No Such Thing As A Fish - 439: No Such Thing As A Finger Fish

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Dan, Anna, Andrew and James discuss Brontes, Bergs, Bugs and Big Ol' Boulders. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Andy. My fact is that there's a theory that the Bronte sisters all died young because they spent a lot of their life drinking graveyard water.

You've said graveyard water as though we're all familiar with it, it's like spring water. You've all seen it on the shutters but still sparkling. Yeah, well no you're right, it's not a thing anymore but I think graveyard water was a much bigger thing in the 19th century before proper hygiene standards and before proper water piping. So this is water that has happened to go through a graveyard. It's filtered, yeah it's filtered through. Whenever you buy a bottle of water and it says filtered, that's what it means.

No, so they lived in this town called Howarth which is in West Yorkshire and it was an extremely sickly place, very low life expectancy, running down the streets, I mean, you know, bad ventilation. You said it was Yorkshire. Sorry, yeah, okay. And also the Bronte family home, the pasture they lived in, right next to it had a graveyard and there is a, it was very overcrowded as well and there is a strong theory or a strong suggestion it's possible that decomposing matter from the graveyard would have filtered into the water supply and that might have really bandjacked the town's overall health.

Those who were using kind of public water sources. Yeah, it definitely would have gone into the village which is in like a valley. Yeah, and presumably there weren't taps back then so they must have been collecting water from somewhere. So they lived in the past niche and they had their own well. Yes, okay. The Bronte's and what I find really interesting is that the well was cleaned in 1847 and that was the first time it had been cleaned in 20 years and the father of the Bronte's wrote

that they'd taken eight yellow tin cans out of it. That's how polluted it was. But it was in 1848 and 1849 that Bramwell, Emily and Anne all died so the year afterwards. So the year after their well was out of use perhaps. Right. So maybe they stopped using the well for a bit and then they started using the more common water that everyone else was drinking and then that might have made them sick. Did they not think when they were drinking something that looked like Gatorade that maybe,

maybe that wasn't going to be good for them. The only thing you can drink. Yeah. Really? What do you do? We actually say the Bronte's died young but you know they lived at ripe old ages by comparison. Did they? Well, I mean not really.

Absolutely. They lived to 29, 30, 31 and 39. Exactly. The average life expectancy, obviously one has to account for the 40% of people who die in early childhood but yeah, it was 25 and I reckon Charlotte at 38 would have seemed like an old hag by the time she copped it but yeah, all the others did die pretty young except their dad who lived at 84, died. It was a very sickly place and the town was inspected in 1850 by a man who was called Benjamin

Herschel Babbage and his findings basically were that it was just an extremely unhealthy place. It was poorly ventilated, some people were living in cellars. And it was their dad actually who got this guy in to check the water supply. So it was the year after three of his children had died and he said we need to do something about this. I think after the first child died, he was like I must get this water checked and then the second kid dies.

He's like damn it, I really must get this water checked. Well the first one was Bramwell who died of alcoholism. Yes. Actually he had two daughters who died before that. So they had two daughters who died like 14, 15 didn't they which sounds very sad. They were in the school which was right at the bottom of the hill where the water definitely would have been pretty rank but Bramwell died of alcoholism but the pub where he drank in is the first place you get to after, if you look at the map, it's house, graveyard, pub

and apparently they used to make their beer out of the water that came out of the graveyard. So is it possible then that we've maligned him and he didn't die of alcoholism? Well he definitely wasn't alcoholic as well. I think people do say that he might have died of TB and he was an alcoholic but he might have died of other stuff as well. So we might have unfairly maligned him. There was opium involved as well I think, wasn't there? It was a concoction of stuff, it wasn't a very healthy life, I'd say that.

But it's always said that alcoholism during, you know, not the graveyard order. Yeah, I'm with Dan here, I actually think that the Bramwell myth may have been taken to the extreme of like this killed him and actually I'm not sure we totally have evidence but Babbage's report was funny, he was particularly appalled by the toilet set up in the village which was consisted of two toilets that were shared each by like 12 families so they were out in the street and he was appalled by the public view of them which I don't think contributes to people's ill health. You mean that people could see you while you're pooing?

Yeah, he basically said, in fact he said there's two toilets that are just on the public street in view of the houses and of Passesby while a third is perched upon an eminence commanding the whole length of the main street. Have you ever been to like a restaurant or something that's on the top of a really high building and then sometimes they put the toilet and they have pretty much a window because there's nothing else can look in and you can poo and look out over the whole city. I've never seen that. I can't remember where I've been and done that but it's really, it's something, it's

quite something. That sounds quite uncommon. You said it as though it might be a standard thing in high buildings but I'm not sure it's normal. No, actually, no, my local Greg says one of those. You could sit in Greg's and as an eminence over the whole of South London. So the brontes in general, they're putting them back together in a way. I know, like other.

Pretty much. So basically all the contents of the house were sold off after Patrick, who's the father, Pop Bronte, he died in 1861 and all the contents were sold off because you have a new person who comes in and the furniture changes. Because he was a curate, vicar, priest-y guy, not a priest, because he has six children. But the Bronte Society, they've been putting the house back together, which is very exciting and they've been slowly, slowly buying an auction, various bits of Bronte paraphernalia. So there was a table that they wrote at, one kind of normal, medium-sized, dark wood table,

£580,000 it's been bought for. But did they all write at this table? I think a lot of them did. I don't know if any key works were definitely pinned on that table, but it was the writing table. Do you think that's a big table? Yeah, do you think, like as a writer, that you are, and you are really, do you think that really now we should get actually quite a nice ornate table because in the future

they're going to look at it and go, that table from Ikea was like, yeah, what's the point of putting that in a museum? Exactly. I like Terry Pratchett's table, where he wrote most of his novels. As soon as he passed away, his assistant, Rob, put a glass plate over the table so that every single scuff mark, every single, you know, mug, wear, and yeah, is there now for all time. It's a great idea.

Like chewing gum underneath it. Yeah, bogeys. Another really cool item. I don't know if it was at auction that they had to buy it back or whether they just still have it, but Charlotte Bronte was given a bit of Napoleon's coffin, which is really cool. How did they get his coffin? He was dead.

Oh yeah. Because he had about seven coffins, I think Napoleon. He was inside multiple layers. Like a Russian doll. Like a Russian doll. Yeah, yeah. Really? There was a small coffin.

That's quite awkward for Napoleon. Poor guy. Do you mean like a French pastry or something? Come on. Did you say Charlotte got Napoleon's coffin? Yeah, yeah. Because that's... From her sexy Belgian tutor who she was in love with.

Oh really? He was a married man. So I don't think any impropriety ever occurred, but she loved him and they had quite a good friendship as well. Oh yeah. Because she wasn't the big Napoleon fan. This is the great thing about the Bronte is when they were younger, they actually wrote more words than when they were adults because they wrote these amazing books together, these

fairy tales. And they created worlds, they created the world of angrier and gondol. And I think this was based on some toy soldiers that Bramwell got given by their dad, but they all played with them and they all claimed a soldier and Emily claimed Wellington and then Bramwell claimed Napoleon and they'd sort of like fight each other and stuff. And then the other two claimed a gravy boy and a waiting boy, but I think they upgraded them at some point to the Antarctic explorers, Paris and Ross. A gravy boy?

A gravy boy, yeah. Again, just like I said, gravy, I'd water it like it was a thing, I don't think a gravy boy is a thing. You know, in American football, they have a water boy who brings on all of their drinks and stuff. What I do now, yeah. Old gravy boy, it's the same in cricket. On your cucumber sandwiches, just bring them some gravy.

Was she quite obsessed with Wellington, Emily? I don't know how obsessed she was, she probably was and I think she met him later in life in his late life. Napoleon was buried in a lot of coffins like a beef Wellington, wasn't he? No. It wasn't even worse. Doesn't make sense, a beef Wellington doesn't have multiple pastry layers. Puff pastry.

I suppose it is, it is layered. It's got a layer of mushrooms and stuff. Yeah, she was covered in duck cells. What just on their writing as kids and the cool stuff that they had. I don't know if any of these remain, but they wrote in tiny books sometimes. Some of their stories they wrote in books that were small enough for their adults or their soldiers to read, which sounds so cool. The writing is microscopic and I think there was one book that, in fact, we do have some

of them because there are photos and they're about the size of the human thumb really. We know there's one because actually the Bronte house has bought one of them back for a million pounds. A million? The tiny book or the tiny book? I don't know. I have no idea how they're funding it. Oh, actually, I do know how they might be funding it because the actual Bronte's themselves

were funded indirectly through piracy. So wait, so Grandpa Bronte, he was a trader, but also he had plenty of dealings with Cornish Pirates who committed actual murders and a lot of his money, a lot of his estate would have come from his nefarious activities and the Bronte sisters paid for their novels to be published and they did a lot of that thanks to money they got from their aunt on that side of the family. So basically they were pirate funded. So are you saying that the current Bronte estate has some sort of treasure chest that

they're still? I mean, where are they getting these millions from? They pay for anything in doubloons if you notice that for the auctions. I read an article about the Bronte Society who run the museum. I don't know if it's the same people, but apparently they made a loss last year of 100,000 pounds. And actually because not many people have been visiting, I think possibly due to COVID, they've been asking firms in the UK who use the name Bronte, they're saying, well, you

know, okay, fine, you're allowed to use nothing we can do, but can you not give us a bit of money for it? And Richard Wilcox, who's the chairman of the Bronte Society, he said there are dozens of companies who are selling Bronte stone cooked chicken, outdoor clothing. Have you never had a Bronte chicken? Bronte fried chicken. It's lovely. It's been, has it cooked?

It's sort of, they leave it on a moor for three days. Yeah. It's very moorish. And also spring water. And what I found is that there is Bronte water that you can buy from the springs in Howarth. No. We've ruined their industry with this podcast. And I just want to kind of balance it out to say that they are part of a company called

Waterlogic UK and they recently announced the world's first COVID secure range of drinking water dispensers. Okay. And actually weirdly, the Bronte Society themselves, just on Bronte merch, they do, they sell a Branwell Bronte, I think it's a wine bottle, or a corkscrew, but given that he died of alcoholism. Amazing. That's amazing.

It's on the nose. They do. I wonder if they get a cut from all the companies then that are in this town where they grew up. Well, that's what they're saying. They don't. And at the moment, there's no legal reason that they should. Because they've really gone for it, haven't they?

They're like, all the salons are like Jane Hare, you know, and stuff like that. Every time. Very confusing. I love that. So Charlotte Bronte was a teacher and in 1836, she started writing about her experience as a teacher and she's just so mean to the students. It's amazing. There's one extract which says, am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched

bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fat headed oats? Wow. Like she did not like her taste. I was listening to this, I'm nodding. That was Emily. That was Charlotte. Sorry.

Sorry. I have a theory about Bramwell Bronte, which is that he inspired a very famous film. Okay. It's a clue. Okay. It's to do with his, okay, no, no, I'm going to give you a clue first. Did he want to stop someone and his mum shot someone? Yeah.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay. You only know two films between you. Andy knows. It's Avatar. It's Avatar. Yeah. Yeah.

One drop. I was thinking of the Hulk. No, so he basically had this affair, we think, and this is partly based on the biography of Charlotte that was written by Mrs. Gaskill, very interestingly. So Patrick, the dad commissioned Mrs. Gaskill to write. Who we should take? Charlotte. Famous author.

Did she have a first name? Elizabeth. But she always goes by Mrs. Bizarrely snobbish about that. When she wrote to George Elliott once, she said, love your stuff, George, but I wish I could be addressing a Mrs. rather than a Miss. Even though she was writing to someone trading under a man's name, an insane thing to say. Also, don't upset George Elliott because you're going to get a big right hand.

Yeah. She'll have that, you. And you will not come back from that. But anyway, what we think is that Branwell had an affair with this much older woman. He was 25 and she was 43, and he was working as a governor, not a governess, a governor, a tutor for her children. Mrs. Doubtfire. Exactly.

I really thought you were going to get it there. You know it. So she's called Lydia Robinson. And that's Branwell Bronte as the initials are BB and in the film, the very famous film, The Graduate, obviously, when Mrs. Robinson is the older woman who seduces a younger man. Benjamin Braddock, initials BB and the author of the original book, I don't think ever commented on whether it was inspired by that, but it was a famous affair between an older woman. Charlotte had a superpower, by the way.

She could see in the dark. How cool is that? Well, in the absolute pitch dark. Yeah, basically. I mean, that was there's stories that she was short-sighted. So short-sighted that if she was trying to even play piano, she couldn't read the sheet music. It was that.

But as soon as the lights went out, as soon as it was night time, her students said that she could read perfectly what was on the page when no one else could. Right. OK. It's good fact. It's a great fact. Thank you. We don't acknowledge each other's facts that often on the show, but a truly good one comes

up. I'm glad we did. It sounds like she was an inspiring teacher who, you know, taught her kids an imaginative story. No, she could. She could do. She could do by that, because I know that Anne, the youngest of the sisters, she could hear things over 300 miles away.

She could breathe underwater. She could breathe metal to her. And then their green brother, Bramwell, who only when he got angry, destroyed everything. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that if you swim too close to an iceberg, you can get sucked in. Not in danger of it. Not one of my top worries, I don't think.

It's worth remembering. You never know when you might find yourself in that situation, Anna. You're right. On Titanic, too, or something. Yeah. How do they do that? Do they generate their own currents near them? They do not.

In a way, they generate their own currents. They're moving around a lot. They're changing a lot. Icebergs are melting all the time. Lots of changes inside an iceberg, and I'm especially talking about very big ones. And when things are moving around, currents get formed. And that's what happened. And I read this in, I was basically going through some old archives of an NPR radio

show called Only a Game. And I found this article from 2001 about someone called Jill Heinef. And she is one of the most remarkable people I've ever come across in the 20 years I've done this job. She was the first person to swim inside of an iceberg. There was a massive one that carved off from Antarctica, it was about the size of Jamaica. And she and her partner went to National Geographic and said, we'd like to do this article about diving through the caves of icebergs.

And they said, wow, really, there are caves in icebergs. And they went, we think so. And sure enough, they got some funding and they went and did it. And the story of her going through this iceberg is remarkable. My wife's gone to swim in an iceberg the size of a Caribbean island. Jamaica? Yes. Extraordinarily, she went up her own accord, completely bizarre decision.

Yeah, it sounds absolutely incredible, doesn't it? And some quite dodgy moments in there. Every moment, every moment is dodgy in there. So first of all, they are next to this massive iceberg and they jump into the water. And the first thing that happens is you're jumping into ice cold water. And I don't know, I'm sure some of you might have done that before. It really hits you hard and it can really take the breath out of you. But in her case, she said it's like an ice cream headache, like the worst ice cream headache

you've ever had is the first thing that you feel. And then you go down and down and down and you see an entrance and you enter this iceberg. And it's all blue, like she says, it's like a robin's egg, the floor's red and orange and yellow, all these amazing colors. And then everything goes wrong. And so she and her partner, they're swimming through it. And after a while of taking lots of video footage, they turn around to go back out. But because it's a melting iceberg, because it's a living beast that's just changing

shape all the time, their exit shuts and they're stuck inside the iceberg. And she's going, I'm trying not to panic, because if I start breathing too heavily, every breath I take is a precious breath. Every move you make. Every move I make. No one's watching her. So frightening. And so she, they just wait, they patiently wait.

And then a new opening happens. It's like a weird mirror labyrinth, you know, like something you would see in a weird fantasy movie. A new opening happens and they manage to get out. And then they just have to wait a while to acclimatize, don't they? You can't just go straight back up. And so the people on the boat are thinking, well, they're gone because they've heard all these changes in this carving and bits have fallen off.

The people on the boat are like, well, that's the end of them then. Yeah. But then they come back up, they go up, they tell their story. It's all going nice. You'd think that's enough. We've explored it. They go, let's get back in there. Let's do it again.

So they go for a second time. Crackers. Well, what are the chances of that going wrong again? Exactly. I mean, it's not going to happen twice, is it? Yeah. It sounded like even there was a scary moment at one point on this expedition when she resurfaced and the boat, I think, had drifted and she came up through a hole in the ice, but the

ice around her was so high she couldn't see anything. You're in the middle of the Antarctic and her boat has disappeared. And I think the boat just happened to swing around and she just glimpsed the stern. It's because they had to take the anchor up and so it drifted while the anchor was up. So they're nearly lost at sea, basically, in this moment. So they get back on the boat and you think, all right, let's get back to home. Don't go back a third time. They go a third time.

They go a third time. And this time they get stuck inside and in order to get out, she basically got up to a point in the iceberg where there was a there was a gap at the top for them to climb out. But it was 130 feet above their heads. So you're looking at a climbing wall, basically, that's unclimbable, except. Yes. And I couldn't quite get it because she's out of the water by this time. Exactly. So she's just climbing up the ice. So she must be inside of the iceberg where there's a hole on the inside that.

It's like a triathlon kind of thing. You know, you do the swimming bit and then you do the climbing bit. But Wendy did a cycling bit. There's a bike at the top of the iceberg. But this is where the story genuinely turns a bit, Brian, blessed me for me because I just think this is impossible. So she climbs up 130 feet. But here's the thing, right?

This is solid ice wall, right? So how do you climb ice wall and she thinks to herself, hang on, there's little animals that burrow themselves into the ice wall, which are creating natural handholds for me to do. And apparently there's enough of these that she could scale 130. So it's a little fish exactly the size of her finger, which makes a little hole where it lives. The fish finger, yeah.

Well, the finger fish, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They make holes in the iceberg and she can use them to grip on to and pull herself up. So she climbs up. Yeah, I know it's blessed. This is suddenly all the way up, all the way. One hundred and thirty feet. The fish living a hundred feet up on the iceberg.

One hundred and thirty. How did they get up there? Who knows? I guess if the previous fish have gone up there, the icebergs flip over all the time. Yeah. Don't know. Do we think what has there been cracks in the iceberg?

Oh, there's some cracks in her story. And they all climb out this way, one hundred and thirty feet up. And then they're back on the boat. And then they slip down the iceberg. And so they're sitting on the boat, not long afterwards. I think they're having some drinks and some food. And then suddenly they just hear screaming from other people on the boat.

And there's huge cracking noises. And basically there's been such a melting point on the iceberg that it cracks in on itself. And they go, well, if we were in there, we'd be dead. We'd be squished in a second. So then they go back again. No, they don't. But what a story.

Yeah, it is quite, quite an old thing to do with your life. You must have to have a very unusual personality, not to panic in all of these circumstances. Like she did one other dive, which she described. And it was into a really, really small cave. So she's a cave diver, basically. So underwater cave diver. And she was taking a scientist down there with her,

who obviously had been trained properly how to dive. But the scientists got wedged in this tiny cave and panicked. Luckily, a tiny fish came and nippled her out. And it was a really nice story because earlier in the dive, she had found that fish and it had a thorn in its fin. Yes. And she pulled the thorn out and then the fish came back to help her. OK, it's not a Bronte novel.

It's this is real life. Sorry, so she's wedged? She's wedged and they have a guideline, which is the only way you can find your way back to the entrance of the cave, because, you know, it's full of other channels and tunnels and stuff. So you'll never find your way back otherwise. The guidelines broken, which is the only thing

to lead them back to the entrance somehow. And I'm not quite sure how Jill does this. While she's trying to fix the guideline, she loses her partner who was previously wedged in Iraq. Yeah, seems careless, a bit of an oversight. So she spends 73 minutes desperately looking for a partner while trapped in this cave. No idea if she's going to escape.

That's extraordinary. And also thinking, oh, God, I've killed this scientist. How awkward. But imagine the moment and maybe it's all worth it for this when finally she realized she has not only found her way to the entrance, but she sees a little glimpse of light. But there is wasting at the entrance. The scientist, who apparently her mask is just full of tears,

because the scientist is assumed that Jill's dead and she's probably going to die, too, waiting at the entrance for her. And she was all right. And she said the weirdest thoughts go through your head. Like, when she thought she was going to die, you think things like, oh, my God, I have to get home then. My husband doesn't know how to do the taxes.

Wow. That's an amazing story. And also, it's given me a new respect for the word guideline. Yeah. You know? We're so used to hearing about the conceptual guidelines, the theoretical ones. Government guidelines suggest.

Yeah, exactly. And actually, guidelines can save your life. I was reading about what Heinearth studies in the other areas of our life, because loads and loads of cave diving, particularly. And have you guys heard of the Halocline? No. So she studies animals which are often

found beneath the Halocline. And the Halocline is a boundary between fresh water, which is higher up, and salt water, which is lower down. And she says, the boundary layer is as thin as a sheet of paper, but you can also see it when you're in the cave. So as you go through it, everything goes blurry for a second, because you've broken the barrier between the two kinds of water.

Like going through a mirror, which takes you to a parallel universe. It's exactly like that. It's exactly like that. And then as soon as you get down to the salt water, everything snaps back into perfect clarity of focus. And you look up and you can see the Halocline above you. But you meet the salt water version of yourself.

The salt water version of yourself on the other side, upside down. Yes, yes, yes. And then you have to climb using fishy ice holes downwards. Yeah, yeah. Early cave divers. The first UK cave diver was in 1935.

And potentially, this is the first world cave dive. Quite late. That's what I thought, right? I read in a few places this was the world's first cave diving. And then a few others, it's first UK. It happened at Wookie Hall. And it was a lady called Penelope Powell. And she did it with a guy called Graham Balkam.

I think that, yeah, I think it is in the UK because you find lots of accounts of other people trying similar things around the world. And usually, you just attach a hose to yourself and go deep in. But definitely in Britain. And it's thought of as the birth of cave diving. Yeah, as like a proper sport, basically.

Yeah, so Balkam actually tried going into a different cave first. And he made his own massively long snorkel out of a hose pipe and a woman's bike frame. And he almost died because that didn't work very well. So they upgraded their gear. In fact, when he went down with Penelope Mossy Powell as she was called.

But it was. Sorry, sorry. Let's just go back to that a second. Penelope Powell, her nickname was Mossy. Mossy. And is she a singer? Ooh! Never known her nickname in the 30s.

Mossy Powell, wow. Mossy. Do we know why she had the nickname? Because she had just hair on the southern side of her body. I'm not sure. But I know that you would have got along very well with me. Anyway, then at that point, we'd have a hard hat. And that would be attached to this hose called the Divers

Umbilical, which is basically a combined breathing hose and phone so that you could communicate with the surface. So they went into a wiki hole. And they went, you know, many, many chambers in a long way. 170 foot they went in. And the air pumps have to be manually operated at the surface. So they were actually broadcasting on local radio. I don't know why they didn't make this national.

Only locally. We'll be right back with Wet Look Back. You could tune in in the Cheddar Gorge area. It was an exciting time. Anyway, so they were broadcast. But their air would only last about 50 seconds. So they'd be saying it was Mossy Graham who did the talking to the surface.

And then about every 50 seconds, he'd have to say, actually, could I get some more air, please? And then the people at the surface would have to pump air in. Just one more thing on the wiki hole expedition. You can actually see a painting that was done 84 years after the actual event occurred. And it was done by a guy who's called Philip Gray. And he's an artist.

And he went down into the place where she went. So he dove down with his painting equipment and a light. And he did the painting down there. It's the first of its kind. You have to explain how. So I'm guessing this is because it was a bit odd. I'm excited to hear your guesses. You know the actual answer.

He went 19 feet down. So either he went down and there's a cave system where he could pop up into a dry bit. And he could illuminate it. So he had everything, let's say, in a plastic bag. Is it a block? Absolutely. And then he painted the painting there,

put the painting in the bag, and then came back up, which I'm guessing must be the way. He definitely painted it there. He didn't go down and take a photo and then painted it. No, he painted it down there. If you were to use water paints, right, but you use salt water and you're above the hallow client. Might it still work?

Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be a pretty blurry painting. Is it possible the painting is just absolute dog shit? It looks pretty cool actually. I think it looks good. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was looking at the world's deepest dive in Scuba, this is. And it was by Ahmed Gabba in the Red Sea in 2014.

And he went 1,090 feet down. The dive took 13 hours and 50 minutes. What? The thing is, 13 hours, 50 minutes, how much of that do you think he was going down? Oh, not very much, because you have to slowly come back up, because otherwise you'd get the decompression stuff. So he was going back up for 10 hours of it.

He went down for 15 minutes. Amazing. And then had to come back up for 13 hours and 35 minutes. It's like when you're driving along the motorway, and it's incredibly clear the way you're going, and you can see the other side of the bike. You just shot the block, you think, I've got to come back.

I'm only going down to the station, and I've got to come back through that. And obviously, if he went quicker, then he'd get the bends. He'd die. Yeah, he'd die. Do you know another thing that you can get from diving, which isn't the bends, and isn't as dangerous as the bends, but is nitrogen narcosis, which sounds actually quite fun.

It's basically getting drunk. And it's also known as the martini effect. Divers compare it to drinking one martini for every 10 meters that you descend after 30 meters. Doesn't really seem to cause much harm, except to your judgment, which can be a problem. Sorry. So let's just work this out.

So after 30 meters, every 10 meters, it's one martini. This guy went 332 meters. It's basically like he had 30 martinis. He was absolutely hammered. Yeah, he was seeing some weird shit. My limit is two, as in the really nicely made martini is. I think genuinely one of them gets me pretty too. How do you like your martinis, Mr. Bub?

Oh, give a fuck. Spine, give me a spine. Where's the fucking olive? Bub, it looks like an empty jar of olives. It came with 33 olives. Wow. That's incredible. So there is a way to get around it

if you don't want to be completely pissed. 300 meters underwater. Oh, you drink a small glass of milk before you go down, don't you? And that just helps to line your stomach. Big roast dinner, and then pop down. No, you use helium instead of nitrogen. So normally diving equipment, the gas that you have

is oxygen, nitrogen, combination, and the ratio depends on what kind of dive you're doing. But weirdly, you can replace nitrogen with helium, and apparently we can kind of breathe that OK as well. They don't quite know why this doesn't give you the narcosis, but helium is less fat soluble, and it seems like there's more soluble the gas the more drunk you'll get.

And so, I guess. It's pretty bad though, if you're in trouble, and it's like, I've been a lot of trouble here. I'm really, really struggling. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Can someone help me? I'm really stuck. I'm getting sucked into this ice pack.

OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that every cup of mint tea you drink contains the essence of 100 insects. This is part of a study which was done by Trier University in Germany, a guy called Henrik Krehenwinkel. He's an ecological geneticist. And basically, what he was looking into

is how can we monitor invasive pests? How can we see if an insect is going endangered around the world? One thought that came about is this new development, which has been around for a bit now, EDNA. We mentioned it years ago in our book of the year 2019, where we talked about a New Zealand scientist called Neil Gamble going to Loch Ness

and trying to look for the dandruff of the Loch Ness monster. It's basically the idea is that you take a little scoop of something, whether it's like water, I guess, tea in this case, and then you look very, very closely at all the molecules in it, and you can find remnants of the DNA, can't you, of other stuff that once passed through that scene. And the E stands for environmental. So it's things that have been in the area,

like you might have breathed on it and given some of your DNA to it. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that they thought they would test out is, could you tell from taking a sample of tea from an area, could you look through it with the EDNA method and work out how many different species have been landing on the plants,

peeing on the plants, chewing on the plants, doing whatever it is on the plants. And if you could do that and you could get that information, then you could look to, let's say, plants that are hidden in museums from the same area from years ago, and you would be able to tell, is there a decrease in the population?

Is there an increase? So clever. It's an interesting way of then looking at how pesticides can travel across the world on boats and so on and become a pest somewhere else. You can then suddenly notice by testing tea leaves from, say, barley, you'd be like, hang on a second, there's a sudden showing up of this invasive pest,

which they don't have here, and they can get on top of it before it then takes over. Is it clever or is it lazy? Is it just a scientist saying, I could go to barley or India and investigate this or I could pop to Asda? Pick up some of these tips. It could be both, can't it?

Often the clever thing to do is the lazy thing because you're saving resources. Very good point, yeah. But that is what literally they were doing. They were popping to their local grocery stores and they were just buying teas from around the world. I think it's, what's amazing, because they're Trier, this university in Germany, right?

One of the reasons that this is such a good place to study this is that Trier has a specimen bank and the role of the specimen bank is just to collect leaves from different trees across Germany. And they've been doing it for 35 years. They've been doing it for decades. I'm not sure what their original justification was. I think I'm going to do it in my garden.

Yeah, they gave it for a fee and they freeze the leaves in liquid nitrogen. So there's this German specimen bank, which is just a load of leaves in liquid nitrogen. I mean, it's insane. And they've just gone, we know this will come in handy one day. And it has, and it has, yeah.

It genuinely has, it's unbelievable. The reason that tea is so useful is that if you take a leaf from a herbarium, you know, it's a sort of samples of ancient plants, that what they do is they keep leaves dark and dry basically to keep them in a kind of suspended animation. And that is basically the same process as making tea. Because you're drying the leaves out,

you're shredding them up and you're just keeping them in kind of suspended animation in a teabag. And so that it's perfect to test that as opposed to herbarium. It's amazing. And Krem Winkle, this guy, he says that probably... Straight, Elvahans Christian Andersen novel.

Yeah, very weird. He said, little boy, little girl, come to my tea and pour him now. Follow the trail of teabags I've left. He said probably 99.999% or something like this of DNA, which we extract is the tea DNA. And only a tiny fraction of what's left is from insects.

And he says, which of course is good for tea drinkers because they want to drink the tea and not the insects. So, you know. I know, I do. But he says that actually it's quite good to know that there's some tiny bits of arthropod DNA because that shows that they haven't used really loads and loads of pesticides.

Yeah. So that's kind of clever. And if you want to try it yourself, contribute to his research, he claims that you can dry your own plants. Now, I don't know if he's actually accepting these specimens, but he says, if you want to dry your own plants, and I thought this was quite cool,

you just need, you can get like a Ziploc bag, sourced from some diver, presumably. And then you dry plants out by just popping in one of those weird silica packets that you get inside. I always eat those. That's really funny. E-DNA. Oh, yeah.

It floats in air, if you take an air sample, there will be tiny, tiny amounts of E-DNA floating in it. So like if someone comes into this room later today after we've gone home, and they took a jam jar of air, they'd be able to get bits of our DNA from it. Pretty much. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing.

But this led me on to another fact, and this was actually sent to us by a listener recently called Andrew Ferguson. So thank you for that. Now that was posted on the QI boards by James 12 years ago. And it's based on an interview with a zookeeper at San Francisco. And I followed the link to the original interview

with the zookeeper, and it's no longer on the internet. They'll have suppressed that like Billy, I won't be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be.

I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be.

I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. I'll be. Like Billy, I won't say. Because that will not do ticket sales any good. But I bet that's one of the facts that we must have posted a dozen times on the internet.

I've tried that because it's amazing. And it's just taken a life of its own. If you test the air in a zoo with a jam jar, you can work out which animals are in the zoo by using EDNA. What I'm trying to do with the jam jar. How incredibly useful. I'm always going to the zoo

and not being able to tell which animals are there. Well, you know, for instance, you could go to a zoo, get a jam jar, get a load of air, close the jam jar, take the air away, go to a PCR laboratory, and then it will tell you that they have giraffes there. Brilliant. Actually, that's really useful

for when the sign is down, but the giraffe enclosure. London Zoo is actually done away with the guides now. They just hand you a jam jar on arrival. It will be an incredibly good kind of like crap alternate zoo. It's just the jam jar zoo. It's the tube scape parents visit to the zoo. You don't cross the barriers. You just scoop it to the jar.

Take it home with your kids and go, look, there's drafts in here. Well, there are two studies that have found this, one in Denmark and one in England. But one interesting part about it is that you can not only tell which species are in the zoo, but you can get DNA from the food that's fed to the animals.

So if you're feeding your giraffe like vole sausages, then it would collect the DNA from the voles as well, even though there aren't any voles in your zoo. Wow. And then you can get the zoo, I presume, shut down, because that feels like it breaches some rules, doesn't it? Vols sausage. That feels like it's an even better zoo now in the jar. Exactly, because you're getting more animals than you.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think, does anyone eat vole? I've never. There's not much meat on a vole, I don't think. No, no. You need to be quite desperate. Pestin's probably done it. Yeah. Have you got other DNA stuff?

Not good stuff. Cool. Great. I've got some stuff about voles. There was an area of the UK where they used eDNA in the water and they found that there must be some water voles there by looking at the eDNA. And then a bit later, they put a kind of video camera up and found that there was water voles there.

So it just shows that it works. Okay, that's what I thought you were going to say, it was just giraffes having a picnic. Sorry, go on. I was looking at the relationships between tea and animals, you know, like tea pests. And there's actually certain types of tea which rely on tea pests to be made.

There's the tea green leaf hopper, which is one of the main attacks of the tea plant, also has lots of other names. It's called the tea jacid or smoke boy or jumping boy. And actually you get special tea, which waits for the tea green leaf hopper to attack it because then tea releases these chemicals. It releases very specific chemicals

depending on what it knows is attacking it. And the chemicals it releases when it's attacked by this creature actually make the tea taste quite nice. So if you get it at the right time, you get, for instance, something called dong ding oolong tea, which actually, I think it's pronounced tung ding, but I like the idea of changing the phrase ding dong, dong ding.

It's like, you know, what's he called? Leslie? Phillips, yeah. If Leslie Phillips goes through that layer of salt water, he goes dong ding. Dong ding. Have you need to know who Leslie Phillips is? If you don't know who Leslie Phillips is,

then why are you listening to this? Why are you listening to this? We can't help you. Yeah. That's very cool. Anyway, apparently it tastes like honey. Google HQ's gonna freak their nuts when they see this spike on Leslie Phillips.

It was later on. It's been a Leslie Phillips event. The shot hole borer is a tea pest. Shot hole, I said. Latin name is eulacia fornicatus. Oh, dear. Do you know how it got the name fornicatus? Anyone can guess?

It was the only, was the first specimen found in the act of having sex. Was it shagging the scientist as he discovered it? What? No, it's because the word fornicate means arch shaped. Does it really? It does, fornix in Latin means arch, and so it's nothing to do with fornication,

as you guys thought, apart from that the word fornix also meant brothel. Oh. Because brothels were often found in vaults. Oh, wow. And that's why we get the word fornication. That's so interesting. That is a great,

so if you're not actually in a vault, it doesn't count as fornicating. Technically not. I'm hearing a legal loophole there. Your honor. May I present the flat roof? Which exonerates my client. Yeah.

One of the guys responsible for tea, particularly Assam tea, was Robert the Bruce. Hmm, that's it. Yeah. Specifically a Scottish man called Robert Bruce. Oh, come on. Sorry.

Middle name there, I don't suppose no. He's just Robert Bruce. He was a Scottish man, he was in India in the 1820s, and this story's quite boring actually. Really? No spiders involved, no battles. We've got a moderately common name with

a great Scottish hero, but not the same, similar. Similar, similar. Yeah, yeah. Great. I was reading... I just saved us all a minute of time, actually. No, thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I was reading about ways that farmers try to avoid using pesticides and use nature or whatever they can in order to help their crops. And one of the methods that's used is there's an army of ducks that people hire in order to eat all of the pests.

So, quite famously, in Cape Town and South Africa, there's a wine estate where they employ around 2,000 ducks that every morning, they walk from their little duck homes all the way to the vineyard, and the ducks spend a full day there just eating all of the worms and all of the pests. Why don't they keep the ducks next to the vineyard

so they don't need to walk all the way from their duck homes to the vineyards? Well, it's the cost of accommodation, isn't it? Yeah. You've got to commute sometimes. And you want to separate work from personal life as well. They get up at 7 a.m.

They all march as one to work at 10.30. They spend the day eating the snails and the pests back home by 4 p.m. 10.30 to 4? Yeah. Oh, bloody hell. I think actually the bosses should be cracking the web a bit more.

Well, they're back home by 4. They leave at 7.30. No, no, no. They get up at 7. They go to work at 10.30. They're back by 4. So they're knocking off at 2.30, I'd say. But here's the thing as well.

So these are runner ducks. And so what it means is that they've got great speed on them. So if they see a snail going for a leaf, they can get there before it does. An ordinary duck. There's no way it could catch a snail. You need a special runner duck.

And so here's the thing, though. They have to hire, along with the ducks, to come with them a bunch of geese who act as body guards to the ducks there. Oh, my god. Because this is a cartoony. This is something I've seen before. This is the old woman who swore to fly.

It's some warped version of it. Who's guarding the geese? The old woman who hired a duck. What the fuck, she hired a duck. So the problem is, is that the ducks get spooked really easily if they're eating the snails and so on. Let's say an owl comes by. A geese's job is to scare away the owls

and all the other animals that come in. Because apparently as soon as a duck sees an owl, it just freaks out and they all go scattering and running away. It causes chaos. So yeah. But here's the thing. It's used for many different kinds of fields and farms. But the one thing it's not used for is for tea leaves.

And it's because you have to pick something that the ducks themselves aren't going to want to eat. And they apparently love tea leaves. I cannot believe the climax of this story is that tea is the one thing that does not involve this very convoluted process. The really interesting thing is this is nothing to do with what we're talking about.

It is. This is a pest control, but they can't use it for tea leaves. You know what I said just a minute earlier when I was talking about Robert the Bruce. Oh, my God. No, look, it's a pest. It's tangentially. No, no, no.

It's completely related to that. Oh, jeez. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Anna. My fact is that the first railway in Greenland was built to transport a meteorite first. And one of the only, I think. Lots of places to say the only, but James,

I think you might have found some other rogue railways in Greenland. Oh, yeah, I found all sorts. So there'll be the Greenland Railway section later. But this is a really interesting story, which I found after some seriously in-depth research. Actually, it took me ages to get there, but eventually on the back of an innocent smoothie bottle.

Anna? Yeah. Why are we getting our facts from innocent smoothie bottles? Look, I read this and I thought, Christ. Because Anna's clearly on a side hustle advertising deal with innocent smoothie. I'm not saying that it's any better or worse in other smoothies, but it wasn't where the fact came from,

but it led me to it. Because it said, in 1894, an explorer found a meteorite on the sensibly named Meteorite Island. Funny bit of humor for innocent. He decided to take it home because it was the biggest ever. But weighing 58 tons, it took three years and a new railway to get it back. While it got there in the end, this guy's story

has taught us a lot, mainly that it's better to stick to the lighter things in life. Innocent smoothies have 30% lighter on natural sugar. This smoothie is a lot easier to carry home than a meteorite. That's a shoehorn, isn't it? Rock on. That's a shoehorn. Oh, it's an amazing fact that the Brontes all

died from drinking graveyard water. What that reminds us of, innocent, is that actually life is not never ending. And you should enjoy every second of it. And why not enjoy the next few seconds by having this delicious innocent smoothie? I thought it was one of the best crowbars I've ever seen. Actually, have you tried the innocent graveyard smoothie?

It's had a quiet taste. A lot of body. A lot of body. Anyways, I thought, what the hell are they talking about? That's absolutely loopy. But then they looked into it. And this was from an expedition in the 1890s into Greenland. It was by the explorer Robert Peary.

And he was led by Inuit guides to Meteorite that people have been hearing about for almost 100 years, but hadn't quite been able to track down. So the Inuits knew where it was and used it a lot, as I'm sure we'll talk about. And other Europeans had got there, tried to find it. Eventually, he found it. And the biggest piece, which is called Anighito,

was so heavy that he had to construct a little railroad by laying down lots of timber and then putting steel rail tracks. I think it was two mini bits, because he had to build one bit of railroad to push it up the hill. And then they rolled it down the hill to the harbour. And then once on the coastline, then they had to build another railroad over a bridge

that they constructed to get it onto the boat. Wow. It's amazing. He went to enormous lengths to steal this quite important aspect. That's one way of looking at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not a quick heist, is it?

It's quite noticeable. He took all three, I think. Yes, he did. And I think, are they still to this day at the American Museum of Natural History? They're in different places, I think. Yeah. The biggest one is in the American Museum of Natural

History. And there's tens of tons. And his name means tent, doesn't it? And he took the other two slightly smaller ones called dog and woman. Yeah. And the people there, they had hammer stones. And they would chip off bits of the ore.

And that would allow them to put tips on their spears and that kind of thing. It was the sole source of metal, right, in the Arctic. But yeah, he did steal it. And when he got back to New York, he made a lot of money off of it. He sold it for $40,000, which is roughly $1.3 million in today's money, the equivalent.

But before he did that, when the boat docked, he'd set it up as like a circus thing, where you would come and visit to see, come see the meteorite. And he would charge a quarter for every person. It just looks like a rock. It's moderately more exciting than your jar of EDNA at the zoo. But still, it's a big rock.

But 20,000 people went to see that. And he charged them a quarter apiece to go and touch it or have a look at it. And so that's about $5,000 at the time, which, again, is about $150,000. So it became very rich off his stolen item. When he sold them, he was selling them to raise the money for another journey north.

That's what he was using the money for. Yeah, he was desperate to get to the North Pole, really. He was desperate to get to the North Pole. Basically, there were claims for a long time that Peerie was the first guy to get to the North Pole. And those claims are not true. He did not make it. Oh, you're saying categorically, Andy.

I mean, I am on your side here. Well, OK. All right, let's put it this way, right? His triumphant expedition to the North Pole, as we call it, was in 1909. And the evidence is as follows. The only people who witnessed him are four Inukwit people who were all sworn to secrecy

and his manservant, Matthew Henson. His diary was inconsistent. He didn't record the readings that would have proved where he got to. He also was a 54-year-old man with no toes due to frostbite. He would have had to manage three times the average speed the expedition had achieved earlier on under less difficult conditions.

That record has never been equal to the history of Arctic exploration. He would have had to travel 70 miles a day. No explorer has ever covered this ground over the same number of days. It just, he didn't get there. If he had got there, it's not even him who really did it. It was Matthew Henson, who was his partner,

who sort of got shunned from history and from that trip to the point where he was sort of seen as a manservant. They were partners, and he was an amazing explorer himself, Matthew Henson. It was because he was black that he was sort of not given the credit. There's lots of thoughts about whether or not he got there, but Wally Herbert is the British expedition leader

who went there to try and use the calculations to see if he managed it. He claims that he didn't, but in the process of doing it, Wally Herbert then claimed to be the first person to do it. Or do we believe, but do we believe the leader? Well, I think Wally Herbert is definitely a legit explorer. Whether or not his claim that period didn't make it is true or not is different.

I think he definitely made it. But what's amazing is when you travel and you're trying to get to the North Pole, the problem is is that you're on a moving body of land, aren't you? The ice is just constantly moving. So when Wally Herbert was trying to get there, you would take a reading of where you were after an hour,

and suddenly you were eight kilometers further away than you were because of the way the ice was shifting. But the thing is, at the very end, I remember reading, he was something like, what was it, like 130 meters from the North Pole, and he was kind of on his hands and knees. Luckily, some small fishes had made holes in the dragon cell. So one of the amazing things with Wally

is that he, I think they even passed it at one point and not realized when they were having a sleep. They sort of just, like the drift took them over it. Yeah, so they woke up and they realized that it was achievable to get to in the day. So they sent a telegram to the queen, saying, Your Majesty, we have got to the North Pole and the first British to do it.

Risky, because they haven't actually done it. Because they haven't actually done it. And the rest of the day became a chase to get there so that the telegram wasn't alive. And they managed it. But just, they only just managed it. So it's good to set yourself these challenges sometimes. You've got a deadline.

Yeah, absolutely. I often say, yes, I've researched three of the four facts for this week's show. That's all fine. But it is, in America, it's very controversial, because they, you know... What, Peary? Well, Peary got there in a lot of people's opinions

and to say it. Opinions don't go out, he didn't make it. Well, you're going to be getting a lot of emails. Podcast at qi.com. Bring it on. I'll be surprised if the emails make it to my inbox. I imagine they'll stop about 70 miles short. It was all kind of unedifying, I think.

It was that real desperation for fame and glory. And it was so competitive. And like you say with Henson, Henson probably, if they did get there, Henson claimed to have got there first. So Henson went for a stroll, I think, when they were at what they thought was roughly the North Pole.

And then Henson came back. This is according to Henson's diaries. Henson came back and was like, oh, wow, so cool. I'm pretty sure I just wandered over to it. And I was the first person to be sitting on top of the world. What a dick move. You just go for the stroll. I was just going to go for a quick...

Well then, so Peary's like, what a dick move. And so he snuck off, took two of the Inuit guys of the four, snuck off and found his own way to what was his own North Pole. How do you sneak off in a completely featureless environment? That's more impressive, actually, to find a way of sneaking. There's one big tree just behind it. Peary doesn't seem like a great guy in a number of ways.

It's weird, because I haven't got that from you that you think that. So one of the other things he did, and this really is the truly shabby thing, so he persuaded, in 1897, which was his... That was the meteorite nicking trip, heist. He persuaded six Inuit people to return with him to America, kind of so that they could be put on stage

as part of a lecture series. Four of them died shortly after arriving of TB. And the youngest one was called Minnick, and he was adopted by an American family. Minnick was given an American name. He was named Minnick Peary Wallace. And several years later, many years later, he was at the American Museum of Natural History,

and he came across some bones in the ethnographic department, which was his father's skeleton, which Peary had simply sold to the museum as a kind of display piece. Minnick obviously wanted, and fought very hard to have the skeletons returned for a ritual burial. The museum refused, and Peary eventually paid for Minnick to go home, but the family's skeletons

weren't released and buried in Greenland until 1993. But did you see that they gave him a fake burial first? So when Minnick came over, and his father died, and Minnick said, I need to bury him with the proper Inuit rituals, they gave him a bit massive log, wearing sort of big furs, disguised as his dad. Disguised as?

Sort of shoved his head on, I suppose, yeah, yeah. They pretended it was his dad, they were burying. I guess maybe you don't get up too close. Yeah, so he thought he buried his dad, and it was a few years later, I think, when he was like, oh, come here. Can I tell you about another railway on Greenland? Because this is all going a bit dark.

Yes, yes, yes, good idea, good idea. There's basically a few that have been built, and they're mostly like small ones, just to transport fish from, you know, the fishing place to the place where people live. They're not very big, you know, it's not like a huge railway going through the country. But it's not a tiny one where like,

carriages for fish, the fish sits in a tiny fish shed. Adorable. Yeah. It's not that. But there's a coal railway in Greenland, and it's on Disco Island, which Disco Island is the second largest island in Greenland after the main one,

and it's one of the hundred largest islands in the world, but I'd never heard of it until this week. Disco Island. Can any of you guess how Disco Island got its name? It's in Greenland. I mean, this feels like another Fornicans trap, doesn't it? Oh, yeah.

I mean, yeah. Disco, it's completely circular. It's shaped like a disk. One theory. The people there, they do the Macarena. That's where we got the Macarena. Yes. It's not a common theory.

I know it's not a Macarena. Light bounces off the snow, much like a disco ball. Very good. Not a theory. Rounded is a theory. Another one is that it's shot for Discovery Island. Another one is that the mountains are quite flat on it, so they look like desks.

Disco Island. Disco Island. But the most common is probably that it was named after a guy called Marmaduke. He was an English explorer and whaler, and that it was originally called Ducky's Island. Oh, Marmaduke. And then Ducco's Island, and then Dicco's Island,

and then Disco's Island, and eventually Disco Island. Wow. Okay. So it's not the next Magaluf. If anyone's got it on a map, put the tickets. I got one more fact on Peary. Explorer Robert Peary brought Vaseline to the North Pole to protect his skin from chafing

and his mechanical equipment from rusting. Yeah. And I found this fact on a Twitter site called at Vaseline Facts, which is, yeah, which is a great handle. Unfortunately, it only lasted for three tweets. You got the others? Yeah, but they're not really that interesting.

So the word Vaseline derives from the German word Vassa, water, and the Greek word Allion, olive oil. Did they do the one about how in South America, the movie Greece was called Vaseline? Oh, they should have. They should have, but no, they didn't. They kind of just ran out after three and the only interaction that this Twitter account

at Vaseline Facts had was just one response to their tweets, which after the one I just told you about how it got its name, someone just wrote back saying, dinnask. And that was from at fuck Vaseline Facts. Wow. To be honest, if I had set up, I think instantly got a reply from at fuck Andrew Hunter M.

I would have stopped immediately. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can do my podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All the previous episodes are up there.

There's links to our upcoming tour dates. Do check them out if we're coming to a city near you. We'd love to see you. Also, if you don't like the adverts that you heard over the course of this episode, guess what? There's a new option to get rid of them. You can join Clubfish either on the iTunes player.

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