Bonus: Drop Us A Line - Will We Pass the Inspection?

Happy weekend everybody! We're sharing a Club Fish bonus episode our main feed. Drop Us A Line is our fortnightly audience feedback show, in which Andy, James and Anna sift through the correspondence sent in by listeners. If you're a newbie to Drop Us A Line and you have no idea what's going on, you're in good company - this was Anna's first DUAL after months away for maternity leave! This episode was released on Club Fish a few months ago - if you like what you see and hear, why not come along to our first ever LIVE Drop Us A Line recording at the London Podcast Festival on 12th September - tickets at nosuchthingasafish.com/live http://nosuchthingasafish.com/live And if you want more shenanigans from us, consider signing up to Club Fish on Patreon! You can get access to exclusive bonus content just like this, plus ad-free episodes, merch, XL versions of the show and much, much more - patreon.com/clubfish http://patreon.com/clubfish Edited by Joe Mayo and Dan Schreiber Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell and Ethan Ruparelia

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:20Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to a super-duper bit of bonus material courtesy of your friends at No Such Thing as a Fish. This is an episode of Drop Us a Line, which is our audience feedback show. If you listen to it and you have no idea what's going on, then don't worry, you are in good company, because this was Anna's first episode back after maternity leave, and honestly, she had no idea what was going on either. This episode was released on Club Fish quite a few months ago. Club Fish is our Patreon place. If you go to patreon.com/clubfish, you can find out all of the stuff that's on there. But we're also releasing it because if you like what you hear, and if you are

• 2:02Speaker 02

  in London, then you can come and see our first-ever live Drop Us a Line recording at the London Podcast Festival on the 12th of September. Streaming and in-person tickets are available now at nosuchthingasafish.com/live. But in the meantime, all we want you to do, really, is to listen to it and enjoy it. So, please listen to our audience feedback show. Drop us a line. On with the podcast.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you got it. I was going to tell you what you have to do in this situation.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  I remember how it works.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Welcome, everybody, to Drop Us a Line.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Look who it is. Look who it is.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Special edition.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  It's me.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  It's Anna's first episode back on Drop Us a Line, which is now, by the way, the main thing we do, Anna. Everything else is a front for Drop Us a Line.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Okay?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  This is the heroine behind the scenes of the grocery shop.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  So, so, welcome.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Back. Right. Cut. Welcome to Drop Us a Line, our audience feedback show. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here with Anna Tajinski and James Harkin.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Hi, Andy.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Hi, guys.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  We've had some fantastic emails.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Have we?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  I'm not even exaggerating. So, we're going to start off with a, just a section, a one-off section, the return of Anna, because lots of people have been writing in.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  That's nice, because when you first came on the podcast, when you came back after your break, the first thing you said is, "Is there not going to be, like, a special intro for me?"

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Starting with fact number one, it's Anna Tajinski.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Just straight my fact straight, or a little, um, welcome back to me intro?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  You haven't been gone that long. Do the fact one.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  She wants her own welcome back, Anna intro.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Like a little speech or something?

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Welcome back, Anna. It's been awful without you.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I know. I've heard the episodes.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Liar.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Rather pull my own teeth out. I'm doing the intro three weeks late.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  I've been saving it up, because there have been so many nice comments. So, let's have a few.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Great.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  See if you can spot the theme of these comments, okay?

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Sarah writes, "Love the podcast and looking forward to Anna's return so that she can whip you boys back into shape." Frank Cardinale writes, "Just wondering if you three are fearful of Anna's reaction to what has become of the podcast in her absence."

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Fortunately, I've never listened, so.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I love it, but it does have a feeling of the kids running rampant while mum's been away.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Theo Warren, "Welcome back, Anna. Please get these guys back in line." Anthony, "Can't wait to hear Anna back on the show. Brackets, you guys are great, but after a while, the class needs a teacher."

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay, wait a second. Look, I thought this was going to be a big Anna's So Great Fest, but I've been called a mum and a teacher.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  It's very, Anna is the disciplinarian.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Is what the listener's been getting over the last 12 years. Don't know how you've got that.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  I thought of myself as the chilled-out, fun-loving clown.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  But a correction from Deirdre Cooper.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  "The podcast blurb in the Apple Podcast player referred to Anna as a prodigal podcaster."

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Mmm, I saw that.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  "Prodigal" means spending money or resources freely and recklessly, which is what the prodigal son did.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  In the story in the Bible, he spent all his money and he had to come back and...

• 5:30Speaker 03

  I saw the blurb. It angered me as well, Deirdre. Don't get me wrong. I felt like it wasn't a good start for me to open my return by sending a furious WhatsApp message on our production group. But yes, prodigal refers to the habits of the son who returns, not the returning.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Sure. But I was merely using it as a metaphor for you, so people would know that you did something similar to what the son did, which was return.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Right?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  No, I get that. I get that.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  But I think also, you are wasteful and extravagant.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually what James meant secretly. That's why I've had to come back to the show. I didn't want to.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Right. "Thanks but no thanks," which I think you might have coined, Anna.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  I'll take it. It sounds like me.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  It sounds a bit polite for you, really.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Well, congratulations, Rafael Alvarez, had an idea for a new tier of Club Fish.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Okay, that's nice.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  So, we've got a dual citizenship, plenty more fish, and then friend of the podcast. Rafael is pitching foe of the podcast. "For an exorbitant amount of money, members can claim one of a limited number of foes of the podcast to curate or fight. Haven't worked out the details. A few examples to get it going: Mark Twain, Adolf Hitler, Zoe Williams, the Guardian writer..."

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Do we have beef with Zoe Williams?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  She wrote a piece asking why we're such bros on this podcast.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  I think, even if you disagree with that piece, I think Hitler and Mark Twain, that's not...

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Hit the Mark Twain and Zoe. What a weird dinner party.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  And the Treaty of Versailles.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. Greg Wallace, of course, foe of the podcast. He was, for a small amount of time. We mentioned him a few times as a foe of the podcast.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Did we call it before or after he became a foe of everyone else?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it counts nothing, yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  "For bonus invective, people in this tier can hear the uncensored clip in which Anna says which country has the ugliest men, and/or the one in which Dan says which celebrity rejected a chance to meet Buzz Aldrin because they weren't a fan of space."

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's been a few of those reductions over the years.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  But the thing to know is that I delete the original.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  So, you can never go onto my hard drive and find out who those celebrities are, because I delete them.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Just in case someone steals my laptop, solely so they can find out which celebrity is not into space.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Which country has the ugliest men? It's so weird. I really want to have access to that file, so I know who I think has the ugliest men.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  It must have been. I wouldn't have redacted it if it was a country that we would never play in, right?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Right. Oh, that, well, that limits it.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  I see.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I feel like I would only do it if it was, like, Wales, or something, somewhere where we might play and you might...

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Is that even a country, though? Moving on. That's a joke, people of Wales.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Let's go on to... Let's move on.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  It's just a joke. It's just a joke.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. To a bonus bream.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  But it's also a get-yourself-off-the-hook.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm not familiar with these. Go on, then.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Okay, bonus bream is where we get extra information about something that we said in the podcast. Getting yourself off the hook is where we've made a mistake and Andy tells us about it.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. But you may be able to get yourself off the hook if it's...

• 8:49Speaker 02

  It's worth saying that all of these names have lots of... Lots of sub-names that mean the same thing.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Right, okay.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Or sometimes the same name means two different things.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  I'm sad that I missed all the brainstorming sessions.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  There was no brainstorming. There was one brame involved.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel weirdly, James, I don't know how you feel about it. I feel weirdly like I'm presenting Dropper's Line to Anna, and I feel a bit nervous.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I'm not surprised you do, and with good reason.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're, you're just in the, you're Ofsted, I think. And I'm a teacher who's, who's like been horsing around for a long time. We haven't read Measure for Measure.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, if you thought it wasn't fun being called a teacher, you've now gone to Ofsted.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  I know.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  The one who fires the teachers.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  And we've been dealing with manageable class sizes too, but I've still screwed it all up, I would say. Okay, Jamie writes, I write in the confidence that you're a podcast who appreciates extremely pedantic corrections.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  In your most recent episode, it was stated that neither Oliver nor Richard Cromwell could have observed the Chinese steam car.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  I believe it was you who said that, Andy.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  It was me who said that. While this is true, because it was in the 1680s. While this is true of Oliver, Richard Cromwell could in fact have observed it. He reigned as Lord Protector for less than a year, but then resigned and lived in exile until the age of 85, dying in 1712. And we've mentioned this before, he was the longest-lived head of state until Queen Elizabeth the Second.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And did he go and live in China?

• 10:27Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Hey, here's a fun thing I read. This is bonus brame from me.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Lovely.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Who's the first European that you can think of who went to China?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Marco Polo?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Do you know, he wasn't, kind of obviously, there was other people who went even as far back as ancient Greeks, some people went to China. But Marco Polo's dad and his uncle both went to China.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  No way.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  He wasn't even the first Polo to go to China.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  That's really good.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  They must have been so pissed off with him when he wrote the book, Flaming.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  He was a, he was a Nepo explorer.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  I should have known, because in his memoirs, he calls his dad drunk from a beach, saying, please fly me out of here.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Um, here's a bonus brame from Peter Blum.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  In a recent episode, you noted Earth is the only place with plate tectonics and that they thus may be necessary for life, right?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Did you know there is another hypothesis which suggests that life is actually required for plate tectonics?

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Because little life is so abundant, you know, small, like microorganisms, that it creates things like mud and limestone. And that sort of lubricates the plates and that might kickstart the kind of tectonics we now have. What a theory.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  It sounded silly, but when you explain it, you explain that you're not just saying that a human one day said, earthquakes, and it happened, then it, it makes sense, actually.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  It does.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love that all mud and earth and rock are all made of animals. I've always loved that chalk, like the reason chalk is white is just because it's skeletons. The White Cliffs of Dover is all just dead things.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Well, as a boring old teacher, you would like chalk.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  We actually have an interactive whiteboard.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  That you've drawn on with permanent marker by mistake.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Oh, rodeo clown number one.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Okay, rodeo clown, Anna, is where.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Well, what do you think it is?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I, I was actually here for this.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Oh, my god.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  I really hoped it might have blown over in the nine months I've been gone, but.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Nothing has blown over. If anything, more shit has blown into where we are.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Right, well, I didn't know it had turned into a segment. I remember rodeo clown gate.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  What, what segment would it be, do you think? What does it mean?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  It's something where we say, whoa, what's this thing? And a million people write in and say, I'm so insulted, I'm this thing.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Brilliant.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Just getting a lot of emails about something.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  So what's the rodeo clown this week?

• 12:55Speaker 04

  I'm gonna start with Laura Falconer. I'm writing in off the back of the latest Little Fish, to let you know that rag and bone men, brackets, people, are still going strong. Rag and bone people.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  They're not going strong. I don't know the context, but where are they going strong?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  So what happened was, I mentioned that when I was growing up, we had rag and bone men.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  But in fairness, they're not always men, but they're always known as rag and bone men in where I came from. But anyway, we had them growing up and even into my twenties, we had them. And Andy was very surprised by that.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, well, I've been schooled thoroughly. Sheffield, 2020 to 2022, Laura Falcon has seen evidence of them calling for any old iron. She says, James isn't old, he's just northern.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  That sounds like someone saying something when they look at my face.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Well, you look old. I'm not old, I'm just northern.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Rob Hardisty says, I remember them on horse-tron carts in the late seventies and early eighties in Rochdale.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  So maybe it was a northern thing. Annie Self lives in the small rural town of Bungay.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Oh, and it's Bungie, not Bungay, sorry. Famous for having lots of Satanists. Not that I've ever met one, not that you know any.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Really? Are they like the Masons or something? You don't know unless you're a fellow.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  You wouldn't mention it. Well, probably some people mention it as soon as they meet. You're, hi, oh, I'm a Satanist, actually. But some people probably keep it. Like a vegan. How do you know someone's a Satanist? They'll tell you as they pull out your twitching heart and rub it on a wall to open a portal to the nether realms.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  But Annie says, we have some guys come around and again in a flatbed truck shouting, any old iron, which is the proper.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Any old iron, any old iron, any, any old iron. See, that's a Cockney song, isn't it?

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Then Lisa Sertes has a slightly related thing, because she remembers them from Hartlepool.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  It is going strong, that sounds like. I take it back.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  But Lisa moved to Hartlepool and says, we have some of the last sea coalers. Twice a day, they drive a truck out to the beach when the tide is out. Gather the coal that has settled on the beach with shovels and load it into their truck every day. So that's it.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  That, I think they're turds, aren't they?

• 15:12Speaker 04

  They burn the same. They burn sweet and bright. And then Lisa says, there aren't many places in the world where coal deposits wash up on the beach. Yeah, I think not, but Hartlepool is one of them.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  No way.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  It sloughs off and washes onto the beach.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Sloughs off from nearby.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  From the, the nearby seam of coal, which is exposed at the seabed.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Wow. That's fantastic.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Daniel Painter says, in Little Fish, you had a quick think of who is the most hatted modern day leader?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's good.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Does the Pope count?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Oh, he has to.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's winning, isn't he? What constitutes a hat?

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Are you thinking skull caps for a chief rabbi or something?

• 15:50Speaker 03

  I'm thinking skull caps, I'm thinking like Yasser Arafat's.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  You know what? That's what I said, and they mocked me of not being up to date with my world leaders.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  He's not old, he's just Palestinian.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  That someone else has similar cultural markers as I do.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Do you think Yesam would do better if he always wore a top hat?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Oh, without doubt.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  He definitely would, wouldn't he?

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Anyway, look, we've, we've got, we've got 50 pages of emails to get.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ, Andy, because I have to leave today.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  He doesn't listen.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  You go when I say you go, not when the bell says you go.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Right, let's come on to Both Finns.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so glad this is still in.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, experts on stuff who've written in to school us. Mendel Skulski, what a name.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  It'd be good if he ran a ski school.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Says, I run a small skiing school.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Just thought I'd offer a slight correction on the kelp highway hypothesis.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so this was the theory that humans moved down the American coast to follow the seaweed.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  The west coast where there was lots of seaweed, yeah. I think it was James who mentioned in passing that people were surviving in transit, biting kelp. I think it.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I think it was you, yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  I think it was me. It's quite likely that some kelp was being consumed, but more likely it was all manner of seafood. Fair point. Because kelp houses lots of animal species, basically.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I see that, but.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  There's other stuff. But he says, in case you're interested, we, Future Ecologies, spent three whole episodes talking about kelp and its ecological and social entanglements.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Who's this? That's a podcast.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Is this an advert for this guy's podcast?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Well.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Redact that.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  I suppose so, yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Unless they pay us.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Okay, but Mendel then adds a great fact, which is the reason I, I wanted to come to this. It's the fact that sea otters were restored to the west coast of North America after having been driven nearly to extinction, right? Sea otters are almost wiped out. And they were restored not for ecological restoration, but to evacuate them from impending US nuclear testing in Alaska. That's just a cool fact about that.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Right, I don't know what section this is. Oh, it says Misk at the top here.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Does everything need to be a section? Yeah, surely we should just have.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  It does.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Fishtalaneus.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  No, it's Musculaneus.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Musculaneus.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Brilliant. Did you just think of, or has it been?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  No, no, but when I said it the first time, I had just thought of it.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Then I wrote it down. And then I've never remembered it since then.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  But I'm writing it down again now.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  There's a lot of writing stuff down in this podcast now.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Okay, cool.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  How's the inspection going, Anna?

• 18:36Speaker 03

  It's, I'm writing a lot of stuff down in here as well, Andy.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Okay, here's a question for you. Hayley Thompson, long time listener here. I'm planning my first trip to the UK, specifically to London.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  I often listen to older episodes of Fish while I'm working, and I've been jotting down places to go that you've all mentioned as possible destinations in anticipation.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Go anywhere else apart from Wetherspoons, it's just funny to go.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  It's not a Wetherspoons, she says.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  I'm planning to go to Dishoom.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, nice.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  The Wetherspoons of the East. That got me thinking.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  I love that marketing idea.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  That got me thinking. If you could all pick a spot that you'd put on a fish tour of London, or the UK, what would it be and why? So I thought I'd put you on the spot.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I like those, um, next to Cleopatra's Needles, those, um, is it the two lions?

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Sphinx's.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Sphinx's, yeah, where Dan said you could put your finger in the bomb holes.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  That was quite a good moment of fish.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  That was great. And actually, once you've finished there, because that's on the embankment of the river, and you should go to, spend a lot of time near the river, go to the Basil Jet Memorial, which is by Embankment Tube, and it's just, it's a sort of, it's just quite roadie there.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Just in a wall, isn't it?

• 19:51Speaker 04

  It's just in a wall, and it's Joseph Basil Jet who built the sewers, and it's on land that he reclaimed from the river. What's your pick, Anna?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I would say go to, um, the, do you know, we did that episode on Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy's grave. So Thomas Hardy, um, designed the graveyard in King's Cross, was it, at the time?

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  But then it all got moved. Um, and now there's kind of a monument to it just behind King's Cross, and it's this amazing kind of tree with all these old gravestones sticking out of it.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Spiralling around it.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  In a spiral, yeah, that's pretty cool.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's really good. Poet's Corner on Westminster Abbey, um, on Westminster Abbey.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  All that.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Tower of London.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I mean, they're just places.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  St Paul's Cathedral, yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Literally, they will be on your first page of Google.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Buckingham Palace.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  London High.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  It's London High.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  If you can get out of the city, Stonehenge is a good, good day.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Shrek's Adventure, if you can't.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  I tell you what, if you're coming from North America and you've got a bit of time to spare, France is nice.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  London Zoo has a lot of animals from all over the world. You don't need to go anywhere once you've been there.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  So there's our.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Big Ben. I mean, genuinely, these are, we live in a city of jewels.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Wanden, that's what I call it, because it's wonderful, you know?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Bloody hell.

• 21:07Speaker 00

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• 21:35Speaker 00

  See store for details.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  This is a bit called Bad Romance. Because we've had romance.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  R O E.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get it, yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Fish eggs.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Now, this one's about Lady Gaga.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  This is a fact about Lady Gaga. Yep. Um, Alex Dean writes, as a long time listener of the show, I've always hoped to one day work a fact from the podcast organically into real life conversation. Unfortunately, due to my terrible memory, I've never managed it until the other day. While on a date, we walked past a model train shop.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Wow, fluffy, lucky date.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  As we stopped to look in the window, I suddenly remembered.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Darren, come back. We need to look in this window for a bit.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  I suddenly remembered a fact from the show that I was delighted to finally deploy naturally in everyday life. I turned and explained that the coal, the coal used in model railway exhibitions is actually just small crushed up pieces of coal.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Reader, I married her.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  She replied that that was one of the dullest things she had ever heard. I don't know, I don't know what to say, Alex. It's how you tell them.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  If she could get in touch with me, I think we might get along pretty well.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Isn't that wonderful?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  That's, that's just lovely.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Congratulations, Alex.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Well, good luck getting back on the apps, Alex.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Your person's out there. She's out there. Ah. There we go. Uh, Logan writes, this is a thing, this is a sort of micro clown, this is a little clown.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Um, I'm listening to Drop as a Line, the episode in which people have written in about having a difficult time telling Dan and Andy's voices apart.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  I'm sure the inbox is bulging with even more people contributing their thoughts on the matter. Sort of, actually. A few people have written in saying, yeah, can't tell Dan and Andy apart. Logan says, I'm visually impaired in a way that affects central visual acuity.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  So Logan relies on voice and stature to identify anyone. Um, Logan works as a 911 dispatcher. Uh, so 999 for British listeners.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  And I've got, and I've got very good at distinguishing voices, right? I work with dozens of units throughout the week and I can identify most of them by voice, having never seen them.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Great.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  I've listened to this podcast almost every day since 2019, and I still can't tell Dan and Andy's voices apart. Isn't that weird?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  They don't even sound the same, and I can tell that it's two different people talking, but I can't for the life of me identify who is speaking.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  What?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  I know.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's, that sort of, so it implies they sound different to you, but what they're saying is sort of so non memorable that you haven't managed to peg it to their name.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Or memorable in the same way.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Ah, they just say the same sort of stuff all the time.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Same, yeah, exactly.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  That's a bit of a slam, isn't it, Andy?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Well, on someone.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  On someone, on someone, yeah. I mean, no one has a problem identifying your voice, Travis.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so interesting.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  They do mistake you and I when they see pictures of us.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  And whose voice is whose.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Um, but I think my actual voice, they would know it was James, but they might not know what I look like.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  This is Andy speaking now.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Well, Dan's not here.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  That's why he's not with us.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  It's this easy today, Logan. Yeah, yeah. Right, come on, get yourself off the hook. Dave Wang writes, lifelong bilingual, and that's not just a boast, because also fish listener since day one. Dan's Chinese name should be Shri Bo, which literally sounds like Triba and means handsome uncle.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Ah, not Uncle Egg.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Because Dan said his Chinese name was Uncle Egg, and then Dan texted me separately saying, oh man, I misspoke on fish, so apologies if you get lots of emails. We've had one.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  I said my Chinese name is Uncle Egg, which it is, but I didn't realise I just said my surname bit. So it's Shi Bo Dan in Chinese.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, Dan does mean egg because Dan Dan means testicles.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Full name is Thanks Shi Uncle Boa Egg Dan. Sorry if the inbox gets flooded.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Dan flattering yourself, the number of people who are listening to what you're saying.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Did you know that more than half the people on this earth are fluent in at least two languages?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  That's good, isn't it?

• 25:59Speaker 04

  That's so cool.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  It's good, isn't it? Western white people aren't great on that, but rest of the world doing well.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of Western white people who don't have English as a first language are great at it.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  They are also very good, yes, yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  It's just English speaking people are a bit of it.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Um, Moaz Akhtar from India here, uh, I was listening to episode 351, No Such Thing as Pop Charts for Bagpipers, in which you mentioned, anyone, anyone, do you remember? The world's longest cake.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I do remember that.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Was it in Romania, or was that the world's longest sausage?

• 26:28Speaker 04

  Kerala, South India.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Oh, Kerala, okay.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  The record was broken in Kerala. I happen to have moved to Kerala for work. There is a bakery a few hundred metres from my house which participated in the event.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  The cake was 5.3 kilometres long, not 6.5, as you said.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  What?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  So we got the cake wrong by.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  How did we do that?

• 26:49Speaker 04

  A kilometre.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Because we, it's not like we looked at it and estimated the length. We will have got that information from Guinness, I guess, normally.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  I don't know. So I don't know what.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Maybe someone ate a kilometre of it before the, that official measurement came in. It must have been a good cake.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, Moaz, I don't think has provided sources, so, and I haven't checked, and so it'll have to be one of those mysteries.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll never know.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Um, final clown, bombs dropping and the whistling noise they make. I think I slightly screwed up the explanation of the.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Doppler effect.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Doppler effect.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Did you?

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Jonathan, Commander Royal Navy.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Cool. What an unusual surname.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Um, says, if it's falling on you, you might hear the increasing note, but you won't be able to tell anyone about it. But if it's dropping on someone else, then a mile away, the pitch will drop down in the final stages because it's sliding down the opposite side of a triangle to you. So this is the sound, the sound that survivors hear is relevant. I'm, I'm going to paraphrase and be brief, because we've had so many long emails about the Doppler effect.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Oh, have we?

• 27:53Speaker 04

  And I'll chiffling just roll over and say, yeah, sorry.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Wait, what? Why don't you say what was?

• 27:56Speaker 04

  So also I said pitch and frequency, and I confused those two, and oh, the whole thing was a cluster mistake. It was surreal.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  A cluster mistake.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Um, Peter Drake, listening to your recent episode involving spermaceti.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  I wondered when you'd get to Moby Dick, a book famous for being comically obsessed with this fluid.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Andy, you got there first with the line, eat it Ishmael, but I'm afraid you misstepped. The harpooner was not Ishmael, but his bunkmate Queequeg. I am sure many people will have pointed this out. Now I'm gonna, now on this occasion, I'm gonna stick up for myself.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  I think if I had said, eat it Queequeg.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  I would have received blank faces.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  If you said that in a theatre of 3,000 people, you might get one English teacher pissing themselves.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  That's made his life. He's thrilled. But genuinely, I just, I could have said, I could have said Ahab, that would have been another valid joke because people know about Captain Ahab, but they were a team effort hunting that whale. I think it's fine to say the, the most famous, call me Ishmael, of the first three words of the book, just, yeah, so reject it.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Important to be right.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  I think we've done, uh, we did a whole section on Moby Dick once.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Um, so I would suggest to go back and find that because it was a, it was a good old section.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Was it a goodie?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Um, Mike Giggler.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Do you know what this is, Anna?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Oh, what?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  It's where someone writes into us saying, I can't believe you didn't make a joke that you could have made on the episode.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Wait, Mike Giggler?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  It's a reference to Private, I think.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Right, okay. I thought it was just the name of a correspondent that we had.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  This week's Mike Giggler is Chris Locke from Farnham. I cannot believe.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  That you discussed the usage of whale meat during World War Two rationing and forgot to mention the song Vera Lynn sung specifically encouraging the population of the UK to eat more of it.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  You mean whale meat again?

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Regardless of the place or time. Yeah, very good. Nice one, Chris, you got us.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  That is a good one, actually. Quite often, these are not very good.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  No, that's much better than you've, that's much better than the usual, I can't believe you. That's lovely. I'm gonna steal that.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Vindancation. We've had a vindancation.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  This is where we vindicate something that Dan said.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  I can tell, and I can tell how long you brainstormed that pun as well.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  We've had so many emails about this. Tim Groves is a great example of this. I'm just gonna do his email. I'm gonna take a punt here on being one of a legion of listeners, correct, writing in about this. I have just been listening to the episode of Little Fish from the 25th of May while on a train to London to try a vegan fish taco, brackets, not important, close brackets, and I was shocked to hear Andy and Anna ridiculed Dan for his vaguely remembered story about a man swallowing a Faberge egg. I also remembered this story and a light search yielded the following. BBC News, police recovered $19,000 Faberge egg swallowed by New Zealand man.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  It was a, an octopussy themed egg? It was a James Bond film.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  I know the James Bond film.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I've seen that.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  It was a pendant, I think, and it was laid about a week after he swallowed it.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so it wasn't a false, I think the problem was, we didn't mention that it was a pendant and actual Faberge eggs.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  I mean, he would, this, this New Zealander would literally look like a Kiwi with the enormous egg inside him.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  But Dan was right, someone had swallowed a Faberge thing and it was-

• 31:34Speaker 03

  An octopussy themed Faberge egg?

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think maybe Fab, I think maybe they've branched out from the original days where it's all for royalty.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  All right.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I think, I kind of assumed that it probably was based in fact because it would be an amazing thing for Dan to have made up.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  He's got a funny old brain, though.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, but no, completely fair, because I doubled down and I teased him again. So, I feel bad for having done it.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Did you message him and apologize?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  No.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  Although the inbox has been flooded by it, so actually I should do, but I do the email, so it's fine.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Why didn't you, to camera, why didn't you apologize to him now?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, what? That's like a hostage video.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  This is like Johnny Depp when he smuggled whippets into Australia or something.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  I could have blinked to show that I need help. Dan, I'm really sorry. No, I'm sorry, Dan, and I hope you listen to this.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  If anyone's been held hostage here, it's not you, Andy. Jesus, what time are we on?

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Dave Rule, his name.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Is this a segment or, okay.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Dave Rule says, I wanted to follow up and let you know how thrilled I am. This has become such a phenomenon in its own right, and how much joy it brings me to hear Dan and James squirm whenever one of these comes up unexpectedly. Dave Rule sent the first ever thing that sounds like it's named-

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Did they?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  For one obvious reason, but it's actually named after a person with an amusingly apt name.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Okay, good. And what was his one?

• 33:02Speaker 04

  This was October 2025. He sent a list of things unexpectedly named after people, including also, I mean, some classics. Main Street in San Francisco, named for Charles Maine. Snowflake, Arizona, Taco Bell, named after Glenn Bell.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  We've had seven more pages of this stuff since the last drop. Like, I don't know what to do. It's what the people want. It's just what people want.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  This needs to be a whole new podcast that we don't do.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  You almost contractually applies yourself into something there.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Turn that full stop into a comma pretty fast.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Dan Painter, Penny's Game, about flipping a coin, heads or tails, right? Created by Walter Penny?

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Daniel Power, the suburb of Sydney called Wallstonecraft, right? And I knew Mary Wallstonecraft was an important feminist, and I joked, imagine if it was just named after some dude instead of her. Well, it turns out that Wallstonecraft, the Sydney suburb, was named not after the early feminist and important historical figure, Mary Wallstonecraft, it's named after a man, Edward Wallstonecraft, who's really only known for moving to Australia to escape the notoriety of his Aunt Mary.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  That's so good, really.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he was a big deal in his own right, but yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Let's see, okay.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Anyway, I can sense the patience running thin here, so I'm just gonna keep salting them away for the book. And when I'm on every till in every bookshop across the world-

• 34:29Speaker 03

  That Penny one is absolutely cracking.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  I know.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  This is, this is really good, this should be a book.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Anna, don't encourage him for fuck's sake.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Oh, it should be a book.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Get rid of him, he can spend six months writing it.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Six months? Oh, are we doing an abridged version? How dare you? This is a 10-year project. The book is called A Thousand and One Things That Are Named. Have you not, have you not heard that?

• 34:52Speaker 03

  What's the book called? A Thousand and One Things That Are-

• 34:54Speaker 04

  Well, this is a vexed point.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Why not?

• 34:59Speaker 04

  It's, it's something, there's the main header, and then the subtitle is, A Thousand and One, The Book of A Thousand and One Things.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  I'm still working on it, that you'd think were named for a very obvious reason, but were in fact named after a person with an amusingly apt name.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  I think that's very catchy.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been proposed by Thomas Groves-Bond that this be called The Hunter Index. Not named after the hunt for these names, but after Andrew Hunter Murray.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Lovely, lovely.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  All right, look, we'll do more of these next time. Thank you so much for everybody who sent one in, I'm sorry we didn't get to all of them. The final closer goes to Anonymous L.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Who says, I believe that I speak for myself when I say- That's funny. That I actually quite enjoy the incoherent ramblings and the way Andrew Hunter Murray runs the Droppers in line show, especially the section naming section and the book of things that are named and all that. There's already been over 50 minutes of discussion on the actual facts of the podcast, so not too sure why the others want to do more.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  A little trade secret, they want to do less. We overrecord every time. I keep saying we'll be out within an hour and we never are.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Anonymous L.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think they didn't want their name in.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  No, why would you with such a heinous oblivion?

• 36:21Speaker 04

  No, I mean, there are bits we cut out of this show, you know, you'll see.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, who would have thought? Yeah. Are we wrapping up?

• 36:31Speaker 04

  We're done. How's the inspection going, Anna?

• 36:33Speaker 03

  I would say special measures coming up for you.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Thank you for listening and watching. If you'd like to send in your stories and your romance, good or bad, or your, what else have we done? I've got a list of things.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Any comments about the show that we've done?

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Spicy meat, your riddle roundabout, your secret squid.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  It doesn't have to fall into one of these, like, weirdly crowbarred categories.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Seaman squabbles.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  No, it could just be-

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Seaman squabbles. Send us your seaman squabbles, and then the music kicks in and out we go, and it's podcastatqi.com. Okay, thanks everybody, bye.