Triforce! - A world of ancient tat | Triforce #346

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Triforce! Episode 346! We're talking about antiques, museums and a world full of all that old tat you don't care about any more. Meanwhile, Lewis' house saga continues now he's moved in with a giant dead fish and Sips and Flax share their top parenting tips for troublesome children. Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hickax. Well, hello there everyone and welcome back to the TriForce podcast. Hodcast. He doesn't have a cold. He's recording from his... He doesn't have a cold. Manoir de Brindley. It sounds like we replaced him with somebody else.

He sounds so different. Finally. I'm just in... I'm on my laptop in the lounge. I haven't even set up my computer yet. We moved in yesterday. Nice. And there's boxes everywhere.

How did the move go? Chaos. Move was honestly fine. Yeah. The lovely... lovely removal service, Pickford's, recommend, come highly recommend. Shout out to Pickford. Big ups to Pickford.

Yeah, I think we've all been there. They delivered everything safely. And yeah, I think it's, it's, it's daunting. It's daunting. But I'll get settled in over the next few days. So it'll be fine. It'll be fine. Nice.

It'll be fine. Good. It was already a leak in the ceiling from, because we had heavy rain yesterday. So it's great to have like your first day in and there's like the water dripping from ceiling. That's what you want. Yeah. That's what you want. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, welcome to home ownership now. Yeah, welcome. You can't, you, the, the person that you to get it sorted out is, finally, that you have to, you got to pay. You got to pay, you got to pay for that to be sorted out now. You can't just phone up your landlord and be like, oh, this isn't

working or whatever. But equally, you don't have to phone up someone and wait on them to bloody do it. It's now on you. Like, it is quite, although it is a gigantic anchor to, you, your life, having a home. It's also very liberating to not be relying on some evil Charles Dickensian landlord. It's like having an incinerator at the center of your life that you just throw money into. There is also that. Yeah, like shapes too, except it's money. You get to sleep in the incinerator and have parties there and fix. You get to sleep near it. You got to pay to keep it powered and stuff, though, too. But that's more money into the incinerator. I mean, it's, it is a weird one for sure, but I guess you get, I guess you get used to it. I mean,

um, I think, I think overall it's, it is a great, uh, milestone to achieve though, owning your own. Thank you. House moving into it, uh, settling in and stuff, you know, like I, I think that's, I think it's good. Yeah, well, I'm proud of you, Lewis. You're really proud of you, Lou. You've made us proud. You've made us proud. You've made us proud of we Lulu or baby Lou. Well, grown up. Oh.

Can I? This is not a mailbag episode, but I want to read this. This is a little bit of admin. Had an email him from a viewer. What is the nature of the email? The email subject is, let them talk. Oh, okay. I'll allow it.

Okay. Love the show, but I've noticed a bit of a change, especially in the mailbag episodes. I actually listen to the podcast so I can hear Sips and Lewis have a laugh and talk bollocks. I don't listen to the show to hear you controlling the episode like a bold Nazi and zoom through the jingles and list the questions. So, okay, listen, listen up. Wait, I've responded. I've responded. Let him speak.

Let him speak. There's two more, there's two emails. That's all. I'm just going to finish the story. Literally breaking the rule immediately. It is Peryan's role in this podcast to keep things moving and he's got a good thermometer for when things are getting boring. And so he will often step in and stop me speaking from telling some incredibly bland anecdote

about going to be in two. Especially the mailbag. is the maestro. So he has to control. He's the flow controller. So here's my, here's my response to the emailer. I said, wouldn't be much of a mailbag if we only read three emails. People take the time, as you have, to email in, I want to try to get as many read out as possible as a way to say thank you to the fans who take the time to give us. What is, in essence, free content. If I was in control of the mailbag, we'd get through about three because of the diversions and the tangents. But that's not what we do. That's more like how.

And zero degrees, who are the other people on that? Rhaps and Lydia. They... They... They... They... They... They...

No, I know. I'm only missing. They have much more of a... Less sort of comments, but more rambles around them. At least that used to be the format. I don't know what they've changed there. They don't have a bold Nazi in charge. That's what you need.

But to be fair to the original email... A flow controller. In response to my response, my reply, he then says, fair enough, mate, thanks for the reply. Keep up the good work. So, thank you. Nice. You know, we're all working together to make it as good as possible.

That's all it is. Listen, I think the ultimate responsibility of this lies with the editor, Tom Haisel, because he obviously left in me going up, during that little bit where I'm about to start a new sentence. I can hear the email being typed in the background right now. No, no, no, no, that's something else. Tom, I'm sorry, I'm bringing you into the boardroom. You're fired.

No, my youngest forgot her zip card today, which she needs to go to it on a school trip. I just drove in and dropped it at reception. And now she's emailed me. She's messaged me on WhatsApp to say, when are you bringing it in? And I'm telling her, I've already done that. That's right. Oh, wow.

Nice. That's quick. What is a zip card? It's a card that kids have that allows them to travel for free on transport. That's interesting. We have a similar thing over here. It's not free. You pay 20 pound a year.

And it just has to be renewed like a week before their birthday. and all the way up until they're 18, they can use it to ride the buses for 20 pounds a year, which is great value. So up until you're 15, it's free in London. And then after that, it's reduced for 16 and plus. Another thing in London. This kid's going to get to college, you know?

In London, the last time we were there, we were surprised, and I spoke about this before, but I think it's such a great thing. All the museums are free now. They've been free for years. It was like ages ago, man, it was such a barrier. They're so expensive to go visit these places. That's years and years they've been free. Now you can actually just go in for free, which is insane.

It's great. We went to, oh, fuck, I can't even remember the name of the museum now. It was a huge one. What describe it to me? Tate Modern? No, it wasn't the Tate Modern. It was like, it was, it was near Hyde Park. It was maybe the Science Museum.

I think it might have been the Science Museum. There's a lot of museums on that area. I think it was actually the Science Museum. But when we went, free to go in, but you had to like book in advance, but it was rammed. I've never seen a museum so busy before my life, but it was so nice to see a museum so busy. You know, people actually going to this place with their kids. Yeah, so there's Natural History Museum is the dinosaur one. Yeah, it's next to that.

So that's the Science Museum, yeah. We wanted to go to the natural history one. I agree. But we didn't book. The V&A is next to. Science Museum. Oh, it's close to the, it's close to the Natural History Museum. Maybe not right next to it, but okay.

It's in the same sort of area. It's like the Science Museum, the V&A, the natural history are all next to each other. Yes. It's a really nice area. It would have been science because we went to see an IMAX there in the Science Museum. Yeah, I love the Science Museum. Yeah, no, it was fantastic. I can't, I can't recommend it enough.

And also, again, the atmosphere is amazing because it's packed. Like you can tell it's like at capacity, but I feel like those places are great when they're at capacity because it's it's so interesting to look around and just see everybody enjoying stuff that isn't just like the usual. You know, like it's not just a bunch of people on their phones or their iPads or or, you know, just sitting in a Starbucks or something. Like it's it's something. It shouldn't be different, but it feels like it's something different. But it was just great. It was it was really good. Yeah. So if you're in London and I would go, I would go to the Science Museum. And we were sad that we couldn't go to the Natural History Museum because it looked amazing.

It is great. We'll go next time we go. For anyone that is thinking of coming to. The Science Museum, as Sips describes it, is exactly right. It's just like cool exhibits. And it's science. So it's telling you like, where does lava come from? What is an earthquake?

Like all that kind of stuff. The Natural History Museum is more a collection of animals that Victorian gentlemen captured in nets and then put in glass cages. that is the Natural History Museum It's much better than that Look at this weird fucking thing What is that? Put it in a box immediately The King will want to see it Exactly, that's the National Huston Museum

The Victorian Album Museum is more like Culture and fashioning stuff like Okay you now stuff it Pop it in a box And pop it home Where's my net? That's rather large What is that? That's a bear sir Brilliant, get my biggest net

My largest gun And my biggest box He's loving when they covered like the forest floor with like nets and then they put like this smoke bomb down and like bombed a tree and like thousands of bugs and stuff raining out of it on to the net. Yeah, mad, isn't it? Industrial scale apprehensions for the museum and the zoo. So you can do one or the, so the V&A will have like, for example, that'll have all the

dresses that Marilyn Monroe wore or it'll have like all the clothes that, you know, some famous fashion Easter wore or it'll have some exhibit about it's all culture. Some of those Marilyn Monroe dresses come from Jersey because there used to be a big, a big Marilyn Monroe dress collector over here. I don't know if they are still over here. But I think at one point they had like the biggest private collection of Marilyn Monroe stuff. Do you reckon they're sniffing it? I would probably sniff it a little bit. You're sniffing history.

You're getting high off the fumes of history there if you're sniffing it. It's just, I'm sniffing it for the history. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You got any weird question. I'm asking for friends. You got any Maryland Monroe underpants in there? Just for history.

I bet you they smell amazing. I bet you they smell. I bet you they smell like tulips. I think it smells more like granny's sock drawer in all honesty. These clothes are like getting on. These are old. And then you can go north from all those and you can go to Hyde Park and Hyde Park's beautiful.

Hyde Park's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it feels like we're like the tourist board for London. but last time we went, we went to see, what did we go and see? Oh yeah, I took my kids to see Disney on ice, which was fine. Like, I mean, my kids are all young and really enjoyed it. But around going to that was like the main reason we went. But around going to that, we just had time to sort of go around London and see a couple of things that we hadn't seen before,

wander around places that we haven't really been able to do before. Because normally when we go to London, we're always doing something. but we're time poor, you know? Like it's, it's kind of a rush. We don't have a lot of time to do as many things as we'd like to because you've got to balance it out when you got three small kids with having time to rest and how long it takes to get them ready and how long it takes to eat and like all this kind of stuff. But the last time we went was really good. They were all like that little bit older where we had more time to just do a couple bits and pieces. Like we went, we went shopping like we went to oxford street and like my wife and uh and my daughters went

clothes shopping and me and my son just went to like hmv and like all these game stores and stuff and it was really fun then we had like a lot of time to go around hide park we went to museums and stuff like it was it was it was really good it's a it is a it is it is a great city actually a lot of people are always like uh talking it down but i think there's so much to do there I don't even think you could do it all in in a handful of trips even. It seems like forever there's something to do there. It's like a really busy happening place. Yeah.

This week's podcast is sponsored by London. The city of London. Well, you could pop into the Bristol. Bristol Art Gallery Museum. That's all free. Bristol is another place that is fantastic. Honestly, like when we were out, the last time I was out there with my whole family was when we had YogCon, you remember, just before COVID? Damn, that's a long time.

It's a long time ago, but man, we had a lot of fun. Like, again, we had a couple of days where we could just wander around and, uh, and check out, like, parks and go to, like, little museums and stuff. And it was, it was fantastic. I think I rate Bristol as well. I think Bristol is such a nice, nice city. Like, it's interesting, you know, there's always like stuff happening. Like, it just feels like, uh, it just feels like, uh, it just feels like, uh, like an exciting place to be. Well, every time I've been at least. Yeah. I think a lot of major cities everywhere in Europe have interesting landmarks and things to see, right? And there's always little art galleries, a little, you know, places. Sarah was, I was talking to, because she's going to, she's like, I've lived in England for like years now and I've never been to Europe. And it's right next door. And so she sort of impulse booked a trip to Copenhagen. Copenhagen. Oh, will she be arriving in Copenhagen?

By plane or by aeroplane? And anyway, she showed me the map of like, she'd highlighted all the Google map. It looked like Copenhagen had measles or something. Stop saying it like that. Copenhagen. Michael Pontillow, Copenhagen. Copenhagen. The garage.

You're in the garage. Wait, what do you say? I say garage. I say garage. I say garage. Garage. I say garage. Garage.

Garage. Garage. I don't even know what I said. Put the car hole. In Chippenham. Put it in the garage. Chip in here. Anyway, and so there's always, I think you can have a lovely day out.

Like, I always think the British Museum has so much crap to see there. Stolen crap. Yeah, I mean, the British Empire did kind of go around the world and just steal everybody's stuff at one point. Yeah, but now it's conveniently located in one place. You can come and out again. That's true. That's true. I mean, you're talking about the in time poor.

Imagine if you had to go all the way to the Middle East to look at some of their artefacts. Come to London. Exactly. You could do some shopping and get a nice cup of coffee. Yeah, you can get a nice cup of coffee. Yeah, you can have some bangers and mash for your lunch. It's just convenience.

We should bring more of it over here. Yeah, let's go get some of. You can have a chippy tea while you're there too. Honestly, like it's more efficient. Like with global, with climate change. Exactly. It's environmentally friendly to central life. We shouldn't be flying out there to see mummies or whatever.

Bring them over here. I think that's what they do, actually. But I like, I also always remember about the British Museum things like this, that these museums have tons and tons more just stuff in storage, right? That they've, they don't show. So like 90% or 95% of all the British Museum stuff isn't on show or more. Because they've got stuff that they don't even know if it has value or not. Like, I remember when Andy Warhol died.

It's handbags. It's people's handbags that they've mixed from all around the air and all their phones and stuff. They know they just never stop nicking. That's why they have bargain hunt on TV and Antiques Roadshow. That's the only country in the world that has all of these shows because they just have so much junk and they don't know how much it's worth. So they're just trying to like crowd and figure out how much this stuff is worth.

All those people knocking phones in London, they're going straight to the British Museum. They never stop. No, they don't. By an immortal Fagan-like character who just sends out. All those phones just go. They're in China. Like immediately. Like, if you turn location tracking on your stolen phone, like the next day, it's like,

it's already being dismantled in a factory in China. Very efficient. It is funny how the clothes go to Nigeria, you know, dead white bands clothes as we talked about on this podcast. I think it was Ghana, yeah, something like that. Somewhere like that. The phones go back to China to be recycled. All the plastic pollution goes to India and gets dumped in the rivers there.

You know, it's just full of Tesco bags, India now. It's out of control. No, but what? The Andy Warhol thing was they, when he died, because he was such an iconic sort of character, they just packed up his whole house where he lived. Maybe it was flat. They packed up every single thing, every bit of rubbish, every bit of junk. He was a bit of a compulsive hoarder as well.

And they just packed it all away into boxes to be sorted eventually because, you know, maybe they can do an exhibit down the road or share. They could do a pawn stars on him. But it's like it's so hard to know what has artistic. They're almost like compulsive hoarders, right? They can't throw anything away because it's like, oh, this is Andy Warhol's collection of old toothbrushes that we found under his sink. Yeah.

You mean, it's like maybe one day he would have made this into an art piece for you all to adjoic, but he never have the time. Apparently, uh, apparently Kirk Cobain's house was a bit like that too, because he was, uh, I guess he was like a bit of, uh, well, I mean, he obviously had his, his demons. He had problems and stuff. But he was somebody who kind of stepped into a vast amount of wealth very quickly. But I don't think he ever caught up with it. Because when they were going through his stuff, all like all of his stuff was just like he had like like, he stored like notebooks in like bathtubs and stuff.

Like it was just there was just junk everywhere basically. And it was like he, but like the way he lived before he had money was was the way that he sort of continued to live like with money. right? Like he just had a much bigger house, but he still had lots of clutter and mess everywhere. And I think it took a long time for everybody to like sort through that because he, he was like a bit of an audio file. He recorded a lot of stuff. So there was just tapes and tapes and tapes everywhere. His whole life was like this frantic drug-fueled. Yeah, he did a lot of art. So there's a fucking art all over the damn place. But it's like incredibly rapid rise to fame. and like this whirlwind of like touring and playing

and like going around the world. It must have been an insane life with no slowdown. And obviously did have some wealth and just spent it as and when on things that interested him. And yeah, you can see how that would result. It would be interesting to see some of that stuff though. Yeah, because you're potentially looking at stuff that would have been produced when he was sort of at his,

if you like, his artistic peak. But not everything was released, you know, like a handful of albums for the band, some art that's like a more well known about than others. And then obviously clothes that like have gone on to to go for loads at auction. Like he famously wore like a, it was like a hospital gown when they did Redding in 1992. He did a show that the Reading show in this hospital gown. Wow. And it was auctioned for like 50 grand like, you know, years later or whatever.

One of his guitars was auctioned off for like 100 grand. And you don't know what you're getting, like, when you're looking through all this stuff, I guess is what I'm trying to say. I think, oh, this stuff is just junk, you know, but like, exactly. Over the years, it does accumulate some value, you know, like it's, and especially for private collectors, it's all speculation too, right? Yeah, where does this stuff go?

And is it people doing it as a speculation thinking they're going to make more money out of it down the road? Is it some private house, do they get it like framed and put up in a wall with the signed thing? Because a lot of people do that and have it. And, you know, it just exists somewhere in someone's house. Or is it stuff that people just buy on an impulse, really rich people and just, it just goes in a cupboard somewhere, it's thrown away or whatever.

You do see this a lot with people finding, like, a thing in their garage, and it'll be something that their dad had or whatever. And it would look like an unexploded shell or like a grenade. You see it come around quite a lot on Reddit. And a lot of this stuff is just toys. And then you see it on bargain hunt as well, where they're like, I bought this for 35 pounds. Let's go to auction.

Do I have any bids for 15 pounds? Going 10 pounds. Going five pounds. Going for free. Anybody want this for free? It is all junk ultimately. Sometimes, sometimes there's like a gym. It's going in the bin.

It's going in the bin. It's going in. Anybody want to pay for the skip? Nobody wants to pay for the skip. Okay. In the bid. Okay. I like that.

And they just chuck it off the stage of the option of the stage. straight into like a river. Some of the stuff is, you can tell, though, when they pick it up is just, oh, man, there's no way anybody wants this, you know? Yeah. It'll be like some mass produced brassware or something, which looks like, if you don't know what you're doing, you see that and you're like, oh, it looks old.

I bet you somebody will want this and it'll be worth something. But like, there's so much crap that's just worth nothing. It doesn't matter how old it gets. I always think this with antique shops, I think they're a little bit like a filter for shit. And the shit that's really bad stays in them, right? And so you go around an antique shop and you've got the, we look in these dusty cabinets of all shiny crap and pocket watches and stuff like this, tons and tons and tons of them. And they don't move in years and years and years.

But the stuff that's new gets put on the front, okay? And if that's good, it gets snapped up quite quickly. Otherwise, it joins the crap, filtered crap, right? So the older of the antique shop is, the worse it is. Yeah. Okay. If there's a new antique shop opening up, it's going to be full of stuff that hasn't been, like, you know, picked over over years and years and years. Yeah.

So you're much more likely to find something that is actually not garbage. So there's a good few markets in London that do antiques and stuff. And quite often there'll be like a street market and they'll have tables laid out with quote unquote antiques. But most of it's just like stuff that would have been disposable back then. Like rather than real quality stuff, like furniture and things like that, it's just more likely to be things like an old mug, some old toys. And it's just kind of... I feel like there's such... I used to think the antiques market was this very well regulated, very well planned and organized things, almost like Pokemon cards or Magic the Gathering, where there's these very dedicated ideas of what things values are, right?

Whereas in fact, it's much, much woolly than that. It's much hazy than that. It's full of, like, fakes. Anything that's got any value at all is... worth knocking up a fakes, like immediately. And then, you know, it infiltrates the whole market so quickly, you know, because what's the point in, you know, trying to counterfeit 10 pound notes when you can counterfeit $1,000 vases, you know, and sneak them out into the market, like, cheaply. And it's the world we live in, right? I think the weird thing is the other side of it.

If you go to Portobella Road, which is always really, really busy, that's a very long road in London that has a market. If you go at the weekend, especially in the summer, brilliant. It's a lot of fun. It's very busy, but it's a lot of fun. That whole street, there's sections of it. There's one section that is just watches. It's like shop after shop after shop, just selling old watches. And, I mean, thousands and thousands of them on display,

and some of them don't have a strap or they're a little bit broken or whatever, but you can get them for like a five or a tenor. I don't know where they get all of these watches. I mean, it's literally thousands. And I assume they either get it from charity shops or someone dies and they've got a fucking draw full of watches and someone just sells them cheaply as a job lot. I think the thing with antiques dealers is people see antiques dealing as just like being a shop

owner, but you need to understand the value of these things immediately. Because the last thing you want, the greatest fear of any antiques dealer would be to have something very valuable and sell it for a tenor. Like you see on, what is that, what is that show, Antiques Road Show? Yeah. Where they're like, how did you get this? Now, like, my uncle bought it for five pounds in a pharaoh. charity shop and they're like, well, it's worth $380,000. So no antiques dealer wants to hear that

story because they're like, oh my God, I could have had the big one. Because they will filter, they will pre-filter everything go, I'm going to sell these at auction and these are for retail. And people will just buy it because they like it rather than, oh, this is worth money. I think most of the stuff you see in the retail. Yeah, it's knowing which one is which. But I think like, I think that like other other places operate on the same sort of principles as like antiques. like in the UK you've got, you know, like those, like the gold, we'll buy all your gold or we buy any car and all that kind of stuff.

We buy any car. That shit all works the same because they're just buying, they're acquiring cars at like below market prices or sometimes they're just like acquiring them almost for free. But then they do very little to them and then they sell them on at auction in some cases or just like resell them and charge like resell fees or whatever. But like the volume is what is what makes them all the money, you know? Like maybe not so much with antiques, but there's definitely some volume in like the,

this isn't worth anything, but somebody will come into the shop and buy it versus I might get like a shit ton of money for this at auction. Exactly. Yeah. You know. Oh, speaking of antiques at the weekend, I went down to Dorset.

me and Mrs. F went down to Dorset. Because my school, Bournemouth School, was 125 years old this year. Oh, my God. And so we went down there, and it was an open day. If you were an alumni of the school, or if you just wanted to poke around, you could just turn up. There was no appointment, and there were pupils ready there. They were currently pupils at the school to give you a tour of the school. Did you bump into some old flames?

No, it was a boy school. My question still stands. No, I did not. But there were, I went with some of my mates that I was at school with, they live in Bournemouth. And it was so strange to see my old school because it was familiar. I still knew my way around it. But they'd added so much and made it so much better, so much nicer.

Yeah. The classrooms were really lovely. It had double glazing now, so it was nice and warm. All new carpeting, the corridors were nice. What made me laugh was to see how societies changed in terms of what schools expect to give to the students and what the students expect from the school. When we were at school, all that was expected of you was to turn up at one time to shut up and do your homework.

Don't have too many Pepsi's in your lunch. Well, yeah. No ripped jeans or like offensive band t-shirts. We wore a uniform. We wore a uniform. Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah. I was schooled in, in N.A. where there were no uniforms.

Yeah, no uniforms. But I'm so the positive about uniforms is that if you're poor or rich, you look the same at school, which to me is a good thing. If you wear whatever you want and you're turning up wearing all the latest gear, and as I would have been back then, wearing just rags, you know, really crack clothes. There was definitely an aspect of that. You look like the poor kids. Yeah.

The big thing was in the 90s when the Bulls were winning all the NBA championships. The Bulls merchandise was like highly sought after, you know. And the glory seeking children. The starter brand. hats, the jackets, the starter jackets, those were all really, really like big ticket, you know, like if you had a Bulls jacket or like a Lakers jacket or whatever, you were like, wow, this guy is cool. Yeah.

But I guess if at a private, not even in a private school. No, it wasn't private. In the UK with uniform, you can't, you wouldn't be able to wear any of that stuff. Yeah. It also, honestly, it makes your life as a parent much easier. And as a kid, you don't have to worry about what to wear or, you know, and also it's just, it's just, to me, it's a lot easier to have the uniform. They've made fun of it at times, the whole school uniform thing in the States, but I think it really is a positive. I think it works. Yeah. But the

kids that showed us around were like these real high achieving sick formers. And I was, I said to them, where's the copse, which is the wooded area out the back of the school. We used to call it the cops. And I don't know why. It's C-O-P-S-E. I think it's an old word for small wood. Yeah. It was always called the cops. And I was like, yeah, we used to smoke behind those bushes. What about you, lads? Like, do you vape behind those bushes? We're like, oh, no, we would never do anything like that. We're very good.

And I was like, fuck off. And then the old gym, the old gym, you're letting the school down. Exactly, exactly. The old gym, which used to be just garbage, it was just a hall with a high ceiling, some ropes, a couple of pommel horses and some ancient mats. That is now a hangout area for the kids called, no word of a lie, le bistro. Le bistro. And I was like, Le Bistro.

Talk, would you like you? talk about how much we hate vaping at Le Bistre. Exactly right. Meet you there. Copenhaven-Hagen this weekend. They just couldn't believe it. It's like all, everything was set at the canteen. He was lovely.

The library was the same. Same shelves, the librarian told me. Same books probably, too. Different books, I checked. And they had a big banner at one end, advertising Dungeons and Dragons. I was like, my God, it's out in the open now. Do you think our library still has one of those old Apple Mac computers that had a CD-ROM drive,

but it didn't just take the CD. It took the CD with the jewel case around it. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, we used to have those in our library. We had Macs in the library when they were brand new, the original Mac. And the little box, it didn't have a fucking disk drive on it. That wasn't a thing.

I mean, as in a CD, it had like a floppy disk drive. Yeah, I think this was like the first, like the first generation of CDs when they came out. You didn't just put the. disc. It came like in a big plastic case and it had like a metal tab thing on it. That's probably a good idea. It means you can't scratch the CD. It was like a cartridge. It was like a cartridge. You fed the whole thing into it. But then we also went to see my wife's cousin. So old. Yeah.

Talking about that school. Well, I'll make you feel young. I'll make you feel young. Okay. Right. Trust me. With the next bit. School is still shit. Okay. Despite all these frills and special whistles at a world, It would be strode now and we don't have the old gym and the new gym We just have one gym So there's half as much gym for you all to do children No it's huge

This whole wing was built The school is not somehow better Do they have a climbing wall in there? Lois I disagree We never have a climbing wall That's right No I'm serious All the old schools are this fancy

No but this is what the schools are like Like this is you go now They have things like Someone who's responsible A dilded cage is still a cage the mental health of the kids, for example. If you're struggling, there's like a quiet area. We can go and chill out there is like counseling at the school.

Yeah. They really do look after the kids so much better. I was watching educating Yorkshire and we watched educating Essex after that as well. And one thing that surprised me is something that we didn't have when we were at school is you had like, you had teachers for like the classes for the year. but then you also had like these, it was almost like like gardens counselors attached to a year. And they were kind of like head counselors for the year. Yeah, yeah.

They would just sort of keep tabs on people that were having difficulty or, you know, if somebody was just having like a bit of a rough time, they could go see them and stuff. And we had like gardens counselors, but nobody used them. Like it was just it was not like, or maybe I, maybe it was just me who didn't ever use them. But it felt like there was no emphasis on that reason. at school, you know, whereas like when I watch these shows, people seem very aware that like

these people were around and they were there to support them and stuff. I don't know. Maybe like, maybe the whole sort of like attitude towards them has changed over the years or something or maybe there's more of a need for them now. I don't know, but. I just think it's good. It's really nice that the kids have someone that they can talk to. That's not a parent that understands the school and has potentially followed them all through that year. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, I think it's really It's really positive. I want to say our guidance counselors were mostly like, I think they sort of came into play closer to when you were finishing up high school and they were kind of like giving you

advice on what kind of jobs you could potentially get or what kind of things you might want to do at university that would lead you to the kind of job that you were looking to get. That sounds like the idea of the careers advisor that we had. I guess it's more of a dual role in a sense. Yeah. But I don't know if there was necessarily anybody that you could just go to and be like, I'm being bullied or I, you know, I am having a rough time at home or something like that, you could sort of talk to and stuff. I think it depended. God, it's so different though. Well, go on,

two facts. Tell me, make me feel less old. So here's, here's the other thing. We went to see Mrs. F's cousin. He lives in Dorset with his girlfriend. And we went to see his, his house. He's had it for about a year. It's in a very, very small village in Dorset. It's very old. It was built in 1480. Right. The house. The house was built in 1480. Holy crap. So it's older than Columbus's voyage to the new world. It's that old. I mean, it's insane. So we were looking around that and seeing things like there was a Wattle and Daub wall in the forge.

There's a forge there. Like it would have been the old village Blacksmith Forge. And it's still got all the, what is it, the quenching tray where they put the metal after they forged in everything. The Wattle and Daube wall. Do you think they had any good metal molds there or were they all ceramic one-use mold? No, no, but that wall is one of the younger features in the house, and it's 400 years old. It's insane. So it's absolutely mad.

Here we have a really, really shit old wall, made of shit, actually. Here we have some bit of old crap from Cape Man Times. There's more shit over here. You can see, this bed is incredibly old and uncomfortable looking at it. But when he bought it, so he bought it about a year ago, and it was, it was in an unbelievable. state. It was really bad. And Mrs. F and my youngest went down to see him just after he'd bought it. And they were looking around. And it was uninhabitable. I mean, you couldn't, you couldn't live in there. It was just, it was impossible. It was too many holes, too much leakage. Place was just in a

terrible state. And he's done an amazing job of getting it up. Has he opened it? He's made it more open plan. No, you can't. It's incredibly closed ceiling. Like the ceilings are all would be. Has he installed a Julian, a Julian balcony? Like one of those ones. to. It's like super listed building. You can't even have a drain pipe. Can't even have a drain pipe on the front of the house. So you're not allowed because it's like, no, no, no, you're not allowed to do anything to this house. I wouldn't. I wouldn't buy a house like that. I want to be able to do what I like, you know? Well, I mean, it is an amazing house. And you're walking around it, you just feel like you're going back in time. It's incredible. That's cool. Yeah. But yeah,

that's so that and then we just drove around, uh, around Dorset to, you know, visiting various people that that we know. It's just a beautiful county. I absolutely love it. Do you feel less old now, Lewis? No, because my house, I deliberately bought this house that it's not listed. Because I knew that I would want to be able to do. But it does feature a forge.

Well, there's, again, we've got a root seller. All the amenities that you would expect. I think about 25 years ago, well, I know that the owner who lived here, lived here for 26 years. They moved in like 2000. And before them, there was this couple who lived there. I think their names were on this fancy deed or whatever. I can't remember the name.

But they were kind of a bit, I think the guy was a bit of an amateur lighting enthusiast because he's rigged up lighting all over the place, like in the garden. Oh, laid on this light. He's laid on some lighting. He's put like, one of the things that really sold us on the house was it had a pre-built fritzel basement. He was an amateur pedophile. He was an amateur fritzel.

He was building his own basement dungeon. So he built, he put all of these outside lights all over the fucking place. And so there's cables just loose running up the garden. And I don't know whether they're electrified or not. You know, I'll keep discovering things, you know, that he's plugged in.

None of them work at all. You know, and the outside, there is actually an outside light circuit in the fuse box, which I've noticed. And I tripped it on and it immediately tripped off. Oh, man. All I can think about is that scene from National Ampoon's Christmas vacation when he's

got all the Christmas lights rigged up in the, you know, he's unfurling that big ball of lights and then it's all plugged into like 20 extension leads in the garage and nobody can figure out what button it is and stuff. That's exactly what it is. So yeah, it's, it's, I needs to be all ripped out. And you know, there's so many things like he's put in some sort of old, incredible the old sound system in the walls and in the seating. It's not a boase.

It is a boase, but it's like, yellow. That old then. Come on. Well, I mean, it's ancient. It's over 25 years old. I know where over 20. If you'd agree with me, if you could see that's what I'm looking at right now. I don't even know what these cables are.

I couldn't even identify them on the internet. I mean, it's mental. Play some, play some Darud Sandstorm on that bad boy and see what the base. It's like, at the moment, I'm in the sort of dining room, right? And I'm looking, there's one, two, three, four different types of lights on the walls. There's like none of them work. Shit.

It's like that Phillips smart lighting? Like, is there an app that you can like, you can work? It's from 30 years ago. Tone it down a bit, please. Warm white. Bedroom red light, please. I want my red lights on in the bedroom. So I've got, I think it's like, it shouldn't be that difficult to fix, but I am dreading it, honestly.

Because the thing is, I had, when I was doing the survey to buy this place, I asked for an attrition to come out and do the electrical installation condition report, which is the thing that they recommend you do when you have a survey. And the guy quoted me like, you know, 400 quid or whatever. So I was like, oh, great. And he came out to do it on the day. And it took like, you know, four weeks or whatever to get him to come out. So I had a couple of different people. I tried to get to come out sooner. But that was the closest, as soon as I could get.

Because getting a tradesman is very slow. Yeah, no, it is, it is slow. This time of year especially, yeah, a lot of them just go away and stuff because it's just slow. But it's my wall guys have been superb. Oh, good. It's still ongoing. Shout out to them, the damp guys. They've been, no, they're not damp.

They're good men. We're about to, we're about to enter our fourth month consecutively of not having any tradesmen in our house. Wow. Fucking wonderful. I've got the opposite. Anyway, I tried, I tried to have a guy come out, and he basically got and took one look at the house and was like, oh, no, this is no. And then he just, he went home. He was like, no, you'll get, you get lots of that. They turn up. And if it's not like really straightforward, they're humming and owing about it. And so annoying. I couldn't believe it. And so, you know, I didn't, I ended up not having one done just because the house had been rented out for a period of time, like five years ago. And so if it was rented out by an agency, they should have had. one done at the time. So I knew there wasn't anything like seriously wrong with it. But I've got, I've tried to book another one in and, you know, it's another like three or four

weeks to even get some around like, oh, because things you can't, like, there's like an order to how I want to have the lights to fix first before I get a painter and decorate your decorator into paint all these and fill all the holes, fill all the cracks. Like, yeah, there's, because it's like, it was a smoker in some of the rooms and so some of the walls are all yellowed or different colors. Like, there's a wood stove in this room. It's like free paint when you think about it, though. So it's all dirty. Like, I think someone did the painting decoration themselves, like about 20 years ago when they moved in. So the paint is all splashed on the skirting boards all badly. You can see streaks and stuff. Yeah. It's just like, it's just badly done. But I can't do

anything until I get the lights updated or working. And I can't do that until I get the attrition. And so I'm kind of in this limbo of like, like, like, I need, I need to, I need this person to do this. in order to get this. And it's like, oh, it's long lead time. So I'm expecting it to take years. It will. Yeah, that kind of stuff. And the problem is you'll do one thing and it'll lead on to other things and other things and other things always. Because like when somebody comes in to do the painting, you're going to find something that needs to be fixed or a couple of things that need to be fixed. And then when somebody comes in to fix those things, you'll find other things that need to be fixed or you'll just be like, oh, I need to take this out or I need to add this in or

whatever. And then next thing you know, you're extending. And then you need to bring the painter back in to like fix the hole that that person left. Yeah. I know. It's like give me a man. I know. I know. I know. So I'm enjoying it though. So far. I've been in one day. And I'm not really. I'm not really enjoying it. Um, a giant dead fish. Um, okay. So there's a, there's a giant dead fish like on the, because I live near river and there's a giant dead. Because it was really, really flood, really, rained really badly. You say giant dead fish one more time?

So there's this been this storm, Storm Chandra, and I live on this river, and it was all like the river was very high. And when it went back down, there was this huge dead fish. It's about a meter long, just lying there on the side in my garden. Nice. And I am not sure what to do it. Do I just shovel it back into the river and let it float down? Or am I supposed to put this?

in the bin. Put it in a bin bag. How are you putting in a bin? I got question for putting a squirrel in the bin. Well, Lewis didn't kill his fish. But I wasn't trying to dispose of the corpse like it was evidence.

It was just a dead animal. You're happy to put a fish in the bin. Think of it this way. If you bought a fish to eat, if you bought a fish to eat and you ended up not using it, what would you do? I put it in the food.

Exactly. So treat it the same way. I'm not going to buy a squirrel with the intention of eating it ever, though. Is it like a pike or something, a meter long? It's huge. It's absolutely, it looks like a, I don't even know if it's real. Tip it into the river and let it just float away.

It's a dolphin. I might just chuck it in the river. I might just chuck it in the river. Either someone's caught it and just left it, which is unlikely. During a start? The water level has come up. It's been, it's beached itself. The water level's gone back down and it's suffocated.

That's probably what's happened. No, it's long dead. It's been dead a while, I think. Just tip it in. Something might just eat it. Yeah, it'll get eaten by stuff. Do you have any bears around there? probably eat it. Bears. There are apparently altars on the river. Oh, they'll eat that for sure.

Oh, did you guys watch the David Attenborough London thing? No, no, I haven't seen it yet. I'm meaning to watch it. Oh, yeah. There are beavers. There are wild beavers in London. They've been re-instuced obviously, but that was great. There are snakes in Camden, like 40. I really want to watch that. It looks really interesting. It's all my, it's on my backlog. Apprentice starts tonight, which is just so lovely to see David Attenborough still doing things. He's just, he's, he's the ultimate national treasure. I love that guy. I love the idea that as well, it's like, what's the easiest thing we could get him to do?

It's like, you can't have to travel. It's like, man, this is my London house and here's the animals I see in the house. Here's a lovely worm in my garden. Here's some grass. This is a rat that lives in the drain. Another guy I really like. that I've been watching recently. I've been watching the great pottery throwdown on Channel 4.

Oh, God, Mrs. F loves that show. Oh, it's great. The master potter guy, Keith, is, he's like, his passion is infectious. Like, but he's such a, he's such, just like a, like a lovely guy, you know, like he's, when he's complimenting people on the work that they've done, he always gets choked up.

It's a bit of like a, like a little running joke in the show that, you know, that somebody's going to set him off sort of thing because he, he, he just seems to like, get. like emotional very easily. He's very, cries about pottery a lot. Yeah. I love it though. It is really endearing and it's just, it's just, it's a wonderful show. It's too gentle for me. It's so gentle.

I really like it. And the contestants, the stuff that they make is just, some of it is amazing. It's so good. It's such a great show to watch. I think the weird thing is I love Attenborough and those nature documentaries like the London one when it's, it is gentle. At one point, he just releases a harvest mouse in a field.

And that's delightful. And there's one where he's just holding like a baby Osprey or something like that. And he just seems like to love nature. And that is very gentle and very sweet, very educational. The pottery stuff is set up as a competition. But everyone is like so supportive and so lovely. And there's no, the judges are really lovely. It's just like, come on, guys.

Like let's have a little bit or something. I think you need it, man. There's so much, there's a lot of like negative shit on TV. It's nice to just, it's nice to just have something that's not. for once. You know, you just have this hour where it's like, this is really nice. People are actually just being really nice to each other, doing creative stuff that you wouldn't ever look into. Like pottery is not something that I'm not interested in. But when I watch them do it, I'm like, wow, that is amazing. Like I would, I love watching people do stuff that

they're good at, you know, like there's not anyone on that show that is like just kind of shit at it. You know, like it's just, it's really good. It's just really well done. These are great examples of things to do that just help your mental health, you know, to just go to museums and try not to, you know, watch too much news or like, you know, read too much about what's going on in the world. Just try to escape from all of it. I mean, I think it's good to be aware, but I don't think you should be consumed by it.

It's too much. When I was, and I harken back to the days when we were all playing World of Warcraft Sips for 10 years, and we were all just completely addicted to that game. We were, we had no worries. I would think, I was at my happiest. No, it was a different time in our lives. So we were all students or just starting out work and stuff. So we had, like everybody that we played with either was a student or somebody that had a job,

but no kids. So everybody just had a ton of free time. You're right. We had no responsibilities. Yeah. We had like, I had like a shitty job, various shitty jobs, but I had that escape of just a playing this game and being fully immersed in it. And it was, I do remember having a very low level of anxiety or stress around that time. You know, it wasn't for me, like, a tense. The biggest stress I had was like whether I would be picked. Yeah, whether I would be picked for the raid team.

Do I have enough DKP for my special magical slippers that I want this week? Yeah, those were the most like, you know, stress like action points in my life at that point in time. And I yearn for that. But I know it's not the same today. So I think we have to discover new distractions. That was one of my news resolutions was to try and watch less negative things. Like I love watching murder mysteries and real true, true crime stuff. And I've been huge into that for the last five years.

24 hours in police custody watched a new episode last night. It was not a fun one to watch. Exactly. Actually, I think that watching that stuff can be so. If it's all you want, But I think if you can weave it in with some other good, some other stuff, like it's not so bad. Oh, God. You can get sick of too much kiddie friend of stuff.

I watched, I watched essay. Me, my wife and my son watched the celebrity SAS that was on, the most recent one that was on Channel 4. And it was good because it was like my, you know, my son's at that age where he's kind of interested in like, you know, military stuff or whatever or thinks he is. you know, because like he's, they're playing a lot of games that have like guns in them and stuff like that. And he's like, I want to join the army when I grow up. And we're like, you don't, you don't want to join the army when you grow up. So we thought, let's let him watch SAS and see what he thinks about like, you know, potentially what like selection is like not for the special forces, hopefully, but like, you know, just generally like for the army, like the, the amount of discipline that they require and

the kind of people that they're looking for and stuff. But it's kind of worked the other way because now he's like, oh, I want to join cadets. When can I sign up? Don't worry. You know what you should show him? Get on the combat footage subreddit and show him videos of people getting blown up by drones in Ukraine. No, no. That's a bit too much.

I did show. Yeah, but that's what it's like. I did show. If someone's saying, I want to join the military, show them what it's like. Show them how miserable it is. We went down. We went down a little bit of a rabbit hole and we watched the opening one-shot monologue of the, the, the drill. sergeant from a full metal jacket you know you got the opening scene where they're shaving their

heads yeah yeah that whole that whole opening scene up until which one of you slimy maggots yeah it's fucking so good but uh no he just thought it was hilarious so like all of these things that i'm trying to like put him off going anywhere near the army with or like honestly honestly here's sips i promise you cadets will put him off joining the army like cadets will force him outside in cold weather with wet clothes, wet socks and horrible food cooked on a crappy fire in England, right? In February, it was such a miserable experience that it absolutely put me off any, and doing anything to do with the military.

So, no, I mean, like, I don't want, I mean, I'm being like, I'm being like a bit. I know you are. I don't want to put him off anything, obviously. if he's interested in doing something I'm supporting. I think my parents wanted, you know, did have a desire to guide me down a direction. And every time they tried to push me down a direction, I would go more.

It's the opposite. You have to use, you can't, like I would go against my parents at every step, right? Like anything they were trying to put me off. I would be wise to it. I'd be like, oh, they don't want me to do this. I'm going to go and do that, Jamie. And I think that's what kids,

that's part of human. Humans want to do that. Humans. Yeah. Humans. I always knew you were a fucking alien. The humans enjoy the trivial exercises. They enjoy it.

Join the cadets today. Join the cadets, human. You will have to fight the Argonaut fleet when it arrives from Cobar 7. You must be ready, human. I'd like to imagine you. You're a benevolent alien who's arrived here to warn us, but very subtly via the TriForce podcast. Oh, hodoo craps.

Yeah, well, you know, it's tried this. The giveaway is you mispronounce certain words that all humans know, like the word human. You pronounce it, human. And that's the tell. Yeah. Bonos Ares is the other one. Bonos Ares, human.

I was reading an article today, talking about kids and stuff, about Fafo parenting. Fafo. Fuck around and find out. Yeah. So that's the new, no-nonsense approach that is all over social media, apparently, is instead of when I had kids, and I think, I'm sure, Sips, you did the same thing, the naughty step or the timeout step or whatever. Yeah. If they were, if they messed around, the rule was they had to spend a number of minutes equal to their age on the naughty step.

And so you just removed them from this situation, said, right, you are five, you must stay here for five minutes. Here's the timer. When the time is up, you can come out. If you come out before the time, I restart the clock. So you were teaching them, you don't have to deal with it. They have to sit there quiet. They get a bit of time to cool off. And it's like a way to punish them.

And it was genuinely pretty effective. And, you know, we would make sure there was nothing for them to play with on the Nauty step. It was like there. It's like torture. This is like prison. Yeah, it's just like for a five-year-old, five minutes is in a time. Yeah, it is. And it was like, it was quite effective.

Now it's like, for example, the example of the article is a child announces that he's going to leave home. so she just puts him outside and shuts the door. And then he's banging on the door to be let in. And that's it. That's Fafo parenting apparently. It's just like calling kids bluff constantly. That's just stupid. The thing is, you're not going to be able to do that all the time.

No, of course not. If you give in one time, if you do one time give in to the kids' demands, they've got you by the ass forever. Like they will then, they are always looking for a gap in your armor as a parent that they can exploit as children. They're very cunning and they have infinite free time. Yeah. So I think the FAFPO stuff, you need to commit to it.

I think a lot of this really heavy-handed parenting is just basically ensuring that you'll have like no contact with your children when they're adults. I think so. Well, not only that, but like it feels like you could get arrested for it. Do you mean? Sometimes. Locking a kid out of the house is fucking weird. I don't.

That feels like you. I don't mind saying it. I've never had to do that. I would never even do that in. Even even in my most like unreasonable. rage if I was that angry, I would never lock one of my kids out of my house. That seems to me to be insane. Imagine that.

Maybe that's just my opinion. Imagine if you locked your kid out of their house and then, you know, they actually left and ran off or lost or got, I don't know, something happened to them. And then you called the police and they were like, what did you do? And you were like, yeah, so I got my kid out of my house. There was that story. They were like, what? And then if that kid died, you would go to prison.

Yes, rightly so. And so to me, it just seems like if I was a parent, which I'm not, I wouldn't, I would be terrified of my children of what I can and cannot do to actually keep them in line. Because, you know, I'm sure kids say, oh, I'm going to ring child line on you kind of thing to their parents at a certain age. you know, because they can, they've learned, they can put the fear of God in their parents if they want to. And I mean, it's bad enough like worrying about doing it wrong, let alone. I don't know if I've ever had to discipline any of my kids. Like, we've always just said, choose the behavior, choose the consequence.

And, and, and, and, and, but we've never had to like, do anything, you know, like, it's always, that, that, that, that thread alone has always just been enough for them to think, like, oh, fuck, I better just like, I need to do this. better do it. Like they're, they're very reasonable. And then, um, and then sometimes, uh, when something happens, we'll just sit down and we'll be like, like, what, what do you, what do you expect to happen here? Like what, like, where your parents were meant to be like guiding you, teaching you what to do? What do you, what are we supposed to do in this situation where you're behaving this way? And most of the time, they're just like, oh, I did it because of this or

whatever. Like, they're very honest about it. And then it's like, okay, fine. Like, I feel like we've all been reasonable here. Like, that's fine. We can move on. Is this, but is this, but is this, like a, what is it called, iron fist in a velvet glove? Or is it like walks off the carry a big stick? Which philosophy is this like, you know? I think, I think with everything, like with kids and parenting and stuff, I feel like deep down if your kids feel like you're on their side, even if you're trying to let, even if you're getting annoyed with them or angry at them or whatever, if I think if they feel like

you're on their side and you've got their back, like I feel like most kids will be reasonable. Maybe like I'm speaking from experience. I'm lucky that my kids aren't like, you know, like big tearaways or like, you know, we've never had like any trouble with them at school or anything like that. They're very sort of like compliant, quiet kids. I think it sounds like your wife has had a very mature grown up and responsible attitude towards being a parent. And your kids have had a good safe environment where they've been well educated and well brought up. And that's why they're like that.

I think maybe. Yeah. I don't know if we're just lucky or if it's something. that we've done or whatever. Like, I don't want to like, I don't want to say like, we're the greatest parents of all time because we're, we're not. We're, we're average parents. Like, I, you know, we're just doing what we think is right or whatever. But I like, we've, we both had like, growing up, we, we, we had parents who were like didn't always get it right, you know, like, like a lot, like my, like my childhood, there was a lot of that like, fuck around, find out stuff.

And it was just, it's stupid. Like, it, it, it didn't serve anything. Like, it just, if anything, It creates a rift, you know? Like, you just think, like, these people aren't on my side. And, like, it's a shitty way to think about your parents. But if that's the culture that they cultivate, well, what can you do? It is what it is, right? So I think that this was a response, this whole FAFO thing. Also, bear in mind, this is only on social fucking media.

This is not the real world. Yeah. So, but the idea is that the prequel to this era of supposed FAFO parenting was the super, hippie, how does that make you feel kind of parenting where every feeling a child had was valid and you sort of listened to everything they said and it was like really gentle, gentle, gentle, isn't that true? They're children. They're little tiny kids. You're meant to be showing them the way. Like what? They're not fucking things that are planted there to go against you and inconvenience you. You are meant to fucking raise them. Imagine if your kid is having a meltdown. You're having a meltdown.

You're having a meltdown. Yeah, exactly. And instead of like telling them off and getting them to behave and punishing them for acting out, you just basically allow, it's like ultra gentle. You never challenge anything your child does. Whatever they say or do is fine. And you just very, you try to get them to understand, oh, how does that, how do you think that made so, so feel?

Like, ultra, ultra, ultra gentle. That feels so deluded. At no point, at no point that are they ever challenged in their behavior, they just have to consider how it might make other people feel. You're not actually telling them. look how bad that makes that person feel. You're just asking them to figure it out themselves and sort of, if you look into gentle parenting,

I challenge you to attempt it because to me it looks like the most impossible task to raise a kid with never telling them off, never raising your voice, never having to be an authority figure. Yeah. Because like you said, they are little kids.

They don't fucking know what they're doing. There's a balance, though. I don't think you're all in on gentle parenting and I don't think you all in on being, you know, fucking Captain Hardass as well. exactly right. But as with anything, if one thing is gone too far, you know, be unpredictable.

When you're only even making a mistake, let them. So when your kid is playing with the pan of boiling water, allow them to. Yeah. So as usual, if something goes too far in one direction, which gentle parenting definitely did, the rebound effect is to fling it

the other way. What you just need is common sense middle of the road parenting, which most people do. Most people do. Yeah. I think, I think, again, I think a lot of This stuff is amplified, you know, you see it in writing and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah. You know, what is happening here? Everybody's doing this, but it's, it's not really probably. It's just social media.

We know plenty of parents who are just very sort of like common sense as well, you know, like, well, we think at least. But, you know, like not too hard one way, not too soft the other, you know, just somewhere, somewhere in the middle. Everyone is saying how fucking amazing the thing they're doing is. It's the age of I'm better than you, right? That's where we live. Everyone on Instagram and social media and everywhere is constantly showing off. And it's just the next stage of what it used to be. It used to be that you had a really immaculate house and garden and a big fucking car out the front.

And, you know, your kids had the latest things. You showed off that way. Now it's all digital. And you can't help but see every single aspect of these people's perfect lives that you're not doing. And that makes them better than you. And so, you know, that's just how it is. And it makes you feel inferior. It makes you question everything you've done and say, oh, is this why my kid turned out like

this? Or is this why this happened? Is this why they had this thing happen at school? Is it because of me and my, that thing I did to them five years ago where I shouted at them because they, you know, were about to burn themselves or whatever? Do you know what I mean? You can't live like this. And that's why social media is so toxic and awful.

It's just a magnified version of all these toxic behaviors that. humans can't fucking help themselves. Humans can't help themselves. I wonder if social media, I feel like social media is like there's like a bit of like like less of an appetite for it now. I think because a lot of it is just very toxic like you said. But, you know, like I think when it I think when people were first starting to get on Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that, it was a little bit different, right?

Like you could, you know, you were, you could see like what your friends were doing. You can see what your family was doing. But I think a lot of it now is just very either political or there's just too much advertising. Like there's too many weird promotional things. I agree with that. I deleted my Facebook yesterday. I actually downloaded all the posts I've ever made and deleted it because I realized that one of the problems is that being able to look into what your parents, friends and distant relatives are thinking is not always good for your mental health. No.

Sometimes you would rather not know what their take is on. ICE and immigration. Sometimes you would like to not know that your friend from school that you have fond memories of is now a fascist. I would just like to have nothing to do with that. And then see adverts and AI everywhere. It's just a million little soapboxes

that people stand on and scream from. But you just think, I'm not, I don't want to hear this. I don't need this from you. So I just got out of it. Like, I don't even really want to know what you ate for dinner last night. At one point in my life, I thought that was kind of funny. But now, no.

Like, you know, like, like, I think we've just been bombarded with way too much useless information. Chicken with potatoes and rosemary and lemon wedges and broccoli. And it was all roasted in the oven. It was delicious. I ate a full can of Heinz vegetable soup and I made some toast as well. And I ate it standing up. That was my dinner.

Are you serious? Yeah. That sounds terrible. That's like being in prison. Man, we were like out of time. It was just like we were late. Everything was like late. Where were you?

This man has three children, one baby, one like, you know, seven-year-old and one teenage. Sometimes I just eat cereal standing up in my kitchen for dinner. That's my full dinner. This man's life is not intact. This man also has a partner who I'm sure does something around the house. There's not time in the day. There's not time in the day for sips to have a decent meal. A bucking can of soup and a bit of bread.

That's a pretty good meal. He was saying he was happy about it. I like soup. Yeah, no, I love it. I like a quick soup meal. That's fine for me. Oh, I forgot you don't care about food. I forgot.

Carry on. I think for sips, it's like going to the petrol station. Do you know what I mean? He has to pour that hot soup down his neck and then he can get back to Zonboid or whatever. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah. What time do you finish streaming? I finish like six, six 30-thirty-ish at night in the evening.

And then normally like normally my wife will have made something. But if she's running late because there's like pickups and classes and stuff like that and she hasn't had time to prepare anything, then everybody is just kind of like a free-for-all for eating. Do you have a microwave yet? No. Oh, you're so funny. You're so funny.

I mean, I don't even know what we'd put in there. Like typically what do you put in a microwave? You warm up that soup in that. I'll give an example. Soup. You could have warmed up that soup in there. It's like a perfect example. It took like two seconds on the whole.

Like it took two seconds to cook that soup. No, it didn't. It didn't take two seconds. It did. I put it in a small saucepan and then I put the, I put the electric hob on five and like five minutes later. It was ready to go. Five minutes, see? You could have it in 40 seconds in the microwave.

I mean, the thing is, whether it's 40 seconds or five minutes, I'm still just standing in my kitchen, shoveling it into my mouth quickly so that I can get on with other tasks. Lewis is making out. you're so time starved that you have to stand and eat a can, probably straight out of the can. He's just eating this. I don't know that it's necessarily that I'm that time starved. It's just hard to find the motivation to cook, like to prepare and cook something for like an hour, say.

Like that just seems like a crazy amount of time to me. It's really fun. I know. If you enjoy it, it is fun, but I don't really enjoy it either. It just feels like another job. on top of like, you know, getting people ready, like to go to bed, getting things ready for them for school the next day and everything. And it's just like, like another thing that takes an hour to do is insane. I completely agree.

And I, that's why I try and find cheats wherever possible. I've got this little instant pot, which does, it's like a rice cooker. Stick that on sometimes in the afternoon. And I'll put sometimes do potatoes or sweet potatoes or something like that. Stick it on. Yeah. Forget about it. And then I come back to the evening.

Oh, yeah. A little cooker. We have one. We just like always neglect to you. The problem with the slow cooker is you actually have to cut. I mean, this is like literally 30 seconds. I go, I open it, put a jug of water in, stick the potatoes or rice or whatever, and I'm put it in there. And then I just press one button and it's done by dinner time.

I don't have to pour, I'd have to weigh it out into the fucking, into a hob and watch the hob and stop it boiling over. Like my partner, like, boils rice on the hob. And it takes like 20 minutes or something. And I'm like, why? There's a machine that does that perfectly. Every time. Perfectly. And you don't have to watch it.

You can put it on at like two in the afternoon and come and get it at dinner time. Just like get a couple of things out. Then you wash it up in the evening. It's brilliant. And also, you know, you can do other stuff in it. You can do like three days worth of rice and put that in the fridge for a couple of days. And you can have it any time you want, put it in the microwave, have a little bit of rice. I don't know if it's healthy.

I think it's actually not recommended with rice on that. But especially, but unless you buy a nice rice is fine. You can put rice in the fridge. It has to be as soon as you've cooked it, basically. You don't want to let it cool down. either way. Do you be careful of that. Chewriters or rice that's been hanging around for a while. Here's what we do with the slow cooker.

Here's what we do with the slow cooker. If Mrs. F gets up before me, so sometimes she'll get up really early. And she'll just chop some vegetables, like some onions, some carrots, put that in the slow cooker, some beef for brazing, put that in the slow cooker. It has to be quick. Because the thing is, if you're not, my partner, cutting up vegetables, she's there for like two hours kind of vegetables. Because she's so precise. She's so like.

There's no need for that. Exactly. I'm just like, bam, bam, bab, bab, bab, bam. Like, I can't onion up in like 10 seconds. And that goes in there. You're like, yeah, can cook with like, uh, with his like teflon knife collection. I've got no time. Like, yeah, a few little pepper seeds get in there. That's fine.

Like, who cares? You can eat pepper seeds. Like, but my partner is like individually taking off every pepper seed. I'm like, give me a break. Yeah, I would take the seeds out too. Like a pepper. You can cut that up in like five seconds. It's like, it just goes in there.

And it doesn't matter if it's all jaggedy and all the pieces. Because it all gets blended up into nothing anyway, right? And so, you know. I mean, so you just put it on for the day. You just leave it for the day. I mean, by the evening, it's ready. You have it with some mash or something. It's the easiest thing ever.

And it smells of cooking in the house all day. That's nice. I just have no, no, I want to cook, but I also don't want to be there. I don't find joy in the art of perfect cubes of everything. No, it doesn't need to be. I just want to get it in there. And any shortcuts. I'm the same with Warhammer painting.

and stuff like this. Shortcuts I can take to get to the end goal. I love shortcuts, man. If I can find a little shortcut, I'm pretty happy. And it's not necessarily machines. Some machines do not save you time. Like if you have to wash up, these spinning blades in a fucking,

some sort of cutting machine or whatever. And you know, you have to look at that side of things as well, right? But man, like, so no, we make lots of things in the pressure cooker as well. Because you can make like a rat toui in there, just smash. You can do a fuller wish in an airfield. Friar, you ever done that?

You ever prepared a full English breakfast inside an air friar? Apparently, you could do it. I'd love that. I reckon, yeah, you just get like all the stuff, cover it in oil. Little squirt. You don't even need to cover it in oil. You just put a little squirt in the little receptacle and you're good to go. I don't have a receptacle for a.

You don't have a little oil thing? No, there's no oil. I don't think they have an oil thing in my one. No, you have to like, put it in oil. You can just put like a pinch of oil and I think it just like, I don't know, like mystifies it or something. It's like a little tiny bit of oil seems to go very long way in that thing.

I don't know how they do it. Aerosolizes it. Yeah, mistifies it. It just makes it into an oily mist. It confuses the oil. Uh-oh. It's all over my balls. How did that happen?

Oh, no, all right. Well, look, God bless you, Sips. And, um, let's you get a God bless. I don't want to be the guy who just complains about being timepoil. I'm not like, like, like incredibly time poor. I feel like it's more just like a priority system, you know, like something. You've got time to watch pottery throwdown.

You've got time to chop an onion. That's all I'm saying. I don't know. I'd rather watch something than chop an onion. You could take it both. It feels like a lot of effort sometimes, you know? Chopping onions can be a real pain in the ass. It's not.

You just said it takes two seconds. Exactly. My eyes are like fucking streaming like with and when I'm chopping the onion as well. If you're not, if you're not good at it and you don't know what you're doing, it takes you ages. then it's like, it becomes the thing you don't want to do, right? And if you don't want to do it, don't do it. Just fucking buy a packs of frozen, chopped onions and use those instead.

And then you just don't get your kids to do it. Get your kids to do it. That's what I would do. Right. Well, they're going to be shit, though. Oh, my God. It's fun. Period.

P. P. Flax is playing Dota 2. You've just loaded Dota 2, P.Flax. That was an accident. In the middle of it. genuinely, that was an accident. I meant to load up football manager. You know, are you done with a lot of football.

You're not played anymore? What, Dota? Zomboid. Oh, no, I'm done with it for the time. What was your last run? What did you get up to? I was fine. My guy is still alive.

No, no. You're not playing multiplayer. I've got to the point where, no. Single player. It's a big server going. The multiplayer in B-42 is not great. It's not very janky. And wait for it to be stable.

Like, yeah, there's all kinds of things that just kind of janky when they, when they ironed it out. I was just, I played it so much for like two weeks. You should get half films into it. They love it. I don't know why they're not. They were playing. It was playing it yesterday, I think.

I saw them all playing it, so I think they were playing some multiplayer. But the multiplayer is a little bit janky. It's a weird game. Like, as fun as the multiplayer is, I prefer to play it solo. I think it just, I think it flows better when you're just on your own. You've got all these little... I think it's too easy in a group. Like, to me, the terror of...

Like, I had a car crash in my guy. I hit a tree. And I had to manage myself. I was on, like, 1% health. Had to, like, really, really carefully make my way home and then spend a couple of days recovering. And that, the drama of that of being alone and not having people to just do it all for you. Yeah.

Made it feel much more. Like it's genuinely there been some moments of actual tension playing the game solo. Whereas in a group, it's like, I don't know. It wouldn't be so much. It makes it easier. It's easier to acquire stuff. Someone could just take care of stuff while you go and do other things. Yeah, I couldn't find a sledgehammer.

My guy is like almost six months in. Yeah. Like just getting through December now. So it's all snowing cold. But I haven't been able to. find a sledgehammer. So I had to grind up blacksmithing, which was, which was fun. And then I made my own sledgehammer, which is great. I don't think it's even that. I don't even think it's that important. Like now you can use welding to cut down doors and stuff. It's just, it doesn't feel to me like it's as

bigger. I think it's, it was more just to like tidy things up. I had like a primitive furnace that I couldn't move, a chopping block that I can. So like sledgehammer, you can just destroy all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You can't move. And also, I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're setting up like a forward base somewhere, it's still good to be able to just knock out stairs and make sheet ropes up to windows. True, true, true. A little bit safer. Yeah.

But yeah, I agree. It's not like essential. Period is trying to end the podcast tips. He's like, he's like, no, not at all. No, no. I have, okay, bye. All right. Football manager.

I have 40 minutes until my next podcast. No, no, we can wrap up. Do you have any lose news or are we done? Oh, no, I do. Oh, let's do lose this. Just carry on. Let's fucking carry on. How's your podcast going, by the way, Darmok and.

July. No, no, we just won't lose news. We don't want to talk about the podcast. How many episodes have gone out? Are people liking it? Can they watch along? What's going on? No, I do like the sound of that one.

I don't know how many episodes. Let me have a look actually on Spotify. I think seven, eight? We've been doing it since before Christmas. Two, three, four, or five. Six episodes have gone out, I think. Okay. Maybe more.

No, seven, eight, nine, nine. Wow. God. And actually, one came out today. So there you go. That's hide and cue. So if you haven't watched Star Trek The Next Generation, we've watched it before, me and Ben, but we don't remember a lot of these episodes. And it's just us watching the terrible early series and then talking about sci-fi and stuff.

It's really fun. I mean, it's all, you know, Ben's lovely. So hanging out with Ben is always fun. He's great. Yeah. I did, you know, 10 years ago, we started playing the X-com UFO Enemy Unknown, the original one. We both played when we were kids. And, you know, it was such a great game.

I just spent a whole summer playing it with my first. friend with the curtains drawn, you know. And, you know, playing it with Ben was such a joy. Yeah, he's just a lovely guy. It's a real fan favorite. Anyway, let's do this. So, rise of the chimney sweeps. It's boom time for wee lads named Oliver Alfie and Ned as energy prices rise and some

Londoners turned to woodburning stoves and fireplaces, chimney sweeps out back in style. I didn't think Oliver was ever a chimney. He wasn't a chimney. He was in the orphanage, then he worked in the orphanage, then he worked in an undertaker's, and then he became a pickpocket. He was never a chimney sweet. I got muckled over my face and I look like I'm a poor orphan. Don't send me up the chimney again, Mr. Pyrrion.

You have a chimney. I don't have a chimney. I bet you've got a chimney in your house. I don't have one in my house. No, Lulu's in the house. We had a chimney, but it's gone now. Yeah, same. We got them taken out.

So there is this thing in Britain where wood-burning stoves are both very fashionable and they're assumed to be like some in some way clean but they're not at all obviously you're just polluting.

It's very polluting and so a lot of places are thinking of actually a lot of legislation in towns I think of just banning wood burning stoves entirely I have one in my house I had it

swept last week by a man he came down by a child did a child sweep it for you? you? He, no, he was, he was, he, the company he worked for, I can give a shout out, was called sweep well. That's a good shout out, which, uh, well, I think it's just him. And he was really, really nice. And he came and serviced the, the, the, the, like, the thermal string on the inside. And he, like, changed the glass and thermal, thermal, whatever is. Like, you know,

and he told me about what, why it was set up all wrong. And, um, He gave it a sweep and he saw... Who put this in? Yeah, one of those guys. Yeah, and so, I don't know. He had a nice chat with it, but apparently, the number of chimney sweeps in the UK has grown. Wait, say it again?

Chimony. Chimony. Chimony. I can't help saying it that way. What is it with you? You're not a human. You're not a human. You're something else.

Chimony sweep. So he... Human. Copenhagen. Chimony. According to the New York Times... I'm sending Timothy Shalomey up the chimney. There were only 500 chimney sweeps in 2021, and there's now 750.

So, London... Oh, my God. London chimney sweeps are making a revival. It's tricky, right? Put that on your Tinder profile. It's funny, actually. London's regressing to an era when chimney sweeps and pickpockets were the two main occupations for children. Pretty cool.

It is strange how these things go in cycles, because obviously originally... Bring back slop buckets that they just dump out the window as well. Let's go way back. Let's get some cholera going in the... Public execution. That is happening as well. Apparently, I saw in... There was an article in the Bristol news about the canals on these...

The Kennet-Anavon canal where, you know, a lot of people on there just dump their loo, you know, toils straight into the canal. The Dave Matthews band did that off like the Boston Bridge or something, and it killed. someone apparently. Jesus Christ. There was like a boat passing under the bridge and the Dave Matthews band decided to jettison their shitter and it landed on the boat. Oh yeah.

It flooded someone was under the bridge. There's this, we are regret. There was a time when everyone in London was Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah. My bad. My bad.

But they did release 800 pounds of human waste. You heard it here first. Dave Matthews is a murderer. on this podcast of facts. There was obviously Victorian London when they were all switching over to, ah, gas is the new thing, do you know,

and everyone was very excited about it? And now I think it still is amazing that we have gas being pumped around the streets, do you know, I mean, into people's houses. And obviously it's all changed, mostly trying to change over to electrical stuff now. Are you binging up gas? I think a lot of,

A lot of central heating systems are still in the heating systems generally. Gas is the way. I miss having a gas cooker. That was great. Gas dough is so much great. I love my gas oven. I couldn't cook on electric hops. Yeah.

It feels old, but I think there's something to be said for gas. Anyway, that's news. It is old. It's from billions of years ago or something, millions at least. Well, your gas stove. Yeah, no, yes, sure. In pop culture news, social media is apparently on trial generally. I think a lot of people are trying to, a lot of countries are trying to ban kids from using it and stuff.

I think it's actually a pretty good move. I know young people don't like it, but I made the point when, because my youngest actually came and asked me about this the other day, she said to me, what do you think about them potentially banning it? For someone her age, she's 14. And I said that people kind of get hysterical about when you age restrict stuff. And yet, we live in a society where tons of things are age restricted for kids. And we all understand that a lot of the things that are age restricted, they're not ready for, they're harmful. And we restricted because maybe sometimes parents are not paying attention or they're kind of carefree hands-off parents.

And you don't want kids just doing whatever they want just because their parents don't give a shit for the sake of the kid. Like, for example, we don't allow them to buy cigarettes, we don't allow them to buy vapes, you want to buy alcohol, they're not allowed to drive a car. There's myriad things kids aren't allowed to do. But social media is seen as one of these things where, oh, no, you can't infringe their right to be on Twitter at 10 years old. Well, maybe you could. And would it be such a bad thing?

I don't know. I'd like to hear some arguments against it, other than it would be difficult. I think most of the people saying it would be difficult are these companies realizing that it's going to cost them money to do this. There's no reason that we can't restrict. it. We do it for so many other things. So the real ones pushing back are surely companies like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok saying, no, no, don't because you get a lot of viewing minutes out of children. Yeah, of course, yeah. So I personally think the social media being just open

to reading whatever that anyone has posted is probably not good, any more than allowing kids to just watch 18 rated movies and pornography is fine just because they have a phone. And the answer that some people give is, oh, we'll take their phones away. But personally, as a parent, I like my kids to have phones because it allows it to stay in touch. If there's an emergency, they can contact me. If they need money, I can send it to them. If they need help, they can get it. Yeah, sure.

And they're a bit of fun as well when they're not just gorging on fucking social media. Like, there's lots of little apps and stuff that are fun for them to use. They can talk to their mates, games, everything. It's a great way for them to keep in touch with people they actually know. You know, honestly, I know it sounds weird, but you can track your kid's location with their phone, which is actually very handy. Yeah. So if you're worried.

We live in the real world and we should take advantage of all the good things without having to put up with all the clearly exploitative rights. Basically, I just don't want my kids subjected to fucking nonstop propaganda on social media. And I think that banning it for kids under a certain age because of like those reasons is a reasonable thing to do. I don't think anybody should get stuck in those pipelines and rabbit holes at that age. Like it's bad enough that adults are doing it. I don't think kids should be getting, like, be going down those, those, those roots.

Like they especially don't know what they're doing because they're, they're much younger. You know, I think it's good to keep them away from that side of things for as long as possible. And then when they're adults, and if that's what they want to do and that's how they want to spend their time, whatever. What can you do? But when they're, when they're kids, I don't think they need to be doing that. I think that's reasonable. I think we are all on the same page here. And if you're not, right, right to the mailbag.

And then we will delete that message. Not true. Not true. I will delete that message. Sonic is getting a scripted noir podcast. Please know. Please know. It's called Sonic Presents the Chaotics Case Files.

Apparently, according to a video, the Chaotics and Sonic will embark on a high-flying action-packed adventure. fighting for every clue they can find. So it's going to be like a weird detective, Sonic. Why was Pikachu a detective? Why is Sonic now a detective? They're not detectives. There's no detecting in the game.

Why are they both being made into law enforcement? Law enforcement has had such a bad rap recently. We need some heroes to come back. That's why. We need some heroes we can finally trust. They're going to get close. If somebody's brave enough to make Sonic a detain like God, next they're going to get Frozone from the Incredibles to join ice

and somehow he's going to fix their public image. Where is my ice suit? Where is my baton, taser and pistol? Oh, fucking hell. It's a symptom of this growing virus of detective shows, right? They've already done everything. They've done ghost detective, vamp. detective.

You fucking name it. There's a detective show about it with it, right? And they've run out. And so now they're onto video game detectives. And Pikachu was one. Now, Sonic's going to be one. And when is porn going to get the detective trend? That would be great.

You imagine? Oh, they said I was mad to stockpile porn, lads. They said I was mad. Oh, my God. Well, listen. Years backlog. Listen, Sips. You need porn.

Who's laughing for now. Listen, there's been plenty of clues, Sips, but many, of us still have not found the clitoris. What do you mean many of us? That's a detective. How do men not know where it is? Genuinely. That's a mystery that I would listen to a podcast.

I'm just, I'm staggered. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Their partner doesn't know where it is. What an incurious man to just never know. I don't know. I never heard of it, mate.

I couldn't tell you. What is that? What do you mean? You don't know where it is. It's right there. So, okay, the guys on the PAL World development team. You know, Powell World, who are being sued by Pokemon. Are they making a game where the fucking Pikmin have to find a clitoris?

Is that the game they're making? This is not, these bits of news are not related. I'm moving on from that. Basically, Pal World obviously are doing things in an interesting way, but apparently one of the requirements for applying to a job working for, working for the dev team pocket pair is to post your Steam profile page on the resume. So people who have substantial Steam, basically the main guy said, if you don't play Steam games at all, you won't make it even close to the resume screening stage.

So they want you to, they're looking for Steam gamers. We want our colleagues to be playing games, indie games that are only available on Steam. So, yeah, it's, it's, I think it's a really interesting attitude to have because we talked about that very thing on this podcast of like our gaming history and stuff like this and now Steam, our Steam hours. And I think it is, in sense, a very private thing. Because, you know, imagine if you had, you know, tons of hours on, we've talked about having secondary Steam accounts to play, you know, hentai games and stuff.

You don't even need one. I think there's like a hidden library option in Steam if you want to use that. curate You can hide games in there and it won't show up on any of the In this case not having your

wanky LinkedIn page You can have this future We'll hook you up after the podcast Anyway that's enough I have to go Thank you everyone Yeah thanks so much Yeah great show today

Yeah cheers Well done Fucking thanks Good job I'd be serious Thank you I might have less echo It might have

It's fine It's fine It's fine I don't know. Don't change the thing. Get some carpet with something. Get some carpet because there's nothing to absorb the sound. You're just in this stone.

You're in the forge. You've got a wattle and door wall on one side and a cave on the other. Get some carpet. I'm just happy to be doing it. I couldn't hear you because of the echo. What? Yeah. What?

We better in the podcast. I can't understand a word he's saying. Goodbye. Bye. Goodbye.