The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 68: Hogfather Pt 1 (Entrailing Off)

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

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 “Hogfather”. Fun! Festive! Frighteningly Manic and Overly Curious Villainy!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:Joanna and Francine on a carousel in 2015#50YearsOfTerry - TwitterAnnotated Pratchett File - Hogfather Hogfather - Colin SmytheThe Big Read Top 100 - BBC (2003 list)LockPickingLawyer - YouTubeOmnibus Episode 303: Elizaɪᴛ’s ᴀ sᴡᴏʀᴅ. ɪᴛ’s ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴇᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ sᴀғᴇ.- comic on adi-fitri’s tumblr Lines & Squares - AA MilneLet Toys Be ToysHydrothermal vents: survival at the ocean's hot springs - Natural History MuseumMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com (intro music altered for Festive Reasons)

I look like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, which is admittedly festive and therefore appropriate. But I'm excited. We're recording The Hogfather. We are. And it is a good book. The world might be horribly going to shit again, because new variant. Oh, yeah. I'm looking to the news today.

We all bird of death. I know we've got to wear masks again from next week, but I wasn't anyway. So we've got all adults should get COVID booster. I will when someone offers it to me. Yep. And that's about it. Queen still appears to be alive or has not been announced otherwise. I'm going to give the context to the listeners that we usually only record

a couple of days before we release an episode. But for Hogfather, we'll be recording a week ahead of releasing just to try and have a jump on things, because we're hopefully giving you lots of content this month, which is lovely. Yeah. So anything we say about current events will be horribly wrong by the time it gets to the listeners. It is.

Yeah, if the Queen's dead. Please celebrate me as some form of prophet that seems reasonable. Yeah, fair, definitely. Storm Arwen was a thing. Not didn't hit us very badly, but we had a tiny bit of snow. I greatly enjoyed the fact that it snowed a bit because I'm still very childlike and gleeful when it comes to snow. I am a lot of the time.

I haven't really been this time. I don't think because it started as sleep. So you do that first moment of fluffy flakes and then I woke up and it was already kind of half gone. I think it was I was up late that night because we were we were it's a fun thing for listeners. I think we're allowed we are allowed to tell them now. We were up very late on Saturday night because we were recording

a little guest appearance on a podcast that's by Australians. So we very nicely stayed up late because of the 11 hour time difference. We very nicely did, did we? We very nicely did. Not that we'd be awake anyway at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night. No, not at all. Of course not. Anyway, so so we were up late because we were chatting to Australia.

Some listeners might guess what podcast we'll be resting on. That'll be coming out. Yeah. And some bonus content from that chat will be going out to patrons. And then I get yes, when I get around to going out to our patrons when I get around to doing the thing. Anyway, so I was up late, which meant I was watching snow. It's not so much the snow on the ground or anything.

I just really like watching snow happen. Yeah. Yeah, it was really, really tiny and it was really windy. So there was like just big blustering sparkle. It was quite nice. You've got a really good view for that kind of thing, actually, haven't you? If I look out the back window, there's it's dark. Yeah.

And front window, it's main road terraced either side. So there's not a lot of. Yeah, whereas I've got like first floor flat balcony and the street lights just up across the balcony and like a nice wide open space. That's pretty cool for snow watching, actually. It's great for snow arching. It's also surprisingly, obviously I've bitched about fireworks on here,

but I do quite like watching fireworks. Turns out that on fireworks night, five or six different displays happening within view of my balcony, which meant I could lie in bed with the curtains open and watch the fireworks. Fantastic. With the noise, not noise. Noise somewhat muted by keeping my door shut. Yes, yes.

Oh, bloody cold though, isn't it? It is very. I've got my heating on. I bet next. Good. I've had my heating on since the start of the month. But I put an extra duvet on my on my bed. I haven't quite.

I don't have an extra duvet. I have considered busting my big, fancy quilt out. But I think I saw a spider crawl up to it. Lives on top of the wardrobe. But I think I saw a spider crawl up there. So so I might just stay cold. Oh, I have taken to turning on the space heater in my bedroom for a bit. Before I go to bed,

I'm putting a hot water bottle in the bed for 15 minutes before I get into it. Yeah, good old old fashioned hot water bottles to the winner. Well, this is even if I put the heating on full in my bedroom and the space heater, the sheets and the duvet stay very cold. Yeah, which is great in summer that they they stay nice and cold. But in winter, it's it's like climbing into an ice box made of fabric. I might buy an electric blanket, but I just I feel like it would definitely catch fire.

Well, you know, me and my fire, fire paranoia, I had one for years. They are one of the most stringently regulated electronics because the really old ones used to sometimes catch fire. Yeah. When I lived in that attic room, I used to have one on all winter because otherwise, you know, it was that room you get frozen on the inside of the windows and wake up breathing steam kind of thing. It took me a minute to remember when you lived in an attic room. And then I remember the fact that there's a small home hole in the ozone layer

above that flap from the time that I tried to give you ringlets. Yeah, this is my my teenage home listeners. This is when I still live with mum and Joanna came around a few times so we could get ready together, which was in our early friendship days. I remember at least one night out, we both went out with dyed blow up to the elbows because we decided to dye your hair before we went out. Yeah, I had a pretty good smattering of it on my face as well, because I couldn't be bothered putting Vaseline where you meant to.

Yeah, good times. I used to have bright blue hair. You did. That's why your your name is still blue in my phone. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, there's not many people still call me blue. I guess some of the old nutshell regular as well. But I don't really call you blue much. Occasionally, if I feel the urge to shorten your name to one syllable,

it will be blue rather than calling you Fran. I just clean my entire flat. That's nice. Yeah. I got all my Christmas decorations out because I wanted my Santa hat. So they'll be going up this week. It would have actually I wanted to have them up for recording all of The Hogfather. But because we're recording a week early, that would have meant putting them up before the beginning of December. Yeah. And there are a few things I feel as strongly about as Christmas decorations

not going up till it's December. Why? I don't know. I just feel like Christmas is one of those things. I don't mind starting to feel a little bit festive towards the end of November. And as I mentioned, when we were recording carpet people, I like it. I can't remember if it was carpet people, if it was our last rabbit hole. I like trying to have all my Christmas shopping done. And it's pretty much all done now because I like being organized.

But I feel like if you're putting up Christmas decorations, is when you start getting really excited for Christmas. And if you start getting excited for Christmas at the beginning of November. And by the time, yeah, by the time you get to Christmas, it's just never going to be as good as you built it up for. On the other hand, I have learned in recent years that if you don't give yourself any bill, I agree, I wouldn't put them up before December, either. I'm being contrary.

But if you don't give yourself enough buildup, it's hard to get excited as well. Because like last year, I was busy right up until... Same. I was working. And then, and also everything got cancelled the last minute because COVID. But even without that, by the time it was like the week of, I was like, oh, I guess I meant to be feeling festive. But like, I haven't been thinking about it. And the Christmas fair was off.

And yeah. Yeah, Christmas fair was off again this year, which was same. Although my Facebook memories came up today with one of my favourite photos, the two of us, which is a really terrible one of the two of us on a carousel together at the Christmas fair. I love it. I don't even think it's a bad photo of us. I think it's just silly. You're in focus and I'm blurry because we're on two horses next to each other

and they were moving at different rates. That's just how I assume we always look. Yeah, good point. I look better with a smear of Vaseline on the lens. It's not a stupid photo. It's just I'm very short sighted. I assume I'm in focus and everyone else is blurry. That's just. Yeah. I'm just caught in the middle of a particularly ridiculous gin of grin

and I look really happy. But it's one of those ones where if I look at it just as a photo, it's like, oh, I look so happy and that was such a lovely day. And then I look at it for a second too long and it's like, oh, no, there's there's an extra chin. Yeah, it's very important not to look too long at those photos. That's the thing. I try not to look too long at everything.

The older they are, the better it is because. It's very hard for me to look back at photos that I used to hate and think anything. But oh, look at me. Apart from the years where like I was very not happy, but like my teenage fix. I'm like, oh. Generally, I just enjoy looking at them. I look very silly. There was also one that came up on my Facebook memories of someone

had obviously shared this picture about six months after the night out had happened. But it's me at about age 17 on a night out wearing sunglasses at two in the morning in a nightclub garden captioned just before she fell off the bench, which is how I remember which night it's from because it is the one where I went also to hit in a club bench. No, you weren't. You were in Australia. I fell off a bench outside of Pub Once as well and went to A&E

and you came with me and it was your birthday. It was very nice of you. Yes, I feel like they might have seen us that story. Look, if you can't spend three hours in A&E with your best friend on your birthday, then what kind of friend are you? Well, quite. Plus, I had brought a hip flask with me. So it wasn't like I had to sober up at A&E.

That's what kind of friend you were. I'm glad we grew up a bit. Oh, good grief. Weren't we terrible? We were. But yes, I'm starting to I'm feeling more excited about Christmas and festive this year than I was last year, I think, because everything was so, so uncertain. It wasn't obviously COVID has been awful.

But it was just that we were coming to the end of that weird month long lockdown. I knew I was throwing myself back into three to four very intense weeks of work and then probably another lockdown. And so it was the 21st we recorded and it was due to come out Christmas Eve. And we were saying on the episode, we were talking about what people are doing and COVID restrictions and we weren't sure what we were going, what was going to be allowed, but we thought it would maybe be all right. And then between that episode being recorded and coming out, Suffolk went

into tier four, which meant everything was going to be closed as of Christmas. Oh, yeah, tears. Remember tears. They were briefly a thing. And then beginning of January, the lockdown got announced. Yeah. Oh, because I look back at our at our Hogwarts festival before the next one comes out. Does it feel feel good knowing you're not going to have a.

A festive kitchen rush this year. Oh, it's so great. It's safe right now. It's the first one I haven't had to work for. No, eight years. It's so exciting, especially because I know I've managed to arrange things with my freelance work, so I actually get to have like a few days off before Christmas to prepare everything at my pace.

Joanna listeners, for those who haven't guessed already, it's a fantastic host and very much enjoys it. As I can just about throw something together in the depths of misery. Joanna does a very good job and does it with a genuine smile from what I can tell. I genuinely love feeding large groups of people. And I really hope we don't get any covid restrictions between now. I've only got five for dinner, but I'm hoping to do what I've done every year up our last year and say the door is open.

Anyone can turn up after four o'clock and there's cheese and biscuits and. More cheese. And I accidentally cooked Christmas lunch for 10 people, despite there only being five of us. If anyone's not had Christmas lunch yet and needs one, here's an entire plate of food. It happens. Are we opening the the the the lines? Opening the lines, the mail bag for the questions, by the way, listeners. Please, as last year, we will be doing a Hog Swatch special.

And so please send in your letters, send us your letters to the Hogfather and some any questions for us. Yes. Yes. Anything you want to know within reason, please ask us. Tell us about your cool Christmas traditions. Ask us about whatever asks the Hogfather for interesting weapons or I don't know what other people want for Christmas. But yeah, I'm assuming interesting weapons. Sward. Swarad. Swarad. Speaking of Swarads.

Speaking of swords. What a good book. I love it. I did start feeling a lot more festive once I started reading it. Yeah. So it helped that the day I started, it was also the day I went to the Jinx and Dayler holiday spectacular. So they combined very well. Oh, the the drag show in London. Yes. Yes. Yes. But oh, yeah, we haven't really recorded since then.

Listeners, I got to see Jinx Monsoon from RuPaul's Drag Race in an amazing sequined jumpsuit trimmed with white fur and with bellbossons saying a song about what a dick Santa is to the tune of Ra Ra Rasputin and then gave a whole TED talk complete with PowerPoint presentation on why Christmas is actually just stealing everything from queer culture. It was the most made for me thing I've ever seen. It was great. You didn't even tell me about that last thing.

Oh, did I not tell you about the PowerPoint presentation? You told me that was a PowerPoint presentation. Oh, yeah. Capitalism is bad and Christmas stole everything from the gaze. Anyway, so yes, now I feel festive. Speaking of stealing things from the gaze, I'm going to steal your line. Shall we make a podcast? Yes, Francine, let's make a podcast.

Terrible. No, cutting that. Please keep that in. Hello and welcome to the Two Shall Make Key Fract, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Fruett's Discworld series one at a time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagen. And I'm Francine Carroll. And we are talking about The Hogfather.

Yay. Dingling bells of floors. Two years. Noises. Two years. Two years of spreadsheet. Two years of spreadsheets and ridiculous planning. So we could talk about this book in December. You can tell it's all been building up to this because we don't have any kind of a schedule for next year.

We will by the Christmas episode. Yeah, that's exciting. I haven't written it yet, but I'll do it half an hour before we record the Christmas episode. Yeah, sounds good. So yes, we're talking about The Hogfather. We are. We are. I'm so excited that we're finally here.

Note on spoilers before we crack on, though. We are a spoiler-like podcast. Obviously, heavy spoilers for the book, The Hogfather. But we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series. 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. Dragged across the sky by two startlingly realistic pigs. Four of four. Four pigs, sorry. So yeah, it is. It is the 20th, the 20th Discworld novel, which is a wonderfully round number to round off the year, I would say.

It is. It's perfect. Yeah. Before I go into the intro, I have a small follow-up. The Carpet People release date, which I was unsure about, is now very obvious because Terry Pratchett estate has introduced a year of Pratchett celebrations as their 50th anniversary. It was the 16th, not the 15th, as I semi-confidently asserted.

But I put a blog post up and everything, you know how I hate being wrong. But yes, so we are now officially celebrating 12 months of Terry Pratchett to celebrate 50 years of Terry Pratchett. Yes. So I will be wearing... A massive bit of wood. That's what that clock was.

Excellent. So I will, of course, be wearing appropriately festive hats for the entire year. Fantastic. All of the Discworld novels being re-recorded as audiobooks, aren't they, in a star-studded lineup. Excellent voices and things. I'm very excited about that.

I probably won't get around to listening to all of them. I'm going to be realistic. I expect I'll listen to one or two. I'm not that big on audiobooks simply because my audio content is usually something I can do something else at the same time and I lose track in an audiobook. Yeah, I can do a podcast, but an audiobook is a bit much. Yeah.

I used to like a radio play when I still worked in the kitchen, though. I could have a radio play on while I was doing the prep of the morning. Oh, that's nice. Aren't you cultured? Francine, would you like to introduce us to the Hogfather? Certainly. As I say, the 20th Discworld novel. It was published on 7th of November 1996 and went straight to number one

in the UK charts, which was the norm by this point. Everybody loves Pratchett. It's a cracker of a book, it really is. Oh, yeah. Christmas cracker of a book, it really is. Well done. All of the characters are really well done. Everything seems very thought out and polished.

It's got three plots and they're all a joy. It came in, I've found this, this is kind of tangential while I was looking up how it was received. It came in 137th place in the Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey of the most loved British books of all time. More interestingly, that made it one of 15 books by Pratchett in the top 200. Nice.

Nortmort was the highest at number 65. Number one on the entire list was Lord of the Rings, so I expected Pratchett would approve. Reviews, I thought this very brief one was quite good. A damn sight better than pretty much anything else you can buy without a prescription or a license. That's Tom Houlton SFX. Excellent.

And then slightly more in-depth than yet only a short extract from the longer one was John Clute in the Mail on Sunday Gazette. At first glance, comic fantasy seems easy to write. If you can create fantasy worlds at will, Pratchett's Discworld is a flat, planet-sized dish set up on the back of four vast elephants who themselves ride a 10,000-mile-long turtle through into the space. Then it should be child's play to place there

whatever conmic antics might be desired. At second glance, however, the task begins to look a bit more daunting. Some of the most unfunny books ever written, many of them abject imitators of Pratchett have been published as comic romps set in the realms of fantasy land. The lesson these imitators have not learned from their master,

perhaps because it takes hard work to apply, is that comedy is not free, not even when it is fantasy. That's an excellent review, isn't it? Yeah, that's a part of a much longer one. It's all on Colin Smyth's wonderful roundup page, which I'll link to. Shall we read the blurb? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. What have we got? It's the night before Hogg's Watch, and it's too quiet. Where is the big, jolly fat man? Why is death creeping down chimneys and trying to say ho, ho, ho? The darkest night of the year is getting a lot darker. Susan, the Gothic governess, has got sorted out by morning.

Otherwise, there won't be a morning ever again. The 20th Discworld novel is a festive feast of darkness and death, but with jolly robins and tinsel, too. As they say, you'd better watch out. I've got to say, there's a lot of references specifically to that Christmas song in this book to the point where I've had it stuck in my head, but haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it

because it's on my Christmas playlist, which I'm saving for when I put my decorations up. It is quite a terrifying song, really. It is, but the version on my Christmas playlist is the Bruce Springsteen one, and it makes me very happy. Shall I tell us what happens in this first section, then? Yes. So we're going from page one to page 153 in the Corgi paperback.

And obviously, before this episode comes out, we will tweet things like page numbers and section may, obviously, like that's something you've reliably done. I'm going to be better. It's my Hogswatch Revolution. Anyway, in this section. It was the night before Hogswatch, but our story begins before.

It begins in the oldest stories with blood on the snow. It begins with Tea Time's admission to the Assassin's Guild. It begins with the turtle in a tangle of spacetime. And it begins in the unseen university with the bells of effect glingling the air before their cause as Archchancellor Ridcully demands the opening of a locked door. Meanwhile, Susan Stohellet, granddaughter of death and governess to Gowyn and Twyla,

deals with a monster sternly and catches herself remembering the future. At the Assassin's Guild, Lord Downey finds himself approached by monotonous gray robes offering a contract on the Fat Man. The Assassin, Tea Time, sneaks in for a meeting and accepts the contract. He has a plan worked out.

Susan takes her charges to the park, and that night she manages to reassure them on matters of the hogfather. Tea Time meets some new friends, businessmen of her sort, hires them for a handsome sum to help out with his planned inhumation. He grabs a dowry on his luck wizard to join the gang and sets out to pick up Mr. Brown the locksmith

and head to a magical tower after celebrating his new friendship by punching Banjo, medium Dave's brother, in the face. Death in the deepest seas feels something is amiss. Tea Time and his ragtag bunch of criminals, including Banjo now missing a tooth, board Ernie's coach with a feminine bundle in tow. Around the back of the university,

they throw something at the wall and it goes twang, and then they head to a new domain as Ernie dies in the snow. Press F5 to pay respects. The auditors observe and discuss the control of children before death arrives. The death of rats is surprisingly death during the Hogswatch duty,

and with Quoth the Raven in tow, they visit Susan, currently dealing with a persistent bogeyman, and they warn her of her grandfather's new occupation. At the magical tower, something is swept into a circle, and Sidney the Wizard reminisces about his childhood bully before assisting Mr. Brown with the magical lock. Susan catches death, false-feared and all, in the children's nursery.

As Pixie Albert joins the party, Death explains that the hogfather is missing, presumed dead, and he's simply covering the duty. Of course, he definitely doesn't want Susan to get involved, not even a little bit, not one bit. He heads off in his pig-drawn sleigh. Susan steps out of time and summons Binky as the auditors watch on.

Susan visits Death's currently feline-filled domain and finds a secret room of gods in the Library of Lifetimers, with the hogfather's hourglass broken on the ground. Meanwhile, at the university, Ridicully meets the Rorocan gnome in his beautiful new bathroom and decides to have the high-energy magic boys take a look, interrupting a therapy section between hex and the bursar.

Albert suggests Death make a public appearance as the hogfather, and they crash the Hogswatch Grotto at Crumley's Mall. The pigs take a piss as Death dolls out gifts and glingle, glingle, glingle glitters in the air at the university as Death is confronted with a smug non-believer. Very nice.

It is a good start, I think. Lots of kind of foreshadowing and things that are relevant later and all the good stuff that Fracture does. Yeah, I don't think any listeners will be surprised to know that there'll probably be the talking points. Foreshadowing is cool and, oh, the power of belief at some point when we discuss this book.

If you can think of anything new to say about it, I will be impressed. No, I think I'm just going to be talking about how good it is again. OK, cool, cool. I'll try and come up with something substantial then, shall I? Helicopter and loincloth watch. I'm going to say the flying sled drawn by pigs is very much on helicopter duty.

Sure, sure. I have not so far been able to shoehorn a loincloth into the book, but give me time. OK, I will give you time. And on the other things we're keeping track of, not quite turtle opening, but a bit of a turtle mention in the early pages. Yes, I'd call it an almost turtle opening.

Yeah, it's close to a turtle opening, but it's not a direct turtle opening. Weird phrase, direct turtle opening. I wasn't sure if we'd found out B.S. Johnson's real name before, but Burk Holt Stutley Johnson. Perfect. We've now found out. And also, I mentioned that the phrase a pun or play on words had appeared several times

throughout Discworld, and this is one of those books where death is congratulating himself on the sleigh pun. Oh, oh, oh. We need deeper voices for this. Yeah, I've got a cold. I still can't do a coffin door voice. Well, yeah, because it's the resonance, isn't it, Roslyn, the croak?

I don't have a deep booming voice. No, we could probably do quotes, all right. Anyway, anyway, quotes, Joanna, quotes. Quote, quotes. Quote, the quotes. Joanna's first. This is Susan reassuring the children on the Hogfather. Wherever people are obtuse and absurd,

and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach, and wherever people are innately credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery, and in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering.

Yes, Twyla, there is a Hogfather. Beautiful, because it is, of course, the tone that matters. It is. I always thought community did that particularly well. Jeff, kind of, it's highlighted that his speeches are often just nonsense, but it's the cadence of it saying things in this kind of way and repeating them and using the rule of three is what makes an inspiring speech, because at the end of the day, isn't it?

At the end of the day, if you finish off with enough platitudes, while you gest your broadly to a whiteboard, nothing has to be on the whiteboard, guys, nothing. And yet, we seem intelligent, because in our heart, we know that's America. God bless us, everyone. On page 112. Yes, Francine.

Death stared ahead for a moment and then shrugged. And we have so much to do, we have promises to keep. Well, the night is young, said Albert, sitting back in the sacks. The night is old. The night is always old. The pigs galloped on. Then, no, it ain't. I'm sorry.

The night is in Denny Olden, the daymaster. It stands to reason. There must have been a day before anyone knew what the night was. Yes, but it's more dramatic. Oh, right then. Which I thought tied rather well into yours. I do like the dramatic line followed by someone reasonably interrogating it. And it's nice to see someone other than Ridcully do it, because Ridcully does it well.

Speaking of, should we talk characters? Let's. And at the top of the list, top of the list, indeed. Top of the list, we've got Ridcully. Ridcully, who is having this locked door that has a sign on it saying, do not under any circumstances open this door and is insisting on it being pride open. Which is very in character. Of course, I've read it.

Why do you think I want it opened on the footnote? This exchange contains almost all of you need to know about human civilization. At least those bits of it that are now under the sea fenced off or still smoking. It's a good one for footnotes. It's a very good one for footnotes. Also, I haven't put him in the list, but just shout out to Modo, the very long suffering unseen university gardener. Yeah, he doesn't interfere in the cause or nature of time

and the wizards don't interfere with the petunias or whatever it was. Big fan of Modo. Absolutely. Give him his own series. Good lad. The rest of the wizards are doing all right as well, just limbering up. Wizarding about getting ready for their excellent B-plot in the next section. Yep, hogs watch dinner.

I like the idea of kind of warming up towards a massive dinner. Practising lifting turkeys on a fork. The best idea is put on looser trousers. I mostly just try not to think about the washing up to emotionally prepare myself. I do also like later on when Red Cully manages to get to taking a bath and starts attempting to sing folk songs. Yeah, that was fantastic. I knew an agricultural worker of some disruption, possibly a thatcher,

and I knew him well and he was a farmer. Now I come to think of it. On the second day of Hogs Watch, I sent my true love back and asked the little letter, yes indeed, and a partridge and a pear tree. I'm going to start singing like that in the shower is what I'm taking away from this. Yep, I respect it. I think it's necessary. Anyway, and then Susan, Susan's back.

Susan's back and she's much better. I like, I think this is good character development. I liked her more than you did in soul music. I think I was just generally annoyed in soul music. But yeah, she's much... Her kind of sensible thoughts actually seem to follow some kind of past now, which is good. There seems to be a reason for her wanting to deny this after the other one. The teenage whimsy has gone.

And I like the sort of eminently sensible and capable vibe. Susan is very much matured and I like later on when she's confronting death. You kind of get to see a lot more of what her personality has grown into. And this A just constantly having to stop to explain to a quote, could you fucking not please? They're not eyeballs. Yes, I did very much like the frustrated yell. The world is full of small round things that are not eyeballs.

But it's when she's having her death and she's just like, God, look at you and all three of you and here's Pixie Albert. This is ridiculous. What are you doing? It's just silly. And I think it's just nice because no one else really, really stands up to death and tells him he's being silly. No, although I do feel a bit bad for death in this one.

Oh, no, I know, especially because he does have the best meaning and intentions possible. Yeah. But it is fun to just watch her completely lose her frustration and go, well, clearly something's wrong, but this cannot be the Albert being a Pixie cannot be the best way to handle it. Absolutely not. I liked the kind of the idea that as a lady, she can be a governess. And that's about it for now.

And that not just because of her demeanor, but because of her kind of social standing, she does seem to be somehow above the people employing her. All the stuff with Mrs. Gator in class actually is just brilliant as the dinner party scene where she almost interrupts the dinner party because she's got the poker out to get the monster in the cellar. Yeah, yeah.

And Mrs. Gator very quietly, she's going to party desk. No, this is the governess, the one I told you about. And they go, oh, yes. Well, very good. That's very clever, very sensible, very modern, very modern, very modern. Yes. Mrs. Gator, I always giggle at the funny,

obscuring of weird class stuff. And she's got the applying for the upper classes thing that she's doing at the moment where it's Mr. Gator knows where he is in boots and shoes and doesn't really work around that. What does that mean? I tried to look up that. Is it boots and shoe salesman? That's that's how they become well big.

Yeah, right. God damn it. I just thought it sounded like a really good saying, you know, he's where he is in boots and shoes. Whereas Susan's got that, like, actually grew up as a duchess thing where they just throw things on the floor because the dogs will eat it. Yeah, yeah. When Mrs. Gator had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin

of a queen, Susan replied without thinking, we called him Jamie usually. Mrs. Gator had to go and have a headache in her room. Oh, dear. Which is nice that we sort of know by inference that Queen Kelly must potentially still exist. Yeah, yeah. I'd hope so. Yeah.

We had a bit more of a reinforcement of how Mort and Isabel ended up. Would they kind of please be normal, please be normal, please be normal? Susan received the sort of Julie Hogswatch presents and chocolate eggs on Soulcake Tuesday and, you know, teeth exchange for money by the Tooth Fairy and was reliably informed that it was all done by her parents. Yes, yeah. Properly labelled. I have to say, this is something I noticed about this in general.

Almost all of these characters, there's not that many new ones. A lot of them we've met before. And the book doesn't bother explaining who everyone is. There's not lots of clunky exposition. No. There's enough so that it's not just confusing. You can read this having not read all of the others, especially having not read soul music.

But although I definitely read this after soul music, so I couldn't definitely say that 100 percent. But it makes sense. You don't need to have read Reaper Man to get who the auditors are and what they're doing. Yeah. It all works really well. And then we have Twyla and I'm saying Gawain. Gawain, yeah.

Why not? The older English version is Gawain. Gawain. And it's a precursor to Gavin. But I think it's generally said Gawain these days. OK. And they're both very sweet and amusing children. Twyla, who very comfortably expects,

has taught being told to believe in the poker. Yes. And exaggerated lisping is a hanging offence and I only do it to get attention. Exactly so. I like the extreme cynicism of the five-year-old and appreciate it. Yeah. And also kind of the reminders that she is still a five-year-old

and like that Susan is very cross with the government as who made them so frightened of everything in the first place. Yes. And Susan's method of dealing with it is perfect. Yes, fine, the monsters are real. But the souls of poker. Yes. And then, yeah, Mr. Downey going up a class again.

Going up a class again, Mr. Downey. But Lord Downey, is it not? Yes, Lord Downey, head of the Assassin's Guild. I kind of like the little misdirector he's built in. You get the impression when he's dealing with the auditors that he's going to be the villain of the piece. And it's quite believable because he's been, you know, obviously he's morally gray, he runs the Assassin's Guild.

Sure. He's been sort of on committees that may have had something to do with possibly getting rid of the scenario a bit in some of the previous guards books. And generally heads of Assassin's Guilds have not been the most sympathetic of characters. So you can kind of believe reading this. The devil you say.

Surprising, I know. So I like by introducing him, seeing him deal with the auditors before we get teatime. You have this misdirector of where the villainy is going to come from for the book. I like the sort of quite aggressive competence of him sitting there. He's worked out something that's coming and listing off all the ways the thing cannot have gotten in.

Yes. Yeah. And then, OK, so you're super natural. Fine. Yes, the complete accepting of it. Yeah. Which takes us to the auditors, actually. Yes.

Rather charming. No, the opposite. Charmless. Utterly charmless. I struggle even calling them characters because that's exactly what they don't want to be, isn't it? The antagonists from Reaper Man. But much the same kind of killing,

interesting things kind of jobby, isn't it? Absolutely dislike of anything that affects order. Yes. And as you've pointed out in the show notes, and I had made a note of this, the whole writing them without using quotation marks is just a great joy to me. Yes, especially in conversation with Downey because it's the contrast between him using quotation marks

and them not. And it's so readable. Yeah, weirdly. Really shouldn't make sense, and it just does. It works really well, I think because it still uses the indentations as if the quotation marks were there. Yes. I enjoy the auditors.

Well, obviously I dislike them, but it is fun to have them back as an antagonist because it is... Yeah, you don't have to dislike them just because they're evil. That's not what they are. That's the tumbler version of trying to appreciate literature, isn't it? Oh, my God, I can't believe you like this character. They're problematic.

That's the point. I enjoy having them as antagonists and having T-Times as an antagonist because I find their motivation so apparent. It's very easy to think of them as evil because they want to get rid of everything random and chaotic and interesting about the world. And then T-Times, obviously I don't really relate to him, but his sick fascination with,

I just want to see how it works and what it does, I kind of get, except in my case it led to me taking up knitting and not trying to murder a god. Good, yeah. I think that's probably better, just. But you know what I mean? You can kind of see something relatable in that whizbang way of a mind works,

even though neither of us go in a murderous direction with it. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, I'll... It's a fun character to read. He is a fun character to read. He is the... I'll talk about him a bit more later, but he is the first Pratchett villain to properly give me the creeps.

He is one of the very best-written villains. Everything about him is just so... But I find it difficult to really relate to anything you're saying about, like, the... Oh, as he is mind works, I just see he creeps me out so much. I just haven't thought about it that way at all. But...

I get the sort of weirdly intense curiosity thing, if not what he does with his weirdly intense curiosity. I guess. But, yeah. I like how quickly he's established as a villain, though. Like, you know, I was saying, you know, we've met a lot of these characters already and there's not lots of clunky exposition.

Tea Time is a new character being introduced. Does not get this huge description, but in about a paragraph, you kind of go, oh, yeah, no, this guy is a really bad kind of bad guy. Yeah. Mr. Tea Time enjoyed himself too much and other people, too. And then briefly followed up with, did you need to nail the dogs to the ceiling?

Which, again, don't find that quite so relatable. No, no. Businessmen, which is our kind of heist crew, basically. Yeah, this is... There's an element of heist, maybe. I hadn't really thought about it like that before. Yeah, but the... Yeah, the general low-level criminals,

but good at it. Yes, we've got Medium Dave, Lily White, and his brother Banjo, Chicken Wire, so known because of his very creative methods of disposing of bodies. That does allow the ecosystem to keep going quite nicely. Peachy and Katzai. Yes.

Peachy, who would normally never be asked about the origins of his name. Which, again, great writing is that it makes a point of no one asks Peachy why it's called Peachy. And it's the first thing Tea Time asks and he does answer. Yeah. Yeah, he kind of comes in and immediately confronts all of these people's just established limits.

So he comes in and punches Banjo, and therefore really upsets Medium Dave and questions Peachy. And they're all like, okay. And all of the real kind of boundary pushing does come after he's said about the $10,000 each, which I'm sure helps, but a lot of it is just, yeah, you're scarier than us.

With the creepy eyes, I don't know if I mentioned the creepy eyes. Yes, yeah, no, the one made of glass and not like a glass eye to look like an eye, but clearly like a ball of glass. And then one with a pinpoint and a pale eye. Yes. It's an excellent, excellent description.

And then Sidney. Sidney or Sidney, I was wondering. I've just been reading it as Sidney. Okay, yeah, let's go for Sidney. Yeah, we have, by the way, just skimmed over this as tea time rather than tea time. Oh, yes. Tea time.

Tea time, tea time. Tea time. Tea time. It's a joke that doesn't really work so well on the page because like lots of people call him tea time and he corrects them. But it only works for people who've seen his name written down and never heard it said out loud.

Yeah. If I heard tea time, I would not immediately assume it was spelt tea time. No, it's quite funny to see him have his human foieville as in the don't pronounce my name wrong. Tea time's a stupid name. Obviously, we will be calling him tea time for the entire podcast.

Anyway, Sidney. Yeah, what about him? Down on his luck, was it? The handy magical part of the gang. Yeah, he's young and he's a student. He's almost a rinse wind, but he seems a bit more competent. It's just fun to remember that the students do exist

outside of Ponderstippen's gang. Yeah, they're obviously the most interesting in most contexts, but here we're going back to the kind of Vincent. Yes, it's nice to remember that it is a university and there probably are still some students lying around. Yes, there's much to be don't like to think about that. And then Ernie.

Bless Ernie. Poor Ernie. Poor Ernie. He's just doing his job. He was a good, well-introduced character to really highlight the violence of Tia Timmy. It's one thing murdering henchmen and people we haven't spoken to,

but someone who we just got a pretty good look at is rich in a life and history. I love that he's very, very, yes, I'm going to keep my eyes forward. I can't hear anyone. I can't see anyone until I've got an excuse to bitch about something that really annoys me. And then I'm going to forget all of that

and pitch about it. That whole bit actually was quite fun. I was thinking of like heavily polluting factories, but then Annotated Practitioner pointed out Practitioner was probably thinking about like nuclear facilities as well, because he used to work in PR for nuclear power plants. But yeah, just the whole,

the university basically functioning as this annoying polluting, not even annoying, like quite criminal polluting organization that's just- It'll all be fine in 50,000 years. Yeah, ruining people's real estate. Making it unreal. And then yeah, Mr. Brown, again,

I just really like the writing. There's something about the neat little voice. So this for me is why it went into trope territory, bringing in the outside lockpick, who just so happened to be able to, you know, walk in and out and- Oh yeah, absolutely. I was reading a lot of it in a Guy Ritchie narration voice,

to be honest. Mr. Brown is a very much a character straight out of lock, stock and two smoking barrels of the, yep, and quietly. And he's sort of giving this sermon in the back of the van as they're driving, well, not the back of the van, the back of the cart. And then cut away to when he did it and then yeah.

I do like the idea of just walking, walk, always walk, walk in, walk out. No one's going to chase you if you don't run. The watch will always chase a running man. You walk out slow, you walk around the corner. Half the time, they'll stand aside to let you pass. Good evening officers, you say. I like the way he's sort of polite about what he's earned

from the job as well. He said, nope, nothing, just a little hogs watch gift, just a little bonus for myself. Lockpicking in general is quite a fun skill, isn't it? The old lockpicking lawyer YouTube channel is very popular. Yes. It's something I quite fancy learning to do, but also seems very time consuming.

Not that useful. Well, it depends, doesn't it? Probably more useful than fucking watercolors, isn't it? I mean, how likely are you to embark on a life of crime, Francie, and remember that we are recording? Oh, for legal reasons, not at all likely. Excellent, good. Allegedly.

Yeah. Wait, death. Allegedly wait to death. That was a new paragraph, paragraph break. Allegedly paragraph break. Death. Death who is, likes to pop in and make sure everything's running smoothly every now and then.

Absolutely. And is currently popped in on a flower at the bottom of the ocean. A little tube. A little tube. A little tube on an ocean vent. And isn't it nice that he takes such an interest in the oddities of the disc?

It is. I like this description of how he does this job. This is one of the best analogies I think he's used so far, if I mean analogy or allegory, of the presidents and prime ministers don't personally turn up in people's homes to tell them how to run their lives. Example, I think, would be a fine word for this one. Yeah, well, I wanted to sound more intelligent than I am.

Well, that definitely went well. Carry on. Yeah, yeah, great for me. It's fine, I can edit it. You're just rinsing me today. I'm sorry. No, I'm kind of into it, it's great. It's that time of day for me.

My medicine is wearing off and I've got to stop drinking coffee soon because I have to get up early. Yes, I like the desk keeping an eye on things and keeping everything going. And I just think it's so sweet when he's hogfathering. Yes, oh no, he's he's darling, isn't he? He's very a very synthetic character in this one. It's just the way he embraces it so wholeheartedly

and has gone, right, well, if I've got to do the hogfather, I've got to do it properly. He's got the pillow, he's got the ho, ho, ho. He cares. And he's got a lot of cats now, apparently. And he's a lot of cats. I'm happy for him. I'm glad he got some cats.

And yes, Albert doing his pixie duty. Yes, and kind of advising on what the hogfather should actually do. Obviously, it's good to have a human consultant for this kind of thing, isn't it? And advising on the traditions and where you might may or may not need a lump of coal. And then, you know, we have Quoth and the Death of Rats

there back and I like the sort of little buddy relationship. Yeah, it's good for the Death of Rats to be able to just be a squeak still and for him to have a mousepiece. And also, they're both just kind of doing their own thing while also being on a very important mission. But ooh, a pie. Yes.

And Quoth's sort of long running fury at Robbins and their good PR. Just because I can't go twitch, tweet. Bob, bob, bobbing and they can't move for breadcrumbs. Me and myself can recite poems and repeat many humorous play phrases. Well, quite. I do, I do like Robbins as well.

But I don't really want entrails hanging out in the garden. So I wouldn't go for entrails as my garden decor. It's not the first thing I'd go for. No. But then maybe that's why we don't have armies of crows. Yeah. Maybe I should put more entrails on the balcony. We'll think about it.

I could do some entrail foreshadowing and then leave it for crows. And then I've got a bit of oracleing done as well. Ah, yes. Foreshadowing, of course, you would be entrailing off. Wait, you're ripping on me for this and then that. I've got to leave it open for a bit of retaliation. It's only fair.

Francine. I like how you're kind of ripping on me as just saying my name in a disappointed tone. That's what I'm used to. That's good. I know where I am with people just saying my name in a disappointed way. Francine.

Professor of Anthropics. Yes, I noticed you put him in as a full character entry here. I'd already put like five things into little bits we liked, so I had to shove him in characters instead. Sure. He's developed the special and inevitable anthropic principle, which is that the entire reason for the existence of the universe

was the eventual evolution of the UU professor of Anthropics. Do you know what Anthropics means? No. Right. I did start annotating Pratchett. I've got some good stuff. We'll link to it in the show notes. They've got some good stuff on Anthropic Principles.

Well, Anthropic Principles is the principle that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, given that we could only exist in a particular type of universe capable of developing and sustaining sentient life. OK, yeah. Yeah. That's kind of philosophy meets physics.

I like how he's basically taken this very complex principle and made himself a sleep schedule. Which is great because I think there's a payoff to the joke later on as well, where Ridd Kully does sort of a, I don't know, I thought the universe existed for us. Well, for the professor of Anthropics, but we're allowed to tag along.

And then the sort of all three, we see them at the same time, ponderstibbons, slaving away in the high energy magic building. Yeah, still leading a little band of nerdy students. And he's leading a therapy session between Bassa and Hex. I may or may not be trying to build a Hex chatbot in C++ because I just learned how to work with things like this. Well, if you get stuck,

I imagine a bunch of nerds have already done that. So there will be notes somewhere. Oh, yeah, but I'm doing the most basic dumb ass. This is how I understand the logic of writing in C++. Oh, OK. It's a very stupid little program I made for our listeners. Yeah, I like that. There are a couple of other little,

actually on the chatbot thing, again, annotated Pratchett. Apparently, this is reminiscent of the Eliza program, which is basically one of the first chatbots. And it was a program written, according to annotated Pratchett, in the Dark Ages of Computer Science by Joseph Weissenbaum. And it would simulate an indirect psychiatrist by transforming whatever the human says into a question

using some really simple programming rules. Yeah, the guy who designed it was horrified at the idea that it would actually be used. Omnibus did a really good episode on this. But basically, yeah, the guy who designed it was like, no, don't use it as a therapist. It was an exact, oh, God. Which I love.

And I can imagine Stevens doing something similar. A couple of other little details from that scene are really like, A, we learned the verse's surname is Din Whiddy. Oh, yes. Ponder addresses him as Mr. Din Whiddy. Hex now has an ear and his old Wendell Poon's ear trumpet. Yep, little appearance from Wendell Poon. Wendell is still with us at heart.

And of course, before we get a tweet, yes, Hex has a label on it saying, Ant Hill Inside. And that is a reference to the old Intel Inside stickers. Do, do, do, do. Yeah, he's just kind of developed rather well. Sorry, it has developed rather well. He's got voice recognition technology. He leaps and bounds ahead of where we were.

Most importantly, he's got a GBL. Do you remind me? Great Big Leaver. Yes, that's right. Please initialize it. Initialize the GBL is, for some reason, one of the funniest lines in this entire section to me. I'm going to start describing everything I do

by saying initialize and then a really stupid acronym. Do it, yeah. All right, initialize the LS. Locations. Yes, location section. Let's initialize the location section, shall we? So we've already mentioned the Unreal Estate, which is the... We need a lever.

Sorry. I've got a knitting needle. That'll do, that'll do. Waggle, there we go. That's been initialized. Perfect. And then to add some magic. Yay, Glingle, Glingle.

The Unreal Estate, I'm sorry. The Unreal Estate, the nuclear wasteland out the back of the university where they chuckle the leftover magic. We have beers, which we've been to before. This is the Undead Bar, which I'm only really bothering to mention because in some of the watchbooks, Angwer's hung out there.

So I'm just head canoning a world where Susan and Angwer become drinking buddies and hang out a lot. Oh, that's nice, yeah. I think they should date. Of course you do. Angwer and Carrot are together, Joanna. Throuple, anyway.

Oh, God. God, where are we? Locations, beers, the tower, the creepy tower. Oh, yeah, fucking creepy hours, right? Creepy magical tower. With four spirals. I don't like one spiral staircase. So frankly, having a tower with four of them,

I would not enjoy it all. We've got a glowing white tower with MCS' spiral staircases jumping over each other, which everyone is terrified of, and Tea Time loves. Yes, because of course he does. And then you're upside down and it's glowing from the inside. So there's no proper shadows anywhere.

Very creepy. Then we have Death's Domain. The only reason I'm really bothering to mention it is we've read so many descriptions of this place that's kind of bleached of color and everything's in black. Yeah. Can you imagine Death trying to make a bunch of Hogswatch decorations, though?

Oh, yeah. Like just a silvery tinsel and a black Christmas tree with baubles. But it's all carved out of one thing. Baubles with skulls on, but they're quite dungal. Well, Death of Rats being atop the tree is one of my favorite moments of his. So, especially with Susan.

I might try and make one of those. Susan, I can, you've got a scythe. Squeak. I have got a Hogfather Christmas decorations. They're some of my favorites. They're like nice wood cut-out ones. Oh, nice, yeah, yeah. And there's a little Death of Rats and a little Quoth.

Oh, cute. The bathroom itself, of course, the mystical magical bathroom that Red Cully is so determined to get into that made me really miss being able to take baths because I only have a shower in my flat. Yeah, I would love this shower. Yeah, my water pressure is not amazing

and I do like those kind of showers where you feel like the top of your head might get drilled off when you're washing your hair. Absolutely. The old faithful joke I finally got this time. Had you not got that one before? I don't remember being quite so aware of the fact that clearly a massive jet of water had just gone up his arse.

Like, I knew that he'd turned a tap and something bad had happened and ho, ho, ho. But yes, it being called old faithful, obviously, it's a geezer and yes. He's not that old. Sorry. I'm sorry. It's a geezer hitting a geezer in the arse.

In the bottom. In the bottom, sorry, yes. But yes, no, the unexpected colonic irrigation is not one of the most memorable plot points in the book. No, we'll be now though. Before we move on, I want to take a second to imagine a shower cap in the shape of a wizard's hat. Yes.

OK, right. I think that's given up the time it's served. Probably is the first sort of department store we've had. Yes, yes. In the disc world. Of course, it's an acrobat. I, for someone who really hates both shopping and capitalism, I fucking love department stores.

I've never, well, no, I have. I've been to the, you know, the obvious one in London. What's it called? Harrods. Harrods, yeah. Yeah. Which I assume they're kind of looking at here. That's because Harrods has the big toy and big Santa's Grotto.

I've never been to a Santa's Grotto in a department store. We had like a little Santa's Grotto thing at school and I hated it and would beg not to go. Oh, no, why? I didn't like sitting on a strange man's lap. I didn't want to. Huh, the devil you say. Really weird considering how my teens and early 20s went.

Well, that must have been what it was. You didn't have that fulfilled. I had to make up for it in late years. Oh, no. So I just got to get in there and call myself a slag before he did. I was not going to call you a slag. I call you, I don't slut shame you, Joanna. All right, good point.

Anyway, no, I think it's because we used to genuinely, like my mum, my sister and I would go for a day out in Norwich when I was younger and it would always start at John Lewis in Norwich. Because I don't know maps of haberdashery and fabric section. Haberdashery. I love the word haberdashery. Yes, and it could. But yes, so crumbly is the location of the grotto,

which Mr. Crumbly is very proud of. One of the pixies was disciplined for smoking behind the magic tinkling waterfall. I like how he capitalises some words. The magic put the dolls of all the clockwork dolls of all nations showing how we could all get along. It's a small world lot, isn't it, from the year? Yes, wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice?

Wouldn't it, though? He's quite considering, he's clearly an ass. He's quite a sympathetic character, isn't he? He just, and he obviously he's doing this to make lots of money, but he's really, really taken care with it and things like the slay that he's delicately, delicate silver curly bits. And he's supervised the gluing on of all the glittering stars. Yeah.

He wants things to be nice for the kitties. Don't ruin it for the kitties. And the kitties, of course, would be perfectly happy watching a ball piss on the floor. The repeated, I saw your pig and death sort of not knowing how to deal with children. I mean, I like that all of the kids having to sit on death's lap and having the forgetting how to speak. Thank you.

Moments. Thank you. Yes, and that death forcibly shuts the overbearing mother's mouth, would there? Yes. I also like the description of a small child of indeterminate sex who seemed to be mostly woollen bobble hat. Yes. Did you, can you, on your version of the note, see the comic I pasted in?

Is this the sword one? Yeah, yeah. I can't see it in my notes, but I've seen it a lot. Yeah, it is one of the more popular fan scenes, I think, just because of the little girl getting her sword. Yes. You can't give her that. It's not safe.

It's a sword. They're not meant to be safe. Which, of course, is true, but he did make it into a little wooden sword, just to be. Yes. Amen. I also like the part of that conversation that goes, you're supposed to say thank you. Thank you.

And be good. This is part of the arrangement. Then we have a contract. Oh, he's very nice. Good old death. I enjoy it. Yes, I think that's all the important locations. I've had to remove my giant fuzzy unicorn slippers.

I'm devastated. As I tried to get off the sofa, they got caught in my headphone lead and nearly collapsed everything. Oh, God. Everything. Everything. The universe. It nearly all went very wrong. You said that was such gravity.

I love it. I mostly mean the recording equipment. Sure. I'm prepared to believe from your tone of voice that something catastrophic would have happened. I probably would have done it. Shall we talk about the little bits that we liked? I will start at the start, which is a very good place to begin. Yeah, as you put in your beautifully worded summary, I must say,

everything starts somewhere, but right at the very beginning. I rather enjoyed, but more specifically, the people have always been dimly aware of the problem at the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowblower driver gets to work or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words, which is exactly the kind of thought process that I feel like you and I go down quite often. Yeah. Too often. Yeah. See, I'd say that's more your kind of intense curiosity than the nailing the dog to the ceiling type.

I'm not saying I have nailing dogs to ceiling intense curiosity. I'm saying I relate to having intense curiosity. I know. Do you know what I mean by the different types of intensity? Yes. I feel like yours is very driven, but not manic. No. Yeah.

Yeah. It might just be a different way that we're kind of reading his inner monologue isn't quite right. He doesn't have an inner monologue in it, does it? Yeah. Point is, I do like that concept of the kind of almost not paradoxes, but riddles of the, yeah. But how? Yeah. But how?

I mean, I always assume the snow plow driver just keeps his snow plow at home. Well, those of us who have seen the Mr. Plow episodes of The Simpsons, of course, do know this to be the case. I'm so glad you brought it up, Francine. Mr. Plow. That's my name. That name again is Mr. Plow. Oh, no. We'd better move on.

Joanna, what was your first little thing? Oh, the monsters and begginers stuff. We already kind of talked about it when we're talking about Susan and the kids and this governor who's input all these monsters into their heads. But one of my favourites is the bears that wait in the street to eat you if you stand on cracks. Oh, yeah. Because it's a really, because I love A.A. Milne. And there's an A.A. Milne.

The guy wrote Winnie the Pooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're also, as well as the Winnie the Pooh books, there were two books of poetry when we were very young and now we are six. Oh. We have this big book of them at home. My mum absolutely loved them. There's still certain ones my sister and I can recite off the top of our heads, which

is really funny when out of nowhere, my sister all suddenly turned to me and go, James, James, Morrison, Morrison, whether it be George Dupree to take care of his mother, although he was only three. But he has one called Lines and Squares. And I don't know if this is the origin of bears eating you when you step on cracks. But I've never read it anywhere else. Whenever I walk in a London street, I'm ever so careful to watch my feet. And I keep in the squares and the masses of bears who wait at the corners all ready to

eat. The sillies who tread on the lines of the street go back to their lairs. And I say to them, bears, just look how I'm walking in all of these squares. And the little bears growl to each other. He's mine as soon as he's silly and steps on a line. And some of the bigger bears try to pretend that they came around the corner to look for a friend. And they try to pretend that nobody cares whether you walk on the lines or squares.

But only the sillies believe their talk. It's ever so important how you walk. And it's ever so jolly to call out bears. Just watch me walking in all of these squares. It's like the opening notes of OCD. Yes, very much so. In my teenage years, I had a friend who had this weird superstition of you can't walk across three drains in a row.

Yeah, I don't know where the three drain thing came from. I wonder if that's very local. I think listeners, if it's unlucky to walk over, this might even be like, I don't even know how drains are arranged in other countries, but like three square drain covers in a row is what we're talking about. Quite often on footpaths. Yeah. If you have that sort of layout and it's considered unlucky where you are to walk across them,

please let us know. Yeah. Because I have a feeling it might be a weird Suffolk thing. Yeah. It seems like it, doesn't it? But we should make up a rhyme about it. That's in follow up. We'll never do.

Yeah. I should make a document to follow what we'll never do. But as I say that, I realize that would go under that category. Okay. Meta. Meta procrastination. Meta, meta procrastination. No.

No. That sounds like an unfortunate skin complaint. Yeah. There's a cream for that. Jack and the Beanstalk. Oh, yeah. So this is, yeah, we've got so many Susan moments in these seven weeks. Because she's just eminently quotable through this in her interesting way of child roaring.

And you get the picture that Pratchett subscribed some of these ways of working. She translated as she read. And then Jack chopped down the Beanstalk, adding murder and ecological vandalism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had just done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you're a hero, because nobody asks inconvenient questions.

And now she closed the book with a snap. It's time for bed. Reminds me very much of my father explaining how fantastic Mr. Fox was an allegory of workers' revolutions and Marxist theory when I was a five-year-old. And so wonder I turned out like I did, isn't it? Yeah. He likes to tell that story because apparently my reply was, Daddy, I'm only five.

I can absolutely believe that also being the case. There are many things your father has tried to explain to me are actually allegories for the Communist Revolution. He's probably not wrong. The sack of toys, Joanna? Yes. It was a strange but demonstrable fact that the sack of toys carried by the hogfather no matter what they really contained always appeared to have sticking out of the top

a teddy bear, a toy soldier in the kind of colourful uniform that'd stand out in a disco, a drum and a red and white candy cane. The actual contents. Actual contents always turned out to be something a bit garish and costing $5.99. Absolutely. It's an interesting look into the 90s, this, because the moral panic about toys at the time being about how everything's all plastic-y from Woolwoods and about these violent TV programs,

whereas very soon it would transfer to the moral panic being about, oh, kids just play on screens now that they didn't play with toys. I can guarantee from having a six-year-old nephew that is not true. I've seen how much Lego he's getting for Christmas. Oh, fantastic. Oh, it's a lucky boy. So I was looking after him the other night and mentioned I was getting a new computer and he sort of said, why don't you ask Santa to bring it to you?

Oh. And I was like, fuck, I forgot you believed in Santa. Don't say the wrong fucking thing. I'm not going to be the one that destroys this for you. What did he say? I said, I think it might be a bit big for Santa to carry on his sleigh, so I've just asked him to get me the mouse to go with it. Very well done, Joanna.

Yes. Aren't you good with kids when you try? When I try, I will. I am pretty sure I am going to be the one that fucks up and accidentally tells him that Santa's not real. Well, he's getting to that age. Sorry, listeners, if you hadn't. Yeah, for God's sake, why are you still listening to this with your children?

You must know by now. This is probably the least inappropriate thing we've said in the last hour. But yes, then obviously death has looked through and seen the toys he's got and such things as real Agathe and Ninja, but in carrot one man night watch that comes with lots of toy weapons. And then the book goes on saying the stuff for girls was just as depressing. It was nearly all horses and fucking gendered toys. This is a big front of mine.

And I know there's there's lots of fronts about it, but stop everything in shades of blue is a boys toy. And then there are lots of the girls toys with pink and there's a big campaign. Actually, it's worth checking out Twitter called let toys be toys. The problem is, I know I find myself falling into it. I would never buy anything that looked too girly as a gift for my nephew, even a Lego set. I wouldn't buy one of the Bingham Berber ones in the worry that he'd reject it.

So I know I find myself buying into it, but also I buy on whatever my sister tells me to buy him. Yeah, I was about to say, I didn't think you had that much choice over it. Well, I got him a PlayStation game and a few books this year. I don't need to contribute to the Lego pile. I did like that Pratchett does also seem to be annoyed about it. Yeah. Like later on in the book, back in Crumbly's, we have, and she doesn't want all that other stuff, said Doreen's mother in the face of previous testimony.

She's a girl. Pratchett's going, no, I'm pretty sure little girls want all the horrible violent toys as well. Children are just this way. I was very lucky when I was brought up that I was never, you can't have that because it's not a girl's toy. Oh, yeah, same. I had Barbies and things because I first learned to sew trying to make outfits for them. Mostly unflattering cloth tubes. I didn't get the hang of it.

Oh, yeah, I had Barbies and things. But I also had the big Lego medieval castle with little trebuchets and skulls everywhere. Well, get you. Very nice. That was my treasured possession. I bet it was. Fantastic. Yeah, I did have Barbies and dinosaurs.

The little model dinosaurs had lots of those. But my brother had the usual boys toys, but we used to just have massive wars using all of them. And like the Barbies were giants on one army and like the Hot Wheels were some kind of cavalry, I suppose. God, we made a mess. But the point is children just like violence. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, so let toys be toys. Stop gendering things.

Perhaps it said so. I wonder how much research there's been into. There must have been a lot by now about just. What effects? Yeah. Yeah. What effects what you're given or refused to be given has on you later. Yeah.

Just let's stop aggressively gendering things. I'd rather we didn't even really gender humans, but I'm willing to start with let's not aggressively gender toys. Let's work up from Lego to people. Yeah. That's what I always say. That's how I practice socialising. Little Lego man. Very weird when you're cooking dinner though, Francie, and I'm not going to lie.

I might have a little Lego man instead of rubber duck for explaining code to that sounds fun. Oh, I'm going to get myself a little Lego man. Do you have a rubber duck for your coding? No, I usually just talk to the lamp. Oh, I might get your rubber duck. No. Anyway. Anyway.

Terrible nightmares. Oh, no. It's just, again, one of my favorite tropey things and one practically does well of not of taking someone to literally. So T time does this, I'm your worst nightmare. And he's like, I want the one with the giant cabbage and the wearing knife thing. You're the one I'm falling. Oh, you know, the one where, you know, there's all this sort of mud and everything goes blue. Fracture does the kind of what dreams are actually like very well.

The campaign for equal heights was my last one. There's a picket line outside crumblies by the campaign for equal heights because I suppose they're not happy about the people dressed as pixies. Of course. Which is just, I like Pratchett taking the piss out of slightly too well meaning activists. Yeah. It's the patronizing the patronizing activists. They now had to spend so much time explaining to people that they hadn't got enough rights that they barely had any time left to fight for them. Yeah.

Well, I think Albert. Alfred. Fuck, it's happened again. Albert. Albert. He's Albert. Alfred is the butler from Batman. I know, but they've got such similar names and they're both kind of the sidekick of absurd, too powerful beings.

Anyway, I think he makes a rather good pixie. I'm a fan of pixie, Albert. Yeah. Imagine he'd be a bit sick of Sherry and pork pies. It is a shame he didn't have his mustard. I miss pork pies. That's one of the few things I can't find a decent vegetarian substitute for. I have to say, I mean, I've never thought of leaving a pork pie out for Santa.

We just left a drink and a carrot for the reindeer. Yeah. Yeah, it was a whiskey and a carrot. Yeah. We weren't the type to leave a mince pie out because we weren't a mince pie family. You weren't a mince pie family. Is that a class thing? No, it's just no one in my family really likes mince pies.

Oh, yeah. No, that's fair enough. Yeah. Not at home when I was growing up. Sometimes if we were doing Christmas at like my grandmother's. Yeah. I always want to like mince pies. I love the smell of them.

I love the idea of them and every, well, I don't think I fell for it last year because I wasn't out and about much. But every year I'm like, oh, go on. I'll have a mince pie and take a bite. And I'm like, oh, that's right. One of my favorite things about the fact that I don't have to work at a restaurant over Christmas this year is the restaurant I worked at for six years. We did mince pies at Christmas and we'd have, we didn't make them from scratch. We had a really good local baker who made them for us, but there was, you know, we're talking minimum of 100 delivered per week. Oh, wow.

I think on record for mince pie sales over Christmas fair weekend was somewhere close to 700. And you'd have this constant smell because we were firing, we were warming them up in the ovens. And it was just silly. And so I smelled mince pies constantly and it was this really tempting, especially because I know Tony the baker makes the best pastry. Yeah. And I would always inevitably want to be really sad because it's just not very nice. Yeah. It's too sweet.

It's too sweet. I'm not a massive dried fruit fan. No. And it's pretty much all just dried fruit. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. That's a fun one actually listeners.

If you're the sort who leaves something out for Father Christmas or the Hogfather, what do you leave out? Yes, that's a good Christmas tradition one for us to add to our little collection. What do you leave out? And does it disappear? And does it? It was so sad that I was so kind of getting used to Christmas on my own for Christmas last year. For me for a second thought about leaving something out. Yeah.

And then just getting out of bed at two in the morning to go and quickly drink the whiskey and nibble the carrot. And then I realized I needed to get out more. Yeah. No, that's not ideal. I think if you'd told me that I would have just come around, even though it was locked down. I didn't. I know. Goodness me.

That's a place for your brain to go. It didn't stay there for long. Good. Late night thoughts are excusable. Well, there was something kind of automatic. I think because I quite often go for Christmas Eve at my sisters and once my little nephew goes to bed, he helps them set. They've got a special little centre board.

There's a place for the mince pie and a place for the drink and a place for the carrot. Sure. That's weird. I hadn't. I love it. It's really cute. And I hadn't obviously been over there that Christmas Eve, so I think I was just missing doing that thing. Yeah.

That I would normally watch them do. And then I realised it's a very silly thing to do if you're not trying to convince a five-year-old that Santa's real. Anyway. Especially if it means like getting up. Speaking of believing in the Hogfather. What about it? Onto the bigger stuff. I love this idea of just believing just in case.

Yeah. Especially it goes into a suggestion put forward by Kwame and philosopher Ventura who said, possibly the gods exist, possibly they do not. Why not believe in them in any case? Yes. Which is of course a reference to the round world. Pascal. But I like the fact that when he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty looking sticks saying,

we're going to show you what we think of Mr Cleverdick. I hope Pascal didn't. I'm an atheist, but I hope God's a real just for the sake of smug people. Well, yeah, I like to think of myself as like a hopeful agnostic. Which is, it'd be nice if I didn't just get propelled into an endless void of nothing forever. But then again, I suppose there's always a chance that all the gods are horrible. Well, exactly. I'm sort of an atheist on the basis that I do think if there is a big external power

that can act on the universe, it doesn't care much about me. Oh, untrue. Untrue as you can tell by the way that your knife has so much interesting narrative. Oh, I'm really looking forward to season four. Six seasons in a movie. Yeah. But I like this idea of the way the kids are sort of believing in the hogfather and the basis of optimism and they might get a few more presents.

Yes. Absolutely. It makes sense. It makes sense. I rather like Pascal's wager actually is an idea. Thank you, Pascal's wager. I can't remember what it was called. I kept wanting to say it was Pascal's razor and that's been mixing up to very different.

I should know then all that different when you think about it. Yeah. Pascal's razor is if you shave and it turns out you haven't got anywhere to be that day, then you've lost nothing. But if you don't shave and it turns out you've got to go to a last meeting, you'll be in trouble. Therefore, it's foolish not shave. But simply.

Yeah. No, that's Occam's wager. Oh, yes. Occam's wager. So you should always place the simplest bet possible. Basically never go with an each way bet. Yeah. Oh dear.

So I agree that is a rather nice little, a nice way to think about it of children believing in things. It profits me to believe in this. So I'm going to keep doing it. Do you want to talk about villainy, Francine? Yeah, all right. So I rather, this book I thought is rather interesting in that it has just several antagonists or villains. I mean, to go from, well, let's use Pascal's razor here and go from the simplest to the most complex.

So that's Pascal's wedge of cheese. Oh, sorry. Yes, of course. With pineapple? No. On a stick? No. I haven't talked about this.

I'm not okay with cheese and pineapple on a stick. I thought we were. Wasn't that an episode title? No, I don't accept it. Pineapple and exposition? Quite possibly. Oh, I'm okay with pineapple and exposition on a stick. Right.

Okay, got it. What would the simplest kind of bet be? Crudities. What are they? Just carbs and veggies. Nice. Yeah. Oh, with hummus.

Yeah. So the hummus of our antagonists, I would say, are the heist crew, as I've decided to call them. What was your, your note was what they were actually called? The gentleman or something? Businessmen. The businessmen, yes. It's a gentleman indeed.

Which are your typical, bit of this and that, cockney, wheeler, dealer, scary criminal firm lot. And their motivation is pretty simple. Money. Money. And they've got their little quirks to make them interesting and fun characters. But at the end of the day, they're fairly, fairly simple. Stock characters.

Yeah. Yeah, stock characters that's good with. You've got the auditors who are not really villains, but are definitely antagonists. They are, I don't know, they are kind of villains, aren't they? Because they try and come across as these completely neutral beings. But in the, it's one of those inaction still counts as an action. And in this case, they've taken it to the extreme in that they're taking a lot of action to insure inaction.

Yes. Which is also a good way of describing how I go about my life, unfortunately. But the more interesting ones, I think, to compare are Lord Downey and Mr. Tudor. Yes. So as you were saying, like at the beginning, Lord Downey's kind of gentlemanly pursuit of murder is something I think we've talked about before, the kind of assassins being absolute arseholes, but kind of covering it in this veneer of respectability. And because we're ever so tasteful about it, because we've got rules.

And style. And style. It's somehow not horrible, brutal murder. And it was put as people who have standards often don't have morals, I think, on the pages. And one of my, I'm not sure this is entirely relevant to the point, but Lord Downey's habit of having his labels on backwards. I thought it was a nice illustration of the kind of stupidity of the whole thing. Yeah.

Especially if he had a bottle of Nociop. Which is just poison. Just poison, general generic poison. No, no brand name poison here. Just poison. It's gone upside down, skull and crossbows on it to really confuse them. But I thought he's kind of what I, you know me, I can't be doing with this class shield of criminality.

But I thought he was really, it was really well highlighted his hypocrisy by Mr. T-Time coming up and being just a proper psycho murderer. Yeah. I said earlier, like here's the first Pratchett villain. Possibly. No, I would say more, way more so than Vaub is actually. But to give me the proper, just the proper shivers. I don't like reading him in a way that I kind of do.

But it's like, it's, I get very uncomfortable reading him. You sort of want to read him while peeking through your fingers. Yeah. Like watching a horror movie. Yeah. It's a hint of clockwork orange to him. Yes. And I hated that movie.

It's a good movie, but I hated it. Yeah, that's fine. The character in it, I don't know. It reminds me of some people I've known in real life as well. And I think just that whole vibe very much throws me off, which is very effective in the case of a book, when you're trying to be, trying to be very in the moment and it works very well. Mr. Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror,

all marvellous facets and rainbows, but ultimately also something that was broken, which I thought was rather a good way of doing it. Yeah. Mr. Teatime enjoyed himself too much. And that's the kind of thing. It's the, we're meant to do this as a trade, as a job. We're not meant to take pleasure in it. Yes.

Satisfaction, you're allowed, as he says, but obviously, again, it's ridiculous because it's the... You're still killing people. Yeah. I like that Pratchett, having created the Assassin's Guild and the only real, aside from, like we said, killing people, the only real villainy we've seen from them is these sort of being slightly parts of plots to overthrow the patrician. Yes.

And it's here where he's taken the actual, and you know, the idea of the Assassin's Guild is like the idea of the Thieves Guild and the Beggars Guild is that it's what makes the city work. Assassination is going to take place anyway. Let's regulate it. Yeah. Like with thieving. And I like that now Pratchett's established that he can go back to it and say, okay, yeah,

but what if there's something really fucking wrong with one of these people who's taking money to kill people? What if they do enjoy it? Yeah. What if there's something wrong with one of these murderers? But yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know.

It's like testing a system by trying to break it. Yes. There you go. In the sense of how he writes it. Yeah. Exactly. And yeah, I do feel like it shows it off as all being ridiculous. I like how the tone and the content not matching up works as well.

And just the fact that he is just a, just as he says, like in the Fractured Mirror bit just broken. It's broken. It's not right. So it's, what's the worst that can happen? I said, Tita, you'll lose your job. Whereas if you don't, you'll die. So if you look at it like that, we're actually doing you a favor.

Oh, do say yes. The lad was definitely what Ernie thought of as a tough and he seemed nice and friendly, but it didn't all add up. The tone and the content didn't match. And if you play, if you sort of contrast that against earlier where Susan's explaining to Twyla, you know, the hogfather exists in the mind of idiots, but in such a soothing tone that Twyla buys it. Yeah.

It's almost like a, it's a parallel, but it's an opposite. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So I thought they were two very well built antagonists and I like the contrast. And I think it was on purpose. Just an extra kind of highlight for me of how well done. Personally, I don't know if he affects everyone quite so well, but personally effective.

Mr. T-Time is as a terrifying villain. I think it is his total lack of introspection. And as you said, there's no inner monologue. Every other character, we get an insight to what they're doing and how they're thinking. We never really get T-Times in a monologue. No. So it's entirely observation of how creepy he is. And there's something about that that works because if this is how bad it is watching him,

God imagine what's actually happening in his brain right now. Yeah. And it would be like impossible to put down in words like that one of how his brain's working because it's just, it's not the same. It's almost uncanny valley, isn't it? It's a, you're nearly a, you're nearly a person, but not. And the eyes being wrong probably helps with that. But yeah.

That was my, my thought on villainy. Excellent. Well done. There's one more talking point. We've got this. It's not really a massive thing. It's another moment I really love. Same moment.

Irrational moments. Behind every rational moment were a billion irrational ones. Somewhere behind the hours, there was a place with a hog father road. The tooth fairies climbed their ladders. Jack Frost drew his pictures. The soul cake duck laid her chocolate eggs. And I really like this. A, like I said, there is a thing about rational and irrational numbers, but I don't

understand complex mathematics enough to explain it. Pi is irrational, technically. That's all I can really give you on the matter. I'm not ready, but I don't carry on. Pi is never irrational. It's delicious. Yes. Oh, I could go a pie.

Anyway, Jesus, stop talking about food. Joanna. Oh God, sorry, irrational moments. I love this idea of the time behind time where these things happen, especially in books like this, because this entire book technically does take place over one night and so much happens in this book. Yeah. I'd forgotten that it does take place over one night, honestly.

But it's very, the spirits did it all in one night. Yes. In this one, you get to see behind the scenes. You do. You get to see the whole behind the scenes of how it's happening in one night, because I think this was what cemented Santa Claus not being real, was the logistics of him getting the presents to everyone in one night. I just didn't accept it, couldn't accept it.

But it's something, often when I read things like this and I sit and try and work out the time frames, and obviously one should never try and work out accurately the timeline of Discworld. It's convenient to the plot. Yes. It's the timeline. We're only four books on from soul music, but Susan has clearly aged at least four years in those four books.

Yeah. But I just, I enjoy this idea, this idea of time behind time where this fantasy stuff takes place. Yeah. And Susan's ability to walk in and out of it at will. But she's human enough that she can feel she's not living there, she's simply existing. Yeah. It was described as kind of stepping off the tightrope as well, wasn't it?

As if the kind of reality that you and I live in is just this very, very thin sliver of what the universe actually is, which I do like the idea of. I'm massively adjacent to us on either side is the places like Death's Domain and the location of the magical tower that requires some powder that goes twang. Twang. Twang. Twang. But I also like it as sort of from a writer's perspective as I can get away with loads

if that's the case. Yes. None of this needs to make sense as a timeline. Yeah, of course. And then, but it's acknowledged when right at the, right at the beginning we get the little glingle, glingle before the thing that starts causing the glingle, glingle takes place because sometimes effect turns up way before cause. Yes.

Yes. Hmm. Anyway, so yes. And the dreams, the, the premonition dreams. And remembering the future. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, yes, it is good that he uses this thing to kind of do whatever he wants with

it and also that he takes the time to at least throw your little explanation with the, yeah, the rubber band was still a rubber band and the death moving like a witch dancing through raindrops, which is almost a callback to rainy weather. It's not getting wet. It's like, I walked between the raindrops. Yeah. Ofs, which I still try and do. And I feel like I come home slightly drier than I would do.

I, probably just cause I'm standing up straight. If you're hunched, you've just got more surface area, haven't you? Yes. I do try and walk with at least decent posture when I'm stumbling through the rain. Hmm. Also, it makes me feel really cool if you're like walking along and very heavy rain, but you're not all hunched over. You're just walking up like, yeah, I'm getting wet.

What? Fight me. Don't fight me. I'm not saying stop trying to fight rain. I can't fight. Can't fight rain. It's not solid. Fight snow.

No, no. I'm projecting fight me to the world. Like how cool I am. I'm just like walking through rain. It's no big deal. But also don't fight me. But don't fight me because clearly I'm not up for that. Yeah.

No. Look at me. We're drifting away. Should we drift? Towards non-obscure reference. Towards an obscure reference finial and drift down towards the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. Let's do that.

Okay. So obscure reference finial is the bit you were talking about earlier where death goes and kills a little tube worm, doesn't kill a little tube worm. Psycho-pomps him. Is that a verb? I psycho-pomp you psycho-pomp. He she they hangled. So in undisqualled, the, the, these little vents at the bottom of the sea are made incandescent

by magical falls, magical force fields, whatever it is on Earth. Obviously that is from the inner hot bit. Good. Well, then mantle. You know, the further down you get, the hotter it goes for a bit. Yes. Spires and minerals had been deposited around this vent. And in this tiny oasis, a type of life had grown up.

It did need, not need air or light. It did not even need food in the way that most other species would understand the term. So yeah, these are hydrothermal vents. He's talking about the food chain, like the entire little ecosystem around them relies on chemo synthesis, which works via microbes. And it's kind of almost like photosynthesis, but instead of light, it's, it's using chemicals. This particular worm, I think is referring to the Pompeii worm. It lives along sides of the vent chimneys.

So in the very hottest places. So it can withstand temperature spikes of over 80 centigrade, which makes it like incredibly heat resistant for a multicellular animal. The little ones. The little ones. Micro, microbee things can, can generally do a bit better. And I think water bears probably can do better. So that's what I think those are little Pompeii worms.

And while we're at it, um, practically did mention lobsters with teeth on their eyelids, which is what made me note this down in the first place, because of course it did. Um, and I think we're talking about the Kewa Hursuta, although known as Yeti crabs, which, um, I wouldn't try and describe because it's really very difficult to, but, um, I don't know if actually, Joanna, if you want to quickly, quickly Google a Yeti crab for me and I'll put in the little jingle. Jesus. Yeah, right.

Um, so yeah, I think we could say they've got teeth on their eyelids. I really like the aesthetic though. There's like a hint of ostrich feather to the eye, to the appeal. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, they're stylish little fuckers, but they are definitely eldritch, as you say.

God, I love the deep sea. Yeah. And then basically I've lost my place. There it is. Final note on that for me is that I believe that a lot of scientists currently think earliest life evolved around these vents, um, because they relied on, like the very early life relied on chemosensis, instead of photosensis, which makes hydrothermal vents a likely candidate for the origin of life on Earth,

as Natural History Museum's article says, which to me brings me back to the opening paragraph of this book. Perfect. The beginning. Amazingly beautiful circle, Francine. Yeah, it would be better if this was like at the end of the book or something as a narrative circle, but for our show plans narrative circle, it works rather well. I'm going to say that again.

I'm also going to say that that's everything we can manage to say about the first third of Hogfather. Yeah. Without completely veering into the next two sections, which I think we did pretty well not doing because I could see both of us getting really enthusiastic about subjects we need to rein in on. I really can't wait to keep talking about this book. Sorry, I'm just enjoying Glingal.

Yeah. No, do more Glingals. More Glingals, the better I can always isolate them later then. Um, so yeah, that's everything we've got to say about the first part. We will be back next week with part two. So section one ends on 153. So we're starting on 154 with don't tie it so tight. Don't tie it so tight.

Squeak. A good beginning. And we are ending on page 313 with onwards and downwards then. Good. Good. Good. Oh, nice. Until next week, dear listeners, you can follow us on Instagram at the tree shall make

you fret on Twitter at make you fret pod on Facebook at the tree shall make you fret. You can join our subreddit community r slash T T S M Y F. You can email us your thoughts, queries, castles and snacks. The truth shall make you fret pod at gmail.com again reminder. We are starting to think about our hogs watch episode a we will be watching the sky TV adaptation of the hog father for that episode. If you want to watch along and be we would love to hear from you, dear listeners, please send us your letters for the hog father and any questions you've got for us and tell us

how you're celebrating. Have you got weird traditions? Are you doing nothing and want to be smug about it? Are you sick of the consumerism surrounding Christmas? You must be the first person to ever round about that. So email it to us. Yes, please do. And in the meantime, dear listener, don't let us detain you.

Sorry, I'm not meaning to have a go at you today, by the way. Oh, no, I know. It's just the quits that are coming up happen to be a bit targeted. I'll turn it around. I'll turn it around. It's fine. I'm away. You don't hate me, I think.