Three Bean Salad - Sleep

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Victoria suggests that the beans talk about the subject of sleep. On their way they touch on Margaret Thatcher, soldiers in the jungle, and the act of eating a crab's memories. Plus bird stories.NOTE: do not listen to this episode while you are sleeping or it will reprogramme your brain and you'll wake up with the intellect of a small brown bird.Get in touch:[e-mail]@beansaladpod

You know, last week someone emailed in saying that they'd noticed that we talk about anuses quite a lot. Oh, yes. And they sort of laid down a challenge that we should do an episode without mentioning the anus. With that in mind, ask me what I did this week. What did you do this week, Ben? I went to the doctor and he prescribed a stool softener for an anal fissure.

Oh, nasty. Oh, that's an ouchie. That's an ouchie place to have a fissure. Oh, my word. So he prescribed, was it a stool? Softener. Softener. Yeah, it's like a fabric softener.

So it comes out smelly. It comes out, it comes out shop fresh. Has it got the same thing where you're never quite sure which way to pour it in? Is it like, is it so unclear? Is it the anus itself? Is it the nose? And then it's gone for all three. It's just evenly spread out between all three.

Oh, God, I'm sorry to hear about the state of your ass. So is it constipation? Yeah. Is the fissure, is the fissure? That'll certainly exacerbate it. Yeah, because I had a phase of constipation. And basically, as soon as I got constipation, it was quite a traumatic constipation event.

And from then on, if I ever have constipation, I go straight to suppositories now. Oh, my God. How continental? It is where you just spent a lot of time in front of me and your childhood and so on. So that's what you reach for. The way I see it is if someone's trying to break in the front of the bank, you don't send the police squad to the foyer, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. And that's how it felt at the time. It felt like someone was trying to break in or break out. Well, no, hang on. Well, no, you're trying to break out. So what I'm saying is... The gold was in the safe, but you couldn't open the safe. So hang on, you're the burger.

You're the robber in this. Are you armed? No, I'm... No, what I'm saying is if you're trying to break them gold out of a bank and you're trying to break it out of the back door, you don't deploy other members of your heist squad to the front. To go through the front to the front door. And so you don't want the police.

You don't want the police at all in this situation because you're doing the heist on your own. On my own terms. Your arse is the vault. So you're Las Vegas and you're rectum as a casino. Yeah. And I've got the product. I've got the product. That's the main thing.

I've got it. I've got quite a lot. Right. So we need to get the heck out of here, guys. So the job of a lifetime could retire on this one? Yeah, this would be the big one. This will be probably after this. Just put your feet up and...

Yeah, go on a beach somewhere and never go to the toilets again. The dream. The dream. So is your point that if you go into the front of the bank, you've got to deal with the cashier. They press the little button under the counter. Exactly. There's all the people screaming and you have to go,

I'm not messing about here and you have to shoot civilians. Exactly. So what I'm saying, exactly. So if a bank had a back door entry, which went straight into the safe, and all you had to do was get into a large, into a big pellet-shaped sort of outfit and headbutt your stuff, and then you could sort of headbutt your way through this sort of valve. Like a four-wheel drive lozenge with a quite a sturdy grill on the front.

Round raid it with a lozenge-shaped vehicle. There's a weak point around the back of the bank you've identified. It's a valve, some sort of aircon valve, with a lozenge-shaped vehicle with a pointy bit at the end. You can get the whole crew through it. The whole crew, me, the clever guy, the strong guy, the sexy guy. Thread computers. All of us.

Yep. Yeah. Straight through. And acrobat gym. And acrobat gym. And you go. And what I'm saying is, if that was the case, then you would use the lozenge-vehicle option.

You wouldn't be messing around going around, going through the front. Now, banks, unfortunately, don't have a weak point valve around the back. But luckily for us, arses do. That's the one key difference between an arse and a bank. I would say they are definitely our weak point as a species as well. The arse. Yeah. It's like the Death Star.

It's that little thing, you know, it's the little, it's the point of entry, isn't it? Well, yeah. You never go arse first into battle, do you? No, famously. And it's what you always say in a fight, isn't it? If you were a bunch of friends, you'd go for the arse. Go for the arse.

Go for the arse. Although, I say you never go arse first into battle. If you do see someone going arse first into a street fight, I mean, that's almost as if they're the most dangerous guy in the brawl, right? They've got nothing to lose. Yeah. Lack of inhibition. They know they're going to get hurt.

They're going to hurt you too. Terrifying. If we want to go up the other end of the digestive tract, go on. And we've already started the digestive tract section, and we didn't even notice. Digestive tract talk. I've got a mouth problem, which is I'm off to the dentist later today.

Oh, don't you? Yeah. So I've got that little scoop in my stride. So that's a bit like them going to the front of the bank. Exactly. So, yeah, I've got foyer issues. I was brushing my teeth a couple of weeks ago, and I heard the sound.

You never want to hear when that's happening, which is a metallic clank. Oh, no. As a filling fill out on my face. That's better than a sort of chinary clank of teeth themselves, of 32 teeth falling out at once. That's true. I was really worried about it because it's literally like,

so it's one of my lower left. It's one of the ones that's for compacting food down. Your molars, your pre-molars. Yeah, it's not one of the prestige front teeth. One of the... Not one of your show teeth. Not one of your show teeth. Not one of the ones that you use to, well, for social status,

isn't it, the front one? The status teeth. It's just one of the thankless guys in the back. If your mouth was the Titanic, it would be one of the guys down in the engine room. Yeah. Yeah. In the third galley.

Good old-fashioned, you know, if he did have a favorite instrument, it would be an accordion. He'd know someone with a fiddle. He'd know someone with a fiddle, whereas the front teeth are very much sort of... Oh, I'm interested in Philip Glass, actually. Front teeth are like, I'm actually more interested in the silence between the notes at the moment. Whereas the guy's in the back, I don't know what he's on about.

Absolutely. Get that accordion on now. Stoke up the accordion and let's... Guys, why can't I hear a jig? Because that's what you do when you're crushing away every day. But the front, the status teeth. But you know, on the other hand, the status teeth at the front, they are the...

You know, you could argue they're the front line. They're the ones that if I was to, for example, fight... They're the first ones he'd punch out at your face. He'd punch those out first. And then work his way back. Work his way back until he finally punched out the... Gigantic turn that's wading at the bottom. Yeah.

Well, it's as simple. Basically, dispatching a weed... Like me, you know, I'm absolutely... Just clearly a weed. Simple method is you punch out the front teeth and then what happens is the weed then ends up on all fours looking for the teeth. The first move that the weed does is... Because the weed can't deal with the fight,

but he finds... But finding stuff and putting it back where it came from, it feels more appealing at that point. While he's being distracted, you know, a tough guy gives him a final stamp, just crushes him under his boat. Yeah. And then his gang, who are lounging about on the bonnets

of a couple of convertible sports cars. Because they don't need to help him. They do need to help him. They're lounging about... They're a mixture of attractive men and attractive women. And at that point, one of them yawns, flicks a cigarette across the vacant lot and says, I'm bored of taunting this dweeb.

Let's go and catch a movie. Nice. At the drive-in. At the drive-in, at which point, yeah, one of them pulls out an oozy. His dad's oozy. His dad's oozy. That he knows he's not supposed to play with.

He's not supposed to play with it. He's a bad boy. His dad's on a business weekend trip away, though. And he machine guns yet your body in half. Oh, is it a tale we've heard so many times? Yeah. And it's amongst the dweebs. Maybe it's time for us to get on with the show.

Let's bean machine it. It's time to fire up the old bean machine. Okay, so this week's topic, sent in by Victoria. Thank you, Victoria, is... Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.

Sleep. I've often wished I was a short sleeper. Maybe I've got Thatcher style. Oh, I knew it was any matter of time before Thatcher came on. People are obsessed with that fact about Thatcher. They are. Or Edison. Let's make it Edison, then.

Because he was another one, wasn't he? I don't know. Was he like a four hours a night guy? He was a four hours a night guy. Was he? But I've got horrible feet... Because I think it's partly because I imagine if I was a short sleeper and I only required that amount of sleep,

that I might get any of the things done that I would like to get done. I've got a horrible feeling I might just piss an extra four hours up against the wall or whatever it is. Oh, absolutely. That's the risk, isn't it? I know we've moved on from Thatcher, but can I... As a country. Well, yes.

But also... A legacy is still there for all to see. I think the right to buy is still something which... Which, you know, affects us to this day. I read somewhere that she didn't really sleep that little. And that she did a kind of Mussolini style sort of dictator move, which was that they'd leave on the light in Downing Street. She'd go to bed, but they'd leave it on to make it look like she was still up working.

And Dennis would wear a wig, wouldn't he, and sit in the window. And so that the silhouette was there. That's right. That's all right. Beavering away. And eventually, of course, he started to think he was Thatcher, didn't he? He did, yeah. And he'd start stabbing a lot of the people that they would come around and stay there.

Just like Margaret used to. Go and stab him in the shower, wouldn't he? So what is the Thatcher thing that people say she didn't sleep at all, or she only had four hours or something? Four hours is what you hear about Thatcher. Four hours is what you hear, isn't it? Yeah. I think the Thatcher thing is that when I'm struggling to sleep,

say if I'm in bed, I'm struggling to sleep and I'm sort of panicking a bit about the next day. You listen to Thatcher speeches on your phone. Well, I'll do. There are these podcasts you can get now, which are called, and there's one called The Thatcher Chill Zone. It's a podcast and you download it and it just plays Thatcher's speeches. With like, yeah, like panpipe, yeah, sort of more cheaper backgrounds. So it's things like, you know, we must not give them the oxygen of publicity.

Oxygen of publicity. There's no such thing as society. They slow it down. There's no such thing. And yeah, it just sort of chills you out. But also, essentially makes you quite angry if you don't agree with the policies. It's not for everyone. But so there's a few things that I do when I'm panicking about sleep.

One of the things that I'll think about is that I'll think about the Thatcher fact. So I'll be looking at, you know, I'll wake up at two or three in the morning or something and I'll be like panicking about sleep potentially if I've got something to do the next day. And then I'll think, it's okay. Thatcher got by on four out. So if, in fact, that's what I'll do. So I'll look at, let's say I'm getting up at eight. Right?

Yeah. And if I'm not sleeping, which happens every now and then, I just have a really bad night. If I look, I'll look at the clock. I'll look at my phone before I am or something. So I've got four hours till eight and then I'll go, it's okay because Thatcher got by on four hours sleep. So it's okay. And then I'll sort of, I'll think about that fact.

And then I'll ask, you know, then an hour later, I'll look at three hours. I'm going to get three hours sleep now. Am I going to be okay? And I'll think, I've got three hours. One of the ones I think about is, I just think people in the army probably don't sleep a lot if they're literally fighting a war in a jungle. I'll think about that. And I think there's a thing, I don't think Marines and people, isn't there a way of,

if you're like fighting a war in a jungle and you've got to be in a battle that lasts like a month, that you can just have little five minute naps like in a tree while your mates are guarding you with guns or something. Jungle map. But I think, a really quick jungle map. Aren't they coping because they're in the genuinely terrifying situation? I imagine they're very adrenaline-less compared to you. The adrenaline levels are just, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you're, if you have to then illustrate something the next day. I might have a high octane illustration drop the next day. If they have to draw a picture of a kidney the next day, it doesn't necessarily gender the same degree of terror as a guerrilla army coming at you. That's true. From the scrub lands. That's true.

It's true. That's right. Because adrenaline will get you through. And sometimes they remember that fact. I think it's okay because soldiers in the army, they're operating at a high level. But aren't they, they're not all just knackered and they're all operating at quite a high level, aren't they? Soldiers when they're in a battle.

They're not just a bunch of people dozing around walking into trees going, oh, have you seen my gun? No, I don't know who's got the names. What? Oh, bloody hell. You know what I mean? They're on it. If you handed a soldier in the heat of battle a little bit of paper and a pen,

they could do a really cracking illustration just like that. Yeah, they could draw, they'd be like, oh, I've just created a sort of believable cat character, which is original as well. There's a lot of cartoon cats, but I've just done one. It's original, but it's got a character standing on two feet. It's got bow tie and it's got movement and character and the eyeballs have got shadows on, which is very, you don't know. I've done that.

I didn't know I could draw. I've fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Send this to my wife. Send this amazing illustration to my wife. Tell her to publish it. The cat's got character and bow tie and a small half a cat. Point out the shadows and the eyeballs. That's how do they look?

I mean, the opposite of that is my personal experience, if I get basically anything less than about eight or seven hours sleep, the following day, I will always, for some reason, just leave the hob on. Yeah. Stuff like that, or like I'll leave the door unlocked. Yes. Well, can I say? I fall down the stairs.

Yeah, that's a sign. I do that a lot anyway, but if I'm trying on sleep, then it'll happen a lot. I fell down the stairs twice within seven minutes a few weeks ago, and I was a bit short on sleep and absolutely mashed my little toe and on exactly the same point as a staircase both times. There was blood splatter. That was when you sent us a photo of that. Yeah, that's a new question.

It was completely foul. Twice within seven minutes. Yeah, it happens a lot. But that's my tell that somebody needs a little nap time. I do the same thing, which is I'll have one of those nights where I'm like struggling to sleep and I've hardly had any sleep, but I've built myself up with sort of Thatcher did it, people fighting war jungle wars do it.

I'm going to be fine. I'm on this, Henry. You can do this on sheer adrenaline, and I realise that I'm pouring cereal into the bin. I can do this. I can do this, and there's a cross on fire in my left hand. Oh, my God! I can do it, Henry.

There's wasps. There's 4,000 wasps in my kitchen. I've got the wasps in. Ah, God! And it'd be like, what's happening? Fair baldings here, dressed in formal regalia. I've invited Claire Boulding around on false pretenses.

I've just done loads of weird shit. She's demanding volavons. Yeah, always, always double check those emails when you haven't had much sleep, Henry. Always. How many times have we told you? No, sleep, I do get... I just go through phases where I'm absolutely fine,

and phases when I get stuck in my head about sleep, and it's like, the more... Basically, the general rule for me is if I've got nothing on the next day, I'll sleep fine. If I've got anything remotely stressful the next day, I'll start getting trapped in my head, and it's like a horrible kaleidoscopic staircase into a kind of MC Escher world of thought horror.

Where as soon as you crack open the door of thought of like, so you're lying in bed, basically, the key to sleep is really to not think about sleep, forget about sleep, and then, hang on, I'm just woken up after eight hours of sleep. You know, it just happens. If you're not thinking about it, you just wake up and you're out of bed,

you've got rosy cheeks, you know, you're in a state of sexual arousal, everything's go, go, go. You know, like, you're up, you're bouncing about, brilliant. You're up, you've got a boner. You're up for the day. You've got a boner, little... Like, you know what I mean? Everything's...

There's three little bluebirds sitting along your boner. There's a little bluebird on your boner singing a song. One of them's bringing a coffee. One of them's bringing a coffee. You press down the toaster thingy, and out, up, pop two glasses of freshly pressed orange juice. The second you sprang out of bed, your rectum emptied itself all over the duvet.

Yeah. You didn't even need your suppositories. Freshly voided, rock solid, ready to go. You've got a whole load of suppositories you haven't used, and they're all lined up, and you're playing them like an accordion with a couple of birers. All the way to the bigger suppositories,

which have a lower tone right down to the high-pitched little mini suppositories that you also have. You're playing them up and down. Yeah, everything just fits into place. You basically just run into your cupboard and run out fully clothed somehow, and you don't even know how it's happened. It's some sort of Wallace and Gromit sort of thing that's happened.

You and I, Henry, are both childless men, and I always feel like when people who are childless, like us, talk in any way about not sleeping very well, the person in the room who has children or recently had young children has this far away look in their eye. It's almost like a sort of army veteran who's like, you just do not know. Is that true, Mike?

Well, you're speaking to the wrong guy here, because I'm a very, very, very heavy sleeper. And let them cry. The oldest one. The oldest one. The first night she was away from her mother for a night when her mother went back to work and went on a night shift, and it was just me and the kid, me in the bed,

the kid in the crib next to the bed. I woke up the next morning, fresh as a bloody daisy, thinking, I've cracked this, I've bloody cracked it. This is a piece of piss, this is. She's slept through, she's slept like a dream. We are at sleeping through stage, I've cracked it. I can't wait to tell. Then you looked at the CCC view footage,

she got out of her crib, gone down the stairs, put your car keys, opened the car, driven to Bristol, gone to a nightclub, came home, back up the stairs. Nine points on her license. Logged into your bank and invested all of your money in Bitcoin. Which turned out to be a great decision. But I looked at the bed and on me, on the bed, were a tiny blanket, another tiny blanket,

a tiny sort of pillow thing, various soft toys and chewing elements. And clearly, she'd been up throughout the night, presumably shouting at me and screaming and bawling and eventually throwing the entire condensate. And I looked over and she was fast asleep in a completely empty cot. She pretty much thrown the clothes off her back at me.

And I hadn't had a bloody thing. Which is quite troubling for me. Yeah. Because sometimes they get up and there's a problem and they're trying to let you know. Mike, I've just remembering now, I have slept in the same room as you a couple of occasions over the years.

Yeah, well, you've even recorded me. You've played back recordings of my animalistic growlings. Yeah, absolutely horrendous. And there's a certain kind of man at your one of them who sleeps really well and they're almost always snorers. Because you essentially blot out, you know, there's a kind of, sleep is a zero-sum game, I think.

And basically, if you stop enough other people from sleeping, you will sleep. You get their sleep off them. You see your sleep theft. You're asleep. There's a certain amount of sleep in the room and you can have it. Each room has a certain amount of sleep.

Yeah, I'm a sleep black hole. Yeah. And it's a very, I mean, my most selfish one of a sleep. And it's not something I'm proud of. But we have found though, we got Pam, the puppy, and who's about eight months old now, Pam, the smallest whimper in the night. I am up.

Like a shot. That's really... It's like I'm on springs. And yet, my own children I will not wake for. But this hairy creature, I do. I do think it reflects very well on me. But it's all stuff you can't be blamed for, Mike, because it's subconscious, isn't it?

Yeah. It's not your choice. I don't know, but to be a subconscious arsehole, is that the worst kind of arsehole? That's deep. When it's deep, when it's deep down, because everything else is learned. That's like being a psychopath, isn't it?

That's sort of like a sort of deep level. It's like those things, isn't it? Psychopath. That film force majeure, where... Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a family in a skiing holiday and then there's an avalanche and the first instinct of the man of the family

is just to run away and leave his wife and children. He flees, he flees, he runs for his own life. Yeah, Jesus. That's a very good film. If that was Mike, Mike would just, he would, you'd get up from the table, just grab any dogs that were in the restaurant and run out with them.

Grab all the dogs that could. Make sure they were safe. Using my own family as human shields to protect the dogs. To protect the precious dogs. Do either of you sleep talk? I'm a sleep talker. Are you? Which I find it's very disquieting.

Because you can't know what you've been saying. No, I'm not. I was a sleep laugher as a baby, apparently. Which apparently is quite unusual. My dad thought I was having some sort of unusual partial brain seizure. To me, that goes along with the snoring thing. It's just something quite smug about it.

The little baby just tick, just like literally cracking himself up. Just kind of... A few everybody else, I'm hovering up everyone else's sleep and having a great time with it. And having a great time, I'm loving this. Yeah. I'm going to be a master of sleep.

As a baby you already knew, you were like, I've completely nailed sleep. And not only am I going to sleep loads in my life, I'm going to stop other people from sleeping. So I could be a sleep talker. I could be a sleep singer. I don't know. Henry would know better than me because as he says,

we have shared a room a few times in the past and you have documented the audio. So I don't... But I think last time what came from that audio was pretty gas-rawl. Pretty primal stuff. It wasn't... Like a sort of pre-language language, really. Yeah.

There weren't any Bon Mott's, I don't think. It's like caveman's speech. No, it's really... Yeah, because it's grim. Because not only is it keeping me awake, it's also reminding me of the essential sort of animalistic nature of mankind. You know, it's actually quite depressing,

sort of like existentially. It's like, bloody hell, I'm going to be in a really bad mood tomorrow. And we're all just beasts. Yeah, so I think that the nap is a great thing. I'm a big fan of the nap. No, no, absolutely not. You know you don't nap, Ben. No, because I've probably had maybe 10 laps in my adult life.

And after each one, you just feel absolutely awful. See, I've had many more than that. I keep wanting to crack it. I've tried it many times, but I don't get... You get quite refreshed, don't you, Henry? What's your technique? Tell me what you're doing, and I'll see if I can help. What am I doing?

Well, it depends what's happening. If there's someone in the house, then I'm doing it in secret in the study on the floor. Bloody hell. Yeah, you are. I'm pretending that I'm working. I've closed the door. To be married to you, Mike, to have an entire night of no sleep

next to you snoring your arse off. And then the next day, to go into your study and find you asleep, what are you under the desk? What are you using the... I presume in your study, you have a globe, which also doubles up as a drinks cabinet. Exactly, yeah. Will that be open?

Well, will you be using that as a pillow? That'll be closed. I'll probably put my feet up on that. There's not much floor space. It's not very big. Yeah, so probably feet up on that. Have you got all the study paraphernalia? Have you got leather finishings on things and old wooden bookcases?

There's a billiards table, but there's no space for it. It has to be on the wall. Is there an old retired colonel in the corner? There's a retired drunk colonel. Grandfather Clock? Yeah, there's a 14-foot oak desk that used to be on HMS Victory. Yeah, you want to get an hour time to work on the desk? Still got Nelson's left arm in it in one of the drawers.

A pistol? A pistol in case I've disgraced myself. And someone just needs to leave me to it with a single shot. Yeah, that's right. A two-headed human baby in a jar. Weird. There is half of an ancient stone tablet that I still haven't fully deciphered yet. And, of course, if you could work out, solve that puzzle, you would, of course,

answer the whole mystery of your father, wouldn't you? Put that to bed. Yeah, and a selection of 80s office toys, of course. Oh, yeah. You're clacking balls. You're clacking balls. You're Rubik's Cubes. You're an inverted titanium pyramid.

The mini pyramid challenge. Yeah, so it's just his standards. Just his average or home office. Yeah, so I'm not with great comfort. I feel too much shade. I would never get into bed properly for an afternoon nap because it feels too shameful. Get on your sofa. That's what I do, and have a nap.

Or if you want to do it on your bed, make sure you lie on top of the duvet. But what about the ever-present danger of the nap, which is you sort of fall asleep at 3 p.m., wake up at 1 a.m., and then you've ruined your week? Yeah, if that happens, you know that, yes, you are useless for a week, and it's going to make a dent in your financial and emotional life that will never be fully compensated for. It's like when Coca-Cola, or was it Pepsi, changed the recipe? New Coke. New Coke.

They've never recovered. The losses they made there will never be recovered. That's to say, I mean, that's not true. Honestly, mate. What do you mean? No, it is true. Apparently, it is true. So Coca-Cola are currently still clawing back the losses from the six-month period

where they tried a new flavor in the mid-18th. I'm not saying that they're not a really successful company. The ground they lost there, they'll never make up in terms of where they would have been if they had not made them. So they're currently the world's number one drinks manufacturer, but they could have been the world's number one drinks manufacturer. No, they could have been. Number zero.

So they could have been even more preeminent, is what you're saying? Yeah. You know, like when you drink a glass of Coke with a burger, you could have been drinking two glasses of Coke. The burger could have been made out of Coke. The ice cubes could have been Coke cubes. And you're drinking out of a glass that's made of Coke, frozen Coke. You could be having a hot cup of Coke with milky Coke for breakfast.

Served by a caffeinated fizzy waiter. Yeah. Okay, I see. I understand now. When you win a race, it could be a bottle of Coke that you shake up and pour all over your head. Maybe there could be just places where... You're right. Yes, I think of Coca-Cola as being all conquering, but there's all these other facets of life

there yet to take over. Exactly. What was the point there again? Something to do with sleep. I was talking about when you have a nap and you get it wrong and you wake up... Oh, yeah. Then you're in such a bad... Is that horrible feeling where you think it's morning and it's evening?

Oh, my God, it's horrible. Yeah. And you will be in such a filthy mood. I will make myself a latte just in order to throw it against the wall. And go, I didn't want a latte! And had Coke not brought out new Coke, you'd have been throwing a glass of Coke against the wall. Exactly. There's something we haven't covered in the world of sleep, which is jet lag.

Which again, from my travels, it's not something I've ever found been too punished. Oh, my God, Mike. No wonder you were laughing as a baby. You bastard. Oh, my God, Mike. I hate you now. I hate you. I do have jet lag.

I suffer with sleep smugness. Yeah, I tend to adjust quite quickly, really, I do. Oh, Mike. The thing that's really awful about jet lag is, especially if you're going on holiday somewhere far away, it basically just ruins your holiday. That's what's so particularly devastating about it is, you know, you're in Thailand, you've got a Pina Colada in one hand and a live crab in the other. He's brought the tennis racket, so he's ready to play.

He's got the... You haven't got the energy. And you're thinking, you know what? He's booked the court. He's booked the court. Everything. His little tentacles are wagging. He's in a great mood.

He's up for it. And you're just going, I just want to be asleep. I'm not enjoying this at all, even though this is great. Such a shame, isn't it? You're looking at a lovely spread of watermelon and mango and a whole... All the fruits that you can get anywhere now, but still. You wouldn't normally just enjoy a fruit platter in quite the same way. In your normal life.

You're getting a weather spoon these days. Get a great fruit platter in any weather spoons for less than two quid. Yeah. See, the crab and I, we dig into the fruit, we play three sets, and then we go off into the evening and he shows me some local color. Oh, great. We have a great time. And you, you and the crab, you're clinking drinks.

Doing selfies. All night long. And he tells me, we've got to be up at the crack of dawn because we're taking a Jeep ride into the hills. And I'm, that's fine. I'm up for it. He's going to go and show me a waterfall in the jungle. And he's like, take a, take a leg.

Don't mind. Just crack it off me. I'm all right. If you're hungry, just crack a leg off. You jet lagged. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

Just crack a leg off me. I'll be, I'll be all right. Oh, you're not one of the main pincers. Just not one of the two main pincers, mate. Just one of the pincers. We just take one of the legs. It's fine. And you're like, you suck.

There's actually barely any meat in one of those legs. And you're like, can I have another one? Make you symmetrical. There's one on each side. He's like, okay, yeah, fine. Go on in. Yeah. Even though his friends warned him not to go down that road.

Yeah. Because before, you know, you just, you're, you're peeling off the top plate and going straight in, aren't you? Straight into his brain. And he's like, oh, come on, mate. Come on, mate. Yeah, they're lovely game of tennis. I've just forgotten all my upbringing.

You have to see the bit of my brain that had my upbringing in it. I forgot my upbringing. I literally don't know which crab school I went to. So that was sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Put to bed at last. Oh, yes.

Thank you. Nice bit of wordplay. That's what people are tuning in for, Mike. Thank you for giving them what they want. Thank you. About time. Back bloody time. Right.

Correspondence. Thanks to everyone who sent us emails this week. The email address, of course, is 3BeansSullowsPod at gmail.com. Now, guys, we've got an email this week and I'm going to read you the beginning of the email and I want you to guess who you think this email might be from. All right.

Dear Mike and Henry, Jessica Ennis. It reeks of Jessica Ennis. It's not the former Olympian, Jessica Ennis. Think about someone who might feel like they want to exclude me from the dear section. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's not Spurbs, is it?

It's Spurbs. Oh, Spurbs. Oh, shit. Oh, I should have known he'd be back. You know what's been really frightening is almost subconscious, even though I've known that he's been watching us, hasn't he? Listening, watching, biding his time.

Spurbs, he doesn't strike when you think he's going to strike, does he? Then you'd have your Spurb defences up. He waits until Henry's had a rough night of sleep. He waits, lulls you into a false sense of security and then deploys an email straight to your subconscious. Deploys a Spurb mail. All right.

Okay. Here we go. I'm braced. Dear Mike and Henry, comma. I think I'm going to lie down on the floor. You lie down on the floor. So that I can't fall off my chair because he's going, whatever he's going to do is not what we expect.

I'm just tensed all over. Oh, fucking hell. It's a cold, bloodless start, isn't it, already? In a boxing match, you get your defences up, don't you? You've got two big gloves on each hand and you get them up around your face to defend your face or one down over the crotch to defend your crotch. But you'll be doing that Spurbsy.

Suddenly a fucking tail will come up. In between your legs. Straight up your arse. Back out your nose and round all the way again. Yeah. You've got a tail up your fucking digestive tract. There is no defences for Spurbsy. You know what Spurbsy is, right?

You think, I've got to defend myself. I'm going to build a wall. 50 foot thick reinforced titanium and steel. It's the thickest wall ever been built. There's only one door in and out. That's made of the same steel. The code is linked to the decay of a radioactive isotope. It cannot be predicted.

That is the code. Yeah. I'm inside. Everything's fine. Who am I talking to? It's Spurbsy. He's already in the fucking thing. I've been explaining it to Spurbsy himself.

That's how he operates. Do you know what I mean? You can't second guess him. Dear Mike and Henry. The podcast is going great so far. Yes. Yes. Yeah, but a qualified, a qualified,

no, no, Henry, don't do it. Don't do it yourself. No, stop me. You're exposing. It's even a qualified compliment. It's gone so far in the end, man. Come on. Okay.

Sorry. Okay. Okay. Comet. The chemistry between you two is amazing. Absolutely. Backhand is straight up my arse then. No, but he's playing.

He's, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He's playing the long game, Ben. Wait. It can't be as simple as it seems. He's playing three dimensional chess, but all the pieces are made of glass. He can't see them. And he's firing a laser into each piece of glass,

and it's diffracting into, across the universe. Into rainbows of hatred. Full stop. My favorite part is the podcast, Segment Jingles. What? There's a twist because as we, as is made clear, it is BP who is the composer of these jingles. So he's really, he's reeled me out big time.

Now he's reeling me in. Yeah. He continues. In fact, I would suggest that you keep introducing new segments until the podcast becomes an hour of contactless jingles. This would be a vast improvement over the current format, Spurbs. It's a pretty full on assault, isn't it, by the end? Yeah.

I think Spurbs is losing control because the. No, but he wants you to think that. The start, the start is very classic Spurbs, but the end, it's not backhanded. It's a full load double slap in the, in the face. But he's, he's reeling Ben back in, isn't he? For the, for the slap. But for the slap.

For the slap. No, but Ben hasn't been slapped because he's saying he likes the jingles. He was slapped at the top though, wasn't he? He was, he was slapped at the top, then tickled. It was, yeah, the slap then tickled. That's how he operates. It's slap and tickle. It's an economy of slap and tickle.

Whereas you two, you were more tickled and slapped. And slapped pretty hard, let's say. So essentially in the same way that the internet and space travel and all of human achievement can really be boiled down to ones and zeros, can't it, in the digital universe? Yeah. Everything, anything can be created at ones and zeros. That binary can create, can create worlds. Can it create Spurbs?

Can it create Spurbs? Can Spurbs be downloaded to a single CD? Or maybe a set of seven CDs that you have to install over the course of an afternoon. But I think Spurbs, see Spurbs has slap and tickle. That's his one and zero. Spurbs has created a universe out of the opposite concepts of slap and tickle, right? Now, the thing is, you look at a painting of the Mona Lisa, yeah? On your computer, that's ones and zeros.

That's what Spurbs is doing now. He's creating. His masterpiece. His masterpiece. His Sistine Chapel ceiling. His Sistine Chapel ceiling out of slap and tickle, and we are the paint set. And what's the ceiling? Again, he's got us dancing a merry dance to his tune, hasn't he?

He wants us to not know what the ceiling is. Whatever we do, we're dancing to his tune, yeah? A merry dance. Do you think we three could ever defeat Spurbsy? To defeat Spurbs, it's a bit like the people at the Bod's at IBM in the 80s, when they built their deep blue computer to beat Casper at chess. I think the only way to defeat Spurbs, I'm thinking about we could get some, we'd have to design some sort of virtual reality headset whereby we ended up

in a kind of virtual space that was like a huge grid that receded to infinity. And then Spurbs would appear as just a big giant face. And there'd be some way of destroying it maybe from within the grid system like that. It's a good suggestion. My fear is that we have created Spurbs, that we have materialized from our own sort of some creeping sense of, is any of this worth it? Is any of this good enough? What's the point of any of this?

So he's a manifestation of all of our hopes and fears. I could see that. That he's the self-doubt, he's the, you know, in the same, in any horror, you know, you've got to defeat the bit, the demon inside. Since the inner Spurbs that we need to turn our attention to. I mean, of course, the thing that you, you have, you two probably have to think is that every time we've had an email from Spurbs, who's been reading it out? Have you actually ever seen an email from Spurbs?

I've never seen an email from Spurbs than an email from you at the same time. Just saying. Is this your, is this your kind of so-so moment? It's Ben Spurbs. Wait a minute. Spurbs. Spurbs, he always has a go at Ben. If you were a Spurbsian, you were also Ben,

you wanted people to not know that you were Spurbsy as well as Ben, you probably would focus a lot of your iron on Ben. And what's Ben's ultimate dream for the podcast? An hour of contactless jingles that he writes. It's what he said we should do in the first place, the first time we talked about it. He said it repeatedly in all of the early meetings. He said it throughout the two-week conference the three of us had away in Italy about it. Out of the podcast each time we record one,

he's been saying there should probably just be some jingles here. There should probably just be jingles. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, it couldn't be Ben. No, no, no, no. Who, no, he would be Spurbsy. No. There is more to the email he writes.

Also, here are some topic suggestions. So these have gone in the bean machine. So there's always a possibility that we will get a Spurbs topic in the future. He suggests yams, dog racing, staplers, barns, dog fighting, paganism, the assassination of US President William McKinley, the concept of self, dogs, the Falklands war, Scientology, animal testing, and dogs. Okay. So he's even playing a bit of a game there.

So there you are. Mike has a dog. Oh. No. Oh, no. Oh, yes. I need to check on Pam. No.

Pam, get inside. We've told him your greatest weakness. That's what he wanted. Now, we've had lots of emails. A couple of weeks ago, we heard from Henry about a time when a small brown bird found its way into his childhood bedroom. Yes. We sort of asked then if people had similar experiences to get in contact,

and we've had a lot. Oh, right. Shall I read the first one? The first one's from William Jones. Yes, please. When I was at university, I used to drink quite heavily and go out on ill-advised nights out. He then says, that's quite a part of why I don't have a degree. One night, I woke up in my hall's residence, and through the gnawing headache of my hangover,

I noticed a BDI watching me. I fumbled for my glasses and encountered something sticky. I put my glasses on, holding my fouled hand into the air. It was white and brown, with some yellow liquid streaks. It seemed both entirely alien and yet very familiar all at the same time. Then I saw it, nestled in my prized leather jacket. A seagull in my room. A seagull?

Oh, good grief. A flipping massive seagull with nothing but hate in its eyes. They were as big as a bird of prey. Their beak is easily long enough to disembowel a large man, and this thing was very angry. Also, it had shat everywhere. Adrenaline did its work, and a shot of pure fight-or-flight energy dispelled my hangover. Finally, despairing that it would ever go away by itself, I threw my duvet at it, and it hit jackpot right in the centre.

It started to move now, scrabbling and beating the duvet. I bundled it up, praying that it didn't hurt the poor creature, and threw the entire duvet out of my sixth floor window. The bird found its way out, and clumsily flapped away. That also, I reckon that may have created another anecdote at the same time, which is someone else in the world. Someone is telling the story of when they were walking down the street, and a duvet containing a shit-covered seagull.

He finishes writing, Later on, my friend asked me, What did you do with that seagull the girl gave you? My reply simply, I threw it out of my window, to which he said, I thought you promised to take it to the vet. Well, we've all made claims on an item, haven't we, to try and sort of impress people. But I will tend to your seagull, isn't the one that I've made. Thank you for that, William. We've had lots of other bird stories.

That's incredible. This is from Violet, Hello Beans, just last week I lived through my own bizarre bird capping tale. My husband and I were driving when we came across a woman in a mobility scooter, drifting back and forth in the middle of the road. She was trying to restrain a madly barking dog, while also chasing what appeared to be an injured magpie. That's, um, interesting thing about that story, that's actually impossible to pick.

I've just tried picturing that, and I've quite a fertile visual imagination, I literally cannot picture that. Violet continues, We pulled up on the curb and jumped out, hoping to assist in some way. When my husband offered help, all the woman did was point at the injured magpie and say, That's mine. Without question, he picked up the bird, which offered very little resistance to being held. The woman took it and casually stuffed it under her coat,

then drifted slowly away, thanking us while wrestling the manic dog. Maybe you can make sense of this, regards Violet. It's impossible to understand that. It feels like the kind of thing that would be the opening scene in quite a good, potentially quite a good TV series on Netflix would be. Yeah. And it turns out the magpie was actually, was a missing child that had been turned into a magpie 10 years before.

Yeah. Potentially. But the thing, it would just be such a, it was grabbing openings. There's a lady, she's on a mobility scooter. She's, she's got a dog that she's trying to restrain, and she's chasing a magpie. What the hell is that about? And then cut. So you see that, and then cut to, and it's sleepy town.

There's been a murder, there's a detective. Yeah. Although the trouble is, if you put that in the script, like logistically, as you said, it's impossible to imagine. So it's going to be, they're going to get there on day one on set. They're not going to be able to film it, because they're not, well, they're going to be able to understand how to do it. Well, they'll have to get James Cameron, David Lynch,

and someone who directs EastEnders. They'll have to have the full sort of gamut of different, sort of realms of visual storytelling. The triple crown. And a very good magpie wrangler. Best in the biz. And probably CGI magpie. I think CGI magpie, animatronic dog.

Yeah. Live action old woman. And yeah, and just Russell Crowe as the old woman. Then you know, you've got safe hands. At least you knew you've got safe hands, haven't you? You're going to get something. Yeah, you're going to get something usable with Crowe always, not necessarily for the film or the genre that you had in mind.

This next email about birds in a room features quite a well-known pop star. Owen Parker writes, Some years ago, I had my studio, he's a song producer, in a converted attic. While tidying the night before a session with an artist the next day, I noticed an awfully unnerving sound of tapping and scratching. As I looked up, I could see one of the recessed downlights wobbling on its own.

This then followed by a short scuttle to the next one, and so on to the next one, where a bird had obviously made its way into the cavity, but not figured its way out. As someone with an acute fear of birds in enclosed spaces, and birds in general, having been attacked by George the Swan as a local farm when I was four. I hate it when people always assume that you know a swan,

you know what I mean? They tell you a story. You can never truly know a swan, even George. Oh, you think that he thinks we should know who George the Swan is? Yeah, George the Swan. Yeah, sorry, I didn't know it's swan from Adam the Swan. Look, these are great stories. They're all reinforcing the main point,

which is birds indoors are a bloody nightmare, and that's why I can't say there's enough bird nets, bird nets, bird nets. We need to have bird nets around our homes. That's why nests don't have roofs. Nests don't have roofs. We do have roofs and walls because we're a more advanced species. Birds can't get the head around it, so we need to keep them out of bird nets.

Now, conservatively, it would cost about £4.5 billion, I think, to bird net every home in the country. To put one over the entire nation. Yeah, one big one over the whole country. And in terms of GDP, it's a small percentage when you think about it. And then these emails will be a thing of the past, and instead we'd have emails saying, I remember when I was a student, I had a good night's sleep,

I had no shoes on my hand, and I got a 2-1. I got a 2-1, and the only bad thing that happened was a helicopter got snagged in the bird nets once, and there was a catastrophe. All commercial flight had to end because there's no way of taking it, because the bird nets were in the way. Yeah, and because birds can't land on the UK anymore, and there's no plants can't get first. Was it, they do birds?

There's all spread seeds around. There's no pollination. So the worms are out of control. Everywhere is completely covered in worms. And then now giant worms, huge, sick, thick worms. Like a tube train. It's now no longer something you mentioned, if you're talking to someone, and there's a huge worm,

attacking them or biting them. Or they've got several worms coming out of their eyes, you don't even mention it now, it's so normal. Because we live in a worm nation. It's called, we now, the UK is now called, and then it called the worm nation. But at least there's no birds indoors. No one's getting their head shot on them, are they?

Yeah, I've never had to throw a duvet over anything, other than the worms, obviously, have to put a duvet over worms every day. Yeah, you've got to carry a duvet with you wherever you go, because you're not even going to be able to get into the news agent, if you can't throw a duvet over some worms on the way in. In fact, that's what all duvets are used for now, and yeah, everyone has to sleep in sleeping bags,

which are even worse, because if a worm gets in one of the sleeping bags... Well, the worm tries to mate with you, because it thinks it's another giant worm, and that's a really rough end to the night. That's terrible, but legally, you've still got to bring up the semi-worm children, you've got to bring them up. Because the worms can control healthcare.

It's a duty of care. It's a duty of care now to the worms. Also, by definition, when they erected the bird nets, that didn't deal with the problem of terrifying flightless birds. So now the only birds that are available are terrifying hook, you know, with a hook claw on the front. Essentially, we've dealt with the windows, but flightless birds come in the front door, four of them,

ruining and messing up your kitchen, picking your kids. You have to live in the attic now. Biting your nipples off, yeah. Biting your nipples off. People now have to have decoy nipples. Like little pepperoni circles, yeah. These little pepperoni slices over the top of your t-shirt, yeah. Which is a nightmare, because the worms are attracted to the...

The worms are attracted to them. The worms, yeah. And the biggest industry in the UK is now reconstructive nipple surgery. That's it. And if you can't get a job in that, you're done for. See, they're all down the do-they factory, yeah. And that's actually controlled by the worm cartels, a lot of that anyway, so that moves them back into their own pocket.

Owen's email continues. So I decided to leave it halfway through the session the next day, and the spotlight started moving again. In a fit of peak, I decided to try one of the weird hatch things that I used to keep old bags. I don't understand this. This is a very strange space. He's in the spotlights.

This hatch is, what kind of a space is this? It's like a submarine. It's a burden of submarine. That is bad. I mean, that's a nightmare. He's had an attic converted into a submarine. Or a submarine converted into an attic. It's one of the two.

Anyway, he opens one of the weird hatches, where it's not worry about what that is. And whoosh, the bird flew past me and into the room. I immediately went into the brace position and shouted, no, no, no, repeatedly. There's very few problems that solve. It's worth a go, though, isn't it? It's always worth it.

It's worth a go. I've got to give it a try. Whilst Lamar, the pop star, leapt into action and shoot the bird out of the Velix window. He had opened with song, with the power of song. I lay on the floor shaking with some bird shit on me and got up and thanked him profusely. I changed my sweatshirt and we carried on writing pop music.

Lamar saved my life that day, Owen Barker. Wow. That's amazing. Fantastic. I'd like to know more. If he wants to get back in touch, I'd like to know more about those weird hatches. Yeah, I've got two questions.

What's Lamar like in real life? And what's going on with your hatch-filled studio submarine? If you'd like to email us, the email address is threebeansaladpod at gmail.com. You can contact us on Twitter at beansaladpod. We're now on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Henry's lovely illustrations. Tough listening. Ta-da. Thanks, bye. The Thatcher Chills Zone. Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope. The Thatcher Chills Zone. To those waiting with fated breaths for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn. I have only one thing to say. U-turn, if you want to. The ladies, not for turning.

The Thatcher Chills Zone. The Thatcher Chills Zone. U-turn, if you want to, may we bring faith. Where there is error. The Thatcher Chills Zone. To those waiting with fated breaths for that favorite media catchphrase or if you want to, may we bring truth. Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Where there is confusion. Lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it. Lock it, lock it, lock it. Lock it, lock it, lock it. Lock it. Lock it, lock it, lock it, periods, like theven Kong. Lock it, lock it, locks it, lock it. Lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it.

Lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it. Lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it, lock it. Sperbsy? Sperbsy? Sperbsy? Sperbsy? Is that you? I'm sorry, Sperbsy.