The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 74: Bromeliad Pt. 1 - Truckers (A Whoomph and a Whiff)

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, usually read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, our Terrific Trilogies season begins with Part 1 of our recap of “The Bromeliad”, as we talk “Truckers”. Nomes! Nerds! Needlessly excessive use of the word “de-familiarisation”! 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:Dead People Can’t Riot (Jack Monroe’s fundraising merch) - TeemillGnome to scaleSN 1054 - WikipediaRincemangle, The Gnome of Even Moor - L-SpaceTruckers book covers - L-SpaceTruckers - Annotated Pratchett FileAmphiboly - BritannicaDeath metal Irish Baron rewilds his estate - GuardianMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com 

I think one of those like overly specific, what's your red flags, ladies? Mine would be never trust anyone who says their ideal superpower would be invisibility. They're definitely perverts. Definitely. Jack's watching the invisible man. Oh, no, I wouldn't be upset if like I could turn invisible at will, but it would definitely wouldn't be my go to. Yeah, no, exactly. Not to yuck anyone's yum. No, I'm absolutely here to yuck yums. That's what this podcast is all about.

Hello. Welcome to the Truth Show. Make you right to the podcast, which has changed direction and is now just here to ruin your day. We're just here to judge you. This is an unsafe space. I have almost finished that unit of my course that I was determined to get done this week. Literally only have the section challenge next to do. So I'm actually ahead of schedule. Fantastic. Are you enjoying? I'm enjoying, but we'll see how I feel after doing the challenge tomorrow.

I may not bother with the user interface part and there is some starter code for it, but I may not bother with the user interface part should go on the grave of every developer who does that. Users do not need. Look, it's a shitty little program I'm only building for this course. I'll into your face. So I don't really need a user to interface. Interfacer. I hardly know that. Jesus.

Oh, no. Sorry about that. Anyway, I'm very proud of you. That sounds like so much work. It was a lot of work, but luckily it's something that has a similar parallel in JavaScript. So I got through the first half of it quite quickly. It was only when it started talking about dynamic memory allocation that it went back to being really C++ in my brain started melting. Yeah, I can't do that in my actual brain that I loaned an external object. Anyway, how else is life? Any news?

Any news? Any news? Well, I just read the actual news, but that's no fun. So let's not do that. Oh, fuck that. No. The Boots index thing is steaming along, I believe. It's nearly new, so I won't go too far into it. Jack is doing some cool merch based on like how much is raised for the trust or trust. Sweet.

Like t-shirts saying you can't write if you're dead, which I approve of. Dead people don't write, I think. Oh, yeah. I really like the one that's like, I can't make it come up now, but that there's like a bunch of text on the canvas bag that's like this canvas bag paid for someone's meal, but in a proper system, we wouldn't have to rely on microcharity, whatever. I always like way too much text on something, I find that amusing. And in this case, ideologically pleasing, too.

So on payday, I might. Yeah, I might get a tote bag. I'm not going to, I'm not buying a t-shirt because I have made a strict rule with myself about buying t-shirts with slogans on and things. Well, I would have got a t-shirt dress when they still had them, but they don't now, so. Yeah, I always got it. I missed out when Andrew and Neil was doing those like t-shirt dresses. I keep every year, I think, oh, I wish I had a nice t-shirt dress, but you know, by the time you want one, it's already that one week of summer we got. Yeah, I might try making one. I don't have any like t-shirt fabric though.

But if I find any, I'll get some. I'm going to go charity shop shopping soon, so. Ooh, let me know if you don't mind coming. I haven't gone for a rummage in charity shops for ages. Yeah, no, I need some clothes that fit properly. I don't really need anything. I just always find good shit. Yeah, I made a nice dinner tonight. That was good. What'd you have? A little cherry tomato aubergine ricotta bake thing.

Noice. I had a burger. Oh, I had a burger for ages. Jack cooked, so. Burger. He's cooked a couple of times this week. That should tell you how fucking busy I've been. Jesus, thank you very much for making a podcast with me then. So what do you call it, sanctuary?

John, can you get me here? Door's shut, headphones on, talking about impenetrable to anybody else nonsense. Yeah, that's actually quite relaxing. Why have you just written the word sorry? Underneath the. Underneath the picture. Yeah, because it's stupid. I made it in GIMP like two minutes before I was ready to.

Francine, don't apologize for this. It's beautiful. I measured it. I did the calculations. So the gnome, I looked up a few places, said the gnome's a four inches tall, so I just went by that. And then it said you could fit eight of them side by side in a steering wheel. Yeah. And so I looked up the average size of an HGV steering wheel, which is about 44 centimetres.

And I went on the lower end because I see they were a bit smaller in 1989, for some reason, because cars were. And so from that, I could work out how tall he was. And then obviously I can look up the size of a UK paperback and then I could put them to scale. So that's actually properly to scale. That's my copy. I could have just measured it for you. Genuinely, it's quicker to just Google UK paperback size probably.

Yeah, right. I'll put pictures of the covers on there. On the WhatsApp. Yeah. Do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to the Two Shall Make He Fret, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book

from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one us time in chronological order, except not today. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. So I just remembered when we're not doing discworld, I usually say like we're usually reading and recapping, but then I forgot so I wanted to throw something in. Anyway, and we are here to begin our terrific trilogies season.

I know that was a working title, but I forgot the better one we came up with. And we are talking about the Bramelliad trilogy. Today we are talking about book one of the trilogy, Truckers, following to our Diggers and Wings. We're talking about the whole book. Nothing about the book. The book, the whole book and probably a lot of things

that aren't to do with the book. I had the weirdest nightmare about doing this podcast. Oh, fuck, what? No, I just dreamt that the Bramelliad was actually a completely different trilogy from Truckers, Diggers and Wings, and that I'd somehow like mix them up and that I would show up to record the podcast having read the wrong book. I dreamt the other week that we were about to do the rabbit hole

and I realized I'd not done my research tool and I was going to have to wing it. And instead of like telling you that I'd mixed up the schedule, I was like, I'm just going to have to wing it. I'm just going to have all these pages open in the next window and pretend that I'm not reading off them all. I mean, I'd give that a go. Yeah, I mean, I think as it's you, I will probably just tell you.

Yeah. And like refusing to embarrass myself in front of someone else's situation, I suppose, I might try and wing it. Yeah, no, there's no point not like, you wouldn't need to feel embarrassed because I'm sure at some point that will eventually happen. Yeah, we'll just turn up and go, wait, fuck, we didn't read the book. But yeah, I genuinely was worried I'd read the wrong book and I like woke up and had to Google the Bromeliad and check

that I was talking about the right trilogy. I was, we're talking about the Bromeliad trilogy, Truckers, Diggers and Wings. Otherwise known as the Nome Trilogy, in case any of you guys are worried. No, on spoilers, before we probably crack on, we're a spoiler light podcast. Obviously, heavy spoilers for the books we're discussing, the Bromeliad trilogy slash Nome Trilogy. But we will avoid spoiling major future events in the Discworld series.

And we're saving major future ones past the Discworld book for our not past 1989. Yes, we will avoid spoiling major future events past Gingo in the Discworld series. I had to check which book we did last. 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. Yelling at your friend down at the footwell of an HDV.

Perfect. And actually, you know, in case anybody's worried, I don't think we'll be spoiling any Discworld books. I feel like if you were going to listen to the podcast out of order, this would be one you'd start with, maybe. And I don't want to put anyone off right away. Yeah, we won't be talking about this. I will mention a couple of Discworld characters,

but there won't be spoilers. You're fine. Do we have anything to follow up on? Yeah. So go to follow up on The Light Fantastic. If you are listening to this for the first time listeners, then I'm hoping you remember The Light Fantastic, because it was a long time ago.

It was just about two years ago now. No, it's not been two years. It's year and change. Have we only been doing this a year? No, we've been doing this nearly two years. Fuck. Yeah. Did we miss our second birthday?

Yes, I told you the week after that we missed it. Okay, good. Yeah. What was I saying? Oh, yeah. So this is only vaguely related, but I really enjoyed learning about it, and I wanted to shoehorn it into the podcast.

So, and it was like way too late to shoehorn it into that one. Supernova 1054 was a massive supernova that was visible in fully daylight sky on Earth for like 20 days in 1054. Okay. And then during the night for like two years. And it's really interesting because it appears in illustrations from like North American petroglyphs, and like the suggested records in Aboriginal oral tradition.

And there's like written records in Chinese astronomy. Nice. Yeah. And that's fucking cool. Yeah, it is really cool. I haven't gone on about it for too long, because I can't remember all the proper facts, but I'll link to something about it.

Yeah. Nice. And now it is a crab nebula. And it's got what's it called in the middle? Like a super dense star type thing? I don't know. It's a pulsar, and it spins and spins and spins and spins like 30 times a second,

and it makes like an electromagnetic thing, and it like shoots out electromagnetic rays, and it's pretty cool. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Anyway. Sorry, that said, it's sarcastic, it wasn't. Yeah, that's my follow-up from the like fantastic,

because there's a star in that. Slightly more relevant follow-up. We've got an email from Steven, who asked in reference to Jingo about the fact that we kind of both ignored the little joke about Mr. Harris as a member of the seamstress guild. Oh, yeah. I thought that was in your notes.

It was in my notes. I never made it into the episode, and I just wanted to clarify, like, yes, sort of yay mention of non-heterosexuality on the disc, but I was very tired that day. It felt a bit like homosexuality is a punchline again. I just did not have the energy to have a conversation about it. Oh, sure.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I thought I'd clarify. I did notice, but I was tired. We do have more follow-up. While I was in the emails, I've seen one that is unopened from Jasper. Email from Jasper saying,

Hello, wonderful podcast hosts. Thank you. I was just thinking about the round-world basis for general tact, because I thought I would share my knowledge. He shares a lot of similarities with Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. During the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden suddenly ran out of monarchs due to what I would describe as a lack of horniness among the royal family.

So I'm reading this blind, so I hope it doesn't get, like, much more erotic than that. The Swedish government asked France if they had any spare nobles hanging around, as an alliance with France would be beneficial to Sweden at this time. Bernadotte was one of Napoleon's top generals and was promptly shipped off to Sweden to do some kinging

and was crowned Charles XIV, I think, John. Oh, wow, Roman numerals, not my strong point. He promptly allied with the UK and joined the alliance that ultimately led to Napoleon's downfall, much like tacticus. No, this is very cool. In another similarity, France, like Count Wolfhawk, became a republic

whilst Genua, like Sweden, is still a monarchy. The kings of Sweden are still of the Bernadotte dynasty, so it's possible that Ella and Baron Saturday are descended from tacticus. I like this. Oh, this is Timfall Hattish. Yeah. Finally, unrelated, Joanna's quote from part two

about the dark being eternal and scary reminds me of the quote, the night is dark and full of terrors from a song of ice and fire. STP and GRR Martin were writing at the same time, so interesting similarities. Not sure if the two ever met, but I feel like GRR would have gotten on STP's nerves.

Definitely agree. Was it like just dark and full of terror, not from anything else? That seems like such a... The night is dark and full of tears. That's what the red priests say in Game of Thrones, but it could totally be in something else. That feels like a lovecraftian.

I mean, I was just thinking the other day, but oh, my sweet summer child is so ingrained in society now, but that doesn't seem like it's that reason, so I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, good point. I use that too much. I try not to use it because it's incredibly patronizing. I'm incredibly patronizing.

No, I don't know. You can say these things without sounding like a ta... No, yeah, no, it looks like good grief. The night is dark and full of tears. It's from... Huh. Also, sorry for not opening or replying to your email, and listeners, you now know that sometimes we will forget.

Open and read them blind on the podcast, and it'll be very easy to trick us into reading out erotic literature. Yeah, which I will edit out of the audio, but patrons forced to deal with the video stream know that I very rarely bothered to edit anything out of that, so... That's the point. Yeah, well, yeah, no, sorry.

It's a feature number five. Should we talk about the actual thing then? Yeah, I think that's not a bad plan. Do you want to maybe introduce us? Truckers was published in 1989, which was the same year as Pyramid and God's Guards. Traitors. What a year.

It topped the children's bestseller list, and it entered the adults bestseller list, which is one of the only books to have done that in England. Nice. It was, apparently, according to Magic of Terry Pratchett by Matt Warrows, based on a trip to Gammage's department store that Terry Pratchett had when he was like five.

And it's the evolved form of short stories that he published in The Bucks Free Press, which starred a known called Rince Mangle. May notice the similarity there. It was a kind of more simplistic, fairy-kitty plot, that one, without so much of their religious overtones. Existential one. Not religious overtones in the same way that C.S. Lewis did Aslan,

but, you know, as a theme. I couldn't immediately find any contemporary reviews. Uh, I only gave myself a few minutes to do that, because usually they're all in one place for me neatly on Colin Smyth's website, and this is the first time that hasn't happened, and, obviously, that caught me off guard. I'll try and have a look for some late 80s, early 90s reviews

of the trip they do before we get to the end of it. Awesome. I'm going to write an angry letter to Colin Smyth. Yeah, no, that seems reasonable. Hey, Colin Smyth, you do all of the work for my co-host, this one, so it wasn't there. I've just realised my blurb is the blurb to the entire trilogy, so I'm not going to do that.

Can you do the blurb just from truckers? To the thousands of tiny gnomes who live under the floorboards of a large department store, there is no outside. Things like day and night, sun and rain are just daft old legends, then a devastating piece of new shatters their existence. The store, their whole world, is to be demolished, and it's up to Masculine, one of the last names to come into the store, to mastermind an unbelievable escape plan that will take all the gnomes

into the dangers of the great outside. It's a good one. So do you remember reading this for the first time? No, because I'd have been pretty young. I think I read this before I read most of the Discworld. I definitely read this before I read any Discworld, because I'm pretty sure I was either late primary school or early middle school. I very distinctly remember getting the first one out from the school library

and then desperately trying to find the other two, because it was always really badly organised. It's because you didn't have me as a library monitor at your school. God, I was cool. I think it's because it was the primary school one, and the primary school one didn't get used much, because most kids, you had to go through all of the reading levels before you did library books, and that didn't normally happen to year four,

but because I was a fucking nerd, they weren't you going through the reading levels too quickly. So in year two, they were just like, yeah, just give up on those to start in library books. I think we've brought up your prodigious reading abilities in the last three episodes. So you really are painting yourselves a worse nerd than me, and I did just out myself as a library monitor. Wow.

You know, it's not like I'm keeping track of our nerd levels or making a spreadsheet or anything. Look, I'm not being funny, Francine, but A, you're making a spreadsheet about it. We co-host a podcast about Terry Pratchett books. Well, one day, Dora, and I know you'll help me with this, I want to write a proper scale for different, not only like levels of nerd,

but there are different areas of nerd, aren't there? Yes. So there's like Pratchettian nerd, and then there's hard sci-fi nerdery, and then I think that overlaps more with stem nerdery. Yeah, and then you've got Lord of the Rings nerdery, which sometimes goes into like linguistic nerds quite a lot. And then I think Star Trek might be its own little...

People get really into it for a lot of different reasons. That's kind of really judgy. I'm not judging, because I haven't seen enough of it to judge. But you know. I love Star Trek, but not like I couldn't tell you any facts about anything that happened in the series. I just used to watch it with my mum all the time, because she fancied Patrick Stewart.

That's fair. Yeah. I respect it. Patrick Stewart has a nice dynamic day about when it was erroneously reported that he was gay. Yeah. And when asked later what he thought about that, he said, oh, I didn't mind at all. When you get to my age, it's quite nice to log on the internet

and find something other than being reported dead. Oh, I like that. Anyway, we've gone off topic again. Shall I tell us what happened in this book? If you don't want to talk about Patrick Stewart anymore. I want to talk about Patrick Stewart, but we're making a podcast about the book Truckers for Unseen. OK, that seems fun too.

The story does not begin or end with the lorry. Not that lorry anyway. It begins with Masculine the Gnome, tired of living outside in the cold and wet, loading his small, in both senses of the word, clan, onto a lorry, along with the thing to seek warmer and safer living conditions. The gnomes from outside find themselves in a lorry nest, lurking out of sight of humans,

when they meet someone unexpected. A fellow gnome, though slightly better dressed. Angelo greets them with some surprise and leads them into the only home he's ever known, the store. Angelo of haberdashery shows them around the home of over 2,000 gnomes and insists that outside cannot possibly be real. The thing wakes for the first time in a long time and requests proximity to electricity.

Newly chatty, the thing explains its origins as a starship's black box and tells Masculine it's time to return to the gnome's true home out in the universe. They meet Dorcas of delicatessen and while people watching, the thing reveals that the store is to be demolished in 21 days. They take the news to the abbot of stationery, who after a brief bit of selective blindness, takes some time alone with the thing as Gerda,

his assistant, teaches the gnomes the history of the store. The abbot sends the gnomes to travel to the top of the store and find the truth via the moving stairs. They meet to the manager's office, question the humanity of the great abros and learn that the store is indeed going to be demolished. The abbot, unfortunately, is dying and begs Masculine to take the gnomes back to the universe.

After the funeral, Gerda, the newly appointed abbot, speaks and Masculine announces the plan to evacuate the store by stealing a lorry. He wants the gnomes all to learn to read, a pastime so far restricted to stationery, and to take as many ideas as possible with them to outside. Angelo, desperate to learn about both lorries in the outside, volunteers to sneak onto a lorry and take a little trip.

Unfortunately, the lorry returns without him and his father, oppers up his men to the cause. Angelo eventually returns. After a hint of adventure, he's hitched a ride back to the store. Dorcas comes up with a clever plan of levers and ropes to get a lorry moving, and preparations for the Exodus are curtailed as silence falls across the store.

The thing turns off, trusting the gnomes to make their own way for now. As the gnomes prepare to leave that night, they sabotage temporarily a handy lorry containing most of what they need, they load on as Dorcas demonstrates steering with semaphore and leave the store with a bang as security drops his cigarette. With a wumpf and a whiff of chaos, the gnomes set off to a new life, and a few days later, the lorry is found in a ditch,

mysteriously electric free. Just a whiff of chaos, was it? Just a whiff. A wumpf and a whiff. I like the alliteration for this very optimistic way of putting it. Carry on, sorry. I was purely for the alliteration. Finally, in an abandoned quarry near an airport,

winter turns to spring and turns to summer as the gnomes settle down, and masculine masticates the idea of flight. No, I absolutely could not have waited that one sentence to interrupt you. Having held off two minutes. Very good, well done. That was nice and concise. Thank you. Helicopter and loincloth watch.

Oh, God. We're doing that on this, aren't we? Yep. It was already in the plan. I'm going to go with the early humans, the first gnomes that land on Earth tried to teach, and they had to settle for teaching them metallurgy instead. They seem like they might be a bit loincloth-y about the years.

Slash loins. So I'm going to go with lorry for helicopter. What, not the airplane? Well, no, because that's a minor bit at the end of the book, and I feel like... Unlike all the major roles that usually... I'm just saying, the third book of this trilogy is called Wings. I'm saving the airplane for myself. All right, I guess you take victory where you can find it, sure.

The bar is low, Francine. What's your quote? Yeah, my quote. Sorry, look at me taking the piss out of you, and then not finding my page while I'm doing that. I'm usually better at multitasking, being a dick and finding the page. So it's a page...

There's no point reading out the page number, because I've got a weird edition. It's the first page of the proper story. Mm-hmm. The sky rained dismal, it rained humdrum, it rained the kind of rain that is so much wetter than normal rain, the kind of rain that comes down and big drops and splats, the kind of rain that is nearly an upright sea with slots in it.

Beautiful. Yeah, you know, I like fractured weather descriptions, and that one I thought was particularly good. Not yet, like, there's some gorgeous, like, simile in that, but I mean, just the phrase, the sky rained dismal. It's gorgeous, isn't it? I love that. Yeah.

Fuck. How about you? Mine is much later on, it's just before they leave the store, to think he'd once called it a lorry nest. Garage, that was the word. It was amazing, the feeling you got from knowing the right names. You felt in control. It was if knowing what the right name was gave you a sort of lever.

Very good. I like lorry nest. I like lorry nest, though. I like lorry nest. I like proper names for things, and I like silly names for things. The other day, I couldn't remember the name for, like, a bank or a verge, and I was sitting there in the office, I was like, guys, I know the word, and don't take the piss out of me.

I know the word isn't inside out ditch. What am I thinking of? The problem is, if you said to me inside out ditch, I would not have worked out you meant bank or verge, would it have been sat there for ages like hump? Here, look. I did say, like, next to a road. Like, I started with the more of an explanation.

Right, okay. So, yeah, now they know. Not kind of a kind of writer they hired. That's good. You get paid for words. I do. There are some things that Sysaurus just can't help with. That's one of them.

Yeah, so what's next? Characters. Let's talk about characters. Shall we start with masculine? Masculine. I like masculine. Yeah, poor little heart done by masculine. The moment where he's really stuck in the kind of unending misery near the beginning,

he's so frustrated and the fire's gone out at the front of their cave. That was very well written. He stuck his spear in the ground and burst out laughing and went on laughing until he started to cry. And I just, you know, those days, like, I just found it really relatable. I must say, I've never done that very dramatic movie tropes thing of laughing until I cried.

And like, I started crying properly. Generally, my emotion comes out pretty full-fledged when it does come out. I've kind of done a combination, like, I think I already talked on the podcast about, like, managing to fall over when my cardigan got caught in a door handle and my feet went out from underneath me and I landed on my arse. And then I was just sat there feeling a very intense combination of humour, rage and misery.

That was definitely cry laughing. At least you didn't have to drag a dead rat back that day. No, you know, I've very rarely had to drag a dead rat anywhere. I'm not going to say never, but rarely. And that is, you know, that's our privilege as people over four inches tall. Yes, not much, but over. Yeah, we've got to get you that step for the kitchen. But yeah, I think Mastin is sweet.

I really like when he lands on the getting the hang of leadership and he manages to cut people short by just saying, good. I really liked when he had that kind of off-screen learning experience as well from the thing and comes back and it's like, and his head's all fizzy and his fingertips are tingling and he's like, things, things are possible. There's so many things. And I also like how he's kind of realistically not that empathetic with Grimmer and occasionally reminded that Grimmer's like.

An actual person. Also had quite a difficult life. There was a really good moment with that going on to Grimmer because I kind of got her neck. He had a few dim recollections of Grimmer in the whole organizing the old women or trying to cook whatever it was. Fancy missing something like that. And it's the sudden realization that she's just as clever and aware as he is.

Yeah. And all of the stuff he hadn't been doing, she had been doing. And it's one of those things where I think quite often domestic work is not seen as work, not acknowledged. It's just kind of, you know, it magically happens to people who work outside the home. Yeah. So I kind of, intentionally, but also they'd all appear on the same page, grouped Grimmer, Granny Morky and Torret together.

Because I have a mild like, not even really rant, but there's something that I've realized sometimes rubs me up the wrong way with how Pratchett can write women. Which is this kind of aggressive competence combined with overbearance. Like Grimmer's such a good example of it. And like it's something I like in small doses, but it feels like almost every, not almost every, a lot of the women in Pratchett kind of written to be like just so much better than the men around them. And it's like one of those things that's funny at first, but when it's everyone,

it's like, can we not just also be shit? See, in this one, I thought particularly Granny Morky was annoying as fuck and not better than the people around. No, but it was that thing of Torret's the leader, but she's the leader behind the leader. Torret is the leader who checks with her before he does everything. Yeah. Yeah.

And you can see that Grimmer's almost groomed to be this replacement of Jollywell Getts organised. And I think I worked out why it was rubbing me up the wrong way as I was reading it. It's not the same trope, but it feels like a cousin to that sitcom wife trope. Yeah. You know where they're just... Like Claire and my family is such a good example of it, of just I'm going to be going if it's a hands on a hips and size and then smiles and does everything that

actually needs to be done while the clown clowns. One of the few examples where a sitcom did get that better the longer it went on and she was allowed to be like an incompetent twat as well. Yeah. Also, one of the sitcoms where like at least the attractiveness kind of matches up. Yeah, no, everyone in that show is kind of pretty. Yeah. But you know what I mean?

This like kind of aggressively competent woman trope does bug me. Yeah. Yeah. It is sometimes like just reading the same character again. It is. Granny Mawky really annoyed me in this one enough that it distracted me from it. That's fair. I think Grimmer gets a bit more of an airing in the next book, doesn't she?

In a less of a just that reused character way. Less of the reused character way and also she's there like spoilers for the next book, but her and masculine aren't around each other too much. So you get to see her exist as more of a whole person. Yeah. I think it's the other thing that bugs me about the trope is that they're so defined by their relationship to a close man. Yeah, although.

Or somewhat defined by dealing with like the particular sexism of this society. I'm not complaining that he wrote the names of sexists like that. That's fine. It makes sense. It's just kind of boring to read again. Yeah. Like the obviously it's silly to think girls can't go somewhere dangerous. Obviously I'm coming with you.

But remember this is a kids book. Oh, yeah. No, I like it. That's I said, I'm not saying it's a bad book because of that. And from 1989. And from 1989. I'm just saying it's like I've become more aware of now. We're in like the latest stages of Pratchett.

I mean, if you think about like pyramids and guards, guards. I guess this this might be like the female version of Pratchett's reusable Victor Tefic template. Yeah, it's definitely a similar thing. And like it gets much better, especially in the Discworld books. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, by the time we're up to where we are in Discworld now, it's women have characters. I think all of these is prototiphanies.

Yeah, that's too one day. God, I can't wait to talk about Tiffany. Yeah, Granny Morky did get a couple of moments that were quite amusing and Granny with a waxy. Yes. But nowhere near as confident. No, but particularly the bananas so big we could hardly dig them out of the ground. And what was the pineapple one? Nowhere near as good as the ones we have to catch at home.

Those bits I like, those felt very Granny with a waxy. I don't have much to say about Torich. He's the mildly amusing incompetent leader thing. He's a nice third example of the leader. I don't think he's incompetent particularly. He was, did you say incompetent or did I just misquote you? No, I said incompetent. Okay, why do you immediately back down?

I didn't even say anything yet. I'm very weak. Jesus, Joey. Podcast is just 9% me rolling over and showing you my belly. I'm sure it's really good conflict like resolution in real life, but it just makes me feel like I'm bullying you if I slightly disagree. I will stand up for myself if I think there's enough in my brain to justify it. But not just at the time, it's like, oh, God, if I try and argue this point,

I'm going to sound dumb as fuck. Just going to agree with you. Oh, well, do you know what? I'm going to contradict myself. I'm like, yeah, he is kind of a constant in this new world. Oh, God, I agree. Oh, my God. He's insane.

He was for what he was like, and I like him as like the third example of leader in that you just have to be consistent. You don't have to be right. And I think that's what the Abbott said as well. And I think that's what masculine is trying not to do so much. Like he's trying to ask other people publicly for their help. I think that's what he came to with Dorcas, wasn't it?

But by the way, the first time you just said that aloud, I realized, Dorca. I didn't get that. I haven't looked at any of these names. I assume there's probably a couple of double meanings that aren't gone. I think a lot of them are just a bit fanciish though, which I prefer. Obviously, like the surnames and the tribal names or whatever from the store like haberdashery and delicatessen. Those I got.

Yes. Yes, those are so heavy handed. I don't think it's 90 reversive even bothered writing that down. It was funny. Yeah, it was kind of funny. I suppose Gerda is a supportive role. We'll also Gerda's. No, Gerda's not from Iron Monkey.

I kept getting really mixed up about who is from there. Like there are just a lot of question marks in my summary. You might have come from Iron Monkey originally. Yeah, we could have done. Because they said they got picked out, didn't they? Yeah. Anyway, the thing. Yes.

Another leader kind of, not really. The thing is interesting. Yeah, a very cryptic cube. Yes. Everyone needs one. Well, I like that. I was trying to work out because obviously I'm going to, funnily enough, talk about de-familiarization a lot later.

So when the thing was first mentioned, and they just sort of say like, it's a weird thing that won't burn, I was trying to work out like what it is, it's like a thing that seems massive to a certain size to gnomes and then smaller, like I was thinking like carpet people where there's a whole city that's a penny fallen on the floor, that kind of thing. So yes, I was, because I couldn't remember. Literally, I read these when I was probably in primary school. I remembered that there were small, tiny things in a department store,

and then I remembered one specific scene that it turns out is from the third book. Cool. So yeah, so I couldn't remember what the thing was until the thing. It's like, I forgot the whole thing about the fact that the gnomes are from space. Oh, yeah, me too, yeah. And I read this like five years ago. Key plot point, it turns out, as we learn from the thing. Yeah, when the thing appears, it's like sudden swing into sci-fi from like

cute little borrower's like fantasy. And then it's like, no, no, space. Turns out. I love this. This is like a theme thing I really love. And I think I'm like more excited about it because I just replayed Horizon Zero Dawn because the new one's coming out in a couple of weeks. I think one of the bits I kind of love about it is this,

we have this thing and we have this kind of myth around what it's for. And it's been carried down for so long that like we know it's important, but we don't know why it's important. It's very nuclear semiotics. It tickles that part of both of our brains, doesn't it? Like, ooh, ooh, what's that? Oral tradition. Ooh, what's that?

Forgotten roots of symbolism. Oh, okay, yeah, more of this. But yeah, hundreds of years ago, it just stopped talking. They all kind of worshipped it and tried to follow its teachings as much as possible. Yeah. And we taught the humans agriculture and we taught the humans fucking... Metallurgy. Yes, the metallurgy.

And the rest of it is not being carried down and the gnomes have forgotten. And I love that. Love that as a thing, as a trope. Is it a trope? Yeah. There's enough trope there. Let's call it a trope. I'm not sure if trope is always meant to be negative.

I don't, I feel the way it is, it isn't. But I wonder if it was meant to at first. Possibly. I don't think of trope as inherently negative. I think of it as like a category. But then if you call something tropey, it sounds quite negative, doesn't it? Yeah, true. Do you know?

Anyway, yeah. But I like it sort of resolutely turning itself off and going, all right, well... Yeah, come and figure it out. Keep being good at shit. Go on, let's see what you can do. It's trying to be apparent. It is. Things fly, little nestlings, or drive.

Drive. Yes, the thing I'm going to end up talking about a bunch more in the next couple of weeks, because it's one of my favourite characters. It's like a good magic sword. Yes. It's like fucking cring, except I don't want to swear every time it speaks. Angelo. Angelo, Angelo.

Angelo. I wasn't sure. I'm going with Angelo, because Angelo feels weird. But he's such a sweet character. He's so excited when he goes on his adventure. Oh, he's a little teenage boy. Little posh teenage boy. He's a posh teenage boy who's excited about lorries.

I respect it. He's so, so adventurous compared to all the rest of them in there. Yeah, Dorcas is great as well. I like how fascinated he is by humans, and how kind of willing he is to hear about the sort of ideas of the outside, and the fact that he's decided to design lifts and steal electricity. Dorcas is like a proto-lenid almost, isn't he? Yes, like he's just very willing to experiment and learn. And I think he's one of the more open-minded about this idea of outsiders.

He's like, oh, yeah, no, I've heard of this weather thing you've got. That's very cool. I like how he's like, I'm not sure if deliberately or whether he's just this straightforward, like, waits to be asked for help each time. And so masculine has to learn to ask. I feel like he's also got a bit of that, like he's offered to help a few times and being told, like, he's been silly, or his inventions are silly, and now he's like, no, not helping, unless you ask for it, I'm not going to help.

With your respect, I like that kind of character. Yeah, for sure. And then we have the Abbott, who's selective blindness was impressive even by, like, Lord Ross standards. That was incredible creativity. Just straight up, nope. Don't see, yeah. And they mean very willing.

Yeah, very old, really. What is it, like, 15? And I like the image of, like, on his deathbed learning of the wider world and finding joy in that rather than frustration that he had to wait that long to learn. Like, he was really happy thinking about the stars in the big store. It's not just a room full of stars. It's not just a room, it's massive. There's loads more stars.

Now, I really love that. I like the Abbott as, like, obviously, it's a character you don't spend long with because of the dying. But I like that once you get past the initial selective blindness, he's like, oh, well, I have kind of have to do that for politics. But, like, seriously, what's up with all this? Yeah, yeah. And then Gerda, Gerda, his successor.

Poor scared little Gerda. Poor scared little Gerda. I like when Gerda becomes the new Abbott and he worries, I have doubts sometimes. I can't imagine why he thought I'd be any good. He's perfect for leadership because he has doubts, which means he's capable of seeing the bigger picture and doing what he needs to lead them to do. Yeah, you don't want to sell it in charge of a church, like, sounds counterintuitive, but somebody who believes unthinkingly.

Isn't thinking. Yeah. Yeah. If he did say I didn't catch how old Gerda is, you get the feeling from, like, his dialogues at 20s or 30s, don't you? But yeah, obviously, that's in the gnome equivalent. Old enough to be slightly set in his ways, but still a lot more enthusiastic than the... Yeah, like, not like middle age, but definitely not like a teenager.

Yeah. Yeah. And, like, the shock of, yes, we're teaching everyone to read. I like how even as they accept and learn new things, they're still very much... It has to be in increments and, like, the limits of their imagination. They can't grow that much at once. So, like, even the ABBA, you know, learns about space and the styles. But to him, it's just the biggest store.

And, like, Angelo comes back and he's like, there's more than one store. And, like, Gerda's like, there's, like, more than... I know the outside exists, but it exists, exists, does it? And there's, oh, yes, no, I see, there's rain now. Yes, no, I kind of knew that, but, oh. I didn't want to experience it. I guess the rain just runs off your head. Yeah.

Speaking of locations, like the store. Yes, good. Big, bigger than the lorry going on forever. I really like this idea of it feels bigger than the outside because, like, outside you can't really see it because there's no edges and there's no top. Yes, absolutely. The store, you can see that there are edges at the top and they're really far away. Apparently, aircraft hangar can really give that, like, sense of, whoa, I've never

been in one of the massive, massive, massive ones. But I remember CTP Gray, I think it was talking about it. This podcast is, like, yeah, obviously outside is bigger, but this is bigger. This feels bigger. Yeah. Yes, so the store is obviously where we spend most of the book. Yeah. And it is, it is a universe to most of the gnomes until they learn about outside.

It's weird, isn't it? I guess they don't spend much time above ground, but, like, the idea that even at four inches tall, you could not ever confirm the existence of outside. Well, I mean, if I'm trying to think of it as the equivalent to, like, learning that actually our world is one, I don't know, big room in a series of big rooms. I don't know, it seems more like discovering other countries, doesn't it? Yeah, a little bit. Because there's no barrier to it, like there is, like, space.

There's definitely an unwiddliness to discover as much as anything else. Yeah, it's like this insular, comfortable, I have settled in and safe, and then you go through a few generations of wanting to stick your fingers in your ears and go, la la la, and this is what you end up with. Yeah, and, you know, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it, when you think of the population that survived outside of the store? Yeah, which is, like, maybe there's some ancestral memory of foxes and such.

Ancestral memory of foxes would be a great album title. Yeah. And then the quarry is, of course, where we end up. It is large, it is abandoned, it has got handy sheds and electricity. Yes, I'm imagining it as, like, one of the massive chalk pits, like, near us because I've never really been in a proper quarry. Yeah, no, I've also been imagining it as, basically, a big chalk bit. Cool.

That's close enough. Yeah. But we'll talk about the quarry more next week. Oh, good, because, yeah, that's the next book, yeah. That's the next book. Sorry, spoilers. Yeah, they don't teleport out of it, between now and then. We will start where we left off, but that's next week, and we've got more of this book

to talk about, Francine. Do we? Okay, I suppose we could do that, couldn't we? Little bits we liked. Concerning gnomes and time is my first one. Go on then, go on then, tell me about it. This is like a little kind of preface to the main book, which explains that gnomes are small, so they don't live for a long time, but they live a lot faster

and uses the mayfly as an example. So a mayfly, a single hour may last as long as a century. Perhaps old mayflies sit around complaining about how life this minute is to patch on the good old minutes of long ago, when the world was young and the sun seemed so much brighter. True that. Whereas trees, which aren't famous for their quick reactions, may just have time to notice the way the sky keeps flickering before the dry rotten woodworm set in. Counting pines.

But this kind of answers a question we had about from the carpet people about what time is for them compared to time for humans, and where their millennia are weak to us. So it's nice to have it sort of exempled. Yeah, and it was 10 times as long, isn't it, for? Yeah, but to a gnomer year lasts as long as 10 years does to a human. Don't let it concern you. Which is handy, because you do need to keep reminding yourselves when they're like 21 days, that's forever.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, 200 days, that's quite a long time, yeah. Yeah, that's the thing with Angelo going missing for like three days. Yeah, yeah. It was like, and had to live off scraps. I was like, well, had to live off scraps as a bit much. Oh, no, wait, no, that's 10, that's a month. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I would want to live off bin scraps for a month. Speaking of bin scraps, environmental allegory, Francine. Sure. I decided to stop trying to do clever segues. I'm just going to say speaking of whatever we last said, and then jump into the next point. No, I like it. Although actually it is speaking of time, because I was thinking about how, with like the motorway encroaching on the habitat,

for gnomes who live 10 times as fast as humans, it must seem almost like a geological phenomenon. I'm all like a climate chain phenomenon, you know? It's not like, not the same as like normal construction would be to us. I just thought generally, this is very much the little species being driven out of the English countryside thing, which was already talked about a lot in the late 80s and is now... Yeah, it feels relatively... ...prepare a lot of places, if you know. No, that's a bit much, but you know.

We haven't destroyed that many ecosystems in Britain compared to some places. Britain's one of the least wild countries in the world now. Oh, yeah, I know it is. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a very small island. We've just tried all of the ecosystems, I think. Yeah, we have as well. It's not in our lifetimes.

Yeah, off topic, but rewilding is an interesting ecological concept that, if I remember, I'll find a link to a cool article about a guy who owns a bunch of land and is attempting to rewild the estate and ignoring laws and just trying to move in whatever animals he can. You've told me about that before. Have we not done it on the podcast? I don't know if we have done it. No, I think it was in the group chat.

Yeah, no, yeah. Let's link that in the show notes. Rewilding is cool. Anyway, speaking of the wild ants. Yeah, I don't know if these are in the right order or not because we've got different page numbers and your bullet points are so cryptic this week, I couldn't even guess. So humans are ants, are they? Humans are ants.

This is when the gnomes are speculating about the intelligence of humans, and they described it as ants where it looks like they're intelligent, but it's all just this patterned behavior. Right, yeah, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. They're comparing them to trying to say, well, but they build things. It's like, well, yeah, but birds, they're just magpies but taller. I also like how they described like the radio noise.

I kept many, when I'm editing this, I'll try and remember to slow down a small segment of talking by 10 times to see what it sounds like because I sometimes slow something down by like 50% if I'm transcribing something by 10 times. Yeah, that's just going to be a moo as they described it. It's like some whales listening to whales. Yes, not the whales. The big undersea mammals, yeah. Yes, no, the whales, they speak so slowly.

That's why I can't understand whales. It's just the speed of it. It's not like a complete lack of knowledge of a second language. Hey, I know like three words of Spanish. Absolutely. Finding fiction. Yes, I thought- Speaking of whales.

Yeah, but we can do better than this. Whales are fictional, no. No, no, you know, the whales are steeped in folklore. Speaking of folklore, finding fiction and it's alliterative, excellent. Beautiful. I liked Maskelin's realization via the conduit of begins with a Vibto, whatever his name is. Oh, yeah, I think it's Vibto. Not Vibto.

Vito. Yeah, Vito. Oh, I like Vimto. I'm a Vimto forever. Anyway, is Vimto still exist? It seems like it's mainly sugar. Okay, what am I talking about? Different types of book and how Maskelin realizes that-

Actually, I shouldn't tell you to only read practical books because what if we find out about what we need from another book? And I feel like that's a subject very close to practice heart. And the fact that you should just be as widely read as possible, that's how you become knowledgeable, not just by reading a shelf full of textbooks or encyclopedias. Like do that, but also then read the atlas in one land and whatever else. Gallivis Travels.

Gallivis Travels. How else would you hold somebody up with a canoe? That's what I want to know. And yeah, I like how- I'm not even sure I could hold up a canoe. No, I suppose not. Double meaning. And yeah, I like the kind of realization of fiction as well in that.

It's not only that these books are impractical, they're untrue. Yeah, kind of learning what fiction is. Yeah. And I feel like he didn't really have the room to explore it, but I wonder if it's just that they never write it down or whether they don't really have a storytelling culture. I mean, they do a bit in the- They talk about like the monsters that roam the things at night, but they kind of believe that.

Yeah, they're kind of like almost legends. Yeah. Like because they see security and they assume that is price is slashed. Yeah. And then you have obviously the mythology and religion built up around Arnold Brose himself. Established 1905. Established 1905 because I don't think they do the Holy-

I don't think they do the sign of the cross. But I feel like they're doing something, is it that? Established 1905. They can't consider that it wouldn't be all be real and true because they don't have a concept of fiction or allegory or myth really. Yeah. And it's that freedom to read that means that when there's more than four people reading it once suddenly, this world of untruths opens up to them.

Yeah. That's an interesting way into it because I feel like obviously humans had fiction before they had books. But yeah, maybe it's also that they... No, that's not right. I was about to say maybe it's that they didn't have time for it for the under, the store names did. Yeah. Yeah, I liked that. What about impossible tasks?

Impossible tasks. Like doing a good segue in this podcast. This is just one of those things that I like because it's very pratchety. It's like almost a cousin to the million to one chances idea, but it's also just relatable of Masculine knew he had an impossible task, but he was used to them dragging a rat all the way from the wood to the hole of being an impossible task. But it wasn't impossible to drag it a little way. So you did that and then you rested and you dragged it a little way again.

Dealing with an impossible task is chopping it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks and breaking it down and breaking it down and breaking it down. I realize now that your bullet points weren't that cryptic. They're not cryptic, they're contextless. I think from now on, we should write the show plan in cryptic crossword clues. No, I hate cryptic crossword clues. I'm really bad at them. Me too, but it will be funny.

I could get Jack to write them. This is why I do the New York Times crossword, because that doesn't really have cryptic clues. We're not doing that in cryptic crossword clues, Francine. I barely know what I'm talking about with my actual literal notes in front of me. Okay, fine. I suppose I'll let you finish your point then. God, what was my point?

I don't know if it's impossible to get it through a point. Francine on the other end is just waking up a bit. That idea of breaking an impossible task down into just difficult tasks and then breaking the difficult task down into tricky jobs. A, it feels very patchy. I like it. Like I said, it feels like a cousin to the million to one chances thing. And B, it's just relatable because I do have to do that a lot.

Yeah, I hear that that's a way to do things, but I've never been able to. It always just remains impossible and huge. I think about it a lot when obviously I do the coding exercises. It's like, I don't know how to build this program, but I know how to build this thing that does a job I need the program to do. And then I need to know how to build this thing that does a job. And then I know how to put those two together. And eventually I have a working program.

They very rarely crash my computer anymore, although I built one the other day that did. What was it meant to do? Dynamically allocate memory on the heap. I'm having fun. I'm having so much fun Francine. But yes, so I like this. It's not sales reports.

At least it's not sales reports. Fuck spreadsheets. Do I? May you be forgiven? No, not fuck spreadsheets Francine. I'm sorry. All right. I've completely lost my point. Let's go on to the bigger talking point, shall we Francine?

You're going to make a pivot table about what you've done. Yeah, sure. Wordplay. My computer's here. What? No. And we're making a podcast. Oh, right.

Right. Sorry. Talking points. Talk to me about wordplay, Francine. Okay. So this is a really fun one for wordplay, isn't it? Fracture kind of took it and ran with it. The whole thing is like dotted rife with double meaning words

and phrases, which by the way, I looked up. I was like, is there a word for like homonym but a phrase? And apparently, yes. Amphibaly. Amphibaly. Amphibaly is like a phrase that can mean a couple of things. It's like grammatically unsun. Oh, not that.

Not explicit. So. Shrodinger's phrase. Sure. We've got to stop abusing the shrodinger thing. That poor cat. Never. We've got phrases in there with it.

We've got so many things in that box. Right. Sorry, Francine. For example, Britannica used I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Ah, right. So I was wearing my pyjamas when I shot an elephant, or the elephant was wearing my pyjamas, I guess. Yeah.

Or there was an elephant in my pyjamas with me and I shot it. Yes. I like, obviously, that's throughout with road works ahead. I sure hope it does. And dogs in push chairs must be carried. And yay, it was Wax Roth because not everybody was carrying a dog on a push chair. And then that finally reduced sounds terrifying. And then you kind of go like a bit silly.

I would like light years and cracked it. And that's just straight up, double meaning of a word. And there's lots of those in there. And then they like go like slightly existential and religious with it. And you've got everything must go. And if you do not see what you require, please ask. Yeah. Taking the store signs as these kind of literal things of religion is something I really love.

And they work really well. Yeah. Everything must go. Everything must go. Make it go. And if you do not see what you require, please ask. Brilliant. And then there's a couple of more like, I don't know, more complex,

but like more relevant in the context. So like critical path analysis, the critical path being like the important, the vital one. And also like critical thinking analysis, obviously. Yeah. Polysemi is the capacity for a word to have multiple related meanings. And polyptotone is like when you use the same word in a different way twice. I think these are amphibole, you know,

meaning liking to find words for a taric devices. And sometimes it's hard to fit them in the right place. I think this is amphibole. Listeners, tell me if I'm wrong. Listeners, tell me how to spell amphibole. And then like the other thing about words, you touched on your quote. I really like the idea of not being able to think about things properly if you don't have the right words for it.

Like it was brought up a couple of times. Like right near the beginning, he was like, and he could feel his brain wanting to think something that he didn't have the words for and I get that a lot. Yes. And then, and then yeah, like the satisfaction of finally getting that little bit of knowledge needed to kind of get your brain going. It's like getting it into gear rather than like coasting in neutral.

Yeah. Yeah. Just a little bit of purchase. Like purchase, like that would be a good one, wouldn't it? Getting a bit of purchase. Yeah, that would go in the book. But the shot, I don't know anymore because it exploded. And caught fire a bit.

Which, by the way, before anybody writes in, we know that a drop cigarette can't do that to diesel. It has to be an active spark, but it's a movie trove and it's funny. And it's a nice mental image. And also I just really love, I love the use of the word because it is so perfectly. Like a dine dog, gently clearing it through. Did you look at the AFP for this, by the way?

I don't know if they have a little edge on it. They have a couple of nondesqueld, didn't they? Yeah, I actually haven't loaded that up. Yeah, I got it from Context. Let me just have a quick look. Yes, there is some. Masculine is a pun on the word masculine. Oh, sure.

Life, but not as we know it, is a Star Trek reference. Stationary is kind of a parody of the Roman Catholic Church. Oh, I meant to say the, yeah, unless you know how to read the books properly, they inflame the brain. That's kind of another really far back callback to equal rights. We were talking about that, weren't we? Oh, yeah.

And women can't go to university. Women can't read. Yeah, I think we might have specifically gone into, I'm not sure if it was Catholics we talked about, or just dickers, men from other generations. Quite possibly. Something to put a pin in for when we talk about the Johnny Birks, which we're doing later this year.

The store is going to be closed and replaced by the Neil Armstrong Shopping Mall, which is a place that features in the Johnny Birks, so we can assume they exist in the same universe. Cool, cool. Yeah. And then there's a couple of obvious small steps for gnome, whatever. Yes, there's lots of Neil Armstrong on what's it.

There's, I just looked at the last annotation, though, and this is something I did briefly look up, but it didn't seem very relevant. The village they're sort of driving through in the lorry right at the end is called Grimthorpe, but it got retconned to Blackberry from the second book. But it turns out Blackberry's not a real place. Grimthorpe is, because I looked it up.

Grimthorpe, maybe. It's spelt Grimthorpe. I think it's Grimthorpe, which was around the time of writing the poorest village in the country. It was an old mining village. Wow, I'm not surprised with fucking arsonist gnomes all over the place. Well, exactly.

It's an old mining village. It's still going and they are no longer the poorest in the country. Oh, well done, Grimthorpe. But there is no John Lennon Street, which is what I was trying to find. Ah, okay. That was why I was looking it up. Anyway, you end up looking at a map of a random village in Yorkshire.

Yes. Yeah, I understand. I understand the compulsion. God, why did I end up trying to look for... God, I can't even remember now. Oh, I did. The steering wheel diameter here. I just remembered earlier thinking to myself,

what are you doing? And it was that and I did it. I love you. Yeah, no, so there is lots of very good funny word play. Oh, I didn't put in... Oh, fuck, I didn't put... I meant to put this in a little bit.

I liked and I refused to not mention this. The garden gnomes. Oh, yeah. The weird mythology. The ceremonial dress being like the... Yeah, what the fuck? I love that. This is a good segue into your stuff, actually,

because you're talking about like gnomes in general. But yeah, it reminded me of... I know I've referenced this book like a million times, but watching the English by Kate Fox, they've got... She's got a whole bit about how garden gnomes this weird class signifier in the UK. And I feel like that's the generation above us,

because I would not give it a fuck if I saw a garden gnome anywhere. Apart from going, ha, I haven't seen one of those in a while. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would call them kind of an upper middle. Yeah, like, no, they're really common. Like... Oh, are they? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, they're common if you have a garden gnome. Yeah, okay. So the example she used was like an upper middle class person would think they're really naff, but a real upper class, secure in their class person, might have a garden gnome. And then if anybody asked them about the name, they'd go, huh, yes, that's my gnome.

But an upper middle class person would be at pains to explain, how it was ironic. It was an ironic gnome. Ah, right, yeah. Oh, yes, an upper class person. We love it, it's Charlie. Yes, it's my gnome. I'd rather fond of gnomes.

There used to be a gnome exhibition, walk around exhibition at Outdoor One in Plymouth. I feel like it closed recently, Jack told me, which is a shame. I want to go to a gnome exhibition. Jesus, that's awesome. Anyway, sorry, yeah, let's talk about gnome-ishness. Yeah.

So you have clarified, and I guess we'll put this image in the show notes somewhere, what size gnomes are in relation to a paperback copy of Truckers, which is why you were looking at steering wheel diameters. I made it the right wideness as well. Hence the steering wheel diameter. So we have a gnome to scale of Truckers, very small. But they're also not entirely human looking,

like a brick wall on legs. They're very stocky. Yeah. So my little gnome is turned to the side of it, so I don't think I got that in properly. But yeah, they're nearly as, they're nearly as, they're about 50% as wide as they are at all. Yeah, they're like little hench gnomes.

Yeah. Like you're a little puppy. Yeah, yeah, like my little brick puppy. She's a little brick, she's a lovely little brick. But there's some fun ideas about this. One I noticed that I really like was kind of a contrast to Jingo. Mm-hmm. Or Maskelin's kind of trying to deal with religion

because he's never experienced it before. There'd never been any religion or politics back home. The world was just too big to worry about things like that. Yeah. Which kind of in contrast to this Fyme's idea in Jingo of, you could understand getting religion in the desert because there's so much space, your brain needs to put something in the way.

Yeah. And I like both ideas. I like the fact that the whole world is too big to worry about having religion. There's too much here. Yeah. And the, oh God, there's so much here, put a God in the way. I guess like there isn't anything there though in the desert,

is there? It's massive, but there's nothing there. No. Where is it? In the field, they're always dealing with something. Maybe there's a difference. Yes. I suppose if you were getting eaten by a giant fox in the desert,

you'd be maybe very quickly inventing a religion. So you've got something to pray to that the fox doesn't eat you. That's what I would do. Desert fox have great ears though, so. Oh, I love fennec foxes. They're so cute. And they've got this amazing argumentative nature that Dorcas sums up amazingly.

If you lined up 10 gnomes and shouted pull, four of them would push and two of them would say pardon. Yes. Which I know is no mission nature, not human nature, but also having met people. Yeah, very annoying, very annoying. I understand everybody's frustration here. I'm not a good team player and I get very annoyed

when I have to hurt people. Yeah, I like managing people, but that doesn't mean I'm good at making them all pull in the same direction. Yeah, I miss bossing people around. I like working alongside people, but I like to not have to rely on someone to get my own work done because, yeah.

Exactly. I don't think I would. I don't think I would reverse your lorry. I don't think I would enjoy being in a large team of people with ropes. I'm also just not very good under that kind of pressure. Oh, yeah. No, for sure.

To be clear, I would definitely be one of the people pulling the wrong direction if someone was yelling at me. I was around some friends the other day and we were playing with a VR headset and we were playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which is like a bomb disposal game, so one person's wearing the headset and then everyone else is solving these puzzles

and telling them what to do. They were like, oh, it's your turn to wear the headset and I got so stressed just trying to work out where my hands went with this fucking thing on and eventually I was like, you know what? I'm not going to do the bomb disposal thing. I don't want to learn how to use the VR headset while also diffusing a bomb, even if it's fictional.

I kind of want to go at that now. It is really quite fun, but my spatial awareness is bad. Oh, yeah. It makes me think about it. But yeah, so the no-mission stuff kind of takes me into my favorite thing, de-familiarization. This is kind of meta-defamiliarization.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. Because you've kind of got the tiny people in the human world and their interaction with human things and that de-familiarization. And then you've got the bigger thing of the inside gnomes not understanding the outside and it's like another layer on top of it. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, double de-familiarization. I think I have that exact phrase somewhere. I don't really mean meta, but... Yeah, double de-familiarization. Yeah, I think we did the same bit there, yeah. Yeah, that's very cool. I also managed to abbreviate the word de-familiarization differently every time I needed to put it in my notes.

Oh, what did you go for? D-fam, de-famil. D-fam. D-f, de-fation. Yeah, good. De-f-fis-ation. Very nice. Very nice.

Keep going. These are in my handwritten notes. No one should ever try and understand the way I abbreviate handwritten things. I understand them and that's all we need. Yeah, absolutely. That's the main thing. But you start getting it with the outside names in the store

and this whole idea of a lorry nest. Yeah. Because to them, the lorries are alive. Of course they are. They have much to do with the answers. Yeah. If the foxes are alive, why wouldn't a lorry be? And it keeps going on.

I like they're discussing the leaves. And Maslow's trying to explain that the leaves go brown and fall off the tree. And it's like, well, they just curl up and fall off. And it's fascinating. Who sticks them back on? Yeah. Just kind of happens.

I like masculine working out that the wind was caused by the trees waving, obviously. Yeah. Because of course it is. Of course it is, yeah. Now we thought of it, of course it's that. But it's taking this idea and then bringing in the ideas of size and perspective and this huge universe that when you then take

the different perspective of the names you've only known outside and the names you've only known inside and try and apply it to these massive ideas of the universe. That's what I was talking about earlier with the store seeming bigger than outside because you can see the limits and see how far they are away. Yes. Whereas outside just is sort of there.

It's the thing we were talking about with the Abbott. The store that's got a room that they keep the stars in. And that was our home. And that's the only way you can understand the galaxy or the sky full of stars. And it goes into these great ideas of perspective. And masculine as well, which is also just a really beautiful name. The Abbott had known and died with his eyes full of stars,

but even he didn't understand. That's nice. He thought it was just the biggest department ever. And I like the way that you sort of see the gnomes trip up on their own intelligence. Like masculine feels proud because the store gnomes can't understand what the thing is saying because they don't have any experience. For them one end of the store to the other is the massive difference.

They wouldn't be able to get to grips with the fact that the stars were much further away. Even if you ran all the way, it would probably take weeks to reach them. Yeah. That's another beautiful phrase. They'd wait until the sun went cold and the moon died. Yeah. The things up there, repairing the ships.

Sorry, just another nice star-related phrase. He's got some beautiful wording in there, hasn't he? Oddly enough, being proud. It's a really beautifully written book. He's already really getting into a stride if you think this is the same kind of time as pyramids and guards-guards. So more so even than say like carpet people and the ones we're talking about and that kind of proto-prouchet stuff.

Like this is more contemporary. Yeah, yeah. Did you note down a bit where they found the little map and they're like, well, we're in the middle? Yeah, obviously. Which like technically they're not wrong because... Oh, if they're in England and they found an English map then, yeah, I guess so, yeah. Even if it's a map of the world, England would have been in the middle.

But I like the way they sort of assume that they must be in China because again, they've got no perspective. They've got no understanding of distance. It's like when you're little and you think like if I dig a hole I'll end up in Australia. Probably straightly all afternoon, but I will get to Australia, yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

And the thing explaining this idea of them coming from the star and how many stars there are and how many worlds have been visited by gnomes, you could see this number was one of the biggest. All of those suns miles apart and all I have to do is move one lorry. Put like that. It seemed ridiculous. And I love this idea of it takes this huge understanding of size that he cannot understand.

Just remember just standing on a planet that's evolving. It's that song. It's that song in a little sentence and that's, I think, partly why the book brings me so much joy because it goes back into my impossible task thing of is it really that impossible if there can be that many suns? Whoa, dude. Have you got an obscure reference for Neil for me, Francine?

Oh, I guess. That smells nice as that, though. Yeah. Nice sacrilegious one for you this week. Beautiful. I know how you like the religious slander. Yep. It's not really that.

It's just that they noted that the holy book, the book of Arnold Ross Rackets Established in 1908 was written on Rizzler, cigarette papers, rolling papers for our American listeners. Not just used for joints in the UK. Yes. For cigarettes too, although often for joints. Big ones by Kingskins. Anyway.

I think we clarified this in Hogfarm as well. I think we did, didn't we? How did I do this two months in a row? Anyway, I was like, I said, do you know I had vague memories of this, like being a teenager and someone using Bible pages? Someone, not me, using Bible pages to roll joints with. I might have had a toke off on it. I don't really remember.

I was 14 and stoned, but sorry to go. Yeah, I've definitely never rolled a cigarette with Bible paper. Yeah. Well, I mean, you shouldn't, because although it is, as I'm about to explain, quite similar paper, it is still got like ink and crap on it. And Rizzler is really cheap anyway. But when you're trying to make a point and you're a teenager, what? I know.

I know the answer. I don't think I was even trying to make a point. I think the Bible was just closer. No, I was. I was an obnoxious atheist. Yeah, no, never mind. We were constantly trying to make fucking points. We were unbearable.

God, we were the worst. I love teenagers. They're so bad. It scared the living shit out of me. Unbearable brackets affectionate. Anyway, yeah. Sorry, Francie. Anyway, yeah.

So they're both non-wood paper, which is why they seem quite similar. And you can make them a lot thinner. You make them out of cellulose and like linen kind of extracts, thing like that. That's why some like dictionaries and it's like cladiers, not so often now, but were more often made of this paper. Just fit a lot more of it in a small space, basically. It is really satisfying like pages to turn. They're very soft.

I've got like three Bibles handy. They're over on another shelf. Just in case you run out of Rizzler. I'm almost barred shut. No, I just somehow ended up with a massive family Bible that no one else wants. And my sister feels very strongly that it must be kept, but that she doesn't have room for it.

Right. So now I just have a fucking huge Bible. I have a Bible, but it was a one they give you when you get married. Oh, I didn't. In Jersey. I don't know if that's the thing everywhere. I've got my missile that I got for my first telecommunion and the Bible I got for my christening.

Did I ever say on the podcast in Jersey, the marriage law is quite different to the point where kissing at the end of the ceremony is a legal part of the ceremony. Is it? That's necessary. Yeah. Wow. No, I didn't know that.

And the whole when we knelt down next to each other and there was like a knot or something, like what was a cloth or something. I don't really remember. I don't know at that point. Mostly focused on still not hysterically giggling after the sermon. Yeah. Anyway.

We'll leave that cryptic, listen. Maybe I'll go into detail another day when I'm not so tired. Tying the knot. That's what I mean. Yeah. That's literally still part of the ceremony in Jersey marriage law. Yeah. Fun fact.

Anyway, that is everything we have to say about this book and a lot of things we have to say about other stuff that has. It is so bad on the standards. I'm so sorry. No, don't be. The listeners love it. We're still under two hours. Then delightful.

I think that just means we said very little of substance. If this is your first time listening to the true show, make you frat. I'll give you another chance. That it's not like this, but. Well, sometimes it's not. I think it's more fun when it is. Would it?

Yeah. Anyway, we will be back next Monday to talk about book two of the trilogy. Trilogy. Trilogy. Trilogy. Trilogy. Terrific. Terrific trilogy.

Terrific. We're not going to give you page numbers because once again, we're going to talk about the whole book diggers by Terry Pratchett, book two of the Bramelead trilogy, because diggers is definitely part of the Bramelead trilogy. Yes. In the meantime, however, dear listener, you can follow us on Instagram at the True Shall Make You Frat

on Twitter at Make You Frat Pod, on Facebook at the True Shall Make You Frat. You can join our subreddit community, r slash ttsmyf, email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks, and gnomishideas, the True Shall Make You Frat Pod at gmail.com. And if you want to support us financially, go to patreon.com forward slash the True Shall Make You Frat and exchange your herd and pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense.

And in the meantime, dear listener, shouldn't be too hard to drive. They've only got three wheels. See, I knew I'd cheer up talking about this nonsense. Good nonsense, this. Yes. This is all you need to do. Fine vintage nonsense.

This is a fine nonsense. 1989. Very good year. Very good year. Very good year for nonsense. Very good year. Would you like to try some of the nonsense before we pull the full bottle?

No, I'll just go straight for it. Okay. No, I won't go for the bottle. It's not corked. That's it. Corked, I was trying to remember. This nonsense is corked.