actually making the show because they are stuck on

other control things like the fact that Warner Bros or HBO keeps massively dropping their budget and telling them actually you can only have eight episodes once they've written a 10 episode season. So some of the cuts they've made are obviously not their choice, but they're the ones getting blamed. And then you've got the very intense fanboys basically saying that Ryan Condal and Sarah Hershey, right, the last season are clearly the worst people in the fucking world for not doing exactly what George RR Martin wants. And it's been like, well, maybe it's not entirely on them.

Yeah. Yeah, I expect that's not to both sides sides, but I expect that is both sides have some points and are a little bit blind to the others. Oh yeah. Like I agree with some of the stuff George RR Martin said in the blog about how cutting this stuff out will make other stuff not as good down the road. But I also feel like maybe all the vitriol from fans, I get an overwhelming urge to do the, you know, George RR Martin's not gonna fuck you, mate. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. No. When I say both sides, I mean, George RR Martin and the TV show people,

the fans having a go at everyone can just fuck off, can't they? Yeah. No, I do hate people. Not our fans. Our fans are lovely. Our fans are great. They never yell at us for storing from the source material. Well, you know, we did release novels of this podcast before we Yeah, we were. The problem is all scripted, believe it or not. Yeah, but we didn't finish the novels before the podcast started

coming out. And then the podcast overtook it. And so now it's completely directionless because we don't have the source material to work from. Exactly. And I mean, our writers, I think are a bit exasperated with us at this point. I exasperate every writer. It's a skill. How are you? What have you been consuming? I mean, nothing really. Sorry, I'm so fucking tired. I can't fucking I'd live there. That's fair. Do you want to make a podcast then? Let's just make a fucking book. So I'm sorry. Dairy Girls. I've been rewatching Dairy Girls.

Oh god, please edit that back in. Hello and welcome to The True Siamakie Fret, a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one of Simon Chronological Order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is part two of our discussion of Dodger, the not a Discworld novel. He's dodged, he's dived. He's jumped back up again. He has done all of those things. Note on spoilers before we crack on, we're a spoiler-like

podcast, obviously heavy spoilers for the book Dodger, but we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series, past snuff, and 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. Trying in vain to catch up a screeching cab in the middle of a London traffic jam, I think. Coach jam. Coach jam. What do Freddie and Freddie and Nobby call it? Some very convoluted, all the carts are backed up so nobody else can move. Lock.

Maneu move. Lock. Maneuver. Yeah. Quick bit of follow up. I thought it was interesting with Ellen and Nerys mentioned in the Patreon that they found this book kind of unmemorable and hard to get to, which I thought was interesting considering I also appear to have no memory whatsoever of reading it, but I'm really enjoying it this time.

Good. memory whatsoever of reading it, but I'm really enjoying it this time. CHARLEYY I did. Yeah, I don't know. I think because I did read it a few times, it stuck with me a bit more. But even so, yeah, there's definitely plenty I don't remember. It's got some really lovely, beautifully written bits and yeah, maybe it's just because it's not in the large context of Discworld. We don't have all the, you all the bits of red twine holding it together. I've still got a bit of red twine here. I'm saving most of it for the third episode. What's life without red twine? You've got to have a little bit of red twine here and there. Oh, and great comment from Pete on Discord. On sewer animal suggestions, are sewer horses like water polo ponies? They must exist

because polo is a game played on horseback, but we never saw a one in the Olympics. Are they invisible but still thrashing away below the water's surface? Or do they have a sort of parallel quantum entangled, untelevised existence in the Paris sewers? And really, I think that's the question we should all be asking ourselves. Yeah, frankly, I'm ashamed we haven't been. Yeah, honestly. So thank you for that, Pete. We've established a glaring hole in our issues. Francine, would you like to tell us what happened previously on Dodger? Certainly. Previously on Dodger. It was a dark and stormy night, but even wind and thunder

can't drown out the shriek of a carried wheel and the scream of a young woman. A toshure with a heart of gold rises from the sewers to intervene, using that chip on his shoulder to really get some momentum with the crowbar. He's found by friendly strangers, takes the rescued lady to safety and bedrest, is quizzed by his new, kind but overly curious friends, and in turn starts quizzing half of London on the mystery of the screaming cartwheel and the accompanying fellas who won't get off so lightly next time. He also finds time to gently exasperate his landlord slash found family member, save a newspaper office from a brutal attack, and become the subject of sinister speculation in a smoky room. Smoky room interlude. Love a smoky room interlude. We need a sound effect.

I feel like it needs to be like a horror door creaking number three. Yeah, yeah, but smoky somehow. I feel like it's implied. Okay, yeah, smokiness implied. Good. Yeah, cool. Right, anyway, so in this section, in this section of the book, which goes from chapter seven through to the end of chapter 12. In chapter seven, Dodger and Solomon discuss the stars, but someone's watching in the dark. The next day, Dodger's up early with shining boots and off to Fleet Street for a shave. He has a close one, as Sweeney Todd takes a turn, but Dodger disarms him in time for the Peelers to arrive, and now he's really a hero. Chapter 8, Dodger and Simplicity go for a chaperoned walk, but there's someone marching them step for step. Dodger accosts Dirty Benjamin in an alley,

and hears about a reward from Harry the Slap. Dodger takes Simplicity to Charlie in search of safe haven, and they find him at the Houses of Parliament. In Chapter 9, our hero is not stopped by the guards for long as Benjamin Disraeli gets him in. Simplicity's German marriage has been discussed by higher-ups, the governments are being careful. For now she needs a place to rest her head, and Dickens takes them to Angela's, and Dodger's invited to a dinner party. In Chapter 10, Dodger hears the screaming coach while traversing the sewers, but Shia Horse Ablution slow the chase. He trudges home, takes Charlie to the pub, and gets a pile of cash as a reward for his heroic deeds. Solomon sees the cash, suggests a bank, and insists

on etiquette. During Onan's nightly ritual, Dodger gets a knife to his throat from one of Sharp Bob's employees. He fights back, reassures his patch, and rains down his winnings on an unsuspecting widow. In Chapter 11, after a trip to the bank, Dodger goes to be drawn, but not quartered, visits the Turkish baths, and a plan sparks after a trip to the bank, Dodger goes to be drawn, but not quartered, visits the Turkish baths and a plan sparks after a suggestion from Solomon. After another wasted chase of a screaming coach, Dodger visits Savile Row and gets a suit measured in error from Izzy the tailor. After acquiring a hat and only minor blood loss at the barbers, Solomon and Dodger go home, sponge down the crevices, don their finery and head for Mayfair. Sorry, I couldn't skip the crevices.

No, you shouldn't for special occasions. In Chapter 12, Dodger's plan clicks together on the drive and upon arrival for dinner, he lays down a challenge for Disraeli and Dickens seizes the story. Simplicity explains peace, Dodger inadvertently scandalizes, Robert Peel's wearing the same outfit, the embarrassment, and he offers to show Dodger the jakes. Making the most of the time alone, Peeler Martyrs about a murder Dodger the jakes. Making the most of the time alone, Piel Amartas about a murder Dodger couldn't possibly have committed,

informs him of the death of Sharp Bob, and suggests Dodger could fix things through a bendy law. Basil Gertin fuses about the sewer expedition. Angela invites Dodger to the theater and gives him an address, and simplicity at the end of the party blows him a kiss. Lovely. Very lovely.

Helicopter and line cloth watch. I'm cheating, I'm using Cambridge wheels again and going for the growlers for this week's helicopter, but mostly because I wanted to look up if growlers had like a fun origin. Oh yeah, does it? Like the word, it's just the noise they made on the crumbled streets. Oh right. A little bit like growling. Okay, that's fine.

That's fun. In the process, I went down through a weird rabbit hole of people who are really fucking into carriages. And then I remembered carriage racing is a whole thing because of the last season of The Crown. But I didn't have time to shove a bunch of that into this episode. It turns out there's a lot of specifications for different sorts of carriage. Carriage racing. Okay, got it, got it. We'll file that away for future obsession. For loincloth, the wonderful unmentionables which Dodger is indeed a credit to. A credit to your unmentionables, sir. How does Sir dress? I put my socks on first. Who's first? Shall I go first?

I've only got a short one this week. Yes, yours is definitely first. Now the streets looked a little like a fairyland under the honey glow of the evening sun. Although it must be said, only a little. I do like the little nods towards the stars of London. Yes. What was your quote? But now the hopeful dog riveted Dodger in the somewhat distressing sincerity of his love and Dodger gave in. He always did.

The distressing sincerity of his love is very well described when a dog just wants your attention, wants all your attention now. Yeah. Hi. It's a beautiful set of phrase and it really applies to dogs more than anything else. Oh, definitely. Yeah. All right, characters then.

Yeah. So Dodger. Dodger obviously making some personal developments and professional developments all in all. I love the- It's a real coming-of-age story. Oh, God. I mean, it is, but oh, God. The astrology lesson earlier in the section and his appalledness that sort of you get up and walk around, you think, you know, everything there is to know, suddenly it turns out up in the sky, everything spinning around like a top and he felt indignant he hadn't been

let into the secret before. Astronomy, I think, but yes. That's what I meant. I'd never put those two the right way around. Could be both actually at this point, let's be honest. Yeah. There's a bit of theology, bit of theonomy. But Solomon still thinks it's reasonably likely there are people living on Jupiter because

otherwise what's the point of it? Yeah. Quite right. I like the not really having a point of comparison. So as far away as Bristol, maybe? Little further even. Yes. Further than Bristol, which is my new EG burning down an orphanage. Yeah, so I mean, Solomon's the making of some brilliant kind of illustrations of Dodger's

growth in this one, isn't he? Talking about how Dodger's got responsibilities and saying this is good for a man because responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged. And I think you can definitely tell that in this can't you? As soon as Dodger is given responsibilities, even if it's responsibility he takes rather than given I suppose, which is looking after simplicity. He just completely changes his life. He's like, okay. And obviously seeing granddad die is kind of a little bit more impetus to that. But I feel like, you know, slightly different, slightly different mindset, whatever it can take you down a different alley. Yeah, granddad is the, okay, I don't want to die like this, but taking care of simplicity is the oh, yeah, there's a there's a lot more I'm good at. Yeah. And

there's a lot of like, you know, nice little introspective bits, this idea of being a geezer being a show being a game, which is obviously, you know, we were talking about last week. When he was not Dodger, he wondered who he was, but Dodger was a lot stronger than he was. Yeah, absolutely. I like the little turn of phrase with the Dodger in spades. I've come to think of it not to space, clubs, hearts, diamonds, diamond geezer. It's really like a word association in Dodger's head. Yeah.

A lot of it, yeah. I think one of the really interesting moments is when he's being drawn by Tenniel and he notices Tenniel's scar and asks about it and is honest about it. And he's not intentionally trying to put Tenniel on the back foot or on nerve him, although he obviously does by noticing it. He's just naturally very good at scrutinizing and then he's also very honest. Yeah, absolutely. I forgot to look up whether he had an injury actually. I'm sure he did. What did it? Yeah, I was trying to limit my rabbit holes this week. I didn't entirely succeed, but I attempted to limit my rabbit holes.

There are so... practicing fencing received a serious eye wound from his father's foil, which had accidentally lost its protective tips and he gradually lost the sight in his right eye but he never told his dad the severity of the wound because he didn't want to upset him anymore. Oh that's a story. Yeah sweet but um oh he's got a fine tash. Oh I've seen a lot of mustaches on Wikipedia pages today. Yeah tell you what say what you will about the Victorians and as a ways I do, but they did have some fine facial hair. They did. Not a fan of the mutton chops, but I like the ridiculous wall with mustache.

That's good. I like it better than the kind of faux Victorian steampunk twirl at the ends one too. Yeah, I've never been a big fan of those little twiddly ones unless you're actually playing a villain in a melodrama and tying someone to train tracks. That's the only time you should ever tash like that. And at that point, I think it just comes naturally. Yeah, if you're tying someone to a train track, you just spontaneously mustache. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Listeners, if any of you have cultivated a mustache like that, I should say please don't try to tie anyone to any train tracks. Yes, no, or take the fact that I have an ex-boyfriend who I hate who had one personally and that's

why I don't like them much anymore. I also dislike them on your behalf for those reasons. God, I was a douche. Sorry, Dodger's name reveal, I was about to say douche's name reveal. Hell yeah. Pip Stick. Yes. What a name. What a name. I like that we get Pip in there, obviously. Yes. What a name. What a name.

I like that we get Pip in there, obviously. Another little Dickens nod, but yes, making it much worse somehow. Boy name suing him. Yeah, very much worse. Yeah, a little bit of that. Yeah, that's a thank me before I dive to the gravel and you've got some spitting right about it. I still fucking hate that name.

Call me Dodger. Yes. As I haven't put Dickens in here, but obviously we get a couple more fun moments and I do like the Dodger says something about a bleak house and the notebook immediately comes out. Yeah. No, no, it's fine. Sorry, I'm not writing down anything about this. All right, inspiration barcicles, they're hitting. Any other Dodger thoughts? I quite like the way his letters, or lack thereof,

were described and that kept a significant distance between himself and the alphabet. Yes. Quite right. But he does know a bit, just not her. And actually, that goes on to, because we're going on Solomon next, aren't we? One of my favorite things Solomon did in this one

was talking about how, if you were better at your letters, Dodger, I might interest you with the works of Sir Isaac Newton, with the other philosopher. I quite like the using the idea of like something you're vaguely interested at as like a kind of philosophical carrot. It's not going on about it. You're not pressing it. It was like, if you learn to get better at your letters, I'll tell you about the sciences and the philosophers. Heather Meehan You can find out just how much you don't know. I've got a treat for a likely lad. It's a snippet of scientific information from the 1600s. You're

gonna learn a read first. So yeah, Solomon. Wonderful summing up of England in the pinch most governments settle for shooting people but in England, they have to ask permission first. and the happening to know, oh, I like the relationship with Izzy where he mentions, I'm certain he'll give a good deal to an old friend who incidentally carried him to safety when the Cossacks shot him. Just little hints of jacquem around the ears there. Yeah, little hints of jacquem and then you get a bit more jacquem I think when he's talking about like his biblical wrath. Oh yeah, the finger and the, god I hope he doesn't throw the Ten Commandments down because

I'm not sure the Essex floor can take it. Exactly. And when he stopped, I love this line, his finger stopped stabbing and joined its family on the hand and the tide turned back. The dark sky became peaceful with somewhat dirty glow of evening and the terrible finger of thunder and lightning fades out of Dodger's imagination. But yeah, it's all very, yeah, Dodger sees him as this terrible in the old sense of the word, figure from ancient mythology as soon as he starts going on one. Or in actual fact, I'm sure it's just Waggys. And this is around the time, the insistence here is on things like, yeah, you need to

learn how to use cutlery properly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Which is a wonderful detail. And yeah, he gets his full finery on which includes a Freemason symbol. Yeah, interestingly. Yeah, just building in is one of those he's really fascinating and you could read a whole book just about him, but it's not as interesting as just getting weird little snippets of information like he knows how to use all of these spices and stuff as you go along. Yeah definitely. Oh I was, because I'd kind of forgotten the ins and outs of this book, I was kind of expecting a bit of a My Fair Ladying for Dodger but obviously he didn't get that but more behind the scenes. Yeah, he doesn't learn to talk proper. You see the results, you see like correct himself

from Ake to Amnot and things like that. Yeah. The fish slice is just there to show off the fact you have fish slice, right? Yeah. Do they mean a fish knife? I assume so because a fish slice is like a type of spatula, but it might have been a different thing in Victorian times.

I don't know the ins and outs of fancy cutlery. That surprises me. I mean, I know the basics. I know how to behave properly at a formal meal and everything. We were taught that from a young age, but if I was presented with say a special fork for snails, I'd probably figure it out, but I would look at it and go, ah, snail fork. Snail fork.

Ah, snail fork. Ah, snail fork. go ah snail fork. Ah snail fork. Ah snail fork. Ah snail fork. Snail fork. I mean to be fair it's one of those great sentences that work equally well either. Any infamous son ah snail fork. There's the title of the episode but yeah no it's fairly simple you just start at the outside and work your way in per course. Yes and I feel like that's the title of the episode. But yeah, no, it's fairly simple. You just start at the outside and work your way in per course. Yes. I feel like that's the one thing everybody knows and then they get stuck when they meet a snail fork halfway. Yeah.

I always, ugh, I still, when I'm laying the table, have to use the old trick I did when I was waitressing, holding up my fingers to make a B and a D for bread and drink. Oh yeah. I don't have to lay proper tables. I've never worked somewhere where I had to lay proper tables. So I'm a lot better. I don't have whatever fits in which bit so that no one's knocking, no one's elbowing anyone else's wine glass. I think that's probably for the best. Yeah. Yeah. And very rarely has anyone elbowed a wine glass at one of my dinner tables. Which is again surprising. Yeah.

Also you've seen the way I prefer to serve dinner, which is cooking our food for 20 people, shove it in the middle of the table and then four of us eat until we cry. And I think that is the best way to do dinner. Yeah, I feel so. Very Mediterranean. Exactly, it's vibe-y. Anyway, simplicity. Hmm. Anyway, simplicity. How do you feel about simplicity as a character?

I know that's quite leading, but how do you feel about simplicity as a character? That's a little bit leading. I don't know, I suppose I hadn't really considered that much, I think... I get a vibe from her that she is inquiring and very gently trying to feel everything out. And when you put her next to almost any other character, that then makes her fade a bit into the background, I guess. Yeah. What do you think? What's your? I really am not enjoying her as a character, and I'm finding it most in this section.

Obviously, we didn't talk about her much in the first section, because she doesn't have a lot to do apart from be rescued and have a couple of conversations with Dodger. But sort of in this, I think it's because we've come from, you know, we recently did stuff like I Shall Wear Midnight and Snuff, and we have the Tiffany's and the Sybils of the world. And I just feel like as a, like one of Pratchett's female characters, she's very meh. And I was trying to put my finger on it. And I think what it is, is we have scenes of her standing up for herself, but we're never in her

point of view. And she's, she's very, like, I shorten names, obviously, when I'm handwriting notes. And so her name got shortened to simp. But I was like, actually, she is very simp for Dodger. Yeah. And there's lots of telling rather than showing. Yeah. I feel very unfair. You know, she's gone through a rough time. She's obviously glommed onto the Dodger because he is the only person putting her agency above anything else. Yeah. Yeah, I think because this is set in Victorian England in the real world. Yeah. Yeah, I think because this is set in Victorian England in the real world, I think

Ratchet has allowed himself less freedom to give the kind of agency that he's given his female protagonist in his own world. Oh, yeah. Because realistically, how fucking, how independent and pugnacious is a young woman of not high breeding but of like a who's married a prince going to be in this situation I suppose. Yeah and you know we have a backstory that she married a German prince who became a snivelling wretch of a man. But then it feels like all of her strengths like every time she's sort of saying actually I can speak for myself, it always starts with, I am a married woman.

And I just feel like she's lacking a bit in any kind of personality beyond I am a married woman and a fancy Dodger. Yeah. I think that means I am an adult though. Yeah, it does. Because again, you're in Victoria in England when I am a married woman actually carries some weight. If you were an unmarried woman, you are just a girl. It doesn't matter what. Oh, yeah, no, it makes sense as a refrain. I thought it was quite interesting when they were in the carriage on the way to drop her off, I think

it was. Yeah. And the tone of her voice changed as she said, in fact, I'm a woman dodger did you know that I lost my baby. And in that I don't think I thought this last time, but I kind of got the vibe that she was like trying to subtly find out if he cares that she isn't a virgin. Yeah. Because obviously, then she's married, but she escaped him fairly quickly, this, that and the other clearly not going great. Yeah. And you know, she might think him very naive or this, you know, but then as it turns out, obviously, nor is he nor is anyone he knows because they are just normal people. Whereas, yeah. And he announces not being a virgin very loudly at the...

I'm not, by the way. Just asked Ginny come lately. Yeah, I did think she came up with one of the lovely lines of the book with the peas in the pod. I thought that was lovely, but I thought it was just this, oh yeah, simplicity is not simple. And I feel like everyone saying that about her is less interesting than her getting a bit more to say. Because she gets the peas. Yeah. As Dodger compares her to Boudicca, or Baudicaire, and I was like, yeah, that's great, but I haven't seen her do a ton of Boudicca-ing and I don't doubt she probably could get on a chariot in Sac-London if she needed to.

Yeah. But I'd like to see her having a bit more of that attitude than just be told she has it. I think it was more, in that case, Dodger trying to say, look, here's a woman who was allowed to do what she wanted. It's happened. We all respect that woman. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think I think what you

were saying actually about it not being from her perspective counts towards it a lot as well. And not from the perspective of anybody who speaks to her honestly. Because if you think about LaTisha, Roland's wife's wife. She's a proper white blanket until Tiffany gets to talk to her properly. Yeah, that's true. I wonder if she was given a best girlfriend, whether we'd get a bit more from her. Yeah, true. If we got to see her actually say like confiding in Angela and seeing something from Angela's point of view. I feel like that's the closest she could get to a girlfriend, which would have been a great way to lead in to talk about talking about Angela. But first, let's talk about Sweeney Todd.

Okay. Yeah, it's really hard to get from simplicity to Sweeney Todd smoothly, isn't it? Well, we've got alliteration. What more do you want? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Perfect. Yeah, what a sad twist on this tale. Yeah. Brief context as well, because I like Sweeney Todd the musical, resisting the urge to start shout singing things. But yes, Sweeney Todd first appeared as a villain in a Penny Dreadful serial called The String of Pals. There are older versions, which is sort of early 19th century. There were older versions of the story as in a murderous barber and the product of his murders being turned into pies in places like France and everything. Dickens references pie shops using non traditional meats in the Pickwick papers.

There is absolutely zero evidence of there being any historical basis for Sweeney Todd, he was not a real person. But there is an author, journalist and nonfiction author Peter Hayning, who has written multiple books claiming that Sweeney Todd was a real person. And many other historians have gone, there's just no fucking evidence. Apart from you saying it. Stop, stop muddying the sauce. But the story we're familiar with, you know, put away for something you didn't do and Judge Turpin and the Joanna of it all comes from a 1973 play by Christopher Todd and then obviously the Sondheim musical was based on the play which came out for the first time in 79. Wow, so that was all quite close together. That's interesting. Yes, it was actually a very recent, that version of the story. The song about, what is it called, No Place Like London, was what I was thinking of even in the first part of this book, before we got to Sweeney Todd, just the whole in the

world, like a great big pit in the vermin of the world, and hammer it, morals aren't worth whatever he can spit, etc. It goes by the name of London. Yes. As I say, etc. There was one more line, why didn't I? Like you said, it's the same amount of syllables, Francie. Swing your razor, hi sweetie. Sorry. But yeah, this version of it's very, very interesting, very, you get a really

interesting psychological break of somebody who is, it's very Magnus archives almost in its kind of complexity of this weird psychosis he's in, where he thinks he's, you know, finishing off the dead men who have come back. It's a brilliant bit of horror writing as well because there's obviously there's an audience expectation like going into the scene because I feel like almost anyone reading it would have heard of Sweeney Todd in some way and have like just a familiarity with the fact that it's a barber who kills people if nothing else. And then you just get the basics of sort of setting him up, of him just being incredibly

morose, but trying to tell the jokes anyway. It was like putting rouge on a skull. So we know this nasty thing's going to happen, but then the war flashbacks start and he sort of is, while he's doing the foam and the foam starts just sort of going everywhere and sort of spotting around the room as he starts saying things like, do you know what a cannonball can do? Yeah. And there was one line of it I thought was beautifully written as well. Our glorious heroes, some seeing for those with no eyes,

some carrying those with no legs and some screaming for them with no voice. I say beautifully written, like obviously it is horror, it's dark, but it's wonderfully written, it's well done. Yeah, it's another kind of callback to Monstrous Regiment, I think, the way he describes warfare in this one, because Monstrous Regiment was, you know, possibly the most realistic of the Discworld books in a lot of ways. Yeah, just this pre-industrial warfare, warfare that was still just dreadful. The fact that it's all in terms of aftermath here of the people it's affected and what it's done to them.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I quite liked the way described as kind of slurring the muttering as well. The words blurred as they tried to get out one after the other, some of them so urgent to get away from the swaying man that they overtook themselves. It was still doing some hell of metaphors halfway through this very tense scene. CHARLEYY I'll talk about the aftermath of it a bit later, but just as a scene in the book, it really stands out as something kind of visceral and terrifying. Especially compared to the last armed person that Dodger took down. Yeah. Which in case of he's drunk, he's got a bread knife and he just needs someone to remind him not to do that.

Yeah, yeah. And compared to the last in this section that Dodger takes down, which is a- Oh, yeah. He's a prick. He's also drunk. And he needs someone to remind him not to do that. Yeah, there's no reminding Sweeney Todd not to do this. No, no. And yeah, it's interesting how much it preys on Dodger's mind throughout this whole thing, yeah. Yeah. And then who have we got next?

Disraeli. Disraeli, a less likable character than most of them. No, interesting historical chap. Prime Minister twice and very prolific novelist as well. Yeah. I didn't go into a ton of historical research because there are only so many hours in the day. Yeah, no, but I mean just the way he's portrayed her. Oh yeah, dickhead. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's portrayed her. Oh, yeah, dickhead. Yeah. Yeah

Yeah, he's he's not like one of the bad guys but Um, yeah, I where is it? Sorry Yeah, um, I do not much like your friend ministered as Rayleigh He's someone who sees that there are two sides to every question. He kind of floats if you get me It's like everything was well like some cloth you could shake and pick up again. My mother said such people are innocent but dangerous. Yeah, some person who thinks like, you know, it's the devil's advocate type thing. It's the, yeah, let's give equal weight both sides. Let's treat this as the thought experiment, even though it's directly affecting people's lives.

Yeah, very that. And Dodger does sort of not totally dislike him when he originally meets him because he gets the wink and thinks of it as you know, one Dodger to another. So I think there's a bit of Dodger that respects some of that aspect of him. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, yeah, again, I think I don't think he's like a... Yeah, he's not a bad guy. Yeah, he's a politician. Yeah, he's a politician. Very much a politician in a way that none of the others really are even till. Yeah. When you get the moment where Dodger turns up at the dinner party and Disraeli says, Oh, wonderful. The young Tosha transmuted into a gentleman. Excellent.

Yeah. And it really pisses Dodger off because everyone else is like, oh yeah, okay, gentleman. He's a bit of a new gentleman, but look, he's a gentleman. And Disraeli acts like a dog that's done a particularly good trick. Niamh Yeah, and I suppose in most of the dinner parties that Disraeli went to, that would be the way to act. But like, he's at this particular dinner party full of particularly accepting and interesting and open people. And so he sticks out as a dick even though I'm sure in the House of Commons he would not.

Do you get a bit of a sense of Pratchett's doing his fantasy dinner party but if it all had to be Victorian here? Because you've got Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and obviously Basil gets very interesting. Definitely. I mean Pratchett said he had to shove some of the timeline around a bit to get the people he wanted in the book. Like, just really, I think wouldn't have been what he was at this point, and things like that. So, yeah, definitely. The creditor, Fala with Lovelace. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was a nice little nod. God, I love Hayley Lovelace. Anyway, yeah, and then Angela Burrack-Cootes.

Yes, yeah. Is it Cootes or Coats? Coats. Well, it was shortened from something so we can probably get a clue there. But I forgot what it was so never mind it. I quickly had a glance at her Wikipedia. She was very, very interesting and I could have spent hours there. But I like Solomon mentions that she keeps bees and says you need to be a very sensible person to keep bees. Somebody who thinks about things, plans ahead and thinks about the future. She didn't just keep bees though, she was president of the British Beekeepers Association from 1878

to 1906. Very good time. Yeah. I just think being president of anything for that long, but the British Beekeepers Association, you've got to work to do that. That was part of the first in a really great list of sort of things she was in charge of and promoted. And another one was drinking fountains for dogs around London. Oh, superb. Yeah.

I've just got a supporter of the British Horological Institute. God, look at this stuff. And then obviously relevant to this one, she did indeed set up at least one probably more refuge basically. Yeah, the second cottage. The second workers and the teacher I think. Fallen women. Yes, yeah. Yes, I don't think they would.

I like Dodger's first impression of her, which is, you saw it once with this lady, you'd need to be either direct or silent. She had the look of somebody who inevitably won arguments. Martin Cheslewit was dedicated to her. That's a fun one. So Dickens did know, I think, most of these people in real life. But I, you know, Dickens, I think knew everybody. He's one of these almost rare, maybe not so rare in this time period, but you know, people who are valued so much now and were equally valued in their time. Like, yeah, we need to do some more reading on her because she sounds really cool. And she is wearing, of course, a Beetlejuice dress in the main picture of her on the wiki.

Yes, it's a very cool dress. I would wear that. No, I wouldn't, but I'd like it. I would and then I regret it after like five minutes because I don't wear corsets anymore and I'm uncomfortable. Yeah, I forgot about the corset underneath it, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to be uncomfortable for even a second. Robert Peel. She was the president of the British Goat Society.

She was president of the British Goat Society. Was she reincarnated as Terry Pratchett? I think maybe she was. We've played this whole thing wide open. Obviously she died before Pratchett was born, but maybe she just, you know, chilling out for a bit. Waited. Yeah, I would. You've done all that. You can sit down for a bit and then get reincarnated into someone else and write 60-odd books.

Yeah. So George Meredith wrote a poem in her memory. Yeah, amazing. What a woman. Cool. Anyway, right. So Robert Peel. Robert Peel. I don't want to root for the guy who founded the police, obviously, but he did clash a lot with Disraeli historically. So I guess we can support that. I mean, I fucking hate these topics. He planned it much better than the police at the time. Yes. The bobbies were an improvement on the Bow Street runners. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think, yeah, you have to take some things in context. And he was

probably not that bad, but also probably a twat. Who can say? Yeah. I mean, he was a Tory. In fact, him and Disraeli were both fairly foundational in the early forming of what is now the modern Conservative Party. Yeah, again, when you go back this far, it's hard to... Yeah, I mean, I don't think I really would have politically agreed with many people who were currently working in the Houses of Parliament in the 19th century. Yeah, like the super liberal politicians, like, I don't know, maybe we should try and

discard husbands from beating their wives. Maybe the poor shouldn't starve. Not always. But yeah, I was having quite a nice time in my comparing, especially during the like the scene in the jakes. Oh, I liked that. Yeah, comparing Robert Peel in my head to Sam Pines. Because obviously there is some

basis there. There's some parallels that – He's the head of the police and he's smoking a cigar. I feel like the parallels are present. Yeah. And I mean, even also in the early guards books, it's very heavily drawn upon and then later when they're calling everyone Sammies and like Vines is, I think, not based on, but definitely has Peele there. Yeah. That was one of his layers. But yeah, it was interesting because, yeah, they're both cops and politicians and seeing Peele in this context, at least by this point, a lot more at home with it than perhaps Vimes

was. Although actually it's not fair, Vimes once he'd gotten over his old diplomacy phobia was pretty good. Once he found out that actually he was kind of employed to not be too diplomatic. He smiled the smile of a policeman, which was only slightly better than the smile of a tiger. Yeah, a lot of weird old smiles in this, isn't there, like Disraeli's smile like the morning sun with a knife in its teeth. Oh, yeah, that was a good line. That's got a sound effect. That's got a sound effect. But I thought, like, just looking at that conversation betweeneele and Dodger in the jakes, the

politician side of him has little hints of, you can't not be comparing in a more direct way with the characters as well. There's bits of veterinary in there. We will be watching you with interest. Felt very veterinary. And we know what goes on, Mr. Dodger, but sometimes we don't see the need to tell people everything we know what goes on, Mr. Dodger, but sometimes we don't see the need to tell people everything we know. Yeah. Now don't let me detain you. I felt like that was almost there at the end of that conversation. Yeah, definitely. An implied eyebrow raise, some background arching of the fingers. Hints of it.

Hints of it. Yes, the very Vimesian cigar, as it fingers. GERMES Hints of it. Yes, the very Vimesian cigar, as it were. STELLA As it were. Then we have Joseph Bazalgette. GERMES Yes. Again, don't know if I'm saying it right. This one is quickly mentioned because he's an interesting chap as well and I like how he's written as so enthusiastic about visiting the sewers and getting ideas. He is of course the civil engineer who ended up completely revolutionising the sewers and getting ideas. He is, of course, the civil engineer

who ended up completely revolutionizing the sewers during the great stink after the big cholera epidemics. Although he hadn't quite fully subscribed to cholera comes from bad water and not stinky fog, it was his work that ended up with making cholera not happen in London anymore because the water was cleaned as a by-product. Also, one of the interesting things I read is that he was very, very hands-on. Although we were seeing the big project, there were a lot of things he would go and physically look at and insist on signing off himself. Oh, interesting. So a bit Brunel around the years then. Yeah, definitely bits of Brunel. Who's at the dinner party as well? Again, Babbage,

Lovelace, Brunel. What a day. Got to have them. Mutton. Yeah, that fish with the eye on it. Yeah, that's lesser feeling. Real nice soup. Really good soup. Julienne. Julienne. Is that a type of soup? I don't know why.

I know it as a way of... Yeah, me too. ...sizing, but I think it means that the things are like that in the soup. I don't know. Yeah, I guess. I'm desperately trying to keep us on track. Damn it. sorry, soup. We get side trapped by soup so easily. Ah, it's an elf hawk. No, Puzzle gets the one who mentions Cloacina or... Cloacina. Cloacina.

Cloacina. I don't speak... I don't know. It could be either. I don't remember how to pronounce Latin Francine. The Roman goddess of the sewers, who was particularly linked to Venus and the Roman deities in closing, it was kind of an aspect of Venus. Oh, nice. Okay, cool. Yeah. And she was the goddess of the sewers, was she then? Effectively, yeah. Yeah. Of a specific sewer system, I think. Like in Rome. of a specific sewer system, I think, like in Rome. Oh, yeah.

So we've talked already about how they were just meant to be a water sewer. Yeah. Is that I guess that that's the case for her then? Yeah, I think this is the earlier forms of sewering. Yeah, it was to do with dealing with runoff wains because, yeah, waste management was wagons and pits. Yeah. And it is, yeah,, especially interesting because when you think of Klaueka, obviously, that's what has now been named. Yes.

Although now we know where it's come from. Call Klaueka now. Miss Sharples I just wanted to mention briefly because I like her about turn thanks to Dodger's heroism. She even gives a little simper. Niamh Oh yes, a little simper. Clara And I like her violent side coming out. If the bastard puts up a fight, pray kick him in the unmentionables, good and proper, do him up bad. Niamh Yeah.

Clara And then her face returned to its usual expression of low-grade dislike for all and sundry. Niamh I do like, I also like her substituting words, have it. I'm sorry to interrupt your little concussion, gentlemen. I think the last time I was watching them like a fork, actually, to bring it to cutlery again. Yes. Hopefully not a snail fork. Izzy, I only wanted to mention because of my deep, deep love for Pratchett's gift for run-on sentences. I think Izzy's introduction is one of the best. Talking all the time so fast, the best you could do was understand that Izzy would take care of everything,

had anything, and everything was in hand. If everyone really left it to Izzy, everything would not just be all right, but also extremely acceptable in every possible way. At a price that would amaze and yet satisfy all parties if and if this was important, Izzy was now to get on with the job. Thank you all so very much." And he continues on, never at any time ceasing to worry, fret and apologize to nobody in particular about nothing very much. Yes, you can see him very clearly. It's incredible. It says nothing about what he looks like, but you've got Izzy in your mind from that little, when I say that little sentence, it's quite a long sentence.

Because the only other male Izzy I know is from Our Flag Means Death, that is who I'm seeing unfortunately, but yes. I can see it. But now he's a tailor. And so George Cayley? Oh yeah, briefly, cause he was mentioned here. Um, I just wanted to say, Hey, cool back. Yay.

Fun. Uh, because we talked about him weirdly enough in monstrous regimen, even though he was not that relevant to him, but because it was brought up in an interview that I found around that time, um, and Pratchett loved him and we reckon it was probably like at least part of the De Querm inspiration. And I'm going to link to that interview again, but partly because I haven't listened to it in a year and I can't remember what the fuck he said about him. That should be fun. Also, there was another interview I found while I was looking up Pratchett to George Cayley because I knew I'd found the fucking connection at some point. And

then I found an automatic transcript of our podcast, by the way, we did this. Anyway, then that's gonna be useful one day. But I also found an interview with Terry Pratchett from 2012, talking about Dodger. And then he was saying, after this, he wants to write a possible sequel to Dodger in which George Cayley, the preeminent Victorian engineer and Charles Darwin will appear and get round to finishing the autobiography. Victorian engineer and Charles Darwin will appear and get round to finishing the autobiography. So that's a shame. Yeah. At least we got Darwin in Science and Discord 3. The varying flavours of Darwin. And then locations, I quickly wanted to mention Parliament because I like this comparison of Parliament to the Rookery. It's bigger, warmer, richer, better fed.

But after that wink, the wink from Tisraeli, just another street where people jostled for advantage and power and a better life for themselves, if not for everybody else. Yeah. Somehow I fell into the side of TikTok that does edits of New Labour, like a romance edit between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and Mandelson and Alistair Campbell. Okay. So that's just wanted to inflict that on you.

Thank you. Please don't send me those. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Well, no. The other location I wanted to mention is that when they go to purchase their hat, they of course go to Luck and Co. Because of course they do.

Because of course they do. And they go for a big, tall top hat because they're not going... A stovepipe hat. ...poking. Yes. In case you've forgotten, Luck and Co. were the place that invented the bowler hat for Edward Coke and is also where Pratchett got his hats. It's good they called it a bowler hat, not a Coke hat, I suppose. Oh, they do call it the Coke hat because all the hats are technically named after

who they were first created for. Okay. But the more common term is yeah, the bowler hat. So yeah, I just, I like that Pratchett put his favourite hatters in. I also like that Dodger's usual hat gets mentioned, which is like a hard leather cap and that's a nice practical sewer hat. CHARLEYY Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But I like that he immediately goes for the most ostentatious stovepipe hat in the show.

CHARLEYY It just works. I don't know why, but it does. CHARLEYY And there's a nice callback as well to the sort of mental image of Dodger and Oliver Twist with his hat. CHARLEYY Yeah, definitely. CHARLEYY Little bits we liked. A couple of fun tidbits about Punch magazine. Oh, okay. Do please. As mentioned in the book founded by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landels, modern name, who's a wood engraver. Something I found interesting, so it's subtitled The London Charivari. And that was a reference to a French satirical marazine called Le Charivari,

or Charivari. But Charivari, it's a folk custom, shaming a member of a community with a mock parade including a noisy piss-taking serenade. Yeah, I was about to say that sounds like a familiar word. Yeah, but this is just a direct quote from Wikipedia. Since the crowd aimed to make as much noise as possible by beating on pots and pans or anything that came to hand, these parades were often referred to as rough music. Yeah, I think we definitely talked about them when we were talking about rough music actually.

Yeah, so I just thought a fun little link there. It'll tie in there. Accidental tie in. Red twine, get the red twine. Now we've got to make it cross dimensions. Oh, not again. I told you Francine, no transdimensional twine. Hand it to that orangutan and he'll take it where it needs to go. Perfect. You there that mammal. Another little fun bit. You there mammal, what's today? The spirits did all the red twine in one night.

So British Library acquired the Punch archives in 2004 and that includes the famous Punch table, which was the massive wooden table, they have these meetings and stuff and it had carved initials from all of the established contributors. Yeah, we need to go see it if we can. Yeah, I really want to. But I like there was six strangers invited to carve their initials on it as well, not regular contributors, including Charles III, although he was still Prince of Wales at the time. And did he? He did.

He did. Mark Twain, however, declined the invitation because William Makepeace Thackeray had already included his own on there and therefore Mark Twain's initials were basically there. Efficient. Yeah. Oh, and speaking of Thackeray, Vanity Fair was first published in Punch. How's that so? As in the novel Vanity Fair, obviously not Vanity Fair.

Yeah, weird little supplement feature. I didn't know that that's in direct. A lot of stuff was serial that I didn't realize, I must say. Yeah, yeah, there was a surprising number of novels. There's a nice list of things that were first published in Punch on Wikipedia. I must say. Yeah, yeah, it was a surprising number of novels. There's a nice list of things that were first published and punched on Wikipedia. Oh, cool. Nice, yeah. Yeah, what did you like?

One thing I liked was the London Baths. Yes, the Turkish Baths. Yeah, the idea that the water went from the posh bit to the middle bit to the lower bit, where at least your wife Sophie. I feel like I read about in horrible histories. Really ringing a bell to me and it made me think, oh, horrible histories. But yeah, I just lying about makes you proud to be a Londoner. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just I just like that bit in particular. I enjoy that. The ceremony of the keys, do I know? Yeah, Dodger compares Solomon unlocking his door to some ceremony they do at Buckingham

Palace. I only pointed this out because I was listening to an episode of Folklands recently and Justin Chubb on there was talking about he had a friend who was a beef eater and got to go over for a dinner party and got to see a lot of Tower of London and stuff like sort of from backstage. It just happened to be an earshot when they were doing the ceremony of the keys. Which is a fun thing, you know, the warden, the chief yeoman warder dressed in his Tudor watchcoat and bonnet specifically. CHARLEYY We must have talked about it in context of the Unseen University years ago, mustn't we? I can fairly remember it.

NICOLA Yeah, I think it's something to do with the megapode or something. CHARLEYY No, it is like early, early Unseen University, there's a whole ceremony of the keys and the yelling and the... Do you remember? NICOLA Oh, I must have had them a minute ago. CHARLEYY Yeah, that's it. Thank you.

NICOLA The proper sort of interaction is who comes there, the keys, whose keys, King Charles keys, past Kings Charles keys, all as well. But it happens at exactly 9.52pm. And the final amen of the interaction is exactly when the clock of the Waterloo barracks strikes 10. We are a silly country. We are a very silly country. Occasionally I'm delighted by what a silly country we are. It possibly goes back as far as the 14th century and there's definitely written

evidence of it at least the 16th, which makes it one of the oldest, like militant, extant militant ceremonies. Although I am a Berm believer, just cause we've always done it one way, that doesn't mean we should. I feel like at a certain point, if it's nonsensical and harmless enough, it kind of gets like a listed building thing, doesn't it? I really think you should keep doing that unless there's a good reason not to. And as far as records go of the ceremony being as it is, it has never been cancelled or not done. It was delayed once and that was during World War II. Even COVID, I wonder if they masked up.

I want to see the updated risk assessment for the ceremony of the keys after COVID measures were announced. I mean, it's technically all outdoor and I suppose they can actually all stand quite far away from each other. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they had to yell it like in fraction. Yeah, like proper yell it. Maybe lob the keys. Super. Oh, yeah, sorry. Rain. London rain. Hang about where I might. He followed the old man out into what was really a drizzle with smoke in its eye. And then a bit later, the

rain was falling faster now rain that was undeniably London rain already grubby before it hit the ground putting back on the streets what had been taken away by the chimneys. It tasted like licking a dirty penny. I'm obviously very glad we live in a post Clean Air Act, whatever it was, world. But just to understand London properly or to see the smog just once would be quite interesting. Yeah, the smog especially, I'm quite fascinated by. Yeah, like that again, to bring it back to the Crown because we're in nonsense London. The episode about the smog was one of my favourite episodes of The Crown. Yeah, and the fog just completely takes over, no one can see anything.

Yeah, yeah. I was... John Lithgow as Churchill was surprisingly good, considering it's not a casting I'd have ever imagined in a thousand years. Yeah, I think I'd probably like the fact that they were willing to do the casting you wouldn't have thought of in a thousand years for quite a lot of the characters actually. I think it worked better because they didn't just go for who do we think would be good. They actually clearly auditioned quite a lot of people. Yeah.

It's also just quite fun. They use so many British actors that you can do quite easy. Like oh yeah and that one was also in Doctor Who and that one was also in Game of Thrones and that one was in Doctor Who and Game of Thrones. We've got the small cast of rotating British actors. Yes. Yeah, as Britain has six actors. Yes. By rotating, I mean between shows, they don't just stand there.

Yeah, no, they just twirl. 12. David Tennant. But not in use. Like on a stand. Amazing. Tell me about the Victorian slang, Joanna. I'm glad you picked this up because I completely

ran out of time for the last two weeks on the trot. I just looked up a couple of them. I couldn't find any origin for purses and what that implied. I think we can guess. Well, no, I know what it means, but I couldn't find if there was a reason why they would be referred to as purses. I don't like the implication of them being predators, but I do like Solomon's attitude of liking them. It seems in some small way they're doing this small planet something of a service by not helping to fill it with unnecessary people, which is an attitude to

have. Furkey toodle. Some debate over what the etymology is, but it seemed fairly standard to sort of to cuddle or fondle, possibly implying heavy petting. The toodle, the furky is a bit murkier. That was an unintentional rhyme, but the toodle... Merky furky. Oh, he's gone backstage from a bit of murky furky. The toodle seemed to be linguistically, especially sort of early Victorian, a word meaning to, you know, sing a nice little song, particularly to a child or something. So I'm not sure how we get Ferky Toodle. I wonder if that's where Doodle came from.

But I do like, I don't Ferky Toodle around is very clearly implying I don't fuck around. Yes. Yeah, I think maybe as well he's like editing as he goes is neither. My favorite one was Hey Ho Rumblo. Oh, yeah, okay. Which means a sort of commotion. But it's a common refrain in sea shanties and it has its origins in a medieval poem. And this quote is from an article called Music, Language and Earworms, which is a very interesting academic piece about refrains in music, which I'll link to.

The medieval chronicle poem Brute tells us that King Edward II liked to go from place to place in his bark and that maidens made a song thereof with hevelo rumbolo, this is in old English so I've probably not pronounced any of that properly, which probably goes back to the rumbling or splashing sound oars make on water and this became the popular refrain hey ho rumbolo, often sung by sailors or in songs about sailing. And it reminds us of the origins of referrains in work songs, which are singing together to enable smooth coordination for rowing or weaving or harvesting. That's great. Love that. Yeah. So I'll link to the full article in the show notes. It's a really interesting piece. Cool.

Another horrible history thing actually that I kind of have to remember are the different names for all the criminals. So Snowdropper here is the one that was mentioned with the getting, I don't remember that one in particular, but all the different names for like cut purses and things like that. I've got bookmarks here, a Victorian slang, glossary, which it's long, I'll link it to you. But I'm not sure it's the same kind of thing. But yes, I need to see if I can track down what is vile Victorians, I think it's called and see if I can find that exact list because that's what I want. I'll have a look next time I'm in a charity shop for that. Re-viling so many children's books. I've got my Goose Dance, got my special effects one.

I'm going to give in and buy the Narnia books again at some point. I think I'd end up just grabbing those on Kindle. Half a superior whore. Perfect. Should we talk about the bigger stuff or do you want to keep talking about superior halls? Well, I do want to carry on talking about superior halls, but I suppose we'd better move on because we only have so much time, which is what I want to talk about. Yeah, basically quite a short one, but I like the compression of time and space that Pratchett manages in a lot of his

books and in this one in particular, and I just thought it was interesting to compare to some of the other ones. So if you think about it mentioned here, how long ago was it that he'd heard a scream and jumped out of a foaming sewer? He counted three days, that's ridiculous. It was moving too fast, laughing at Dodger to keep up with it. And it's something we've talked about before in the context of Pratchett books, especially I think in Angk Moorport books, everything moves very quickly and you're like, oh wait, count backwards. Like this is fuck all time. So the truth, I think we were surprised by, weren't we?

Yeah, like the amount that happened in 24 hours. Yeah. It's a little more obvious with some of the watchbooks because it's very blow by blow from Vines is like waking up and that's a little more in line with like police procedural, the stuff he's drawing from. Yeah, prestige kind of thing. But yeah, I thought it was very nice. And then I thought it kind of makes sense for it to be like that in a city because one of the first things I highlighted in this section was London wasn't all that big when you thought about it, a square mile of mazes surrounded by even more streets and people and opportunities. And I was thinking, God, yeah, a square mile is fucking nothing, isn't it? Yeah, you think

about it, like, you know, there's a few fields, whatever, square mile, it's not big at all and the countryside is nothing.. Then if you think about like a square mile that's been deliberately landscaped so that there's paths that go all around the place and somehow it feels a much bigger part than it is kind of thing. Then you think, fucking city, yeah, and get this entire world squashed into a square mile. It very much feels like it ought to go faster. It feels like you've... Because you've squashed it together. No, I see what you mean. Because you've squashed the space together, the time becomes compressed as well. And so a lot more happens in a day than it will in a bucolic countryside setting.

Yeah. And I mean, like it is, I think, scientifically studied, the more different things happen to you in a day, the longer time feels. And so then if you think back, it's like, fuck, that was only three days, that was ridiculous. Like the novelty of things. And that's something you get a lot more in a city than it is in a countryside setting as well. Heather Miedema Yeah, there's more room for novelty. Emma Cunningham Yeah. Heather Miedema Unless your vines on holiday. Emma Cunningham Unless your vines on holiday. Yeah, actually, that's a good point. That does

break my rule because when you go on holiday, you bring the city with you if you're black and more pork. But in Lancor. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this, you talking about, you know, it being very blow by blow with police procedurals and we get a lot of vines, like waking up. Yeah. But once you get into the police procedural with a vines book, he's waking up on his desk on an hour's sleep. Yeah, he doesn't get sleep.

And I feel like you get that sometimes with like Tiffany books thinking about I shall wear midnight because so much happens in a day because she's only getting two hours sleep before her day has to start again. I remember talking about in Isha Ware Midnight how compressed the timeline felt. She went with Letitia, she went to Ankh-Morpork, that all happened over a few days between the funeral and the wedding. Yeah, definitely. I think you start to get that kind of odds in a good way pacing near the end as well as you realize that Vimes has had no sleep in the last fortnight or Tiffany is running off exactly no, maybe minus sleep because of the dimensions she's tripping through. Yeah. Yeah. And Vimes in Nightwatch saying, like, technically I've not slept for

40 years. No, don't worry about it. That's a problem for future me. It's fine. I lost the plume, that's the main thing. That's a really cool idea. It's something I was thinking about as reading this. I like that as a concept. I like thinking about it that way. Especially when you take into account, if you think about cities and

more people crammed into a small space, it's because building is so upward, so everyone's literally part on top of each other. Obviously Dodgers have been in his tenement attic. But in Dodger you've got the sewers as well. Oh yeah, got another layer. But that's the place where things slows down and he takes time to think because he's not surrounded by people and input. So he can amsummindedly walk, he can do that kind of thing where you switch your brain off and your hands do the essential grabbing, sixpences and farthings as you find

them. Yeah, which is a little vines walk in the streets at night that little bit, isn't it? Just the automatic actions. Yeah, your feet know where you are. Yeah, nice. Anyway, sorry. How about you? What's your main? Heroes and villains and truth. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer. Two really good lines about anvils from Solomon, this section. An anvil heavy section, that's what we like.

I do like more anvils. This idea of the flexibility of truth is obviously a concept, perhaps it does well and talks about a lot. That one book we named our podcast after. But this idea of heroes and villains I really like continuing on from last week talking about games, it's another very simple and black and white idea that has to be blurred throughout the book. Yeah. So you have these moments like Charlie tells Dodger that he's a hero after he's disarmed Sweeney Todd. But immediately in it Charlie's saying like, yeah, you're a hero, you're a hero and I am going to write a really good article about this. An article the likes of which has never been written

before since possibly the time of Caesar. Charlie is not telling Dodger he is literally a hero, Charlie is telling Dodger I am going to write about a hero and that hero happens to be you right now. You are a story. You are a story. And I like that aspect of Charlie. He is putting people into stories around him, not in a militia way. Yeah. And he tries to explain that to Dodger who kind of gets it a little bit, but not quite. explain that to Dodger who kind of gets it a little bit but not quite because he's not. Gabbard You get this great sort of fog of truth thing. The truth rather than being a simple thing is constructed rather like heaven itself.

We as journalists, as mere wielders of the pen, have to distill out of it such truths that mankind not being godlike can understand. Then he says the truth is a fog in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other sees a flying elephant. Which is where he definitely loses Dodger a bit because Dodger's not entirely sure about elephants. I'm not entirely sure I can say elephant. But I find it interesting, Dickens and William DeWerd come at this idea of truth from very different angles but ultimately end up in a similar place. William DeWerd come at this idea of truth from very different angles, but ultimately end up in a similar place. William DeWerd is focused on the truth first, but he's still aware he is shaping what truth he gives to the public. He finds it very alarming.

He finds it alarming, but he does it. Yeah, maybe Dickens has gone through the stage in his career. Yeah, it's possibly not even different angles, it's just different places. Yeah, it's possibly not even different angles, it's just different places. Dodger obviously, he protests his lack of heroism and I really like his line, I'm not no hero because I don't think he was a villain when talking about Sweeney Dodd in the aftermath of all of this. Dickens gives a nice perspective a bit later on, which is a hero is a man who might protest that the villain is nothing more than a sad, mad man in torment because of what was done to him. And that's nice because Dodger actually gets this reassurance of he has been a hero, just not in the way everyone

thinks he's been a hero necessarily. Yeah, he's more of a, not quite, but more of a Captain Carrot hero than a Coen the Barbarian hero. Yeah. And he does start accepting all of this to himself or accepting what he needs of it and adopting it because he's shaping himself into a new personality as he goes along. So when he confronts Dirty Benjamin, the mist of truth didn't like awkward details. So there had to be a villain, there had to be a hero. And in that situation, he needed to be the hero to put the fear of Dodger into Dirty Benjamin. Ionea He's adding definite, he does get it to an

extent because he's doing things like, and the knife, it speaks to me, like the razor blade of Sweeney Todd. Now I've got this little mythical detail. Gina Yeah, he's building his own mythology, which is something we like seeing characters do. Because he's building his own mythology, which is something we like seeing characters do. Because he's building his own mythology, he's not investing in it. He's sort of doing this, but he's also aware that he wears the character of Dodger, the geezer, as a coat. So when he's building this, he's giving it to the geezer, slash making it into another coat he can wear when he's not geezering. That metaphor just ran the fuck away from me. Which is amazing

because it's a coat, it doesn't have legs. For some reason when you said give it to the geeser, my brain put it to the tune of blame it on the boogie. So give it to the geeser. But he's sort of thinking about it, you know, seemed to be a hero and seemed to be clever, seemed to be trustworthy. And it seemed to fool everybody. But I think the great bit of that is he realizes it was doing the same thing to him and forcing him on like a hidden engine. Yeah. Yeah. And like, oh, he's got to be seen to be doing this and that. I feel like as well that's very much him talking himself into not being just a fundamentally good person.

Like as soon as he has some money that he's stolen off this dickhead, he goes and gives it to an old lady. Yeah. He is becoming that person slash has always been that person. But he just needs to consider it in this way. And you get the fairy tales being brought up in the context of simplicity. And she thinks, oh, I know, I thought I was in a fairy tale when I met my husband, but it turns out princes and princesses, you know, aren't what I thought they'd be. And just revisiting the games aspect from last week in this idea of this very simple happy families game, you have these characters like Simplicity, like Dodger,

who are amazed and kind of disappointed in her as well that the world isn't as simple as maybe it could have been. And Dodger, staring at Simplicity with his mouth open, a princess, you had to be a knight or something to even rescue one, didn't you? And she's been calling him a knight as he goes along, but it suddenly takes on this kind of mythic quality and I think the way the heroism hadn't for him. So I think it's really nice the way you've got these really simple motifs that are then immediately blurred and turn into very complex ideas as the book goes along. Yeah, it's nice.

Have you got an obscure reference for me? Yeah. Cool. All right, it is. Oh, oh no. Write this down when I was feeling less tired. So it's about kicking the cannonball stuff. Which I've picked up the nicer now. Yeah, that whole thing about kicking a cannonball and it fucking you up is kind of true. I don't think it would blow your leg off. I thought I'd just look it up to see. Because I was like, wow, that sounds weird. But I mean, it's still weird. It's near as damn it, to be honest. I found a fair bit of information from the US Revolutionary War and the Civil War in the US, because there's a lot of

cannons. There is one extract here from a manual of military surgery for the use of surgeons in the Confederate States Army with explanatory plates of all useful operations. Explanatory plates, lovely name for a girl. The amount of destruction affected by a spent ball is often surprising. The uninitiated on the battlefield will attempt to stop with the foot, a cannonball rolling on the ground, which is just about exhausting its force perhaps with only momentum sufficient to carry it one or two feet further and yet it crushes the limb put out to oppose it. So yeah, it would basically just crush people's feet to the point where they would need amputating and people did it quite a lot because it looks very much like it should just be able to happen. And then related, there was a chap called Major Sherbourne, who was very badly injured by an almost, they called them spent cannonballs when they'd stopped flying, I guess, by an almost spent cannonball, it was just very slowly frondling.

Major Sherbourne had been in the house with General Glover and some other officers. When they'd aid to camp had gotten up from his chair to leave the room, Sherburn had just seated himself in the vacated chair when a spent cannonball from the scene of action bounded in at the open window, fell upon the floor, rolled to its destination, the ankle of Sherburn, and crushed all the bones of his foot. And I mention this because according to Trumbull, Major Sherburn later declared, if this had happened to me in the field in active duty, the loss of a leg might be borne, but to be condemned through all future life to say I lost my leg under the breakfast table is too bad." Incredible. That's from allthingsliberty.com, which has a lot of articles that draw from primary source material. It's very interesting. There's also, as a side note, there was a belief about the wind of a ball, and that basically

you could receive catastrophic injury from a ball not quite touching you from the force it was going out. It seems that this wasn't the case. It seems that catastrophic injuries kind of blamed on that were more to do with the fact that the cannonball had hit somebody but hadn't left like a wound or something. So in some case just from where it's hit. But yeah, that was quite interesting. And then I have a request for an obscure reference for O'Neill because I was determined for this to be one and I couldn't find anything possibly

because I packed most of my superstition books away. I've only got that one, which is Sweeney Todd storing his razor facing north to keep it sharpened. I couldn't find anything on that. I'm almost certain, practically, I got it from somewhere. I'm sure I've heard of that as a superstition. Well, it made me think of was where you were telling me about keeping razors under pyramids to keep them sharp all the way back in pyramids with the pyramid tower. God, I don't remember that. And then I was looking up razor superstitions and there's a lot of forums from the mid 2000s on just razor, razor, razors, straight razor shaving.

Oh, that was like really in for a bit. And yeah, they were talking about various superstitions and like, there was a superstition that you shouldn't leave a blade out under moonlights, it'll blunt it. And then there are some things that like, oh, but you can sharpen your blade on moonlight surely from another superstition. And I just quite like the comment, what grit is moonlight? Fantastic. What grit is moonlight? Sounds like the opening to a poem, doesn't it? Yes. What gritties moonlight.

All right. Yeah, that's a prompt for everybody. Listeners, and Joanna and me, if I ever get time to write a poem again. Fantastic. But yes, also tell us about north facing razor blades listeners. Yes, please. I have a south facing garden. Can I sharpen my razor blades?

Should I? Probably not. I mean, you probably should sharpen your razor blades because you don't want to blunt. Do you have a razor blade? I mean, not a straight razor. No. Yeah. Sorry. That's what I meant. Obviously, I'm assuming you have some sort of razor in the house. No, I don't. No, I don't have a straight razor. I did at one point have one of those like safety razors, like the refillable dummies, which was quite good actually, but I forgot to buy refills and it went rusty, whatever. This is not necessary to say on the podcast.

No, neither does the fact I need to sharpen my pen knife. We will, that is everything we're going to say about part two of Dodger. We will be back next week with part three, which starts in chapter 13 and goes all the way to the end of the book. Speaking of things you can contact us about dear listeners, teensy little bit of admin. First of all, we are currently banning around the idea of a live Hogswatch special. But before we properly plan anything, we need to know if we're going to have an audience because we can't afford to not sell tickets to it basically if we book a venue. We're looking at

somewhere other than Beres-Nemann, somewhere that's hopefully got more convenient rail links to London at least. If you do think you'd be interested in coming to something like that, please get in touch with us because we want to have an idea before we said we book a venue and then don't sell any tickets. Also, the eagle-eyed Amunni might have noticed that this is episode 149 of the True Shell Mickey threat, which means next week will be episode 150. There's so many episodes. There's a lot of episodes. We are going to do a bonus 150th special at some point later this month.

Not promising when because I don't remember how time likes. So if you've got any questions specifically for that, we want to do a little mailbag thing, send us your thoughts and all of that jazz before the end of the month. Yeah, do you have questions? Do you have interesting facts that relate to these books that we've missed out and you're furious about that and you want to write it down and edit it to be polite email. Or don't edit it to be polite and I'll just sulk about it for a year.

Yeah, that's fine too. Cool. Anyway, so if you'd like to contact us about Razor's Hogswatch or 150th bonus episode, you can. Only those? Well, you can contact us about whatever you like. You can join our Discord. There's a link you like. You can join our Discord, there's a link down below. You can talk to us on Instagram at the true show make key fret, Twitter at bluesky, make key fret pod, on Facebook at the true show make key fret, our subreddit r slash ttsnyf. You can email us about all of those things, thoughts, queries, castles, snacks, albatrosses, straight razors, blunt razors, wonky razors, the true show

make key fret pod at gmail.com. And you want to support us financially you can of course go to patreon.com forward slash the true shall make ye fret and exchange your hard-earned pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. It's so bonus, it's so nonsense. It's so bonus, it's so nonsense. And until next time, dear listener, don't let us detain you. That's not what the microphone's meant to be. It's a twisty bit. I know, it's just the fact that it likes to untwist itself when I'm not looking. Chaos. Theory. Something something. Ent looking. Chaos theory. Something, something entropy.

Possibly. Pixies? Probably pixies. I'm 90% sure we have pixies. At least they're like the spiders. Fucking spiders.