You're Dead to Me - Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined in the 11th century by Dr Eleanor Barraclough and actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe to learn about legendary Viking explorer Leif Erikson.Leif was possibly the first European to reach the Americas, nearly half a millennium before Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean. According to the stories told about him, he was a lucky explorer with a murderer for a father and a fearsome warrior for a sister, who travelled in his longship across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. But we only know about him from two Norse sagas, written in the centuries after his death – so did he exist at all?This episode explores the saga narrative before delving into the archaeological evidence for a Viking presence in Canada, to discover what we can know for sure about this legendary adventurer.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Norman Mason Written by: Jon Norman Mason, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the radio for comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are braving the brisk waters of the North Atlantic and following in the wake of Leif Erikson, the medieval Norseman who might have been the first European to visit America. He probably was. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In History Corner she's a historian, writer and

broadcaster based at Bath Spa University where she's senior lecturer in environmental history. Her research focuses on the cultures, literatures and languages of the medieval north, particularly Viking history and the Old Norse sagas. She's the author of various books including a new one, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. It's Dr Eleanor Baraclough. Welcome Eleanor. Thank you, Greg. Lovely to be here.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian and broadcaster. As well as his fab stage performances in The Government Inspector, you'll also recognise him from hosting TV's The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms Ghosts, Staff Let's Flats and Man Like Mobe or Delighting the Nation on series 15 of Taskmaster it is the amazing Kael Smith-Bino. Welcome to the show Kael. Hello. I feel like I've been slightly blindsided because I didn't know you were a doctor. I'm not the useful sort of doctor. If you have a heart attack you're on your own. No, that's fine. I know what to do.

You've not been on the show before Kael. No I haven't. How do you feel about history? Something you enjoyed at school? When I think of history in school, I remember the module where you have to build a castle, and mine was going so badly that I turned it into a dilapidated, ruined castle. Nice. And that wasn't what I started out to make. But then I just went on clipart and made some pictures of fire and then printed it out and

stuck it to the front What do you know about the man the myth legend Leif Erickson? I know that that's who we're talking about today great So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listeners will know about today's subjects and even if the name Leif Erikson is not familiar, you might have heard that a Viking was the first person to probably reach North America. You might be sitting there thinking, what about Christopher Columbus? Well, we'll get to him. But if you're listening from North America, hello, maybe you know that in the USA and Canada, the 9th of October is Leif

Erikson Day. You get today, which of course is celebrated in a much loved episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, an important document. He also pops up in Netflix's Vikings Valhalla, Leif Erikson that is, not SpongeBob. And the Norse presence in North America is referenced with a Viking character in the US remake of Your Sitcom Ghosts. I haven't seen it. That's fine. You are in the good one, that's brilliant. The American one is fine, it's nice. When you say he gets a day as in not his birthday, it's just another... Just a ceremonial day. Yeah, October 9th. So Leif Eriksen shows up in pop culture. There's novels. But how do we separate the truth and the lies from Leif's life? Did Vikings really

make it to North America? Or is this just a big story? And how many people do you need to kill before you're kicked out of Norway? Let's find out. When we talk about the Viking Age, what is it? How long is it? Yeah, well, we can fix ourselves chronologically if we think of the Viking Age as spanning at least from around 750 CE roughly up to about 1100 CE. And it begins in the Scandinavian homelands. So we're thinking Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It involves violence. Why is Finland not in there? Because actually that's not a Scandinavian country. Nordic, they're there, but not quite in the same way. But yeah, there's lots of violence, there's conquest, but there's also

trading and exploration and settlements. So you end up with this Norse diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and settlements. So you end up with this North diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and Ukraine, and then all the way to Constantinople, they end up in Baghdad. Then in the other direction, they go all the way across the North Atlantic and they settle the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland. Do you know why we call them Vikings, Kyle? No. Fair and honest answer. Thank you.

Eleanor, there's no place called Viking land? No, no. There is a place called Vik in Norway, which is sort of might be related to the word, but there's an old Norse, so that's language that the Vikings spoke. There's an old Norse version of the word, Vikinger, which is someone who's essentially a raider. So it's basically a sea-born raider, but not everyone who lived during the Viking age in that cultural context is a raider. So they're not all Vikings. And even raiders are not always raiding. And sometimes, sometimes they call their children Viking. What's a raider doing if he's not raiding?

Farming mostly. Farming? Yeah, fishing. A farming raider? Yeah, mostly farming. You've got to eat before you can go and steal all that. I'd bully that guy. So most Vikings aren't Vikings. Most Vikings aren't Vikings. Yeah, and that idea in the 19th century gets expanded and Viking becomes a sort of catch-all term for that early medieval Nordic diaspora.

Let's talk about Leif Eriksson himself, the star of today's episode. Who's Leif Eriksson? When's he born? So, okay, so Leif, he's probably born in, I don't know, something like 975, 980 in Iceland. He's a character mostly in two of these sagas. One's called Greinlendinge Saga, which means the saga of the Greenlanders. And the other one is Erikssaga Róida, which is the saga of the Greenlanders. And the other one is Eirik Saga Roida, which is the saga of Eirik the Red. Now together they're known as the Vinland Sagas because Vinland is the Old Norse word for that part of North America, the edge of the continent that the Norse, spoiler alert, do reach around the year 1000 or so. And Leif seems to be a very big part of that. I can't believe you've spotted that for me. But Leif, his dad is called Eric the Red.

But he's Leif Erikson because of that. The sagas like him. He's described as promising, tall, handsome, moderate in his behaviour in stark contrast to his father. Oh, okay. All right. So can we trust the sources? Can we say they're historical documents with real people in them?

Yes, the historians answers, depending on your definition of historical. Great, good historians answer. There you go, just covering all the bases. But how do you decide what's real and what's not? If there's so much of it mixed together, how do you decide what's real and what's not? Just on like what you like? What you like. Yeah, I mean you're looking for other evidence. So for example, the Vinland Sagas, these two sagas featuring Leif, they were actually the basis for archaeologists in the 60s, realizing that actually the Norse had reached the edge of the North American continent and then they

find the archaeological evidence. And sometimes you've got to think of them in a different sense. So it's not just a case of, okay, let's sift out the history from the fiction. We've got to think of them as essentially kind of cultural storytelling, remnants of how this particular culture thought about the world and their place within it. And in fact, the word saga comes from an Old Norse verb, at seia, to say, to tell. So we've heard that Erik is the father of Leif Eriksson. So he's born in Norway and then he's forced to leave Norway because of some killings. How they put it in the subject. How many killings is some killing, Helena?

More than one. I can't remember. It's not good. So he's outlawed and he goes off to Iceland, settles there and he marries Theod Hildur, his wife, and they have a family but then it's not long before he's in trouble again. And this is such an embarrassing story. Basically he gets into an argument with his neighbor about some bench boards which are kind of carved decorative panels and everything goes downhill very fast. And once again he finds himself outlawed this time from Iceland because of some killings. So Eric the Red was exiled twice, second time for an argument about some bench boards. You

seem like a very chill guy, Kyle, but have you ever gotten to a beef with a neighbour over a lawnmower or something? No, can't have it in the first place. Get off. No, I don't think so. My neighbors recently painted their fence and some of it's bled through and it looks horrible on my side. So what are you going to do? Some killings. How do we know North America is settled by Vikings or at least what do the sagas say? So the saga, so we're back with those two Vinland sagas, the saga of the Greenlanders,

the saga of the Reds. They give slightly different accounts. According to the saga of the Greenlanders, the first person to sight land to the west of Greenland is a merchant called Byadni. He gets blown off course. Often discoveries happen because people have just got lost at sea. But he doesn't explore it and the sagas are not very pleased about this. Basically everyone criticises him because he's shown a lack of curiosity, which is sort of not a Viking thing to do. And then later Leif goes back and finds the land. When you say not very pleased, is that? Yeah, they kill him.

No, he's fine. He doesn't, but it's just like, oh, okay. You didn't set foot on that. All right. Passive aggressive, right. So the Sargas are extremely passive aggressive. Yeah. They'll just say she slightly changed colour and that means she's absolutely furious. Wow. Yeah. I used to work for a lady who ran a children's entertainment company and every time she hated

something she'd go go that's interesting. There you go. Okay so one thousand Leif Erikson has found or at least explored a new land. So what does he find? Well I should say not just he but his followers and the main discoveries once again in both sagas are made by enslaved people. So it's very important to say one is called Tyrkir and the others are two sort of Scottish slaves called Hacke and Hecce. And they basically find, so well before they get to Vinland, they find other lands and then they come to this region, which they call Vinland because of the sort of the wild grapes. The weather is fine, the winters are mild, there's salmon, there's all sorts of nice things and they think great, this works.

And so they build some temporary houses there. How lovely, yeah. Yeah, and they call them Leif's Boothier, which means kind of like Leif's Booths, Leif's houses. So we've heard about people getting blown off course, we've heard about shipwrecks. Kyle, in Taskmaster you built a beautiful eggboat. Yes, I did, didn't I? You are a master shipbuilder.

Yes. So could you talk me through how to build a Viking longship? Well, what you want to do is get some of your neighbor's decorative, what's it called? The bench boards. Bench boards. You want to turn them the other way around so your neighbor can't tell that you used his and then knock it together. Get some mead for the journey. maybe a pig, because you don't know how long you're going to be at sea. How are you propelling this boat? What's the propulsion mechanism? Pig? More boards.

More boards? Yeah, so we use the boards like oars. Okay, you're using oars? Yeah, because I imagine the water's quite cold. Yeah, wouldn't you? Yeah, so I'm not popping my hand in there. No. Right.

So, but that can, we can also use some of that to cool the mead. Cool the meadwife. So you're called the meadwife. That's my plan. Tell me about Viking shipbuilding, because they are renowned. Oh, yeah. They are amazing. You mean it wasn't exactly what I said?

What, like, they are amazing. You mean it wasn't exactly what I said. What like Raft with a P? Well, for a start, they're propelled by sails as well as by oars. And that is very important because when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic, you might need the odd sail. And rather than your raft, you've got to try sort of clinker built style. So you've got boards, you've got planks, and then you're overlapping them. So they make these very supple, beautiful boats with very shallow bottoms, which means if you want to go raiding, you can sail them into very shallow bays. And then if you want to go across the North Atlantic, you're going to need something a bit bigger. And those are boats that then you can fit your family and your followers, your livestock. You can try pigs, but I go for goats and sheep. So these are two different types of...

Yeah, there's multiple different types of boats, but it's still pretty cold. Yeah, there's no cabins, there's no lower deck. No. Just benches. Yeah. So it's open sky, it's raining, if it's snow. Exactly. You're there with your furs.

Yeah, you're there with your furs. Yeah, you're there with you and the furs are probably wet. I mean, there's also a lot of sun, too much sun and not enough wind, also not great. You can end up just stuck there in the middle. Let's get back to Leif Erikson. So we have the two sagas, the Vinland Sagas. They don't say very much about him after the journey. We know about his family though. He's got siblings? Yeah, He's got siblings? Yeah, he's got siblings, half siblings, something. Yeah, we're not quite sure. But yeah, exactly.

And they, even after Leif comes back to Greenland, then according to the sagas, seem to be making voyages out again to Vinland, as they call it. So there's one led by Leif's brother Thorwald, doesn't end well for him. Another by... Nice name though. Yeah, it's a lovely name, isn't it? Yeah, so Thorvalder and then he's got another one, Thorstein. Spain I'm not into. No, it's like Thorstone. Thorstone, yeah.

I like it. I prefer the first one. Okay, we'll stick, yeah. And then there's those ones led by what was his sister-in-law, Goodreader, with her new husband, Carl Stefani. And then there's another one either led by, or at least she is there, depending on the version, by his sister, half-sister, Fredis. And she's, how am I going to put this, delicately terrifying? Should we rate that? Oh yeah. I mean, rate that doesn't even come close to her.

Sarah McAllister Okay, but here we're talking very specifically about the Saga of the Greenlanders, because this is one of these really interesting things where we've got oral traditions that end up in these sagas, but her character, it depends on which saga we're looking at. Saga of Greenlanders, yeah, absolutely terrifying. She makes a deal with two Norwegian brothers to sail to Vinland and they're there to gather timber and resources. But she ends up getting her followers and specifically her husband to kill all the men on the other boats and no one will kill. She gets into an argument with them and she wants the bigger of Leif's Boothier and she wants kind of all the resources and she's just not nice.

She knows what she likes. She does. The problem is, it gets, yeah, she also, so no one, there were women in the other party as well on the other ship and no one will kill them. And so she actually, she says, hand me an axe or literally put an axe in my hand. She finishes them off and it just says in the saga, and so it was done. It's horrible. Freydis in one saga is a sort of psychopathic Tarantula character. Yeah, horrible. But in the other saga, she's not nearly as terrifying. No!

But she's still quite hardcore. She's hardcore. She's totally badass. She's amazing. She's a raidet. Yeah, yeah. So she doesn't lead the expedition in this one, but she's on the expedition and then there's a violent encounter. She's tired from the last of those ones to bits. She's exhausted. Oh, yeah. Well, so they get into an altercation with the local population that they meet there. And so basically all the men run away and there's a weapon on the floor

from one of the people who's been killed and she picks it up to face the sort of indigenous people who are coming towards them. And by the way, she is heavily pregnant at this point and she bears her breast and she slaps the sword against it. And we're not entirely sure why, but basically the indigenous people are so terrified they then run away. That would scare me actually. Yeah. Yeah. We've touched on a really important point. You said, you know, the locals. So when we

talk about the discovery of new lands, obviously they're not new lands. People have been living there for 25,000 years. Indigenous peoples in North America, in Canada, the First Nations people. So what did the sagas say about these interactions between the Norse and the native people of Newfoundland? Is it Newfoundland? Yeah, well, and further south. Yeah, exactly. And this is really interesting because it's possible this is the first time if we think

of the world as a circle, this is the first time you see the two sides culturally meeting. Those are the first encounters we've got. And it's sort of pretty typical. So depending on the saga, depending on the episode, sometimes they're trading and they they particularly so the indigenous people particularly like the red cloth and the dairy products and the weapons but the North like now we'll keep hold of the weapons. Thank you. But then they give the North, the North give them furs and skins. So it's actually very much like what happens later on when you end up with this.

Fair trade? Not necessarily, because in other encounters, they basically all get horribly wrong, and there's a lot of violence, and people get killed, sometimes entirely without provocation. One episode, it's like, they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them. Oh, come on, they're asleep. Yeah, it's like they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them. Oh, come on, they're asleep.

Yeah, it's not great. It's really not. And it's telling. They describe them. The word they use is skrælingar, and skræling means sort of wretched or puny. So that's how the Norse are looking at these people. And they lump them all together, but we're probably talking about the Innu of Labrador and the Beotuk of Newfoundland. And then we've got around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is probably that sort of southern extremity of where they get to. We've got the Algonquins and the Iroquois. So we've got these various groups that the Norse do seem to encounter, but ultimately when they leave for the last time in the sagas, they say, we found a land

of fine resources, but we won't be able to settle here. We won't be able to use it. So that's the story told by the sagas, these two sagas, the Vinland collection, which is Eric the Red Saga and the Greenland Saga. Do we have any more evidence for the life of Leif? Basically those sagas, from what we know of the sagas, he's got to have died somewhere between 1018 and 1025 and that's purely because in one of them he's there in Greenland and in the next it's his son and there's no sign of him so he's probably gone.

Definitely dead by 1025. Yeah, it looks like it. A thousand years ago. A good, nice, memorable number. There we go, let's stick with that one. So we've killed off Leif Erikson, right? We don't know how he dies, but he died in 1025 We think it will take ish probably of my old age or whatever. Oh, you know, maybe he was killed But I've got to put this in my calendar. We can't say ish Okay, I by 1025 someone else is in charge. Yeah, so he's definitely dead by them. Okay, so that's right

Let's agree 1025. Okay, can't be that yeah. We're not in the right period of history to be really specific. Let's talk about the afterlife of Leif. The afterlife. The afterlife! That's so good. Thank you. What happens to his story? He's dead, but what happens to his story in the modern day?

Well, so this is quite interesting because the first English-speaking settlers of the US and Canada want to emphasize their English roots. And we know that Columbus landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola takes hold as sort of an alternative origin myth for the US after the war of independence, particularly. But Columbus also has never actually set foot in North America. So then the story of Leif Erikson gets really popular in the 19th century. And part of that is because Protestant US citizens, they're not, you know, Columbus is a little bit too Catholic for them. So what seems to be happening is Viking gets conflated with the idea of

Anglo-Saxons. It implies a sort of ancestral link to modern white Americans. So it's this sort of quite uncomfortable racial myth of white Anglo-Saxon colonizers bringing civilization to indigenous populations around the globe. You know, it's the classic story. So, Eleanor, you are an environmental historian. You work with archaeologists? Yes. Collaboratively? Yes. Okay. What kind of science have we got that actually goes, you know what the Vikings did

get in North America? Yeah, we do have that. And so basically the Vinland Saga has directed these archaeologists straight to it. So in the 1960s, archaeologists started working on a site in Lanser Meadows in Newfoundland in Canada, and they found the remains of several North-style buildings. So it looks like there's some that people can live in temporarily. There looks like there's workshops where people can sort of learn things. It's the tip of Newfoundland. Yeah, there's a place called Lance O'Meadow. Yeah, it's right by the water. This is temporary. So you can tell no one's really living there

permanently because yeah, essentially you'd expect to see more rubbish, you'd expect to see some graves, all the rest of it. You don't have that. So it looks like what they're doing is essentially using it as a stopping off point, mending their ships, overwintering, and then they can go further south. And there's some things that have been found at that site, like butternuts that don't and butternut wood, they don't grow that far north. So we're talking the area further south down the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So they've brought stuff there and left it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So Vinland in a way isn't that place. Vinland is the whole area

going south from there. Okay. And the exciting, the exciting scientific term I'm going to use, radio carbon dating. Oh yeah. You know what that is, Kyle? Not a clue. No. Solar flares. That's a bit... That's not helping. No. So this is something that's just been found, which

is they know that there was a big cosmic storm, so like big solar flares in the year 993. And you can see that in some of the woods that has been obviously been chopped by the North at this site at Lanzar Meadows. So the way we can know this is we know the date of the solar flare, which is 993, and then we just literally count forward on the tree rings. Every ring is a year. And when we get to the end of the rings, that tells us the year that the tree was cut down. Dendrochronology. Dendrochronology. Exactly. Thank you. And so... So it's how many rings since the flare?

Yeah, exactly. And so we know that that wood was cut in the year 1021. And so that's the one date that we can say, all right, it looks like the Norse were definitely at this site in this year, which is really specific because usually we're talking, you know, a good flabby hundred years or so. Yeah. So that's during Leif's life because he died in 1025 ish probably. His sister might be there. This could be Fre sister might be there this could be Freydis it could be the axe she used it could be the murder weapon

who knows so this site is called Lance O Meadows it's very exciting it's very important there's other stuff too there's an archaeological site that's not Norse it's early Inuit and it's close to the sort of southern most tip of Baffin Island and there they found this really lovely piece of carved wood and it's a human figure and it's about five and a half centimetres high but it looks like it's wearing Norse clothing so it's got like this very full, yes it's lovely, it's like this full folds of a skirt and then possibly a yoked hood covering the head and the shoulders. Mason- And we have Norse graveyards in Greenland.

Emma- Yes, so we've got a Norse grave, and I can't remember if it's stuck in their ribs or something, but it's an arrowhead. This is not a Norse arrowhead. The only thing they found that is sort of equivalent to that is over in the cultures of people who were living on that edge of the North American continent. And actually that's how one of Leif's brothers is said to be killed in the saga. So an arrow basically hits him. So it could be him. It could be him.

Let's say it's him. We've got the greatest... We found him. Now we've got Leif's brother. This is what I'm starting to realise. Let's say this. Let's say why not? Yeah.

That's what history is. You heard it here first, Clarell. The New Ones' Window! Let's say, why not? That's what history is. You heard it here first, Coyale. The Nuance Window! This is the part of the show where Coyale and I pull the ship to shore, we get warmed by the fire, and Dr Eleanor teaches us something we need to know about Leif Erikson and the Viking Age. Take it away, Dr Eleanor. Okay, so what I would say is that big names such as Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red are

the ones we tend to know about. But I want to make the case for the everyday people who are just bumping along living their lives through the Viking Age because they're every bit as interesting, if not more so, than the larger than life characters who end up in the sagas and history books. We just don't get to hear about them so often, although every book coming out in September called Embers of the Hands, which may be very much about that subject. So it's this idea of looking at the everyday people who slip between the cracks of history and the little bits and pieces of them that survive. And Greenland is actually a really exciting example of this. It's my favourite part of the Norse world because its remoteness and that permafrost we talked about means

that tons of material from Norse Greenland has actually been frozen in time. And I'll give you two examples, but they give us more names, names of ordinary humans that we wouldn't know about otherwise. Now, one of those comes from a coffin in a graveyard. There's no body in that coffin, but there's a rune stick and carved onto this little piece of wood is an inscription that can be translated as this woman who was called Gulveig was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea. So earlier when we were talking about those great voyages across the ocean, we have to remember how many ordinary people and how many women were there and how many of them may have actually not

reached the other side. The other example again, runes, this time on a stone found high in the Arctic hidden in a cairn and these runes refer to three men Erling Sigvatsson, Bjarnir Þordersson and Endriði Þordersson and it says they built these cairns the Saturday before Rogatian Day, which is in late April. They were probably hunters. Perhaps they were up there looking for walrus because of that really, really precious ivory. But if they're there that early in the year, they probably got stranded. Maybe they overwintered there. We never know if they got home, but we don't know what happened to them. And so that's what I'd say that is the stories of everyday

people that we really need to remember. Oh lovely, thank you so much Eleanor, that's fascinating. Should I go to Greenland? Yes. What do you mean yes? Because depending on which bit of Greenland, what time of year you want to go and what you want to get up to while you're there. And how hot does the summer get?

It can actually, well particularly now, you know, it can get quite hot. I've been there when it's, I can't say 25 degrees, it's got a t-shirt weather. Not enough for me. Not enough. So if you're looking for tropical, nah, not Greenland. No. But they did get, I mean, you can go to Istanbul, you can go to all sorts of fucking nice places. Oh wow, I thought you weren't about that. Yeah, Vikings got there too.

Okay, well, let's know if you want more Viking Age adventures. Check out our episode on Old Norse Literature for more early American history. Why not listen to our episode on Sakka Jowaya, who's a very fascinating lady. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the excellent Dr. Eleanor Baraclough from Bath Spa University. Thank you, Eleanor. Thank you. This has been so much fun. It has been fun.

Thank you for teaching me. Thank you. This has been so much fun. It has been fun. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for learning. And in Comedy Corner, we have the master student himself, the brilliant, Kyle Smith-Bino. Thank you. Rawr. Good Viking energy. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we sail off on more historical adventures. But for now, I'm off to go and fight my neighbour over who gets to keep my lawnmower. Hooray! Bye! for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking. Each week we take real listeners questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs,

dentists, pockets, or the lack of, anything really, and apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help, but also hopefully entertain. Join us why don't you? Search up Now You're Asking on BBC Sounds. Thanking you. BBC Sounds, Tank & You.