I used to be a dab hand at an owl. Or so I told myself.

I deployed the standard “cupped hands” technique, driving my parents to distraction as I hooted and tooted my way round the house. Still, at least they knew where to find me.

Revisiting this lost skill fifty years on, I find I can still, after a bit of trial and error, at least make a sound.

I’m no Samuel, though. Samuel, when this video was made, was eleven. So now I suppose he’s twelve. And Samuel is BRILLIANT.

@diabetic4oneTwo years after his first ever Talent Show, Samuel came back to where it all started. Some new birds and some of the familiar bird calls this time. It was a farewell to Intermediate school #birder #autism #tourettes #fyp

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

News outlets have, unsurprisingly, picked up on Samuel. This clip includes an absolutely uncanny impersonation of a swallow.

Like humans, birds have a larynx. But while we use ours to make sounds, they pass that job up to a higher organ, the syrinx. The size, structure and position of the syrinx varies from bird to bird. Here it is on a pigeon.

In songbirds the workings of the syrinx are extremely complex, under fine control by multiple sets of muscles and modulated through movements of the trachea and beak. And the muscles on either side of it are controlled independently, so they can make two sounds at the same time.

Samuel does not, as far as I’m aware, have a syrinx, which makes his imitations all the more extraordinary. Mimicking the sound of a dove is one thing – and Samuel does that superbly – but a swallow… astonishing stuff. And all the more pleasing for the response it gets from the kids at his school. It could so easily tip the other way – let’s hope it continues like that.

In the replies on Bluesky, there was quite rightly a storm of wonder and praise at Samuel’s abilities (and his fantastic comic timing). But there was one miseryguts – there always is – casting doubt on the accuracy of his bald eagle call. Rather than dignifying this idiocy with a reply – although my fingers hovered, I can tell you – I’ll just put another clip out into the universe. It’s Samuel fooling Merlin into thinking there are birds in the area.

@diabetic4oneSamuel wanted to show off his bird accuracy #merlinbirdapp #birder #cornelluniversity

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Thing 2 – Linguistidals

May I speak candifically? I like making up words. I do it fervibly and vigifically, even if I don’t always rigify.

If those words seem familiar but wrong, perhaps this chart will lend lucor. It merely consists of gaps in the English language – words that you might expect to exist, but don’t.

It’s done the rounds this week, but was produced back in 2011 by linguist Geoff Pullum in this entertaining blogpost, which also touches on the etymology of tiramisú and the charming ways children misunderstand language.

Looking at it, I’m making a pledge to drop a few of them into the next book and see if my editors kick up a stink – I’ve already got away with ‘widthy’ on several occasions (seriously, we have ‘lengthy’, so I don’t see why not). Look out for torpible, tepific and pallify when it comes out next year.

It’s also made me wonder how ‘terrific’ bucked the trend – horrific, horrid and horrible are all undeniably bad – and came to be a good thing, and now I’d like to know which way ‘terrid’ would go – good, like terrific, or bad like terrible? Answers in the comments, please.

But also, before you comment (and please do), may I just direct your attention to Geoff’s footnote on the original post:

“Comments are closed because I couldn’t bear to read fifty people saying “Oh, I knew that”, or “How could you not have noticed?”, or “I found some old citations for tepify in the OED!”, or “Why didn’t you just have the profiteroles?” (I did), or “My uncle Joe in Milwaukee speaks Italian”, or “I know a nice Italian restaurant near Milwaukee”, or “I was in Milwaukee last year for my cousin’s wedding” . . . You know how you get.]”

Thing 3 – Plugs

There are many things I find frustrating about being British, and I can quite understand the urge to criticise us or make fun of us for all manner of idiosyncrasies, oddities and, quite frankly, awfulnesses.

But do not come after our plugs. The BS 1363 plug may very well be up there with Lego on the TP (TreadPain) scale, but on the other hand it’s magnificently robust and, most importantly, (and unlike the plugs of some countries I could mention) reassuringly safe.

Here’s an excellent, useful and nerdy thing: The Outlet Atlas: a field guide to the power plugs of the world. As well as a rundown of the various types, there’s a really useful “do I need an adaptor?” tool, and a fascinating brief history of the wall socket.

And if that’s not enough for you, the plug socket museum is your friend.

Thing 4 – Rothko

Ever wondered which Mark Rothko painting would best represent the weather where you are right now? Current Rothko is here to serve.

Thing 5 – Disgust

The Disgusting Food Museum in Berlin is one of those places I’m glad exists but have no particular desire to visit – or at least not at 1pm on every first Saturday of the month, that being the time when they open a can of surströmming.

This, from their homepage, might help you decide whether it’s for you or not:

“Disgust is a basic human emotion. It is not universal. What is delicious for one person can be repulsive for another. Our museum presents nearly 100 extraordinary food exhibits from all over the world such as bull penis, grilled dog, cow’s blood or surströmming.”

If it’s your kind of thing, you’ll be pleased to learn that they have regular events and tastings.

Thing 6 – Letteris

Letteris is a fun, slightly random game, described by its developer ChrisTheBarker as “a cross between Squaredle and Tetris”. It’s still in development, but has already improved since I saw it a couple of days ago. Pleasingly, rude words count double.

In 2016, prompted by the resurgence of my childhood enthusiasm for birds, I set out to see 200 British species. The above book was the result. Ten years on, I thought it would be fun to revisit it. Throughout 2026 I’ll be going out, looking for birds, revisiting old haunts, seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.

Free subscribers will get a monthly post – a little vignette from that month’s birding activity. There might be occasional references to Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? – enough, I hope, to pique your interest, but not so much as to irritate you if you either haven’t read the book or have no desire to. For the benefits of becoming a paying subscriber, see below this month’s piece, which concerns terns, music and how to pause time.

A Tern For The Better

There’s a piece of music by Rameau. It goes like this.

I’m not going to insist you listen to it before reading any further – you’re responsible adults, able to decide for yourselves how best to spend four minutes and forty-five seconds of your time, but I put it to you that listening to that Rameau is a worthwhile way to spend four minutes and forty-five seconds of your time1.

It’s music of exceptional simplicity, exquisite in its stillness. It’s a reminder that complexity isn’t everything, that sometimes all the universe requires of us is to stop and notice, to place ourselves into a receptive state, open to wonder, and that if we do that, then sometimes, just sometimes – and without wishing to get excessively mindful on you – we can pause time.

Listening to it just now, sitting with my wife at our kitchen table amidst the remnants of lunch (beans on toast, since you ask – another, albeit quite different, offering of exquisite simplicity), it made me think of common terns.

Let me explain.

We were at a nature reserve. Hello birds, hello sky, hello 30-degree heat at 10.45 in the morning.

Hello dog owner either unable to read or comply with signs asking them to keep their dog on a lead, the better to protect the nesting plovers, which – entirely understandably, given that this was after all a nature reserve – had established themselves on the beach.

You don’t need to know the full details of the exchange. Let’s just say that words were had. Words from which it became abundantly clear that said dog owner cared little for the plight of plovers. (For the record, I love dogs, and yes of course not all dog owners. Definitely this one, though.)

I simmered. I seethed. Trying to find a positive angle on the encounter, I thought about differing worldviews, and how best to bridge the divide between them.

In this mood I entered the hide. Here, I thought, I could sit in peace and seek the elusive state known as birdfulness.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a tern colony. They’re dainty birds. Even the largest of the British species, the Sandwich tern – named after the place, not the foodstuff, it made no. 95 in Robert Francis’s excellent “100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time” list – lacks the stoutness common to their gull cousins. Where a gull has bulk, a tern is all angles – sharp bill, pointed wings. In flight, they have an enviable buoyancy, gliding overhead with delicate wing flicks. And to see a common tern hover and dive for a fish is to witness murderous grace in avian form. No wonder they’re known as ‘sea swallows’2.

But for all their angular elegance, they’re not quiet. The calls vary between species, but common to them is a harsh, rasping quality. The call of the common tern is sharp and choked in a way that reminds me of the Wilhelm scream, while the Collins Bird Guide has this to say on the flight call of the Sandwich tern: “a loud, grating ‘kerrick’ (like pressing amalgam into a tooth)”. I can’t argue with that description, although I suspect it was written by someone with a recent and traumatic memory of a dentist’s chair.

I was greeted by a seething mass of terns, cheek by jowl on the four islands in the lagoon, and competing for space with black-headed gulls. Many seabirds have a raucous quality to their vocalisations, and if there’s one that can give terns a run for their money, it’s the black-headed gull.

This is my long-winded way of saying that it was all very loud, an unrelenting screeching babble, each bird laying claim to its own little space by shouting at all the others to fuck off.

And in among it all, on the nearest shore of the nearest island, unusually silent and matter-of-fact, two common terns, one standing on the other’s back. Now, why on earth would they be oh yes of course, I see.

Oblivious to the surrounding din, they wait, a still point in a hectic world.

When it came, it didn’t last long. A few seconds. Just long enough for the cloacas to meet and for sperm to be transferred. An upwards arch from the female, a brief flurry of wings from the male, and then off he jumps.

Such a tiny moment. Blink and you’d miss it. And it would be wrong to present it as something tender. Matter-of-fact, more like3. But for me, the lone observer, it suspended time. The racket went on all around it, and those two existed, for just those few seconds, in a time bubble, unconscious to anything but their genetic imperative.

I find myself wishing I could follow their story – laying, incubation, hatching, chick care, fledging. So much has to go right for them to bring their offspring into the world, and each stage is fraught with danger. An egg is a tasty and nutritious snack for a crow – disaster for the terns. You’d shout, too, if you thought it was the only way to keep your children safe.

Within a few seconds, as if determined to perpetuate stereotypes, the male abandoned the female and whizzed off to get a fish. The female lingered for half a minute, and then she was gone too, flying towards and over the hide. And all around the cacophony continued, as if they were never there at all.

So this is where we say goodbye to the free cohort.

For paying subscribers, there are extra goodies below the line. If you’d like to join them, this is what you’ll get:

– PDF and audio versions of that month’s chapter from Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

– an extra piece with more detail about the writing of the book, behind the scenes stuff, trivia, whatever crosses my mind

– occasional chat threads where you can ask questions about any aspect of the book: birds, music, places, the writing process, anything that occurs to you

– a whopping 50% discount on the signed and dedicated copy of the paperback edition

PS While I do earnestly invite you to sign up for the assorted goodies listed above, do please get in touch if you really want to take out a paid subscription but can’t afford it. No questions asked. There will also remain the option to chuck something into my tip jar via Ko-Fi.

LEAVE ME A TIP

This month’s extra content concerns close encounters of the ornithological and musical kind.

Read more

My fifth guest is Mark Diacono, award-winning food and gardening writer, walker and photographer. Mark’s Abundance: Eating and Living With The Seasons, is one of the more delightful offerings on here.

You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).

The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.

Lev Parikian: Hello and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent or just downright bizarre. My guest this month is Mark Diakono. Mark is an award-winning food and gardening writer with over a dozen books to his name. He’s a regular columnist for the Sunday Times and Country Life magazines, and he writes beautifully about food and gardening and nature and life in general on Substack, where his most recent book, Abundance, was mostly written. He also teaches writing, hosts the Cafe Murano Book Club with Angela Hartnett, and started the groundbreaking Otter Farm, where he grows an incredibly diverse range of edible stuff. Mark, thanks so much for joining me on Six Things. Food and gardening, your two main loves, possibly? Or two main professional directions. Which one came first for you?

Mark Diacono: That’s a really good question because I think I didn’t mean to, you know, I kind of accidentally fell into writing about anything really. I came to all of it quite late. I’ve always been a greedy guts, but then that’s most people, isn’t it? And it wasn’t until I met my wife and we got together around the kind of turn of the millennium that I had any inclination that growing anything might be quite interesting or fun, you know, and she found me deeply attractive because I had a garden and she didn’t, you know. Quickly, she moved in, in all senses, and I realised I ought to do something out there that was not just listening to the football while she was gardening. I planted a few things and they kind of grew and they were all edible things, you know, because I’m a bloke from the southwest, and they they were a real pleasure. And really it sort of accidentally spiraled out of control from there, with a few things that… had you caught me on a slightly different point one of my Six Things might have been mulberries… you know, because I remember tasting mulberries for the first time and it being life-changing, you know?

Lev: yeah…

Mark: … and I accidentally started writing… well, no, I started a blog writing about what I was planting and growing just as a record for me, you know, I would remember because you do stuff and you think “I’ll remember that, what variety it is”, and you don’t… and it sort of, I don’t know, quietly took over.

Lev: Interesting. What I’ve noticed about your writing – obviously there’s lots of people writing about food and there’s quite a few people nowadays writing about food and gardening together, which I think is more than when I first got interested in food and cooking in the 80s. That was when supermarkets had really begun to properly take off, so it was just… well, you just go down to Sainsbury’s, and the amazing stuff you can get that’s been flown in from all over the world, and isn’t that miraculous? You can have asparagus in December, and isn’t that wonderful?

Mark: …from Cuba! Or wherever it is…

Lev: … and of course things have gone in a different direction, certainly for a lot of people these days. And I’ve noticed that you have a very curious palate, if I may say – in terms of curious as in seeking things out. You may have a very curious palate, I don’t know, but you seem to seek out ingredients and tastes that other people maybe aren’t covering. Has that just been a natural product of your natural curiosity?

Mark: Certainly some of that. When I started growing things I realized I had the very clear thought of “why grow, like many people do, the cheapest, most widely available, most disease-prone food, that’s most susceptible to drought or deluge, you know… why don’t I leave other people to do that, and buy that stuff, you know, grow some of it, but there must be a million other things that we can grow here, and sure enough there are, you know, and the more I looked into it the more I realized that perennial kind of growing of food was a really lovely way of providing yourself with a kind of really resilient gorgeous garden with lots of brilliant flavors coming out of it, that include things that everyone knows, like, I don’t know… pears and artichokes and asparagus but also the more I kind of nosed around the more I became aware of these other things that were… that we just didn’t grow, just out of habit. We didn’t grow Szechuan pepper, you know… and all this stuff, and there were eemingly endless fruit, vegetables and herbs that people weren’t growing, that I thought “well maybe it’s because they’re crap”, but very often it wasn’t, and you know, that mulberry I talked about – most of us haven’t eaten a mulberry, and it’s just because they’re hard enough to get from the tree into your hand…

Lev: …before they fall apart and go mush…

Mark: … yeah because they’re just… that’s the point you want them, so they’re never going to fall into the supermarket system, which is how we tend to eat and feed ourselves. So I think that’s what a lot of it is, you know, and I love a potato like the next person, but I was wanting to have lots of fun of growing things that were… and discovering that some of these things are crap, but many of them are really delicious and perfectly possible even in the smallest of gardens, you know?

Lev: That’s really, really interesting. So, if anybody is not familiar with Mark’s writing, obviously there’ll be links galore to discover it, and it’s a wonderful thing. The first piece of yours that I read on Substack was your terrific piece about the guy at Glastonbury. It was a very wet Glastonbury…

Mark: It was 1985. I still give deep thanks to the fact that I knew someone who had a camper van that year, because... you know getting in and out of a camper van even when you’re leaving your shoes behind in the slurry outside is enough of a game, but getting in and out of a tent, you’re on that slurry and separated by, you know, a millimetre of failing fabric. It was truly an experience, but, you know, there were some great… I saw a lot of good bands that year. I saw them through, you know, a veil of rain and thunder and all sorts. But yes, there was a tale from there that is best read.

Lev: It’s a beautifully written horror story, and I shall link to it without saying anything further. So, on to the things, the six things which you’ve chosen.

Thing 1 – Woodpeckers

Thing one is chosen, I think, as so often… quite a few of my guests have chosen things that quite blatantly pander to the tastes of the host. Thing one is woodpeckers. Tell me all about you and woodpeckers.

Mark: It’s a funny thing. I mean, growing up, I was never interested in birds at all, other than in that kind of… a lot of kids are almost dinosaur-like… you’re going “oh, bird of prey – good!” You know, they do interesting things

Lev: Violence.

Mark: … yeah, yeah, you know… wingspan… there’s a top trumpiness about birds of prey that appeals greatly, but I I think the sort of beginning of my eyes opening to the potential of the joy of bird life was when we moved to a couple of fields that I turned into Otter Farm with my wife. When I was planting things, I would hear the squawk of what I knew to be a buzzard. Because, you know, they were the most visible and obvious bird that was circling around. I became aware that, you know, oh, it’s four o’clock, they’re making that noise again. And it became more obvious that it wasn’t a they, it was a particular bird that had particular habits. And even that little thing kind of personalised the connection with bird life. And there were a lot of kingfishers, and they’re not hard to love, are they? You know, they’re the sort of Beatles of the bird world. You know, it’s like, yes, yes, we all love the kingfisher.

Lev: So you’re about to liken the woodpeckers to the Stones, are you?

Mark: Well, the thing I like about the Stones… who would I liken the woodpecker to? I’ll try and get to that before the end of this, because one of the things I love about woodpeckers is that they look a bit homemade. You know, the wings are set just a little bit further back than you think they should. I have this feeling that they’re constantly in a battle to kind of stop the nose dipping, you know?

Lev: Yeah, and the flight is a little bit off kilter and a bit bouncy and... oh he’s still doing it, go on, you can do it…

Mark: … yeah definitely that, so there definitely needs to be a bit of home-made… I mean maybe that is the Stones, because, you know Keith Richards shouldn’t really be able to play

Lev: … he shouldn’t really be able to breathe…

Mark: … no he shouldn’t… so let’s go with them. I love that about them. I love the way they fly, you know…

Lev: … that kind of bouncing gait…

Mark: yeah, they look like… they make me feel like that’s how I would be if I was a bird. I’d be a bit shit at it.

Lev: It’s interesting – I’m about to get all ornithological on your arse here, because the way a great spotted woodpecker flies ,and the green one as well, is they do that bouncing flight because it’s more economical. It saves energy because they’ll do a burst of flapping and then they’ll allow themselves to descend just to the point where they’re probably about to fall out of the sky, and then they do another burst of flapping which gives them another 10 yards, or whatever it is, and in between the bursts, to make themselves more aerodynamic – a lot of small birds do this – is that they hold their wings tight against their body, which is one of those marginal gains that of course, the British cycling team, Team GB, became very famous for under Dave Brailsford, these marginal gains, and it’s one of these things that’s evolved in birds – these sort of flap-glide patterns, completely different from the buzzard, which is making the most of rising warm air, which is also economical. So that’s just a bit of science there for you.

Mark: Wow. I love that because that reminds me of my journey to school where, you know, you would sort of I would pedal like crazy and then see how far I could glide without… you know, with a Parka on, not likely to be getting any marginal gains, but see how far I could go wiggling the handlebars, and then I pedaled some more so it kind of you know… that they’re very… they feel very understandable that’s the one… they feel, I don’t want to humanise them as such, but they feel kind of like relatable. And then you get the Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, you get Woody Woodpecker, kind of back from when I was a kid, and they just, they feel like something’s turned up, you know?

Lev: Yeah, and there’s something that sets them apart from other birds. It’s partly that, I think there’s a slightly mad look about them, I always think, especially the green woodpecker – they’ve got the kind of staring eye, but even even then with the great spotted one there’s partly the, you know, that black and white plumage, which is great, but the little red bits that you get on the… underneath the belly, and also on the back of the head. I think also because of the drumming, we all love a drummer – and later on we’re going to talk about a bassist – but the fact that their song isn’t a song, it’s non-vocal, and it’s a very recognisable sound. Again, you’re walking through the cemetery and even people who don’t know about – I say cemetery, that’s my local walk – even people who don’t know about birds, when it first happens in… usually January and February nowadays, somebody will go, oh, where’s that? What’s it coming from? You know, what is it? It’s not your average bird song.

Mark:It’s not.

And I don’t know, I just, I feel like, I feel like they’re a special... I can hear them every day and it still feels like a special thing that’s been part of the day, and like anybody I’m increasingly interested in bird life and I’m so envious of those like yourself who have a kind of a greater and deeper understanding, and I remember a great friend worked at Slimbridge and I remember saying to her, you know, “how the hell do you know?”, and she was like “how do you know with the footballers?” You know, you can tell it’s Messi without a name on the back of the thing. You just have to, it’s just familiarity.

Lev: It’s so tedious, isn’t it? I mean, that kind of boring Malcolm Gladwell thing of 10,000 hours. How do you know how to? Well, of course, I’ve made one… I’ve done that every day for the last 20 years. I’d be really annoyed if I was not good at it. When I was studying conducting, which I came to in my sort of late 20s, early 30s, having been an orchestral musician for about 10 years, I went and studied in St Petersburg in Russia with a great pedagogue, Ilya Musin, who was 92 when I went to study with him. And he was once asked, how do you know so much about conducting? And he just looked with pity at the interviewer and said, “I haven’t thought about anything else for 70 years.” It’s like... obviously…

Mark: oh honestly I get this all the time from my daughter about music, she’s like “dad, how the hell do you know so much about 1978-9 to 87?” It’s like, because I just listen and go and see music, and it’s interesting because it is the woodpecker that has got me into being more inquisitive about the other bird, you know, something sticks, something… you go out and…

Lev: you write about it quite often in Abundance, you’ll mention – and you write beautifully about it, I should say – you say you don’t know much about it but you’re always… it’s observation, I think, which comes across. Do you use Merlin, the app?

Mark: yeah I do yeah.

Lev: do you find that helpful and useful?

Mark: I’ll tell you who got me into it, it was Adam Nicholson of all people. He was really enthusing about it… last time… I haven’t seen him for a couple of years… and he was really enthusing about it and how it builds knowledge rather than the reverse, and what I found with it is, increasingly, is that I’m going, okay, I’ve got some closed off here. I know that’s a wren. I know that’s a chiffchaff. I know that’s a blackbird. I know that’s that. And then there’s this kind of world, like, I tell you where I am now, I’m going, is that a blackcap or a whitethroat? To you, you’ll be like, that’s like saying...

Lev: No, it’s not. They’re very similar. They’re the same family. They’re both warblers and they’ve both got a kind of... you can’t sing their songs. They’re very scrabbly. They’re very scrabbly and yeah, I absolutely get that.

Mark: But this is the lovely thing is that... repeatedly going, “now I think that’s the blackcap because of this” to yourself or the person you’re with, and being able to verify what it is is it does just tighten the nuts and the bolts that allow you to just expand on this knowledge, and honestly the joy of it, at any point in life you have a whole wall of things that you’d love to be interested in but you don’t have the time to, or maybe the feeling of “I can make any progress” and I really think Merlin is one of those things along with… and I’m not just saying this because you’re the host… people who write brilliantly about birds in a way that makes you see the magic and it makes you want to follow the magic… I love that, you know, because there is that thing of, like, why does a blackbird even… I remember waking to the sound of… “what the fuck is that singing at this time of the morning?”

Lev: … and why is it singing…

Mark: yeah, all of that, and why does it stop, and why does it come back at another time, and those sorts of things are such quality of life lifters, and for once I feel, I would say borderline grateful that I’ve got so much more to discover about it because it’s such a pleasure to discover more about it.

Lev: Absolutely. Yeah, I certainly think that, god, I’ve come to it late as well, although I came to it early and late because I was very keen birder when I was a kid, and then other things got in the way for about 30 years, and then middle age onset, and it all came sort of trickling back, and then I found myself writing about it. It was actually when I… it coincided with… I needed an idea for a book, and it just, the two meshed perfectly. And I’m now what I’ve described as an accidental nature writer. I never intended it, but it just seems to be something I love doing. But with Merlin, I find it’s been so transformative for many people’s lives. People, not even like you, who have had no interest, really, but they go for a walk with their dog, so, you know, somebody’s put them onto it and they go “well this has just changed everything” and they’ve… it’s led them to observe, even if they’re not questioning it in the same way as I think you do, which

is… you know, this is a learning tool… they’ll just go “god, I never knew there were eight different species of a bird singing right now. The game I like to play with it is, firstly it’ll hear something that I haven’t heard, and I’ll go “okay, right, stop, listen for that goldcrest” or whatever it is… and then, you know, I do hear it but then I also quite like to sort of look at it and… going “are you going to actually acknowledge that nuthatch, the one that’s been going for the last minute… are you going to… ah there it is, well done, jolly good.” So it’s a kind of two way thing, I like to be the winner as well – I like to one-up it

Mark: It’s crucial, it’s crucial… it is a real pleasure…

Thing 2 – Balls

Lev: I try and do little links between the things. I’m struggling here with linking woodpeckers, number one, and thing number two. So thing number two, you’ve said balls. Just in case I get the wrong idea, you’ve said specifically in the realm of sport. So go ahead.

Mark: I was thinking about sort of spheres the other day, because I think if we didn’t have them, we would find them really hard to imagine, because there’s not really... a reference point, there’s no edge, there’s no… they just kind of are, and I think we’ve grown used to seeing and imagining the sun and the moon as round, you know, as in spherical rather than round, but it’s quite a concept to get our heads around, and the fact that this thing is consistent, you can hold it in whatever way, you know, pick up a snooker ball, and you can hold it… it’s the same, and there’s something really magical about that, you know, it’s just one – there’s no extra lengths, there’s no other, it’s all one, it’s all of itself, and the reason I love that in particular with the sporting thing, and love… I tend to, when the Olympics are on I couldn’t care less. You know I could… I literally couldn’t care less… I’m not interested, and I’ll pretend to… it’s like why are you not interested, it’s, like, there’s no ball. The reason I love a ball is that because of its spherical nature… when I’m saying this and it becomes clear maybe why I’m less interested in rugby… is that it’s an object of expression. What you would do with a ball at your feet, in your hand, coming towards you, is very different to what I would, but under the same conditions, same stresses, same whatever else, it has a consistency that I love that about it… it’s a revealer of personality… you know, as we were talking about with birds a minute ago, you know, 20 years ago I could go that’s Maradona – you can put a coat on and I’ll tell you that’s Maradona. And I wasn’t able to do that about any birds and it was because they do… just people generally will express the personality, it’s a vehicle for personality, and I I really love that about it. I love it with football, and I have two or three favourite goals. The joy of those goals never wears off because they’re to do with somebody knowing that that ball is going to behave in a certain way, if they can only execute this feeling, this emotion, this sense of artistry that they might have in themselves. And when it happens, it feels like... This is quite an odd analogy, but let me follow it, and I’m not sure if it will get a bit thin. When the old man died, I felt like this was essential time. This was life with all the fluff and nonsense and the stuff we... create to organize and complicate things. All of it was removed. I felt like I was really alive. I was aware of the passing of the day, the air, the everything about it. And those moments, they share something in common. There’s a particular goal. I’ll send you a link to it because it makes more sense. There’s a particular goal that a guy called Paolo Di Canio scored 10 or 15 years ago, and it was impossible. Nobody else I know could have done it… who’s ever played could have done it.

Lev: Amazing footballer. Slightly dodgy politics…

Mark: No, exactly. This is the awful thing, isn’t it? Let’s not mention Morrissey as we go. And the whole subject of separating the art from the artist. But the most extraordinary... Just a moment. I remember when I saw it, I stood up and I actually cried. It was ridiculous. Because it felt like a delivery from the universe of something... that could have only have happened in those circumstances. Somebody in a perfect moment and something, and the essential ingredient, yes, was this person who had whatever it is, but the fact that the ball had to be a ball, had to be read. The fact that we can all understand that Ronnie O’Sullivan, Alex Higgins, they are made of something different to the next snooker player.

Lev: with football there’s obviously there’s always the variables of the other people on the team, the goal that… when you said two or three goals, the one that instantly came into my head was Dennis Bergkamp

Mark: yeah yeah, I mean, that…

Lev: you know the goal I mean?

Mark: I do.

Lev: because he gets… it comes to him from 50 fucking miles away, and he touches it once, touches it again, and it’s in the goal

Mark: And nobody else in history could have scored that goal. You could never do it. I wish you’d link to that one as well.

Lev: And I’m sure there’s going to be people who are listening to this who have turned off at the mention of football. So I’m just going to describe it as ballet. So maybe that’ll get them switched on to it because this is an extraordinary feat of not just athleticism, but the way you describe it is creative art.

Mark: One of the reasons I think I love those moments so much is that it’s beyond the actual thing. You know, it’s beyond... it doesn’t matter if you like football or not it’s the same with it and it’s the same with… we’ll be talking about a musician later… when you see somebody doing something they were made to do in a way that is so unique to them, and the moment, and that moment there’s something just transcendent about it I think, and at its core beautiful… and it’s the same with music, it’s this… of the same material that is unusual and beyond… You talk about ballet. I mean, the gorgeousness of a Federer backhand… You can hate tennis and just watch that and go, oh my God. There’s nobody who can play a shot like that. It’s just graceful gorgeousness.

Lev: I noticed two things. Firstly, that you’ve talked about football and footballers, but we haven’t mentioned a team yet, which I think is really telling. Do you have a team?

Mark: I do. I do. Well, I’m from the South West and absolutely no connection to Liverpool other than… as a kid… other than I watched the 1974 FA Cup Final on the telly and I saw Kevin Keegan… I was like “who the hell is this little guy doing the most brilliant things?” And it’s been Liverpool since that day and I… so much in my young life was just watching Liverpool, you know on the telly and Match Of The Day and The Big Match and you know Keegan went and I was bereft and then Kenny, and… do you have time for a quick Kenny story?

Lev: Go on then. I’d love to hear it. I can cut it out if necessary.

Mark: Yeah, if it’s that dull. Anyway, so, and I love Liverpool, I love the music of Liverpool, I love the football of Liverpool, I love all of that. And I’ve had increasing opportunities to go for various reasons, been to see Liverpool play a few times. Anyway, about four years ago, I was invited to become an honorary professor at the University of Liverpool.

Lev: Ooh.

Mark: Yeah, I know, I know.

Lev: That’s fancy.

Mark: Yeah, and the difficulty with that is, the thing you most want to say is the thing that it’s quite hard to say, which is... what the hell have I done to become…? Anyway so I get off the train, wander around Liverpool and thinking… you know, you’ve got to go and do that thing of going to Eric’s, which is where a lot of bands played in the 80s which is really close to The Cavern, just do that and then go and check in your hotel. So I got to my hotel slightly later than I meant to. Nobody around. Big foyer, and a young woman appears, and she was like “hello, I’ve just started here, my boss has just gone to the loo, she’ll be back… can you fill out this form, name, address…” I do all of that, and a figure appeared next to me and I kind of looked up and carried on writing the thing out, and I went “oh god it’s Kenny Dalgleish, it’s Kenny Dalgleish, it’s Kenny Dalgleish, the actual Kenny Dalgleish

Lev: it’s like that Half Man Half Biscuit song, “Fuckin’ ‘ell it’s Fred Titmus”…

Mark: yes yes exactly and my immediate… and I’m writing this thing… and he’s like I don’t know, three yards away in a big foyer, so this big room, two people. The young woman has gone off to get some photocopying or something while I’m filling this thing out, just me and Kenny in this massive room, and I’ve immediately gone, “I can’t talk to him. I can’t say anything. What do you say? I can’t say anything. It’s Kenny bloody Dalgleish.” And then kind of future me has gone, “it’s Kenny Dalgleish. You’ve got to say something.” And I looked up, and I looked at him, and I was like three meters between us or something and I went, “Kenny, I don’t want to disturb you”, because you know he’s quite a private kind of guy in that way, I said “but I just need to say thank you for all the years of, you know, watching you play and the way you replaced Keegan and then…” The man, you know, as a manager, and then, you know, he went to all but every funeral after Hillsborough and really led the city in its response to Hillsborough. And I kept my distance, didn’t reach for my phone, anything like that, and he walked towards me and sort of put his hand out, and he was like “you know I should be thanking you for all the years of support that you’ve given me”. And I had to take a… you know, it gets me a bit now… I had to sort of… I didn’t ask for his picture, I didn’t take any more of his time, and just… I had to sit down with a whisky afterwards and go “I just spoke to Kenny Dalgleish, a man who has given me…”

Lev: … and he thanked you

Mark: I know! If he… if it… was possible for a man to outgrow all of the expectations I had of a complete hero anyway, he totally did that in a couple of minutes of just chatting with him. And I just literally had to sit down and compose myself. And also then just because I hadn’t taken a picture with him – I didn’t want to intrude and I didn’t want to break the moment of being with him – it was that thing of going, did that just happen?

Lev: Nobody’s going to believe me.

Mark: No one’s going to believe me. And then I saw him, he came out of a meeting that he was having in the hotel. So I was able to go, yeah, I just had a chat with the actual… he’s a real person. He’s not just a fantasy figure who makes other people’s dreams come true.

Thing 3 – James Jamerson

Lev: That has provided me with a really nice link, actually, to thing number three, because I’m going to ask you what you would have done if you had ever met James Jamerson.

Mark: Oh, my God. So if anybody’s not familiar with James Jamerson...

Lev: Yes, we should explain who he is, because part of the appeal, I think, is almost because a lot of people don’t necessarily know who he was.

Mark: I mean, for most people, he had... like a huge guiding hand in the pleasure of much of the music that many of us have listened to over the years. He was in the… kind of… the Motown house band that was behind everything from Marvin to Four Tops to the Jacksons to Stevie Wonder to… literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of really wonderful songs, you know, things from Bernadette to I Was Made to Love Her and...

Lev: I mean, there’s a list.

Mark: It’s just... River, Deep, Mountain...

Lev: Through the Grapevine, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Papa Was A Rolling Stone, My Girl, and on and on and on and on.

Mark: That’s just literally... what do you think of when you’re thinking of My Girl… it’s that the beginning… and then away he goes, and he just was the heartbeat, but the gorgeous… you know, he played bass guitar, but he played it in a way that nobody had ever played before. The way he rolled around the melody, the way he rolled around the rhythm the way he made a song sing. And I came… I remember I came to him… When would it have been? It would have been in the late-ish, the mid-late 80s. I was living in Exeter with a friend and I went to this brilliant record shop in Exeter, a second-hand record shop called Caterpillar. And you’d go in there with nothing that you’re particularly after and you’d scuffle about and you’d always come out with something. And I found a tape of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album, which... you’d always see and you still always see as one of the greatest five albums of all time and whatever list it there it will be. I’m going “Marvin Gaye? Are you sure…?” Because what did I know? I knew Heard It Through The Grapevine and that’s about it, you know, and I thought “well it’s 49p this cassette, I’m gonna get it, yeah”. And I bought it and took it home and I listened to it and this was not the music I was listening to at the time, you know, and it was 15-20 years after it had come out, I think it’s 1970. It’s just an extraordinary album of kind of love and activism and...

Lev: …and anger and frustration at the state of the world.

Mark: All of that.

Lev: 1971, I think, because it was Vietnam, wasn’t it? So it was near the end of Vietnam, but it was... Yeah, yeah.

Mark: And very different for Marvin. You know, it wasn’t singly. It was... But there were incredible songs.

Lev: And singles off it, but...

Mark: Yeah, but it sort of ran as a whole. It was a proper album, you know. And there was this incredible bass playing. There was this incredible bass player.

Lev: I think there’s a lot of people will, as you say, they will know the songs, but they will not know the musicians behind it, the Funk Brothers, who are the, as you say, the house band. It wasn’t just... I was trying to think about why this is. Partly it’s because they’re... they weren’t credited on any of the records until until that one, I think until, it was 1971… that, so these are these nameless people and the people that… the names that people remembered were the Marvin Gayes and the Temptations and the Four Tops and all those bands that came out of Hitsville, and this… the production line of extraordinary creativity, and there were about… I think there’s officially…there’s an official roster of the Funk Brothers and there’s 13 of them in total but I was interested that you chose James Jamerson above them all. Funnily enough, it’s one of those things… I watched… when you sent this thing through, I rewatched for the first time in ages the documentary about him, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, which is amazing. It’s just a moving... amazing story, and at the beginning of that documentary they go into a record store… it was made in 2002, and they go into a record store and they talk to the punters and say “so do you know your music?” “yeah”, “do you know the music of Motown? Can you name some bands?” “yeah of course, sure”, “and some artists?” “sure, Marvin Gaye Smokey Robinson, blah blah blah” and then “can you name any of the musicians behind them?” “oh… uh… no…” Of course since then I think they’ve been more widely recognised and individuals have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and all of that and when I mentioned your list of six things to my son, who’s a young musician, who actually wrote the music for this podcast, and is well versed… and I said James Jamerson he said “fucking excellent”

Mark: It is one of those people… and once you hear it, it’s like “oh my god there it is, there it is, and it’s the magic, isn’t it?”

Lev: I also watched a brilliant nerdy half hour YouTube between two bassists taking apart his most legendary moments and explaining to the uninitiated and the initiated, those who are interested, exactly what it was about his playing that made it different. The creativity, the absolutely centred rhythmic impetus that just, you know, that whole rhythm section just makes you want to... I don’t dance, but it always makes me want to get up and dance. And the melodic creativity of bass lines and the changing of rhythms... that people wouldn’t, you know, I think bass playing until he came along was pretty foursquare.

Mark: Yeah.

Lev: Both harmonically and rhythmically. Walking bass lines. A good swing, you know, and he had a background in jazz, you know, grew up in the 50s playing, being a brilliant upright bassist before switching to the famous Fender. That came, he just, yeah, he changed things.

Mark: Everything that came after owed so much to him. And the thing I find incredible is that the other bass player, Bob Babbitt, it’s extraordinary. You know, he’s just a wonderful, wonderful bass player too, you know, so there’s two in this kind of house band. But there’s something about James Jamerson’s playing that is... It feels like a ribbon that’s been sewn through the song that is aware of the melody, the rhythm, the vocals, everything... but in such a gorgeously perfect way. Again, I’ll put it so that if you want to post it, you can… there’s a gorgeous thing on YouTube where somebody’s made a... I don’t know if you...

Lev: Yes, I saw that.

Mark: It’s almost like a graph.

Lev: It’s fantastic. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

Mark: It’s wonderful. But the one that I feel is even better than that is the I Was Made to Love Her, the Stevie Wonder song, where... you can see this… it’s like a mountain range of what he’s playing you know it goes up when he goes up and comes down when he comes down, against Stevie being incredible, and from… I play bass… and from that day to this it has the same feeling… all his playing has the same feeling… it makes me want to put mine away as a kind of, you know, a pathetic thing of, like, how can you… how can you pick up a bass if you’re not going to do something as beautiful as that, but also makes me want to play, yeah, even more… so it’s this lovely kind of balance. But if you’re not familiar with him it’s so worth investigating, because he you can see how he has made what those brilliant Motown singers and other musicians were doing so much better but also how that has rolled on into the music that we love now, you know…

Lev: …and sort of surreptitiously as well because there’s something about a bassist that is sort of under the radar, so…

Mark: I think it’s probably been applied to a drummer as well, but you can get a T-shirt that says, you know, no one wants to shag the bass player. If you’re not the guitarist or the singer, you know, you’re actually stuck at the back anyway, you know.

Lev: And it’s also sad, I mean his story is very sad because of how his life went in the end, after the great hits of Motown, and as we said, he was uncredited – he was paid well enough, but when it came to the move from Detroit to LA in the early 70s, I think he was the only one of The Funk Brothers who actually went there with the label and tried to make a go of it. But his style of playing became quite unfashionable quite soon after that.

Mark: Which is quite hard to imagine really.

Lev: He got… people playing slap bass, which he wasn’t interested in, and there was a whole load of disco coming up, which… I love disco, but it was much more, again, more foursquare in a way.

Mark: A bit driven.

Lev: A bit driven, yeah. And he would drive music, but in such subtle ways. And so much of that is all absolutely under the bonnet. You have to listen quite hard, I think, to really... It’s like observing the blackcap and the whitethroat. Why is this song so good? Yeah, all because… it’s all the elements are in perfect perfect sync… and it’s all been driven by this, this elite motor…. and he descended really into alcoholism – I mean he’d always had a… not surprising in that world… and he eventually died in the early 80s of cirrhosis which is just… I mean he…

Mark: Which is awful. And he’s since been… unusually for someone who’s tucked away like that… has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as he rightly should be, but it always feels sad when people get their recognition afterwards. They’re not around to enjoy it

Lev: And all the bassists who will cite him as their biggest influence. A list as long as your arm of great musicians, but as you say It would be nice to have the true recognition while you’re still alive

Mark: Wouldn’t it?

Thing 4 – Stem Ginger

Lev: I can’t think of a link from James Jamerson to stem ginger, so I’m just going to go straight in. Thing number four is stem ginger.

Mark: If you kind of, get a stem ginger out of a jar, you’re going to use one finger, which is all that James Jamerson… he never played with two fingers on the plucking hand, as it were. So it’s a terrible link…

Lev: … but it’s good enough, because actually we didn’t mention that… we should have said that he’s doing all this stuff and some really really incredibly nimble… and again on this video that I’ll link to, they talk about how they need three fingers to play that… just one finger… so you’re going to get your stem ginger out of the jar with one finger. Why stem ginger, not just ginger?

Mark: Stem ginger. So we won’t need to talk a long time about stem ginger, I’m sure, but it has sort of crept up on me that there are several ingredients that I think really elevate, that… I’m extremely fond of tarragon – I’d happily move to the country with tarragon, and it’s kind of a herb that classically I use all the time. Rhubarb is another ingredient I use all the time, and to the point where an editor will go, “listen I think 14 rhubarb recipes for this book is probably enough.” Stem ginger… I just couldn’t love it more, and the thing… one of the things that I can’t quite get over is that I love the two elements of stem ginger. I like the testicles, as I call them, of the stem ginger, and the syrup in which they’re held. If there was a jar only of each I’d buy both jars really equally happily. I love regular fresh ginger, you know that’s totally fine, but use stem ginger in so many cakes and crumbles, and it just brings a kind of sweetness, but it’s quite bold, you know, it’s the kind of… it’s the Extra Strong Mint of the world it’s a…

Lev: it’s a pungent thing, and that’s probably its appeal, isn’t it? That marriage of the sweet – we all love something sweet but something that’s too sweet is… what you want to say, undercut by that…

Mark: yeah and it… it’s soft and enjoyable on the tongue and teeth, but also the syrup… I mean it’s… usually I’ve got two jars in the fridge and one is maybe… got half of it is left with the kind of… the actual stem ginger, but it’s dry of syrup because I use the syrup a lot. I use the syrup, especially kind of now, when we’re in maybe the latter stages of the rhubarb season… if you get really fresh rhubarb and it’s kind of… you know, you could put it between two chairs and walk on it, you know, nice and soft and taut… and that just dipped in stem ginger syrup and nibbled is one of the great – you know, uncooked – is one of the great pleasures. It’s big, ginger: big sweet, big sour. Yeah, it’s just a pleasure. But I use the syrup in a very good Tom Collins. So ginger syrup. Stem ginger syrup, lots and lots of lemon juice and gin in relatively equal quantities is just a very, very fine drink.

Lev: You do like a cocktail, don’t you?

Mark: Do you know what? I like making them. I drink very little these days.

Lev: Right.

Mark: If I’m going to drink anything, I want it to be excellent. And I think this is maybe one of the moves through middle age that I quite like is that my... enthusiasm for small excellent things that are repeated in life becomes more of… a conviction, you know, so I’ll have fewer lovely coffees. If I’m going to have a cocktail I’m going to have a drink I’m just going to be… it’s going to be a beer I really love

Lev: Is that to do with mortality and thinking “I’ve got less time left to enjoy things, to experience things, so actually I’m not going to have the crap now because I want as many of these experiences to be things I take with me”…

Mark: possibly…

Lev: … to the inevitable grave”, I mean I’m sorry…

Mark: not a bit, not a bit, I hope to defy that… but no I think it’s a bit that, but I think it’s a realisation that for all… I’ve never been particularly ambitious in terms of “I’ve got this life plan or I want to live like this or whatever”, you know my ambitions are to be as content and untroubled doing things that I enjoy, and I think it’s the realization for me that if you’re fortunate enough to be able to do something that you really love, to spend most of your time and earn a living, that’s magic. After that, assuming everybody’s healthy, then what have you got? You’ve got the simple stuff that you love every day that doesn’t need striving after. It doesn’t need anyone else’s permission. It doesn’t need a great wodge of money. It doesn’t need you to climb a mountain of whatever to get to the Holy Grail. It’s just not having... shit bread, let’s say, or whatever… the small pleasure is just that is where my pleasure…

Lev: … sometimes shit bread can be fantastic…

Mark: I know exactly what you mean I meant shit as in, it’s not what you want. And I think very much now if you said to me, “right you’ve got three weeks in Mauritius and you just eat bog standard whatever and you’ll just have whatever beers in the fridge”, the last thing you’ll ever hear from me is “as it comes”, you know, about a drink, or “oh no you decide”. I, you know, have an opinion, for fuck’s sake, and then if it doesn’t cause anyone else any harm pursue it, and that is how I feel I want… the everyday pleasures are much more of a joy for me than a three week in Mauritius once a year or something…

Thing 5 – The Jerk

Lev: Right. Thing number five. And I’m interested in this one. When you mentioned it, I rewatched it. Thing number five is The Jerk, which is a film starring Steve Martin, made in 1979 and directed by Carl Reiner. And it’s the first of four films that they collaborated in. The others being Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man With Two Brains and All of Me. And I’m interested to know why you chose The Jerk, if you were going to choose a Steve Martin, Carl Reiner movie.

Mark: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I could have... It’s interesting, this, because I don’t... If you’ve got something that’s quite on the edge, comedically, it’s quite easy to imagine. We can look at, say, Vic and Bob, you know. And what you get with it is an awful lot of hit and an awful lot of miss. And what you don’t get is sort of six and a half out of ten. it’s nine out of ten or it’s one out of ten and I feel that a little bit about how Steve Martin was moving with his comedy. I’m not that interested in his stand-up, especially watching back at it, but it was a vehicle to get somewhere and I love Dead Man Don’t Wear Plaid, I love the idea of it, I love the way it was executed, I like the way it was delivered, and as you say the other three all have their brilliances. You know I can watcg The Man With Two Brains at least once a year because again everything about it… and he has more than anyone a gift for naming people excellently… Hfuhruhurr.

Lev: Uumellmahaye. What we’re going to do now is we’re just going to quote lines this is the worst thing… it’s two blokes quoting lines from movies. Sorry.

Mark: Let’s stop there, but The Jerk… the thing I love about The Jerk is it could be awful… this perfect film seemed to arrive at the point that everybody was ready for it. I love that you know the whole idea of the film… and it seems to be quite a few films within films, as the great films often are…

Lev: Actually the element of it that makes it is Bernadette Peters.

Mark: Yes!

Lev: She plays off him so perfectly… the way she plays the cornet… all these little things that are so sweet, and there’s a sweet love story at the heart of it and it’s a brilliant… it’s the rags to riches to rags to riches story, which is a lovely take on the normal trope. The way he makes his money is ridiculous, the way he loses it is even more ridiculous and as you say it could be awful… and I think there are going to be people who are going, yeah, no, it’s just not for me. And if you’re not into Steve Martin’s physical comedy, then probably not.

Mark: I think one of the things I love about The Jerk, as you sort of touched upon, this kind of love story and the warmth, but also it speaks to every one of us who’s been a jerk in the quiet ways, in the small ways.

Lev: Oh, God, no, that could be me.

Mark: No, exactly. And there’s something really... with something really warm about it while there’s all of this stuff going on. If I was listening to this and I hadn’t watched The Jerk, I’d be like, you know what, I’m not going to bother. It sounds like it’s great, but I’m not going to bother because of whatever. Give it a go because it’s perfect it’s a perfect film…

Lev: I think it’s worth watching at least the first five, six minutes, because in that original… the first thing to camera is fine, but then there’s the set up of… he’s this very obviously white guy who is you know, being… living with a black family as their child… and there’s a beautifully executed gag, which I think most musicians will get because he’s… they’ve got blues music on, and he has no rhythm at all, and he does that hysterically and then one morning he wakes up listening to an old white dance band which is on the radio, and you see him discovering he has rhythm for that kind of music, and it’s a lovely gag in and of itself, but the beautiful bit of it for me, as one who’s railed against this for many years, is that when he discovers he’s got rhythm, he starts snapping his fingers on one and three.

Mark: That’s really interesting.

Lev: The way everybody does when they’re watching Strictly. It’s like, oh yeah, ONE, two, THREE, four. And I’m saying, no, it’s about the backbeat. You’ve got to do it on two and four.

Mark: Two and four.

Lev: …and after 15 seconds of him clapping on one and three he stops and then he switches to two and four which is just… I don’t know whether he did that I’m sure he did it deliberately but it’s just a beautiful little moment… oh yeah they do get it, yeah…

Mark: it’s a film that bears re-watching because you you might notice something like that, that you’ve never noticed before, or they’re a little throwaway the lines that in other films are made huge… I remember when, you know, without giving too much away, there’s a bit where they tell him that he was adopted and he just says quietly, “you mean I’m going to stay this colour?” And, you know, it’s like, it’s just such a great line delivered, you know, without the fanfare and everything. There’s a lot of that that goes on in that film.

Lev: It also has another thing that I think makes it is Jackie Mason.

Mark: Oh, Jackie Mason.

Lev: Inexplicably Armenian name for somebody who’s quite clearly Jewish.

Mark: I’ve no idea why he would be called Mr Hartunian. And again, perfectly cast. Around then, everyone was cast so well. I mean, there was David Warner, wasn’t there In The Man With Two Brains.

Lev: Yes.

Mark: All of it, Bernadette Peters again, just this perfect casting. Jackie Mason, again, at that point where he was, it was just a joy.

Lev: And again, not having to sell it big.

Mark: oh it’s a joy, I mean it’s genuinely… I think it’s a perfect film, and there aren’t many of them… it has the spirit of films that are not like it… oddly I think of it as a pair with Stand By Me.. there’s a warmth and a humanity about it that is beyond what you’re actually just seeing, and I think it’s a very special thing.

Thing 6 – Propelling Pencils

Lev: Final thing. Propelling Pencils

Mark: Propelling pencils.

Lev: Go on then.

Mark: I love pencils. I always have one all the time with me and it’s interesting because you know when you sort of have a quiet companion that you almost don’t… you ignore until… when I was a kid I used to, you know, draw these cars, you know, and I thought I’d like to design cars when I’m older. I think part of it might have been… now I’ve literally just made this leap… it might have been Bond-related. I remember being given a propelling pencil as a kid and I would draw these cars, but like I’d have rulers and the tools with which to do it very simple ones and I remember kind of going into secondary school and doing technical drawing and really loving all of that… there are many things I love about a propelling pencil as opposed to a pencil… I love a pencil of all kinds including the propelling pencil because it feels like I’m free to write what I want because it’s kind of…

Lev: you can change it…

Mark: yeah it’s temporary, and that feels quite freeing and nice and light and enjoyable. I like the consistency of it… never gets blunt, you know, the line is always the same quality and you know physicality… it doesn’t get fatter and wider, it doesn’t do any of that stuff, it’s always the same. I really love the clicky button, you know it’s like I’m being creative, you know, it feels like a reintroduction of that. I’m setting myself up. I’m writing some more.

Lev: Starting again.

Mark: Yeah. So it feels like an injection of fuel.

Lev: I am a writer, honestly.

Mark: I am a writer. Which, again, you really need to keep telling yourself if you’re trying to, because it does vanish very quickly. The rubber it, it occurred to me the other day that no matter how long I have a propelling pencil... I never run out of the rubber bit, the eraser.

Lev: That’s because everything that comes out of it is perfect. You don’t need to erase it.

Mark: You would think, but no. You can see that I use it a bit, but I don’t use it much. And I think it is because I’m freed enough by the fact that it’s a pencil that I’m allowing myself to be more squiggly and more kind of temporary in the way I write. But also that lets stuff out. I remember having a chat with the guy who designs my books. When we’re trying to think of something to do with it maybe a subtitle or a title… he’s like, “you’ve got to let everything come out, all the crap ideas, you can’t hold them in, you actually have to vocalize them for the others to follow, because they’re like in a queue, and you get to that one by doing this one…”

Lev: …and there’s no shortcut…

Mark: there’s no shortcut…

Lev: it’s so annoying

Mark: it’s really boring, isn’t it, because you think “why didn’t I just think of that at the beginning rather than all these crap things in between?”, and I think that’s one of the things I love about the pencil it’s the crap yeah but I’m happy to keep the crap because it feels like part of the journey and I do really love them and I think they become a friend. I think that’s the other thing. I really love a pencil, a regular wooden leaded pencil. I really do love them, but I don’t like the fact that they go. I’m a bit sentimental about odd things.

Lev: Yeah, I love pencils. I don’t love propelling pencils in the same way, but I have a different sort of fetish in my conducting work. The way I mark up scores... is part of the preparation of things. I’ll get it and I’ll make these pencil markings, whatever it is, it’s speeds or dynamics or just which instruments are coming in where. And that has to be minimum 3B softness, 4B probably.

Mark: That’s really interesting.

Lev: Simply just because an HB, god no, that’ll cut up the paper. That makes an indentation. 3B and 4B are the ones and then you get into absolute sort of pencil wanker stuff, which is “it’s got to be Faber-Castell” or “it’s got to be Palomino Blackwing”, you know, just grab anything, but there are, you know, there are good ones and there are bad ones and the same thing with the eraser, you have to have the right one which actually erases somebody else’s pencil marks

Mark: Rather than dilute across a big area.

Lev: That’s not what we want.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. Not what we want.

Lev: And then when it comes to writing, I do a mixture of note-taking on voice notes occasionally, mostly little things scribbled, not scribbled, but tapped on my phone, but also the endless, inevitable notebooks. And I enjoy a pencil for that as well, because the pens that I also enjoy, they feel like fair copy. That’s got to be good. That’s really...

Mark: There’s definitely something... freeing about a pencil, it really is, and I think I might… I hate to say this but I think I might come around to using a wooden pencil again at some point, it’s just not right now, and I think – I’m not quite sure why that is – and…

Lev: You’re not ready for it, Mark… you’re not ready…

Mark: I’m not ready. I’m not mature enough to handle a pencil…

Lev: it’s a sign of personal growth and maturity… it comes to some of us

Mark: yeah maybe it’ll come to me. The only pencil I do possess funnily, enough is one of my dad’s. And it’s, I think I could probably use it for the rest of my life, even if I greatly outlived his age, because it’s a 6H.

(Short, appalled silence)

Lev: Oh, bloody hell.

Mark: Yeah, no, honestly, it’s like a ghost has written something, you know.

Lev: In the bin, straight away, sorry.

Mark: No, exactly.

Lev: Obviously, it’s sentimental value and everything, but still in the bin.

Mark: Yeah, no, quite. To you, that’s a stick, rather than a pencil.

Lev: It’s just a pointless stick. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, and it’s interesting because I literally, I think I could use it for the rest of my life, even if I lived to 100.

Lev: Well, certainly you’ll never actually make a dent in it.

Mark: No, literally not. I’m not even sure it actually writes. As you said, I think it maybe just leaves the indentation of the letters on the page.

Lev: Tearing out bits of paper left, right and centre.

Mark: I hate to say it, but I think it could be something that I become a wanker about if I got into the wooden pencil where I’d be going, “oh no, it’s got to be one of those.” Having explored the full range of the best ones.

Lev: I think in time you will come to embrace wankerdom and it’s a happy place.

Mark: I’m already there on so many subjects.

Lev: We’re doing no harm to anybody at all.

Mark: No, no, no. If we’re quietly scribbling away with our own pencils, who’s come to harm?

Lev: Thank you, Mark. It’s been an absolute joy talking to you, really. There’s so many things that you’re interesting on and funny and your six things were just terrific.

Mark: Well you’re very kind.

Lev: I’m sure everyone will agree. You can find out more about this episode’s featured things in the show notes with links where appropriate, and there should be quite a few links, I think, and I hope they bring you as much pleasure as they’ve brought me. Thanks for listening and see you next month for six more excellent and fascinating things.

This is the story of Nigel. It is, on the face of it, a sad story, one of loneliness, woe and despair. But it’s not for us to judge the lives of others by our own standards. For all we know, Nigel was—

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who, you might be asking, was Nigel?

Nigel was a gannet.

He lived and died on Mana, a small island off the southwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Mana is something of a conservation flagship island. The New Zealand Department of Conservation took over its management in 1987. First thing they did, they killed all the mice (they spared the lawyers). Mice on an island like Mana are bad news. They eat eggs, they eat chicks, they even eat adult birds. If you want seabirds, you don’t want mice.

With the mice eradicated, the programme could begin in earnest, the plan being to reintroduce species that had once called Mana their home. Plants, invertebrates, reptiles, birds – this last group including things like robins, takahe, kiwi, plovers, parakeets, petrels, prions, shearwaters.

And gannets.

The plan was this. Make Mana the kind of place gannets might want to live. In fact, make it look as if there were already gannets living there, so any new arrivals would think they were joining a thriving colony. They painted the rocks white to simulate guano; they played recordings of gannet calls through loudspeakers; they made 100 concrete replica gannets and repainted them regularly, maintaining the illusion.

In 2000, no gannets came. In 2001, no gannets came. In 2002, no gannets came. In 2003, no gannets came.

You get the idea.

And then Nigel came. Oddly, nobody can quite agree when – some time between 2013 and 2015 seems to be the consensus – but when he did, he made his mark. The concrete birds did their work, and Nigel fell for it. He took a shine to one of them – he groomed it, courted it, tried to mate with it. There was no response. Easy enough for us to chuckle at this, to mock this inability to distinguish inanimate from living. But then we’re not as confused as Nigel.

The envisioned colony never materialised. In 2016, no more gannets came. In 2017, no more gannets came. In 2018, three more gannets came. At last, companions for Nigel.

He ignored them for a few weeks, then – in an act of quite magnificent curmudgeonliness, an absolute and terminal “fuck you” to gannetkind – died.

RIP Nigel.

His death brought him posthumous fame. Features were written in reputable publications, the island’s rangers were interviewed. The outpouring of grief for this distant bird prompted people to compose songs, make art, and – inevitably (oh god) – write poems.

The universal assumption is that Nigel lived a sad and lonely life. “No mates”, they called him. “The world’s loneliest seabird”. Playing in to this view is the suggestion that his arrival on Mana was the result of his exclusion from another colony. He roamed the wide oceans in search of companionship, eventually having to make do with imaginary stony friends. Poor, poor Nigel. Always an outsider, condemned to a life of utter loneliness, driven to the last resort of falling in love with a fake bird. A sorry tale of unrequited gannet love.

But here’s the thing.

Perhaps Nigel was happy. Perhaps he desired nothing more than the company of his concrete congeners. Perhaps, to him, they represented all that was good about his fellow gannets – the elegance, the gawkiness, the delicious peachy colour of the head – without all the disadvantages: the constant squawking, the ammonia smell of piles of gannet shit, the chaos and mess and lack of peace that comes with thousands of individuals existing cheek by jowl. Perhaps, when he found Mana, his first thought was “thank fuck for that”.

We will never know, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Thing 2 – Art & Sports

I’m a big fan of the Instagram account artbutmakeitsports. A simple idea, beautifully executed – pairing famous works of art with sports photography. There’s a nice interview with L J Rader, who runs the account, here. And now there’s a book, too.

Thing 3 – Flamingogogo

I like automata.

I like flamingos.

I like experts explaining how they do things.

Enough said.

(Thanks to Chris Coates of the excellent Odd This Day for sending me this)

Thing 4 – Repeatyversionseries

Thanks to Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s excellent Meanwhile newsletter for highlighting the excellent genre “artists making repeated versions of the same thing” and for asking a) why there isn’t already a name for this kind of thing and b) what we should call it. I’ve drawn a blank so far, but you’re a clever lot, so no doubt you’ll come up with a snappy, searchable name in no time.

Daniel’s examples are Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Henri Rivière’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower and Joel Meyerowitz’s Empire State series. I’ve added Monet’s Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, along with the latter’s offshoot by photographer Andy Marshall, Wells In A Day. Any more?

Thing 5 – Flight

Delightful little film from 1938 of an inventor fundamentally misunderstanding the laws of physics, aerodynamics and… well, pretty much everything really.

You’ll believe a man can fly!

Maybe.

Thing 6 – Horsle

I think this might be the hardest daily game yet. Sorry, everyone.

Few things exercise my particular corner of social media quite like a bit of Book Discourse, so the publication of The Guardian’s “100 Best Novels of All Time” list was greeted with an entirely predictable flurry of activity, presumably on the grounds that nothing helps a Saturday pass quickly so much as a pointless online argument. Numbers were shared, comparisons made, judgements passed. And so the long day wore on.

Some, semi-sheepishly, shared the information that they’d read more than 50 of the books on the list; others wore their 7 out of 100 with exaggerated pride. There was outrage, some of it apparently genuine.

I (19 out of 100 but about 30 if you count other books written by authors on the list) facetiously complained that there was no Dick Francis on the list. Others seriously complained that there was no Ballard/Updike/Roth/Mitford/Carter/Jackson/Wodehouse/Pratchett/[insert your own favourite here]. Depending on who you chose to believe, the list is either too snobbish or too populist or too conservative or just NOT RIGHT. Rob Palk (80 out of 100) threw a handful of added spice into the cauldron by sharing this equivalent list from 1898.

The main thing is that people were talking about books, which – to get all Oscar Wilde on you for a second – is better than the alternative.

Whatever your view on the merits of the lists, they make for interesting reading.

Thing 2 – Boids

If you’ve ever wondered about the dynamics of bird flocking, you might gain some pleasure and/or enlightenment from this tool, which offers a pretty convincing simulation of how they work. You can fiddle with the settings to your hearts content, or just look at the pretty patterns.

Thing 3 – Butterflies

I am, as anyone who’s spent even a minute in my company (whether real or virtual) will know, devoted to all things avian.

But I like butterflies too. Perhaps you’re the same. And if you are, you might want to spend a few minutes with this.

All you have to do is vote for your favourite (British) butterfly. It doesn’t matter if you know them all, of course – it’s just a fun way to get you (and perhaps especially any children you might know?) engaged in the subject.

There’s also a quiz to establish which butterfly you are.

Good clean family fun, and kind of important in these times of doodah and wotsit.

Thing 4 – Comparisons

The Pudding can always be relied on to provide stimulating visual stories, and their latest, Comparisons As Predictable As The Sunrise, is no exception. It’s an analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction, and it’s as good as… well, I’m sure you can come up with something suitable.

Thing 5 – Cracking

Do you want a YouTube channel running 24/7 and entirely devoted to live-streaming the entire Wallace & Gromit oeuvre?

Of course you do. You’re only human.

Thing 6 – Landmarkr

Geography-based games seem to be all the rage at the moment. Landmarkr, as the name implies, asks you to name the place based on six photographs of landmarks.

Yesterday was World Migratory Bird Day and, what with being in the middle of writing a book on animal migration and everything, I have Things To Say.

I could tell any one of billions of stories – birds are probably the most notorious migrants, after all, and for many people the most visible and easily encountered – and any one of them would boggle the mind (they’re how small and travel how far??) – but I’ve gone with the Manx shearwater, not least because I have this photograph of a Manx shearwater chick looking like the contents of a Hoover bag, and if I told you that within a month of it being taken this bird set off on its maiden flight all the way to Brazil, you’d probably look askance at me and suddenly find you have somewhere else to be.

But that is exactly what happened.

Even better, it did it all by itself, without anyone showing it the way, its parents having abandoned it once it had showed them it could feed itself. It converted the Hoover-bag plumage for actual flight feathers (you can just see the beginnings of them above its rear end), and spent a few days exercising its wings in preparation for the journey.

Then, probably a month or so after this photo was taken, it waddled across the rocks to an outcrop or cliff and launched itself into the air, flying quickly away from its birthplace, banking and gliding and flapping on stiff wings low across the water towards, yes, the coast of Brazil. About 7,000 kilometres across the featureless ocean.

This map, from the excellent migration atlas, gives you an idea – although as each dot represents the beginning or end of a journey, and the lines merely link them in the most direct way possible, the situation is inevitably more complex. Birds (despite what you may believe from the expression ‘as the crow flies’) generally eschew the purely straight line.

The point is, HOW THE HELL DO THEY DO IT? How do they do know where to go? One thing that helps is their ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field, a boon for keeping them oriented to the north-south axis. And it’s thought they’re also genetically programmed for that first journey: “fly west for x amount of time, then southwest for y amount of time, stop when you see land.” Plus they have an incredible sense of smell, so can pick up olfactory cues from what to us seems like an utterly featureless expanse of water.

If our mind is boggled by this (and it really should be) we should also remember that what seems amazing to us is second nature to them. No doubt they would be equally dumbfounded by things we find relatively simple – placing an Ocado order, for example, or playing three chords on a guitar, or walking, an activity for which they have very little aptitude (experiencing this at first hand only serves to make these already endearing birds even more so).

Mind you, they excel in other areas, possessing as they do an extraordinary homing instinct. Because not only do they know where to go on their first journey, they know how to get back.

In 1952, Rosario Mazzeo (a clarinettist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and keen amateur ornithologist) visited Skokholm. In the kind of experiment that wouldn’t be allowed today, he took a Manx shearwater back to Boston with him, then released it at Logan airport. It made the 5,150-kilometre journey back to Skokholm in twelve and a half days. You can read more about that here.

Just one more thing about the Manx shearwater, something that might come in handy at a pub quiz one day: counterintuitively, its scientific name is Puffinus puffinus. Puffin – pophyn or poffin in Middle English – was the word for the fatty, salted meat of Manx shearwaters. Meanwhile, the puffin’s scientific name, in case you were wondering, is Fratercula arctica – ‘fratercula’ being a Medieval Latin word meaning ‘little friar’, a nod to their black and white plumage.

So let’s hear it for the Manx shearwater. About 40% of the world’s 11,000 or so bird species undertake some form of migration. While they’re all worth celebrating, few are as spectacular as the Manx shearwater’s.

Thing 2 – Diane

On June 8th in New York, Bonhams will hold a live auction called The Architecture of an Icon, featuring “a thoughtfully curated selection of fine art, interiors, iconic fashion, personal objects, and other creative touchstones” from the much missed Diane Keaton.

Along with the live auction there are three online ones, each focusing on a different aspect of her impeccable and inimitable style – Tailored and Timeless, At Home With Diane, and Chapters of an Edited Life. Even if your chances of buying anything from the auctions are slim (or maybe they’re not? I’m not assuming anything, and I’m genuinely tempted by, for example, her photobooth strips) it’s a thoroughly enjoyable browse.

Thing 3 – Names

How popular is your name? How popular has it been over the last 150 years? How many name-based stats can you bear?

Find out with Name Daisy, a baby name explorer based on US Social Security Administration data. Very nicely presented, with loads of options for viewing the data, plus a handy comparison tool.

Thing 4 – taken

Another fascinating tool, this time telling you what a webpage knows about you when you visit it. Quite a lot, it turns out, and very quickly.

This is Volume IV of an ongoing project. Volume I tells you what the world did while you visited it. Volume II is the sky you missed. Volume III is what was already at your feet.

Thing 5 – Eponymous Laws

Oh no oh no oh no MASSIVE RABBIT HOLE KLAXON.

This is a Wikipedia page devoted to a list of eponymous laws. Some favourites, not entirely chosen at random:

– Cunningham’s Law: the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.

– Muphry’s Law: if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

– Hofstadter’s Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law

The last one particularly applies to this volume of Six Things, which I started working on four hours ago thinking it would take two hours, max.

Thanks to the excellent Ewa on Bluesky for sharing it. It’s Ewa’s birthday today and she celebrated it by starting the most wholesome thread in the history of the internet. (Only visible to logged-in users, I’m afraid)

Thing 6 – Ratioed

Oh this is fun. All you have to do is draw the perfect rectangle to the ratio required (1:1, 16:9, 1.618:1, that kind of thing). Turns out I am both brilliant and awful at it.

For reasons (basically, I’m writing a book about migration, thank you for asking) I’ve found myself immersed in the world of the humpback whale. And what a world it is. I could go on at length – in fact, I have, but you’ll have to wait till the book comes out for all that.

For now, here’s a piece about an amazing and wondrous thing: the oldest known recording of whale song, from 1949. And here’s a short film with researchers talking about the discovery.

Thing 2 – Landsat Names

Everyone seems to be sharing this, and I hate being left out, so here is “your name in Landsat”. If you’re not familiar with Landsat, it’s NASA’s satellite initiative, which has been logging our planet’s surface since 1972. Inevitably, shapes turn up from time to time which resemble letters of the alphabet, enabling us to write… well, anything we like, up to a limit of 50 characters. Here, for example, is the opening sentence to Iain Banks’ novel “The Crow Road”.

But most people seem content enough to write their own names, and I’m no exception.

Thing 3 – Hand Tools

I’m rather taken by this very nicely presented chart of hand tools, not least because I had no idea, until I studied it, what kind of beast a Universal Vernier Bevel Protractor might be. But now I do have an idea, although it seems unlikely, as of even date, that I’ll ever find the need to use one. Many other such wonders reside within.

Thing 4 – Ducks

This short film, by A J Jefferies, is sweet, funny, mad, briefly terrifying, educational and rather brilliant.

Thing 5 – Birthday Colour

It was my birthday last week, so inevitably I rushed to the charming birthday colour calendar to check my hue. (Emerald green, if you’re wondering).

Thing 6 – Noun Sense

Repeat after me: I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games. I do not have enough daily word games.

This one, pilfered shamelessly from Tom Scott’s newsletter, is rather fun. You’re given ten adjectives, and have to guess the commonest noun following each one.

In 2016, prompted by the resurgence of my childhood enthusiasm for birds, I set out to see 200 British species. The above book was the result. Ten years on, I thought it would be fun to revisit it. Throughout 2026 I’ll be going out, looking for birds, revisiting old haunts, seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.

Free subscribers will get a monthly post – a little vignette from that month’s birding activity. There might be occasional references to Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? – enough, I hope, to pique your interest, but not so much as to irritate you if you either haven’t read the book or have no desire to. For the benefits of becoming a paying subscriber, see below this month’s piece, which concerns swifts, bitterns, and hide-guys.

Hoomb Without A View

They’re back. Sing praise, cry hosanna, halle-bloody-lujah – the swifts are back.

Their return is usually a May thing, but at about noon on April 30th I heard the briefest ‘scrree’ overhead, and snapped my head back – osteopath bills are an occupational hazard at this time of year – just in time to see them disappear over the house. For the second year in a row (they came on my birthday last year – so nice of them to make the effort) they’re April birds, and so warrant inclusion in this – slightly late, sorry everyone – monthly missive.

Hosanna, praise, hallelujah.

I’ve written a lot about swifts over the years, so that’s the only attention they’re getting here. If you want to catch up, this post from two years ago pretty much sums it up, containing as it does the confession that I have written myself out on the subject, as well as a sort of ‘found poem’ cobbled together from bits of said writing. You might also want to play a game of Swift Bingo.

Right. Enough. Other birds – contrary to the boyfriend above’s opinion – are available. Especially if you go to Minsmere, the RSPB’s flagship reserve in Suffolk. Loads of birds there, as you’d hope and expect. From the suicidal red-legged partridges running ahead of us on the approach road – you have wings, guys, try using them – to the insistent chiffchaff going at it mechanically from dawn till dusk outside the visitor centre, and every shade of bird in between.

Black-headed gulls fighting turf wars, with an appropriate accompaniment of raw screech. Avocets – the piebald wader adopted as the RSPB’s logo – tiptoeing daintily across the scrape, long legs accessorised with slender, upturned bills. A coot, thuggish in the shadow of such delicacy, ploughing gamely across the lagoon, a floating “fuck off” in avian form. Sedge and reed warblers announcing their arrival – “just been to Africa, you know. It was hot” – from the depths of reedbeds. Two ringed plovers, simultaneously dumpy and delicate – a neat trick if you can pull it off – fossicking around on the fringes. Lapwings, displaying – a flight of extravagant virtuosity executed with nonchalant aplomb. And so on. Riches beyond imagining wherever you look.

And wherever you listen. Because right now the air is alive with birdsong. Positively pinging with it. And amidst all the great tits, blue tits, goldcrests, chaffinches, linnets, dammit don’t let me do that listing thing again, you’ve got better things to do with your time – amidst all that, a sound of immense strangeness, an other-worldly, uncanny, un-birdy noise, the kind of thing you can easily miss but, once heard, makes you stop and stand utterly still in the hope of a repeat.

Hoomb.

Don’t move. Neither scrunch nor rustle can disturb the moment. Shut up, sedge warbler, I’m listening, and I’ve cupped my hand round my ear to prove it.

Hoomb. Hoomb.

Aahh, you magnificent weirdo, you, what a pleasure to hear you again.

It’s the boom of a bittern, the elusive, flolloping, dagger-billed camouflage-meister of the reedbeds, like a brown heron with mumps.

Hoomb. Hoomb. Hoomb.

Like someone blowing across the top of a milk bottle. But that’s not how they make the sound. It’s a bellows thing. Listen. Listen to this. Please. The preparatory in-breaths and bill-claps as the oesophagus inflates. Then, hoomb. You magnificent, strange, tubular weirdo.

Hearing a bittern is thrilling; seeing one is a rare treat. Because, as I say, they’re elusive. Compile a list of avian skulkers and the bittern will appear high up on it. To see one you usually need to be in a bird hide. So that’s where we went.

There were some guys in the hide. There usually are. Not just any old guys, though. Guys of a particular type. Inexplicable camo gear. Long lens. There for the long haul. Not moving until the bittern flies up, not for anyone.

I have nothing against guys in hides. It’s a free world etc and so forth. Guys – inexplicable camo gear or no – are at liberty to sit wherever they like. But there’s no denying that an accumulation of hide-guys of a certain type carries with it an aura. A vibe. Not actively unwelcoming, as such. But not “hail sirrah, well met! Sit thee down and partake awhile with us of a slice of avian wonder!”, either. And this vibe can be forbidding, especially if – as is the case with my wife Tessa – you’re relatively new to the world of birds. There you are, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to learn and to make new friends with a shared interest, or at the very least to pass the time of day in comfortable silence without being weighed down by the indefinable pall of lowkey resentment. And what do you get? A brooding wall of hide-guys.

I have to be even-handed, so in the interest of balance I must say this: not all hides, and not all guys. But yes, this one, and them.

The bittern didn’t fly up. Not while we were there. That’s often the way. We gave it twenty minutes, then, imagining the baleful glares on the back of our necks, we tiptoed away.

So this is where we say goodbye to the free cohort.

For paying subscribers, there are extra goodies below the line. If you’d like to join them, this is what you’ll get:

– PDF and audio versions of that month’s chapter from Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

– an extra piece with more detail about the writing of the book, behind the scenes stuff, trivia, whatever crosses my mind

– occasional chat threads where you can ask questions about any aspect of the book: birds, music, places, the writing process, anything that occurs to you

– a whopping 50% discount on the signed and dedicated copy of the paperback edition

PS While I do earnestly invite you to sign up for the assorted goodies listed above, do please get in touch if you really want to take out a paid subscription but can’t afford it. No questions asked. There will also remain the option to chuck something into my tip jar via Ko-Fi.

LEAVE ME A TIP

This month’s extra content concerns a moment of ornithological triumph.

Read more

My fourth guest is Isabel Rogers, poet, novelist, cake-baker, occasional cello-practiser, and nearly full-time coal-tit-whisperer.

You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).

The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.

Lev Parikian: Hello and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent or just downright bizarre. This month’s guest is the writer Isabel Rogers. Isabel began her writing career at school, adapting Asterix books as weekly plays for her class. After years of morbid teenage love poetry, she forgot about writing and went to work in the city for 15 years, before seeing sense, moving to the Highlands and writing her first novel and many examples of what I call Proper Poetry, for which she has won what she describes as “a biggish poetry prize”. More of that in a bit, I think. She was also Hampshire Poet Laureate for a few years before swerving into comic fiction, in which genre she’s published four excellent novels in the Stockwell Park Orchestra series, which is a subject – as a conductor of amateur orchestras – that I find close to both my heart and the bone, what with (spoiler alert) her killing off a renowned conductor in chapter one of the first book. Isabel can sing a top C, makes a lot of cake, and doesn’t practice the cello enough. Hello Isabel.

Isabel Rogers: Hello Lev.

Lev: Thanks for coming on.

Isabel: I’m sorry about the killing of the conductor.

Lev: That felt quite personal.

Isabel: Somebody had to do it, Lev.

Lev: We’ve known each other for a few years and you’ve always known what I do for a living, and it just felt a little bit pointed. He didn’t have a very similar name to me, to be fair. So maybe it wasn’t me that you wanted to kill off.

Isabel: It wasn’t. I’ve known lots of conductors before you, Lev.

Lev: …and wanted to kill them all, I suspect. So you’ve brought six excellent things. But first, before we go into the things, I do want to know, because you’re slightly coy about the “biggish poetry prize” – so it’s either extremely big and you’re being coy or it’s extremely small and you’re trying to make people...

Isabel: The poetry world is very small and nobody knows anything about it. There’s the National Poetry Prize which everybody knows about and you win five grand and you get on the news and everything. I won five grand but it’s a prize nobody’s heard of. It was the Cardiff Poetry Prize and it was huge at the time but nobody knows about it apart from people in the poetry world.

Lev: You have brought six wonderful things, and not all of them designed to curry favour with the podcast host.

Isabel: At least two of them were, I admit that.

Thing 1 – Coal Tits

Lev: The first one very much is – and it is, or they are, coal tits.

Isabel: Yes.

Lev: So we should firstly… obviously anybody who’s a regular listener to this podcast will know that I am very keen on birds. And if they’re British, they will probably know what a coal tit is, or they’ll have an idea. It’s the lesser considered member of the tit family. The great tits and blue tits are the ones that people will probably know from their feeders. Coal tits are… they’re underrated birds. There’s a great category of underrated birds and coal tits are among them. If you’re American, you will be listening to this and going, oh, what is a coal tit? It’s the same family as the chickadee. Chickadee is so descriptive of the kind of sounds that they make. And these coal tits are… they presumably make these kinds of sounds when they see you coming…

Isabel: Oh, they love me, Lev. They love me. I have made friends with my coal tits. We may have to explain, I am currently living in my garden room down the end of the garden because I’ve got a massive building project going on and I have no house. And there’s a deck outside the garden and I’ve always fed the birds, but now I’m kind of in the middle of the wildlife. They seem to have been bolder and they were feeding on my hanging feeder. And then I just noticed a whole load of coal tits over the winter, about 20 of them maybe, maybe 30, I don’t know, but getting bolder and bolder. I thought, oh, I wonder if they would take food from my hand. So I started putting my hand out with choice sunflower seeds on. And do you know what? It took about three or four days, maybe, of me just...

Lev: I was going to ask how long. And how long on each session? I mean, not all day…

Isabel: Well, they were used to me anyway, because I do my washing up outside on the deck, right next to the feeders. They’re used to me wandering around and they didn’t fly off much. So the first time I was probably standing half an hour, maybe.

Lev: Right.

Isabel: But I like standing in the garden anyway, which we’ll get onto later. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Lev: But also in a stress position with your hand outstretched.

Isabel: Oh no, I learned fairly early on that if you stand propping your elbow against a hip, it’s quite comfortable. Although it does make your hand closer to your body, so maybe it would have taken them less time if I’d stood with my hand out, but you know.

Lev: More pain for less time, yeah.

Isabel: Yes, but it was great. And they came. And then over the winter, I would regularly have ten flying around and trying to fight for space on my hand. It was extraordinary. And now there’s one that’s just tame as anything and he or she loiters around. And if they’re hungry and I’m not out, it will knock its beak on the glass or land on the outside door handle looking at me. So I go out and get the tin open and it will be on my head or my arm or my shoulder while I’m getting the seed out of the tin before it’s in my hand and then it will go into my hand and…

Lev: This is pet behaviour isn’t it?

Isabel: I love them.

Lev: “Give me food!” Quite marvellous. I’m so jealous of this and I have not tried that hard, I have to say, to have things feed from the hand. My relationship with birds has always been a more... I love watching them and I love watching their behaviour. They have come close… so we can be sitting on our terrace and there’ll be the feeders there and they will come close… you know, they’re quite used to our presence there but…

Isabel: Well if you sit on the terrace you can have your hand out with some seeds on and still carry on your chat and they will eventually come and…

Lev: So this is where it falls down because I just don’t have the patience to do that. This is one of those things where… I’m too restless as a birder. I do tend to just kind of go, right, well, they’re not here, I’m going to move on and go to the next one.

Isabel: But I want to know why the robin hasn’t come because they’re supposed to be really tame. And also I have the guilt of the sparrowhawk who has also learned what I do and quite often screeches around the corner of my garden room. And there have been a couple of piles of feathers on the ground. I think they’re blue tit feathers. I don’t think they’re my friends.

Lev: It’s really interesting as well that people love the garden birds and will demonize anything… there’s a sort of hierarchy of the things we love.

Isabel: Absolutely.

Lev: We love the fluffy ones. We love the blue tits. Magpies are horrible because they predate chicks and eggs. “Disgusting, disgusting birds”.

Isabel: Yes, I try and just accept that sparrowhawks have to eat too. And there were plenty of little birds around.

Lev: Exactly. I’m interested that it’s that specific species that seems to love you. The other ones...

Isabel: I have no idea why they’re so bold. They’re the smallest birds that come into my garden and they’ve been the boldest. I don’t know why.

Lev: And you have others? I mean, I presume you have things like chaffinches and great tits and...

Isabel: Loads of each of those, yes. I’ve got a pair of robins that come. I’ve got blackbirds, various thrushes. The robins come quite close, but they’re supposed to be famously friendly and would have been the first to feed.

Lev: In Britain, at least. I think if you go to Europe, continental Europe, the robin is a more skulking kind of...

Isabel: Oh, maybe I’ve got a European robin then.

Lev: Perhaps it’s flown over. Back to the coal tits. Do you have them identified down to name level, each and every one?

Isabel: No.

Lev: And be honest, have you given the insistent one a name?

Isabel: I have not. Perhaps I should. I know. But I do talk to it quite a lot. And I think I can distinguish... In the winter, I had loads and loads of them. And I think – you’re the expert, you tell me – if they spread out to breed, they’re very... but I think I can tell the difference between a male and a female landing on my hand, and I think I’ve got a pair now that are staying, nesting nearby and the male kind of, it’s the male that’s the really bold one who kind of dollops himself on my hand. “Here I am. I want my seed.” Off he goes. And the female, I think, is smaller. Would I be right in thinking that? Slightly?

Lev: I don’t think so.

Isabel: Maybe it’s just a really slim one.

Lev: Maybe it’s a slim one. I wondered if it was that you knew the male and female because there was a different way of landing on your hand.

Isabel: Well, yes, I think there is.

Lev: It was more delicate and more...

Isabel: Delicate, yes. It’s like a sort of ballerina coming into land after a...

Lev: It’s kinder.

Isabel: Let’s just stereotype everything. But they all look the bloody same, so I don’t know.

Lev: Yeah, exactly.

Isabel: I am going to start running writing courses and retreats up here. And one of my side quests to that will be, would you like to feed my coal tits by hand? Along with willow weaving and all this kind of stuff and seeing the Northern Lights...

Lev: I don’t think there’s any writing retreat that could offer that level of personalized service.

Isabel: Exactly.

Lev: So I am very envious of your coal tits…

Thing 2 – Victoria Wood

Lev: So thing number two is not a thing. Quite often… it’s quite difficult because I have this… it’s called Six Things, which means it can encompass everything, and occasionally somebody comes up with a person and you just feel really terrible saying “and Thing number two is Victoria Wood”, because she wasn’t a thing, she was a person, and she was a wonderful person, and you’ve described her as “not a thing but a person who did things that become things in our heads” which I think is…

Isabel: Well I think that gets around your rules – your silly rules. Victoria Wood, we were all reminded last week, died ten years ago, so people have been remembering her and talking about her, and I thought I have to include her because she’s been such a huge part of my writing life, and just grown up life, because she was a genius for years and years and I can’t remember not having her lines running in my head most of the time. Before she came along British comedy was… it wasn’t boring but I mean goodness she just made it more Northern, more diverse, and just funnier.

Lev: We always see these finished products. Dinner Ladies is a great example. And you think, well, obviously that came out so easily and that just is so fluent. But you can imagine the writing process to have reached that level of perfect rhythm, perfect nuances, perfect observations of people saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. And then having done the writing bit, getting the ensemble to work…

Isabel: When she wrote Dinner Ladies, I don’t think she’d done much for a few years. So she’d been working on it for ages. And famously, the work system that she did for Dinner Ladies, her acting troupe absolutely hated. It was performed in front of a studio audience, recorded in front of the studio audience, and they did it twice in a week. They did the first performance in front of the studio audience on a Friday evening, got laughs, didn’t get laughs, whatever. Victoria went away and practically stayed up all night on the Friday night, rewriting the bits that she thought could go better because she heard what didn’t quite work on stage or something. So in the morning, Saturday, everybody turned up, bricking it because they knew what she’d been doing and she’d be handing out all these new scripts, and they had to relearn different lines and then perform them again hours later to another studio audience, and everyone was exhausted and everyone got bad-tempered with her. But they… interviewed later on, they said, of course, she was a genius and that’s how it worked so well. But at the time, they found it really hard.

Lev: But that’s… I mean obviously the rewrites is one thing, that might have come partly from her doing stand-up, where you’re – presumably, I gather, I’ve never done stand-up – but you’re noticing what goes wrong and changing, changing, changing until, you know, finally ideally it gets better and better and better… but that’s the vagaries of different audiences, so you’ll get something that hits one night…

Isabel: Exactly. It doesn’t land at all the next.

Lev: If you’re doing that for yourself as a stand-up, then that’s one thing. But if you’re doing it and then demanding that the cast do it, having already done that work…

Isabel: It paid off.

Lev: In her prolific, fairly prolific output – Dinner Ladies is one thing – what’s your favourite if you had to pick one bit of Victoria Wood?

Isabel: She could do everything though. It’s really hard. No, I refuse that question. I can’t possibly choose. I mean, Dinner Ladies is classic sitcom and tightly plotted and all the things that you said it was. She could do stand-up. She’d been doing stand-up and selling out the Albert Hall, for years. She started off as a pianist because she was so shy. She used to hide behind a piano and some of her song lyrics are absolutely inspired. I mean, the most famous is the Ballad of Barry and Frieda. I mean, let me just give you two little extracts from that. There was the famous “beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly” of course, which was fantastic. But also in the same rhythm, “roll with gay abandon on the tufted Wilton”… I mean she’s so specific. She once Got into a conversation about why a custard cream specifically was the funniest biscuit to use in a script, she really got into which words were funnier than others, and tufted Wilton is just brilliant.

Lev: It occupies the same area as Alan Bennett, that specific thing of very English, a specific kind of Britishness, Englishness.

Isabel: Yes.

Lev: You recognize that alternatives, you know, chocolate bourbons, are not as funny as custard creams. It’s not.

Isabel: I was going to give you another extract from her song Reincarnation, which actually I had never heard until these 10-year reminiscings came past on Bluesky and somebody shared Reincarnation. And it’s a brilliant song about how she’d wanted all these other lives and one wasn’t enough. And one of her characters said, “I’d prefer to stick to Mrs. Beeton, have a hob I can then reheat on, use my toaster with the ears of wheat on”.

Lev: laughs

Isabel: Along with all that she could she could really write serious drama as well, I mean one of her brilliant brilliant plays was called Housewife 49. She used diary entries in the World War II mass observation project that they ran. And Nella Last was a northern housewife and wrote in pencil and she wrote all these diaries. And Victoria Wood made a whole play out of her wartime experience. And it was very touching and moving, and not a comedy line in sight. And she acted in it as well and I think she won awards for it. But she could really write.

Lev: I didn’t see that. I presume it exists somewhere…

Isabel: And Pat and Margaret, have you seen her play Pat and Margaret with Julie Walters? They were two sisters. Victoria plays the northern chip-serving dinner lady type person and Judy Walters was the one separated very early on who went off to be a famous actress, I think in America, and came back very very glamorous, and it was their reunion and what happened with that, it’s very very good.

Lev: I think there’s something, when you’re talking about doing the stand-up and hiding behind the piano, is it also possible that there was the character Victoria Wood, who she played when she was on stage playing the stand-up?

Isabel: Oh, definitely.

Lev: And the actual person was completely different, so there was the mask that she wore, yeah.

Isabel: Yes, yes. I think Vic Reeves tells about when he acted with her when she wrote the script for the Morecambe and Wise play. I think when they were filming, they went out for dinner and she was very, very shy and they had a very stilted conversation and then he started observing their fellow diners and she was then taking the piss out of them and doing impressions, and they then completely opened up to each other through the medium of laughing at other people. So she just had to relax.

Lev: Excellent. Well, that’s a superb thing too. And thank you for shedding a little bit of light on one of the nation’s favourite comedians and writers.

Thing 3 – Gardening

Lev: Thing Three. This is a large subject, Thing Three. But it’s not a person.

Isabel: Do I get points for that?

Lev: Well you always get points for doing… all six things get points, and it’s not a competition… but yeah you’re winning at the moment. Thing Three is gardening.

Isabel: Yes.

Lev: It’s a big thing but you’re more specific about it.

Isabel: I am and I’m very aware that you probably vicariously know much more about it than I do because you happen to live with a garden designer, I believe.

Lev: Yes, and an extremely intrepid gardener and allotmenteer.

Isabel: Exactly. I don’t pretend. I come to this with the hugely enthusiastic amateur vibe. I know about three Latin names and don’t ask me to say them now. I can’t remember them. I don’t do that kind of gardening. I do the kind of gardening specifically where you do lots of hard work, and it is hard work, but then you get to loll about in the space that you’ve created from your hard work, and that is the point of gardening. We mentioned it before, but recently-ish – it’s been a few years now – I now live in the middle of the Cairngorms National Park in a plot that used to be used as a holiday home. And it basically needs a bit of TLC, a lot of TLC to make it into a garden instead of just a bit of a hill. I’ve got great plans, but the end plan, the end vision is to create some sort of circularish path that goes all the way around my plot. It makes it sound like a great estate. It’s not. It’s quite small, really. And it’s all up and down. You know, you’ve seen it.

Lev: It can be made to seem bigger with skillful skills.

Isabel: Well, yes, I have no skill, but lots of enthusiasm. But the idea, I mean, maybe it’s because I’m a writer, specifically a poet. I don’t know. We like dreaming and chewing the end of our pencil and staring up and stuff like that. But I want a path that goes all the way around and it’ll have to be sort of raised boardwalk through the boggy bits and they will be winding. You can wander around with a cuppa or a glass in hand and you can go by the pond and look at the tadpoles or you can look at the burn as it twinkles through the sunlit evenings. I don’t know. And you can stop and look at the view and look at the birds. And that is the point of the garden, I think.

Lev: Excellent.

Isabel: Does that make any sense? It’s not really getting any closer to being a thing. Sorry.

Lev: Well, it’s still a thing. It’s something that gives you joy. And I think what my description is, you’ve got to find it joyful or inspiring or interesting or magnificent or downright bizarre. It could be any of those.

Isabel: When I was tiny, I got given an edge of my dad’s vegetable patch and I could do what I wanted with it. So of course, I grew carrots. I was once a redhead, bright redhead. It’s gone a bit now. So for about three years constantly – I didn’t know anything about crop rotation then, I just grew carrots and I got really good at growing carrots and there’s a picture of me and, apparently, in a PVC Bugs Bunny apron which was quite apt, holding triumphantly this enormous carrot which was almost as tall as me – we have very sandy soil so yeah I’ve always been doing that…

Thing 4 – Theorbos

Lev: Thing number four, again, slightly in my wheelhouse, although I’ve never played or worked with anybody who plays them – slightly earlier than my period – is the theorbo.

Isabel: Isn’t that a great word?

Lev: It’s a great word and it’s a great thing, but we might have to explain to non-musicians, especially non-early musicians, exactly what a theorbo is. So, yeah, that’s your job. You can do that. You chose.

Isabel: Oh, God. I thought I’d get an easy round.

Lev: Why?

Isabel: Because this is in your wheelhouse and I knew you’d like it. Okay. Do you know what a lute looks like? Most people know what a lute looks like. Now you’ve got to imagine that you’re in one of those party games where you draw a little bit of somebody and then you fold it over and then somebody else draws the next bit and then somebody else draws the legs and then you open it up and it doesn’t look like anything or it looks weird. Anyway, somebody’s drawn a lute, and then the next bit, it’s a really long fold, so they’ve got to fill it up. And they just decided to draw a ridiculously long second neck, second fingerboard, shooting out about three miles, and stuck to the top. And you know when you take a pano shot with your phone and the thing you’re trying to take moves along the frame? So you end up with a cat that looks like a really, really long sausage or something. It’s like that. Have I got anywhere close to describing what it looks like?

Lev: That’s the perfect description. I always think of it as if it was an animal, you’d look at it and go, well, how did that evolve? Well, that’s evolved...

Isabel: The Friday afternoon design job.

Lev: Either the Friday afternoon design job or it’s that thing that has evolved specifically to get the fruit from the top of that tree, that weird tree that has co-evolved it because they...

Isabel: It’s the giraffe of lutes.

Lev: It is the giraffe of lutes. But what, Isabel, does it sound like?

Isabel: It’s the same, I think it’s the same, roughly the same register as a cello-ish. So you’ve got the kind of bass lute, I think, in the main guitar-y, lute-y area. And then you’ve got the bass section of the grand piano strings going up three miles past your left ear. And I don’t think you can change the notes on those. They’re just drones, open strings, and you can... the bass octave, basically a whole octave below what you then play on your little lute that’s in your lap. And also the strings aren’t… the high one at the far end and the low one at your end – they’ve stuck the high one in the middle. I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I love it. It looks amazing. It sounds absolutely extraordinary. It sounds like you’ve got a whole orchestra there.

Lev: Perhaps we should also explain under what circumstances a theorbo is played, and with other instruments. It’s not part of a regular orchestra. It’s an older instrument than that and it’s predominantly in early music.

Isabel: Well, apparently it got invented sometime in the late 16th century because Florence invented opera. I think that’s the story. Opera suddenly evolved and you had a little kind of lutey thing that used to accompany one sad poet singing his little heart out. And it was all very soft and intricate and, oh, poor me.

Lev: Yes.

Isabel: But that didn’t cut it when opera suddenly started being bigger and brashier and on stage and things. So they needed a bit, a bit more oomph, apparently. So they started inventing stuff. There’s a brilliant Elizabeth Kenney, who’s a lutenist, I think at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She has this fantastic 10-minute YouTube video, which she kind of explains the origins of it, which I could recommend it and I’m sure you can put it in the links afterwards.

Lev: Put that in the show notes, as the saying goes…

Isabel: And she did a really good explanation of it, and there’s Piccini who invented… he called it the arch lute which was a fantastic word, basically a lute with an extra neck, and then the other inventors worked on something else and they were trying to be all intellectual and Greek called it the chitarrone I think…

Lev: Yup.

Isabel: …but then because it looked a bit daft it got called the theorbo…

Lev: Big guitar. “-one” – that suffix in Italian, means “big”

Isabel: I’ll take your word for it

Lev: Violone…

Isabel: I don’t know, I didn’t do Italian.

Lev: Well I’m just… this is your first lesson.

Isabel: But then you’ve got these two words…

Lev: The chitarrone, the big guitar, yup.

Isabel: Thanks. So she’s got a hifalutin Greek music of the spheres guitar, refined thing. But also she says, explained that it looks so daft, it got called the theorbo, which is the sort of man in the corner of the farm yard, churning the hurdy gurdy. And she loves the fact that it’s got these two personalities coexisting in the same...

Lev: The rough and the refined.

Isabel: Yes, in the same stupid looking instrument.

Lev: And that people still play. I always find it fascinating as well… as I say, conducting is my thing, so orchestras are my thing.

Isabel: Have you ever conducted a theorbo?

Lev: I’ve never conducted a theorbo, but I have conducted instruments that sort of occasionally visit the orchestra but didn’t get a toehold in it. But you think about all these things that have been... invented and that are still played, and then think about how the other ones just got lost and aren’t played anymore. I mean, ridiculous. Bartók wrote in his opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, for a keyboard xylophone. So this is not a xylophone played with two sticks, but like a piano. And this is an instrument that happens to, well, I think there’s one of them in the world. And it never gets played because it’s a ridiculous thing. But because there is one piece of music that is actually quite well known and reasonably regularly done, every time Bluebeard’s Castle is done, they have to find a way of concocting this ridiculous xylophone part.

Isabel: Like Scriabin’s colour organ…

Lev: The colour organ, yes. So these magnificent things that just fell by the wayside, but occasionally people have to go, what do you think it was? How would you make that? But also there’s the other link with the theorbo and percussion, with my personal experience of lugging big things around on public transport or even in a van. My favourite personal experience, a regular one as a timpanist, was at the end of a concert, taking a large kettledrum out of a small… you know, a 32-inch drum, trying to get it out through a 30-inch...

Isabel: 28-inch…

Lev: Yeah, and somebody in the audience was passing by, watching you going, ah, bet you wish you played the piccolo. And thinking that...

Isabel: That is the line that people go to.

Lev: But they always think they’re the first person to have thought of it.

Isabel: They do. I’ve travelled on London tubes carrying a cello case.

Lev: “That’s a large violin.”

Isabel: “Is there a machine gun in there?”

Lev: We’re coming across as very embittered.

Isabel: Can I also just point out that you don’t do that anymore? You’ve swapped it for a teeny tiny little conductor’s baton that you can put in a back pocket.

Lev: But I still need the van for my massive ego. Right, I think we’ve beaten the theorbo to a slow, lingering, painful death. Have you anything else to say about the theorbo, Isabel Rogers?

Isabel: No.

Lev: No, thank you very much.

Thing 5 – Loos In Space

Lev: Thing number five, I inevitably, seeing this on the page, I have to do the voice because you can’t see the words “loos in space” without thinking of the Muppets and going (*silly voice*) “looooooos iiiiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaaace”

Isabel: Which is exactly how I wrote it. So well done for that.

Lev: Perfect. Thank you for that. And this actually links quite neatly with a thing that previous pod guest brought on – Matt Brown. He brought on the International Space Station.

Isabel: Yes. I hope I wasn’t treading on his toes too much with this.

Lev: Not at all. I think it’s a complementary one because it’s more specific.

Isabel: Absolutely more specific.

Lev: So I ask you, is there a website devoted to the question, how many loos are there in space? Because there is one devoted to how many people there are in space.

Isabel: Do you know, I don’t know that. That wasn’t part of my research for this, but I bet there is.

Lev: There must be.

Isabel: I bet there is.

Lev: But do you know...

Isabel: But I do... Well, up until last week or two weeks ago, it was ten. It made double figures, which is why I suddenly thought of this, because when Artemis II launched to do its little jaunt around the moon, it brought the number of loos in space to ten.

Lev: Now it’s back to nine.

Isabel: It’s back down to nine, but I think reaching double digits seems a milestone for any intergalactic civilization, frankly. So we ought to celebrate that. There are various ones. I think there are four on the International Space Station all the time. And then you’ve got bits docked onto that. You’ve got the Soyuz docked, which has one, and then the Dragon docked, which also has one. And then there’s a Chinese space station, which has two, and then something docked onto that, which has one. So anyway, there are nine, going around at the moment. And then Artemis took it to 10. It’s important.

Lev: It is important. I have to ask you what exactly piqued your interest? Was it Artemis that piqued your interest in this? Because they were quite specific about it. And there were many things about that mission that I found terrific and really wonderful. Not least the views, but also the way they went about it, how the crew went about it and how they were and sharing so much stuff.

Isabel: Yes, and let’s face it, on Bluesky, we spent about two days absolutely riveted about their faulty loo, which was all anybody could talk about on the way.

Lev: And of course, the fact that it was fixed by the only woman.

Isabel: Of course. When Artemis went up, they got the new loo. It’s all terribly, terribly exciting because they’ve got a whole bathroom. And it’s a tiny space. Was it nine cubic meters or something for four people for ten days? Just ridiculous. But they actually had a door in the floor with a separate bathroom and they could close the door and do their business with the universal waste management system, which was fantastically named because nobody can say toilet. And did you know it was only 2020 that NASA spent 23 million quid inventing this new loo, the universal one. 2020! And it was the first time that they’d ever made it available for a female astronaut to use it as well. So before then, they would have to... I’m not going to get all technical. I’m sure we can all imagine that. But it wasn’t really quite right. And there have been female astronauts before that. And people have been zooming around in space for 60 years. And it took them 60 years to invent one that women could quite comfortably use as well. I mean, that’s quite something.

Lev: I think it also brings home the reality of it. I mean, it’s all such a lovely idea, isn’t it? “Oh, no, it’s okay. We can all go into space. You know, we can all live in space. We can all garden in space. We can live in it.

Isabel: But the point is, we’re animals. And if we’re going to go into space, we need air to breathe where there isn’t any and we need to be protected and we need food to eat and water to drink and you need to recycle your wee to drink the water on the ISS and all that kind of stuff. And you need somewhere to go to the loo. If you want to send poets up and be fantastic describing the dark side of the moon, which we all loved and NASA got loads out and we invented a whole new vocab for moon love or whatever it is they called it and everyone was getting really excited about all these new descriptions of sending real people there. You need to send loos up there because we are glorious and alive and messy and it’s important. And it’s the first thing kids ask if an astronaut goes and does a school talk or something. They say, how do you go to the...

Lev: What happens when you need to do a poo!

Isabel: You know, life is messy and wonderful and we should embrace that and all the invention that allows us to go out and be poets in space.

Lev: Absolutely. Thank you for the excellent Thing 5.

Isabel: You’re welcome.

Thing 6 – ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)

Lev: It’s another musical thing and I know music is a huge part of your life, and always has been and still is, always will be, and this is the biggest musical project in a certain way that I’ve ever come across, and it is something I have featured in Six Things but that was a couple of years ago and it’s good to be able to talk about it, because it is a wonderful idea that has been realised, and it is a piece called As SLow aS Possible. Written inevitably by John Cage, and is being played at this very moment and will be for a very, very long time. Tell me about Organ 2 slash ASLSP brackets as slow as possible by John Cage.

Isabel: It’s just ridiculous. And before we go on any further, I mean, what is with the capitalization of that title? This obviously doesn’t come across. It says as slow as possible. And the A is a capital A. And then the “SL” of the slow is capital, and then the S of the “as” is capital. It doesn’t make any sense. If anyone knows please write in. Anyway there you go it’s just brilliant, absolutely fantastic. John Cage of course famous for writing a completely silent – or not, it’s controversial – piece wrote this…

Lev: 4 minutes 33 seconds, or 4’33”, which is… it’s not silence it is ambient, it is the ambient noise of what happens to be in the room at the time, anyway…

Isabel: Thank you Mr Conductor…

Lev: That could be another thing…

Isabel: Do you conduct 4’33”? Do you have to stand there?

Lev: I did once do it as an experiment, with an orchestra, in the nature of silence in a rehearsal, and the nature of it… it didn’t go down well at all, it’s like “why, what the fuck are we doing?” I have performed it. The trouble, if we’re going to do this, the trouble with doing 4’33” is it has become such a thing and it’s… It’s almost it’s not long enough, because the first two minutes at least…

Isabel: I think it’s just buttock-clenchingly awkward, especially in this country…

Lev: …and then there’s giggling and then there’s… people… it takes at least as long as the piece lasts for people to settle into actually getting what it’s about

Isabel: You should hand out Leonard and Hungry Paul before you start and then the people can just get into being silent. Anyway, we digress.

Lev: We digress.

Isabel: So, as slow as possible. It’s a brilliant concept. I mean, Cage wrote it. I can’t remember how long the premiere was, but it was quite a sensible 40 minutes or something. I’ve no idea. It’s just a piece with various chords on an organ written down. And the only instruction he put is to play it as slow as possible. So, people have started... joking around with that and I think somebody did it over 24 hours or something and it broke records or something. Anyway, there’s a village in Germany called Halberstadt and they have a Cage Organ Society or something like that and they decided to do something with it. They’ve decided to make it last more than 600 years, which is ridiculous.

Lev: It’s also, it feels slightly arbitrary that, you know… “How long can it be? “Well, let’s say 600 years.” I wonder how this came about.

Isabel: Well, I can tell you.

Lev: I’m so glad you have an answer to that because I didn’t know.

Isabel: They interviewed the guy in charge, Rainer Neugebauer, I believe is his name, in charge of this. And apparently the 639 years is to mark the time between the construction of the world’s first 12-tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt in 1361 and the New Millennium. So that’s why they did it. And then Halberstadt conveniently had some abandoned 11th-Century convent that they donated. So they’ve got an organ in there and they do use an organ because they’ve made little teeny tiny sandbags that they put on the notes to hold them down so it can basically play as long as you want.

Lev: Yes, I think the listener might have been thinking, who is playing this?

Isabel: Ah, yes.

Lev: I’ll do two days and then you can come in and change over.

Isabel: Apparently the committee that was discussing this at the beginning, one of them suggested that the organist should just play there until he died on the seat. Which was vetoed, rather alarmingly. Yeah, so they built this organ and they’re still building it around the notes because they only change every few years. They did some terribly complicated maths apparently to work out how they could stretch it.

Lev: Exactly.

Isabel: And the first 17 months was just the bellows inflating. Because Cage had put a pause at the beginning before you start playing. So to stretch it out over these years, the pause should have been 17 months. And then they realized later that it should have been 28 months, but it was too late. They’ve started that and they’re not going to do it again.

Lev: You can’t go back to the beginning.

Isabel: So they started playing and every few years or so they change the chord and people troop off to this church and they stand around. I think a thousand people went for the last chord change and then they change the sandbags or something and then they think, oh, this is a new note.

Lev: Imagine if you screw it up.

Isabel: Well, apparently they’ve had people resign from this committee because they have had screw-ups. Apparently they had delayed one chord change because some local dignitary was off doing something else. So they delayed it for two weeks and the person swanned off in a huff because it was all wrong.

Lev: Right.

Isabel: Exactly.

Lev: “The rhythm is all wrong!”

Isabel: Oh dear. And it’s just hilarious. I think we’re all very grateful that it’s happening somewhere else that we can’t hear it. But knowing that it’s going on is the whole thing about it. And it’s brilliant. I think it was 2011, the organ had to be encased in acrylic glass because I think there were noise complaints for people living nearby.

Lev: Actually, I mean, genuinely, it must feel like the worst kind of tinnitus if you’re near it.

Isabel: Exactly, exactly.

Lev: I’m almost tempted to go for the note change, like a solar eclipse, it feels like something one should…

Isabel: Well, it’s coming up soon. I think the next one is on August the 5th. They always change it on the 5th of the month. We don’t know why. It’ll probably be explained somewhere. But the next one’s August this year. So we could all troop off to Halberstadt and watch the sandbags. I mean, there’s a very fine line between the philosophy of all this and being just plain daft. I’m not quite sure where it falls here, but I’m glad it exists.

Lev: Yes, that kind of hinterland, as you say, it’s good to know that it’s there, even if we don’t have to experience it.

Isabel: Especially if we don’t have to experience, I would say, but yes.

Lev: Definitely. Isabel, thank you. What a pleasure, as always, to chat to you. Thank you so much for your six extremely fine and worthy and worthwhile things.

Isabel: I was honoured to be invited. Thank you very much.

Lev: They are a great addition to the Museum of Six Things. And thank you, the listener, for listening to us talking about these six things. And I hope we’ll meet again very soon. Bye.

Who drew this?

I suspect that, unless you already know, your guess will be wide of the mark. Find out here.

Clickbait, yes, but it’s an interesting story nevertheless, even if it only goes to show what artists will do when they need a bit of monet.

Dammit.

Thing 2 – Wurlitzers

I’ve been meaning to share this for aaaaages, but somehow, for reasons that pass all understanding, it never quite made the cut. It’s a 1978 documentary about the idiosyncratic world of Wurlitzer-lovers, and it’s well worth 25 minutes of your time. Shared on Bluesky by Rose Ruane, whose wonderful book, Birding, is one of the books of the last couple of years.

Thing 3 – Clocks

Ever since we worked out how to mark the inexorable passing of time in visual form, there have been almost endless variations on the design of clocks. Few, though, can have been so wilfully unreadable as this, the aptly-named Accursèd Alphabetical Clock.

It has two modes, both annoying.

In Three-Hand mode, the hours, minutes, and seconds are each independently sorted by their English spelling, with a hand for each. In Combined mode, every possible time (43,200 of them) is spelled out, sorted alphabetically, and a single needle points to the current one.

And yet, for all its wanton impenetrability, there’s something rather charming about it.

As a bonus, here is Maarten Baas’s People’s Clock, which is anything but annoying and impenetrable – rather, it’s a wonderful and heartwarming example of what can be achieved when many people decide to do something unnecessarily complicated in the name of art and timekeeping. I mean, they could have just built a functional clock. This is much more fun.

And here’s how it was made.

Baas has form with innovative timekeeping devices. Here’s his Analog Digital Clock, a standard digital clock in which a man manually indicates the time by painting and revealing the digits. And then there’s the Sweeper’s Clock, consisting of two men sweeping trash for 12 hours, indicating the time as they go.

There’s also the original Schiphol Real Time Clock (it has a twin in Paddington, London), as featured all the way back in Volume 7.

Thing 4 – Tickets

Single-subject Instagram accounts are often intriguing rabbit holes, and rarely more than this one devoted to public transport tickets. The unimaginative cynic might ask “why?”, to which the only possible answer is “why not?”

Thing 5 – Sand

Every so on a social media post on the subject of sand under a microscope goes viral, and every so often I post my ho-ho-ho riposte:

I jest (as far too often), but there is something genuinely fascinating about these microscopic worlds, as even a brief exploration of this site devoted to magnified sand will prove. There’s even an interactive map.

Thing 6 – Suffering

Now look, I don’t include these games just to inflict unnecessary perturbation and despair.

No, wait, sorry…

I DO include these games just to inflict unnecessary p and d.

Anyway, as always, HAVE FUN.

It’s called Hostile Volume, and to progress all you have to do is set the volume to exactly 25% and hold it there for three seconds.

Its companion, the unofficial competition between developers and designers to come up with the worst volume control in the world, is nearly a decade old now but continues to give joy.

Hello on this, the 72nd anniversary of the least eventful day of the 20th century. Have a look at the relevant entries on Wikipedia and see if you disagree. Thanks to the always excellent Bluesky account Depths of Wikipedia for this timely gem.

Thing 2 – Labels

Ah this is really nice – a Flickr account dedicated to the art of the luggage label. It pulls off the neat trick of conjuring up nostalgia for places you’ve never been to and eras when you weren’t alive.

Thing 3 – Swing

Back in Volume 119 I shared the excellent story of a town called Baarle, in Belgium The Netherlands Belgium The Netherlands Europe.

Delightfully, it is now the home of the only cross-border swing in the world.

Thing 4 – Geograph

Geograph is quite the thing. A photography project open to all, it aims “to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland”. Since 2005 over 14,000 contributors have submitted over 8 million images, covering 85% of the total squares. An almost endlessly browseable resource. And of course you can add your own photographs.

Thing 5 – Thomasson

I have to say I’d never heard of the phenomenon known as Thomasson – you, more sophisticated and worldly, have no doubt been all over the concept for years. If so, please humour me.

Thomasson is “a preserved architectural relic which serves no purpose”. It was named in the 1980s by Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei after a baseball player called Gary Thomasson. Gary was of a type familiar to sports fans: very expensive but sadly unsuccessful. Akasegawa saw this as an analogy for “an object, part of a building, that was maintained in good condition, but with no purpose, to the point of becoming a work of art”.

There’s a really nice analysis, with plenty of examples, on the wildly explorable site MessyNessyChic. And Wikipedia, inevitably, has chapter and verse.

Thing 6 – JND

JND stands for “Just Noticeable Difference”. All you do is click on the line between the two colours on the screen. Easy, no? Yes, for a bit.

Then basically impossible.

Have fun! Don’t shout at me!

“Matchbooks were never designed to be preserved, yet they quietly documented the rhythms of a particular time; where people ate, drank, travelled, smoked and socialised.” – Billy Woods

At the intersection of nostalgia and everyday design, this collection of matchbooks is a vivid reminder of an age when smoking in public was commonplace (every household had at least a matchbook or two knocking about the place, whether there was a smoker in the house or not), and a celebration of lost ephemera. Lovely stuff.

Thing 2 – Modes

Randall Munroe recently introduced an extra layer of playfulness to XKCD with the addition of a mode menu. There’s a choice of 20, including “space opera”, “hacker”, “stained glass”, “boat” and my favourite, “origami”.

Thing 3 – Moon

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” – Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut.

I’m not especially space-y, but there are several aspects of Artemis II that I’ve found moving and noteworthy, not least this collection of photographs from the spacecraft, and particularly the above photograph of Christina Koch, space plumber extraordinaire and the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

Thing 4 – Cat Subway

Cat subway.

Cat. Subway.

CAT SUBWAY!

Thing 5 – Barometers

There is a Tumblr called @barometersontelevision, which acts as the official website for SABFAT (the Society of Appreciation for Barometers in Film and Television). I think that’s all you need to know.

Thing 6 – 50/50

I am “grateful” to Nathan Hamer for sending this game. Simply cut the food in half. What could possibly go wrong?

In 2016, prompted by the resurgence of my childhood enthusiasm for birds, I set out to see 200 British species. The above book was the result. Ten years on, I thought it would be fun to revisit it. Throughout 2026 I’ll be going out, looking for birds, revisiting old haunts, seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.

Free subscribers will get a monthly post – a little vignette from that month’s birding activity. There might be occasional references to Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? – enough, I hope, to pique your interest, but not so much as to irritate you if you either haven’t read the book or have no desire to. For the benefits of becoming a paying subscribers, see below this month’s piece, which concerns redwings and migration.

Melted Into Air

The redwings have gone. Slipped away overnight, leaving not a rack behind.

Rude. Would it have killed them to leave a note?

It’s not that I didn’t know they were leaving. Their presence sustains me through winter, but their departure is merely an intrinsic part of the natural order of things, a sign of the turning of the seasons. Redwings gather before migration; spring – or, more precisely, the first of at least seven false springs – is near.

The low-key burble of these sleek little thrushes was my early morning companion during the first two weeks of March. It came from behind the trees out back – just beyond my sight, no matter how much I craned my neck. Occasionally one of them would zip across my sightline on a mysterious and urgent redwing mission to… well, to that other tree over there, to be precise. And all the while the burble carried on. It reminded me – soggy anthropomorphist that I am – of the excited chatter of kids on a school trip. A discussion, perhaps, of the journey ahead – when to go, how high to fly, the best way to avoid the roadworks on the A2712.

Then, one morning, nothing. Just the plaintive wail of an angle grinder to accompany the insistent great tit and the energetic shouts of a horny wren. Redwings: gone. Off to Iceland, Norway, Sweden. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe even further east. Some will die on the way, inevitable casualties of the migratory lifestyle – perilous for the individual but benefitting the species as a whole.

I imagine them in the air, perhaps travelling in a loose group, calling across the night sky to keep in touch – tsee tsee, all good?, still there?, keep going, tsee tsee. Over the icy water, each bird a tiny dot on an unfathomably huge and complex map of connectivity.

There’s a lot of it about, this migration malarkey. A massive biannual shift in the distribution of birds across the planet, undertaken in some form by about 40% of the world’s 11,000 or so bird species. Each journey an individual adventure, each bird following its own itinerary.

The scale is one thing, and astonishing enough in its own right. But then you contemplate the how of it, and your brain melts a bit round the edges. It’s a reminder that no matter how clever we think we are, we should give our heads a wobble, take a seat and pay attention. There are more things in heaven and earth etcetera and so forth.

Because while we’ve discovered a lot about the mysteries of migration since Olden Times – when it was thought they flew to the moon/hibernated at the bottom of ponds/transformed into another species altogether (and plenty of other ideas we now regard as ridiculous) – and while recent advances in technology enable us to track individuals and groups in ways not previously considered possible, building a massive dataset that we hope will become a clear picture if we stand in the right place, the answer to many questions about migration is often “fucked if I know, sorry.”

We’re pretty sure that celestial maps, magnetoreception, day length, sun position, internal clocks and landmark recognition all play a part in their migration decisions. But to what extent, and how those factors combine with other influences – smell and hearing, to name just two – remains mysterious.

Perhaps it’s better not to worry. Just notice and appreciate it. Bid farewell to our winter visitors, and keep an eye and an ear out for the new arrivals coming to replace them from the south – warblers, wheatears, cuckoos, swallows, martins, swifts (ah, swifts!) and many more. And when they get here, perhaps we’ll murmur “ah, hello, you’re back”. A nod of respect for their endeavour, and a note to ourselves that despite the slackening of our collective thread of connection to the natural world, despite our continual and inexorable encroachment on it, these phenomena still mean something.

Not that the birds crave our attention, or even notice it for an instant. Did they leave a note? Did they heck.

So this is where we say goodbye to the free cohort.

For paying subscribers, there are extra goodies below the line. If you’d like to join them, this is what you’ll get:

– PDF and audio versions of that month’s chapter from Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

– an extra piece with more detail about the writing of the book, behind the scenes stuff, trivia, whatever crosses my mind

– occasional chat threads where you can ask questions about any aspect of the book: birds, music, places, the writing process, anything that occurs to you

– a whopping 50% discount on the signed and dedicated copy of the paperback edition

PS While I do earnestly invite you to sign up for the assorted goodies listed above, do please get in touch if you really want to take out a paid subscription but can’t afford it. No questions asked. There will also remain the option to chuck something into my tip jar via Ko-Fi.

LEAVE ME A TIP

This month’s extra content concerns the mysterious and addictive world of birdlistening.

Read more

My third guest is Matt Brown, London explorer and main contributor to Londonist’s excellent Time Machine newsletter, which provides a weekly look at London’s history from unusual angles.

You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).

The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.

Lev Parikian: Hello, and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian, and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre. And I’m delighted to welcome Matt Brown to this episode of Six Things. It’s fair to say that Matt is London-obsessed. In the cause of exploring London, he has waded along the buried River fleet twice, spent the night in a haunted plague pit, crawled through the little-known tunnel beneath the deck of London Bridge, and walked along the tracks beneath Leicester Square at 2am. Matt is the main contributor to Londonist Time Machine, a newsletter about the history of London. He’s also the author of 12 books, not all of them about London. There is, for example, the award-winning Atlas of Imagined Places and its sequel Atlas of Imagined Cities. And his most recent book, The Boroughs of London, explores the history and peculiarities of London’s 32 boroughs. Matt, thank you so much for coming on Six Things.

Matt Brown: Oh, thanks for having me, Lev. Big fan, big fan.

Lev: Oh, thank you very much. Well, we like big fans. And I’m also likewise a big fan of your work because I get the Londonist, the many Londonist missives into my inbox. And there’s always something that’s going to take me away from something I should actually be doing. So thanks for that. Just briefly, before we go on to your things, where did this London obsession start? I mean, you’ve lived in London all your life, have you?

Matt: No, so I’m actually from the Midlands originally, from a town called Grimsby on the East Coast, near the River Humber. But I’ve been down here now 27 years, so I’ve got this weird hybrid accent that’s partly Grimsby, partly London. And my love for it, I don’t really know, I think it’s… I’m a scientist by training, so I did chemistry and biochemistry, and that kind of scientist training, the brain you get as a scientist to explore, to be curious... to look into everything… it makes me… wherever I go I want to explore the city in minute detail, maybe catalog it and build spreadsheets of different places and things, so it’s… I approach the city from that scientist perspective, I guess. I still do even though i’m a recovering scientist these days. I don’t quite go to those geeky lengths anymore but it’s that combined with just the sheer magnitude of the history here, the different layers… it’s infinite, as Peter Ackroyd once described it. There’s… just any street has got a thousand stories. And I’ve been covering the city now for over 20 years, and still every time I walk the streets, I discover something new every single day. It is infinite.

Lev: That’s absolutely so right about noticing things. And I think… I would suspect that the majority of people who live in London, even people who visit it, don’t spend that much time doing anything like that and noticing all those things. One particular thing, local to where I live… I’m in West Norwood in South London, as you know, and there’s a series of lovely little plates in the various bits of the pavements. In fact, in the cemetery, there’s one as well, marking the course of the River Effra. These lovely things, they’re like manhole covers and they’re embedded in the pavement and they’re a beautiful design. And they say, you know, underneath your feet runs the River Effra, which is just a lovely little thing. When you notice it, you start looking for more. All sorts of things like that. Excellent. So let’s get on to these things.

Thing 1 – Tube Station Smells

Lev: Thing one. It is a London thing, as I partly expected you might. And I’ve got the title of it, Tube Station Smells. Perhaps you could elaborate on those three words.

Matt: Yes, I think even the least observant Londoner or visitor to the city, when they go down on the Tube, will notice smells. They’re rarely unpleasant, but there are smells. I think I noticed particularly on the Bakerloo line, there’s this strange smell through the central section, particularly as you get down sort of Waterloo-Lambeth way. I think it’s a sort of smell of rodent, a mousy smell, not in a particularly horrible way. I associate it with mice. I think that’s what it is. A few years ago, I thought, what other smells are there down there? What else can I detect? So I actually spent a few weeks going around town into each tube station in the central area, having a good sniff of the air and writing down what I thought that station smelt of. Now, unfortunately, I was interrupted by the COVID pandemic. So I had to finish that map because I turned it into a tube map of smells. I had to finish it after the COVID pandemic. So I was there in 2021, 22, going around sniffing tube stations, which was a slightly scary, dodgy thing to be doing at that time, sniffing the air too heavily in tube stations. But anyway, I’ve produced this map. It’s available online. And it’s my impression of what each Central tube station smells like.

Lev: What it immediately made me think of was the first time I visited Paris. Because it felt to me… I was about 13… and Paris… the whole Metro has a distinctive smell of Paris Metro, not particularly any different stations with their different smells, but it smells so different from the London tube that I knew. And even now the modern tube, I think smells different from what it smelled like when I was a kid. I think.

Matt: Well, that’s an interesting angle. Yeah. How it’s changed over time as well.

Lev: I think, I think it’s, I think a lot, well, certainly the Jubilee line smells kind of fresher in a way.

Matt: Yeah. And there’s a vague ozone, a tincture of ozone on the air as well about it from the sliding doors on the platform guards.

Lev: Possibly. I wonder, I’d like to think they pipe it in like the supermarkets pipe in the bread smells. Just to give everybody an idea of the kind of things you smell, I’ve jotted down a few samples from your map. So Warren Street, it smells like “sooty milk”. I like this one. Marylebone – Marl’b’n – whichever way you prefer to pronounce it, is “Scalextric sparks”, which will probably only mean something to anybody who played with Scalextric as a kid. And that’s a niche subset. You can Google it if you want. Marble arch is just “toast”, which is admirably succinct. I wonder, were you having a stroke when you did that? If you smell burnt toast, you’re having a stroke. Notting Hill Gate, and this is on the nose, “coins”.

Matt: I don’t know why, it just did.

Lev: And then this one I’m going to just needle you with a little bit, which is Embankment, which you say smells like “sweaty cardigan, but not mine”, which feels a little bit like protesting too much.

Matt: Well, the thing is, I don’t own and have never owned a cardigan, so that one’s slightly more objective. So it definitely isn’t my cardigan. I’m not sure where that one was coming from, to be honest. There are a lot of common smells. The toast one, I think, you can detect in various places. I think what it is, in a lot of cases, it’s street food above the station wafting down. You often get a waffle smell, like Belgian waffles and things like that.

Lev: Yes, it’s a Westminster smell. Yeah, Westminster and those nuts, the caramelised nuts.

Matt: They always smell so nice, but you know you shouldn’t buy them. I’ve never actually bought them or tried them, but they smell so good, don’t they?

Lev: Yeah. So have you had any pushback? I know you published this on Londonist. Did you get green ink letters saying, “Sir, how dare you say Warren Street – my favourite station of all – smells of sooty milk of all things”.

Matt: It’s milky soot. Got it the wrong way around.

Lev: Yes, exactly.

Matt: No, I mean, I deliberately made it… It’s got to be a subjective exercise. I was hoping that people would push back with their own suggestions and amendments and observations. With any of these things we put on the Londonist website, we always put them on social media as well. And of course, then invite feedback through Facebook and X and things like that. So we’ve got a long thread of other people’s opinions on there as well. I could compile those into maybe an average smell that people get… 20 different opinions about one station and see if there’s one that is overwhelmingly the most popular.

Lev: Yeah, I think it’s… obviously it’s a bit of silly fun, as so many useful things are, because I think what it might do, of course, is encourage people to go around and notice the smells of London, even if it’s not a smell that assaults the nasal membrane, that they actually go, “OK, what does... I’m getting cinnamon, I’m getting plums and, you know, that kind of thing to remind us that we have, you know, it’s not just looking and hearing things, that places have their distinctive smells.

Thing 2 – Parakeets

Lev: This is very much in my area as a bird lover and a nature writer. Let’s go straight in and just say the single word – and it’s a very contentious word for many people – parakeets.

Matt: I love them. I know people hate them. I love them. I think they’re a flash of colour. I like colour. We’re too grey and black in the city sometimes, there’s too much dark shades everywhere. I see both you and I are wearing black shirts as I’m speaking, but a splash of colour is always welcome and the parakeets add that. And the noise can be a bit over the top, kind of a bit too much, depending if you’re too close to a roost. But I quite like that as well. It’s just all part of the thing that London is. It’s a place of immigrants and people coming here to make their their living and parakeets are an example of that because of course they’re non-native species from Asia originally, I think, and so it’s great to have them here I think.

Lev: I write for the guardian every few weeks in the Country Diary, and usually there’s about six comments underneath the thing saying “oh this is nice” or “I’ve got my own story about this”… when I wrote about parakeets it was the most contentious thing – it’s the one thing that people do have opinions about in the bird world is parakeets, and they do divide people. There are those who like you say, it’s a lovely flash of color and a bit of sound, and otherwise we have drab lives. And then there are other people who will say they are even worse than the feral pigeons, you know, even more disruptive and rowdy. We have them on our feeders occasionally. They’ll come every few weeks, not mob handed, but four or five and they do raise a ruckus. And occasionally a bold great tit will get up on the feeder next to it and go, “Yeah, what are you going to do about it, pal? But they do… for the context, they’re not, as you say, they’re not a native British bird. They have… invaded is such a horrible word… but they have… a population has sprung up in the last 40 or so years, I think it is, maybe 40 or 50. The first time I encountered them was…I play… occasionally, I play cricket for a side that plays in southwest London. And we play our games in the grounds of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. And one day I was just idly fielding and was distracted by a squawk behind me. I thought, well, that’s odd. That’s not a bird I know. And there was this green parakeet. Unfortunately, the arrival of the parakeet also coincided with the arrival of the ball, which I then dropped. At least I had an excuse that time. Usually I drop it and I’ve got no excuse. “But the parakeets got in my eye, honest”. So that was probably in the early 1990s. And I think anybody with any kind of observation of London wildlife will have noticed that they have grown and spread since then. They’ve spread quite a long way. Reports now, even up in Scotland – Edinburgh and Glasgow, as far as that, and certainly into the north of England. Do you know where they came from, how they came to be here?

Matt: Well, there were all these urban legends, aren’t there? There’s one that Jimi Hendrix released them on Carnaby Street in the 60s, which is nonsense because there were reports of them long before then. There’s the theory they escaped from the set of The African Queen, which was filmed… that was over in West London somewhere, wasn’t it?

Lev: Shepperton, yeah.

Matt: Shepperton, yeah, which... which would make sense in that there are large populations in Richmond and over to that part of town and Twickenham and Teddington, as you say. Most ornithologists and scientists would say that they were just gradually released piecemeal bit by bit over the years from different aviaries, or escaped. There was… the Great Storm is another one. The 1987 Great Storm destroyed lots of aviaries, apparently, and they all escaped then. But again, they were already quite common before that.

Lev: Yeah, I’m not buying that one, although I haven’t heard it. The Jimi Hendrix and African Queen stories are the ones that I’ve seen and heard the most, and I wonder now if they’re actually being more repeated more often by people like you and me seeking to debunk them than anybody actually saying, “Oh, that’s where they came from.” But they certainly, as you say, the geography works for the African Queen story because that… southwest London was... as far as I know, that’s where the original population took hold. So that would make sense. But the timeline doesn’t really make sense. And it’s all, you know, it’s kind of, it’s a lovely idea, but it’s just kind of implausible.

Matt: I actually had the pleasure of asking… so Hendrix’s girlfriend, Etchingham, Cathy or Julie Etchingham, I’ve forgotten her name. She was reopening the Handel Hendrix Museum. There’s this wonderful museum. It’s a museum, well, you know, as a musician, Handel and Hendrix lived next door to each other, obviously at different times.

Lev: It’s that magnificent connection, isn’t it?

Matt: It’s amazing, yeah. And so she was reopening this museum about 10 years ago, and I asked her in the press conference, did you know about this story of Hendrix releasing the parakeets on Carnaby Street and she’d never even heard the story before so I think we can safely say that that one’s just made up by somebody

Lev: Yeah i think so… I think the truth is, as you say, rather more mundane and birds escape and sometimes they establish a little foothold and the climate is fairly conducive to them nowadays… they’ve found it easier. And they are adaptable. They’re also… they nest quite early in the year, I think. So they’re hole nesters. So they’ll build their nests in the holes made by other birds – woodpeckers are one example. And they do make these large roosts in big public places. Near us in Brockwell Park, there’s quite a large one, I think. So you wouldn’t necessarily want that in your own garden, and if you back onto Richmond Park near the roost then I could imagine that’s quite disruptive. There is a photograph of you… I found… one of the first hits actually. Put it this way, you’re 75% Matt and 25% parakeet.

Matt: Yeah, this is a spot in Kensington Gardens, I discovered, which has actually been cordoned off now. I don’t know if it’s because of the publicity from this article was getting people to go there. But the parakeet seemed particularly tame. They were pecking around on the floor, which you don’t normally see. And I went up to them. I had an apple in my bag. I got it out of my bag and held it up. And three or four of these things landed on my arm and started pecking away at the apple. So I came back a few weeks later and repeated it with my camera so I could get a nice article and video out of it. And they did the same thing again. And they were really tame. I actually got this passing guy to hold the camera for me and take the photos. And he turned out to be some kind of Buddhist monk. He was over here from Nepal or somewhere like that. And he was terrified of these things. He wouldn’t get close to me to hand the camera over. Eventually gave it to him. But he found these birds really threatening and scary. So I don’t think everyone loves them quite to the extent I do. I can’t speak to the point about them endangering native birds, but in all other aspects, I love them. I think they’re gorgeous.

Lev: There’s one other little aspect of them which I love, and as I said, I could go on forever about this. But if you look closely at a parakeet, they’ve got the red beak, but they also have a matching, accessorised, beautiful little red eye ring, very slender ring around the eye. And the noise they make, of course, is the familiar squawk. But get one that’s sitting on a branch above your head just by itself, and you’ll find it’s sort of burbling to itself. So it’ll have done the [IMPERSONATES PARAKEET SQUAWK] and then it lands and it starts to go [IMPERSONATES PARAKEET BURBLE] to itself. So that’s something to look out for. I can’t speak to the smell of them, though. I don’t know about that.

Thing 3 – Wetherspoons Carpets

Lev: So we’ve got two fairly already contentious things, I think. We’ve got the smell of tube stations, which people will disagree about. We’ve got parakeets that people will disagree about. Do you think people will disagree about thing three? Wetherspoons carpets.

Matt: I think most people in this country who are pub goers will know about the Wetherspoons chain. They’re famous for their very cheap beer. I found a pint of beer in there recently under £2, which I don’t remember even in the 1990s being able to get a pint that cheap. They’ve got quite a nice range of beer. They’re very large. They do nice food. So there are all these things going for them. But the best thing about them, they’ve got these extraordinary carpets. Every branch has got its own unique design, which is custom made for that branch of Wetherspoons. And quite often things are woven into the pattern to represent the local history or the local area. One example, for example, is in Paddington, a newly opened one on Paddington Basin. It’s named the Alexander Fleming because penicillin was discovered around the corner in St Mary’s Hospital. And they’ve woven kind of penicillin spores into the carpet, which is slightly off-putting if you’re trying to eat food, but it’s kind of nice and historical at the same time.

Lev: Were you the first person to notice this or were there other people engaged in the carpet hunt?

Matt: There’s a whole community out there, I think, who photograph these things and look out for them. There’s a book came out maybe 13, 14 years ago called simply Wetherspoon’s Carpets. And of course, the chain has massively expanded since then. So there’s scope for a sequel, I think. But yeah, it’s a well-known phenomenon. And yeah, so each new opening, they go to extra lengths now to even put penicillin spores in there. So it’s quite special.

Lev: That’s really nice. And I think that the incongruity of it is, as you say, this is a cheap chain known, and actually sometimes kind of derided and dismissed, I think…

Matt: That’s right.

Lev: …for its cheapness. And yet they’ve gone to this extra cost and extra length for something that you would associate more with some sort of gastropub or some kind of beer parlour place, you know, “and look at our bespoke carpets as well”. And I think this is an excellent thing. And it’s not cheap the way they’ve gone about it, because this isn’t just any, as you say, they’re all individually designed, so that’s one thing. But apparently they are really nice Axminster carpets chosen because they have a wider range of colours available to them so they can really go to town on these on these carpets. The websites devoted to them, I think, are particularly enjoyable because there’s quite a few of them, there’s several ones I’ve found. The one I like the most is the one where they’ve taken a photograph of every one they’ve been to, and there’s quite a lot, upwards of 100, and in every single photograph, the photographer’s feet are also included in the photograph. So they haven’t cropped the feet out.

Matt: I do that too. I don’t know why. I’ve not even seen those websites. It just feels like the natural thing to do. You need a focus as well as the background.

Lev: It’s proof that you were there. It’s not just generic photograph of the carpet. And I think the other thing is that the designs being related in some way to the pub or the area, or as you say, the person, is a particularly nice touch. Is it always detectable? I mean, if you look at the carpet, can you go, aha, that is a penicillin spore? Or do you have to sort of read…

Matt: Some more than others. I think it’s relatively new that they’ve made an effort to do that. I think some of the older ones are just interesting designs. It’s only in more recent years they’ve been more clever about it. There’s one, I think in Cambridge, I found one. It’s an old cinema and that’s, you can see reels, film reels built into the design. it’s things like i think ones that are out in more woody places or a place on the edge of the country you often get pine cones in the design or that kind of thing and even if there isn’t something it’s good it’s a good exercise to sit there and try and imagine how it might relate to the local area even if it’s just pareidolia or something that you’re not there’s nothing actually there but also I mean carpets in pubs are a good traditional thing which we almost lost. There aren’t many central London pubs where you can still find carpets on the floor because, of course, they’re difficult to maintain and keep fresh in the pub environment when drinks and food are being spilled all the time.

Lev They do have a relationship, therefore, to thing number one, which is the smell of carpets.

Matt: That’s right. There is a very distinct smell, isn’t there?

Lev: Yes, yeah.

Matt: Do you remember the Bree Louise pub up in Euston? They’ve demolished it now for HS2. That was a very much loved pub that specialised in craft ales or real ale. And it was great. I mean, the beer selection was wonderful, but their carpets really stank. There was like almost a toilet smell about them. Otherwise, that pub was brilliant. So there are hazards to having a carpet. They have to be looked after very well. But when they are, it really adds something homely to the pub, doesn’t it? Welcoming.

Thing 4 – Wazzbaffles

Lev: Very good. Well, we’re assailing the nostrils with smells, which leads us very smoothly on to thing number four, which is a word I had to Google. Inevitably, when I Googled it, it took me to something that you’d written. So I’m going to, again, say the word and then you can explain what the hell it means. The word is… I feel like Robert Robinson in Call My Bluff… the word is wazzbaffles.

Matt: These are the sort of thing… I like these because most people walk past them and never notice them in their lives. And once you do notice them, you see them everywhere. It’s one of those kind of things. And these are the angled surfaces you sometimes see along walls or in the corners between two walls. Forty-five degree angle and they’re there to stop gentlemen urinating against the wall, because the idea is that the wazzbaffle, it makes the expellation drip down onto their shoes, it comes back at them, bounces off the wall and off the slope and hits them, either in spray or in torrent… so these things are typically put down alleyways or in quiet corners the sort of places that drunk men might go to relieve themselves. And they’re a Victorian invention. So they’ve been around for, well, well over a century. I can give you one or two examples if you want to go check these things out.

Lev: First, I want to ask you, did you workshop the word wazzbaffle? Because I think this is something that you’ve coined yourself.

Matt: The formal phrase was urine deflectors or words to that effect.

Lev: That’s terribly bland, isn’t it?

Matt: Yes.

Lev: Utilitarian.

Matt: Yes. I think I woke up with the word in my head one day. I don’t know what kind of dreams I was having. But for those overseas, wazz is a kind of colloquialism for urination. In English, British English, we say wazz, have a wazz. And baffle is a sloping surface, an architectural feature, usually to balance light or heat. But here I’m using it to deflect urine. There’s some argument about whether these things would actually work. I mean, every time I post about these things, there’s people saying, “Well, that wouldn’t stop it. You just take it slowly and it would gradually drip off.” So I’ve never done the experiment as a former scientist that maybe I should, but I think I could be arrested for doing such an experiment.

Lev: You say the Victorians, as with so many things, they invented them. They also brought in the widespread use of public toilets, didn’t they?

Matt: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, there have always been some form of public toilet. Dick Whittington, or Richard Whittington, was famous for many things. And one of them was he built a massive toilet in the square mile in the 14th century. So even in medieval times, they had… Whittington’s Longhouse, I think it was called, and that had space for 30 or 40 people at the same time. And it had a men’s section and a women’s section. So it was very forward thinking. And of course, the Victorians, as you say, went to town on this, literally, and they built urinals all over the place, nearly always for gentlemen. You’ll see two or three designs that… there are quite… most commonly the subterranean toilets, many of which have been converted into cafes, or one was a nightclub for a while. So there are various uses. Some of them are still toilets, increasingly rare, but one or two of them you can still go in. And then you get standalone cubicles as well, which are quite rare, these green painted things. There’s one hiding in the woods in Twickenham in one of the parks there. There’s another one off Chancery Lane down an alleyway, and you sometimes find these dotted around

Lev: And is there also not a fairly recent invention… the pop-up urinal, which is a sort of tubular thing that comes up out of the pavement?

Matt: Yeah see I think they were only designed for instagrammers and tiktokers to stand on top of as they’re rising it’s to get an interesting video…

Lev: So, you could… i interrupted you when you were about to tell us where we might find a good example of a wazzbaffle…

Matt: Yeah, so there’s quite a few in central London, and any anonymous corner or alleyway is likely to have something like this. It’s not always metal, so sometimes they’re metal slopes, sometimes it’s built into the structure of the wall itself. The longest wazzbaffle in London that I’ve spotted… If you know Charing Cross Station and you go up to the sort of, there’s a back exit to it, which leads out to a very long footpath, a raised footpath over Villiers Street towards the river. And you go along there, you go inside an old brick structure, which is part of the original Charing Cross Station. And in there, there’s some sloped surfaces that I think were put in there to stop people having... weeing, let’s say it’s a nice word for it, against the walls. So that’s the longest. But my favourite wazzbaffle in the whole of London is just off Fleet Street. Anyone listening to this who’s never walked down Fleet Street, do it because there’s so many wonderful alleyways off to the north side and some to the south. Always go explore those, you’ll find all kinds of things. The best one of all is Clifford’s Inn Passage… it leads to an old legal building called Clifford’s Inn, and down there they’ve got these exemplary wazzbaffles… they’re made of stainless steel I believe, and they run the length of the passageway… and they’re gorgeous big chunky metallic things which once you spot them, you can’t ever not spot was baffles again because you get it in your head that these things are down there…

Lev: That’s the picture of the wazzbaffle. All of your things, they come from close and detailed observation, I think, or just being interested in the curious. Is that something you’ve always had? Have you always been interested in odd things and out of the way things?

Matt: Yeah, I think so. I think, as I said at the start, that my scientific background makes me want to examine everything maybe that little bit more carefully. Walking the streets today, I just don’t notice the people. I’m almost bumping into people and I won’t spot a crime on the other side of the street. Not that much of that happens, but because I’m looking at wazzbaffles or plaques or interesting doors.

Lev: Stink pipes.

Matt: Yeah, stink pipes, another good one. There’s some very good ones in your part of town as well.

Lev: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I just don’t notice the people. I’m forever looking at the walls and the floors and the rooftops. And I think that’s a good thing and a bad thing. I probably miss out on a lot of human interaction.

Lev: It strikes me as a very good way to live. You’re taking an interest in the world around you.

Thing 5 – Diamond Geezer

Lev: Because you’re not the only person who’s interested in London… I wouldn’t like people to think that you have a monopoly on London-based stuff. And thing number five is not a thing but a person. And it’s a person who goes by the name Diamond Geezer.

Matt: Yes, so that’s not his real name. I don’t actually know his real name, even though I’ve met him on maybe 20, 30 occasions. I always want to keep it a mystery. So he blogs under the name Diamond Geezer. Now he’s, in my opinion, the Samuel Pepys of our day. He started blogging 22, 23 years ago, so he’s been going all that time. Still uses the original blog template, so reading his blog is like going back in time.

Lev: It’s a wonderful throwback to the 90s, isn’t it? Fantastic.

Matt: Yeah. And he does that deliberately. He wants to maintain, like in aspic, how blogging used to be. And he blogs every single day, has done for all of those years. And the minutiae he observes the city in goes way, way beyond what I do. And for example, I mean, not just what he observes, but where he goes. Last year in 2025, he... kept a tally of every time he went to every single London borough, of which there are 32 or 33 if you include the square mile. He’d been to every single borough 40 times at least which means you’d have to go to three or four boroughs every single day, and that’s extraordinary… that takes real real effort. I mean he is retired so he’s got a bit more time on his hands…

Lev: …but also the dedication and the relentless interest in the subject. Recently he started doing an alphabetical tour of I think what he describes as unloved London suburbs. So places that people who don’t live there don’t know about. His restraint is that it mustn’t have a train station or a tube station or even a tram stop. So these are real local pockets of London, which, as you say, there’s… it’s an infinite subject.

Matt: It’s a double-edged sword in a way for the reader, because do you necessarily want to read about a tiny suburb that you’re never going to go to, you’ve got no personal interest in? But yes, you do, because he always writes it with such verve and such wit. And he’s always right. He gets all his facts right. He’s like a machine. And he’s so readable as well. So I always say to him, we have to make sure your blog gets preserved, because this is an artifact. It’s how London has changed over 25 years or whatever and beyond. And he talks about subjects nobody else will talk about. He’ll pick a bus stop in one of these places you mentioned and write a whole 2000-word essay about what’s going on around the bus stop, which can sound really dull, but it never is. It’s always very well done.

Lev: As you say, the Samuel Pepys of our age...

Thing 6 – International Space Station

Lev: We leave London now for thing number six, your final and possibly defining thing, the one that will sum up everything, and it is the International Space Station.

Matt: Yeah, I’ve been entranced by space from a young age. I think a lot of people are. It’s one of those romantic topics. It’s about technology, human progress, what’s out there. And it also speaks to fundamental philosophical things like where do we come from? What’s the universe here for? Going out into space is one of our ways of trying to solve those questions. So when I was a teenager, I used to have posters of the space shuttle on my wall, whereas all my friends had Cindy Crawford and people like that on the walls. Mine was always different. I could tell the four space shuttles apart by their tiling patterns. That’s kind of the level of geekery I was getting into. And I’ve maintained that into adulthood. I still love the space program. I mean, I’m aware of all the kind of pros and cons and the financial reasons and the dangers and all that. But just the sheer romanticism of it and the thought of exploring and getting out there and what’s beyond still appeals to me. And the International Space Station is a real symbol of that. I think it’s underappreciated now. I think historians of the future will look back at it with wonder and think, wow, they put that together with primitive early 21st-century technology. But it’s huge. I mean, this thing is the length of like five or six double-decker buses. It’s got the capacity of two or three jumbo jets. It’s got loads of space up there. It had to be launched over 40 or 50 different missions and then all bolted together in orbit. Absolutely massive. So large, in fact, you can see it very clearly when it passes overhead at night time. There are websites that will tell you when it’s coming over London or your part of the world.

Lev: Incidentally, just a very nice mention there for the classic unit of measurement, the double-decker bus. Full points there. If you’d managed to get Wales or Belgium in there somewhere or Nelson’s Column, that would have been...

Matt: Tennis court.

Lev: Yeah, tennis courts. The fact that it’s so visible as well, because it is in near-Earth orbit, that you can look up and it is this slow-moving, quite shiny, really bright object. It’s a connection. I remember hearing an interview with Chris Hadfield fairly shortly after he came off the station talking about the world and the way it changed his view of the world. And he said something like, the interesting thing was that on the first few times when it went round, the astronauts would be looking down and pointing out, “there’s my village”, looking out for their village or their town where they grew up. And then the next few times they’d be saying, “Well, there’s my county” and then “There’s my country”. And then gradually they just expanded, “Well, there’s the world and we’re all in it together.” It’s a beacon of hope in a way, isn’t it?

Matt: Well, it is. It’s for two reasons. I mean, it’s been up there a long time. It’s been up there 25 years. It’s been permanently occupied. So if you’re younger than 25, which I don’t think either of us are, but some listeners may be younger than 25, you’ve never lived a day of your life where there haven’t been people in space. And before the turn of the century, that wasn’t true. There’s always been long gaps between space flights permanently occupied. But its real resonance is the way it brings international groups together. It’s always crewed by at least people from the USA and Russia working together up there still, despite tensions here on Earth, but also crews from Europe, from Japan, and various visiting countries as well. It truly is international. And it’s one of those few spaces that is kind of outside the bounds of the normal territorial system. It’s where people come together, a bit like Antarctica, to do research and to live the human experience in a challenging environment and to learn from it. For all those reasons, it’s a beacon of hope. But also a beacon of now, it makes us realise what humans can do when they get together, when they’ve got massive amounts of money as well, because that’s also important to be able to build something like that. But what a triumph. And they are talking of de-orbiting it in four years now, so not long at all. Four years’ time, as plans stand, they’re going to de-orbit it into the, I think it’s the Pacific Ocean, which would be a real shame. I think there are calls in Congress to preserve it for longer. I think it should be preserved as a museum up there. Whenever people can go visit, I mean, the challenges to that, you’ve got to keep boosting its orbit and things to keep it up there. But it would be like trashing Westminster Abbey. It’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than that. A thousand years from now, the International Space Station will be of absolute importance to our history and we should preserve it, I think.

Lev: Yes, I think that’s really interesting. What you said about the technology felt very insightful. Years from now, people will look at that and think what primitive technology that was. Certainly when it was launched, We thought this was obviously the most cutting edge and the most amazing thing in the same way that in 1969, the moon landing, the moon rockets were the cutting edge technology. And of course, famously – I’m not sure this is really a very good analogy, I’ve been told it’s not a good analogy – but it is that, you know, the computing power that that powered the moon landing was equivalent to the computing power of a greetings card that plays Happy Birthday to you. There are reasons why that’s a bad analogy, but it gives you an idea of the scale of it. And that we think that, you know, even in the time that it’s been up there, it has… obviously it’s aged and technology has moved on. Thank you so much, Matt. Those are six wonderful things, very much in the spirit of Six Things. I will put some links into the notes so that people can explore and look around the internet and find out more about all of the things that you’ve discussed. And I hope all of these things bring you as much pleasure as they’ve brought me. So thank you so much, Matt, for being a guest on the Six Things podcast.

Matt: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks.

Lev: Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next month for six more excellent and fascinating things. Bye.

I saw my first sand martins of the year this week, darting around above suburban South London, and doing it with such grace and nonchalance, as if flying back to exactly the same place in England from West Africa when you’re five inches long is no big deal. For us it seems as close to a miracle as makes no difference; for them, it’s a way of life.

The journeys made by birds get a fair amount of attention, and the concept is familiar even to people with no interest in them. Less well known are the similar – and even more mind-boggling – exploits of insects. The migration of the Monarch butterfly has been well publicised, but I suspect most people are unaware of the extraordinary scale of these journeys, and the number of animals across multiple species undertaking them. This is a really good exploration of the subject and the technological advances that have advanced our knowledge of the subject in recent years.

Thing 2 – Search

I thoroughly recommend reading this guide, by Hana Lee Goldin, to making Google do what everyone actually wants it to do. It also contains suggestions for alternatives. Really useful, especially if you want to use the internet to, you know, find things out and stuff.

Thing 3 – Strandbeest

A couple of years ago I featured the marvellous contraptions called Strandbeest (‘beach animals’), made by Theo Jansen.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for featuring the most recent update on the development of these gloriously weird things.

Thing 4 – Wikicity

Mike Sowden, of Everything Is Amazing (you subscribe, yes? Subscribe.) sent me this marvellous thing. It is simply the top 100,000 Wikipedia pages rendered as an almost endlessly explorable cityscape.

Thing 5 – Museums

Friend of the stack Matt Brown of Londonist likes making connections. He also knows more about London than I suspect is healthy for a single person. A few weeks ago I featured his “entanglogram” of London history. And now he’s only gone and made another one, this time exploring the world of London’s museums (past, present and, if the powers that be have any respect for his wishlist, future).

Thing 6 – 100 Jumps

OK look I’m sorry. This is appallingly addictive. Please don’t hate me.

All you do is jump the little purple blob to the next shelf. 100 times. Simple, no?

No.

I’d love to meet a dodo. Also, for that matter, a Haast’s eagle or a Chatham penguin. And – if we’re doing this, which we seem to be – how about a Guadeloupe parakeet or a golden toad or a Steller’s sea cow or a quagga?

Alas. All gone.

These thoughts of extinct animals were prompted by two things. Firstly, I’ve been rereading Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine (as mentioned in last week’s Six Things).

But also, and rather more tangentially, this weekend I’m conducting Richard Strauss’ monumental Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony in English, or, if you want to show that you’re in the know, just ‘Alpine’).

To say that it describes a day of mountain climbing doesn’t do the piece anything like justice. Strauss had a great ability for descriptive composition – he devoted an entire piece, Symphonia Domestica, to portrayal of every aspect of his home life, and once made the extravagant claim that, if necessary, he could musically depict a knife and fork.

Who better, then, to write such a piece? He had a lot of compositional skill in his locker, and in Eine Alpensinfonie he took everything out of that locker and threw it into the music, from glowing sunrise to sombre nightfall and everything in between: woods, glaciers, streams, waterfalls, pastures, sunshine, fog, getting lost in the undergrowth, the uncanny atmosphere at the summit, and the most spectacular and alarmingly realistic storm scene in the musical literature. All wrapped up in a 50-minute orchestral extravaganza featuring a hefty string section, dozens of wind instruments, a shedload of percussion (including cowbells, wind machine and thunder sheet), an organ, two harps, and 12 offstage french horns who play for less than a minute near the beginning of the piece and are never heard again.

It’s thrilling, glorious stuff.

But what the hell does this all have to do with extinct animals?

Glad you asked.

At the beginning of the score, below the list of orchestral instruments, appears the following:
”The Samuels Aerophone is recommended to facilitate the long woodwind tied notes”.

And what, you further ask, is a “Samuels Aerophone”?

Glad, once again, you asked.

The Samuels Aerophone (or Aerophon or Aerophor or Aerophore – nobody can quite decide) was invented by Dutch flautist Bernard Samuels in 1912. It’s a device designed to help wind players play long notes without having to worry about the limitations of the human lung. A small foot-operated bellows connects to a rubber tube which leads to a mouthpiece – this sits in the corner of the player’s mouth, next to the instrument’s mouthpiece, and supplies air to the player. A water reservoir and electric light bulb make sure that the air supply is appropriately warm and damp, to match the player’s breath. Et voilà! Mechanical circular breathing. A magical device, which, according to this 1914 article, “will tinge the orchestra of the future with marvelous and hitherto unknown colors and will moreover serve a finer and more humanitarian end – it will conserve the player’s health and nervous energy.”

I’ve written all that in the present tense, as if the Samuels Aerophone (or Aerophon or Aerophor or Aerophore) is the kind of thing you can pick up at your local music shop.

Alas.

For the Samuels A (or A or A or A) has gone the way of the dodo, the quagga, the Guadeloupe parakeet and the Steller’s sea cow. For whatever reason, it never caught on. Perhaps the wind players of the day were resistant to change. Perhaps the technique of operating the footpump proved too much to deal with on top of the already onerous task of playing a musical instrument. Or perhaps it just didn’t work.

There are moves afoot to bring animals like the quagga back from extinction. I have mixed feelings about that. But if anyone wants to reconstruct the Samuels Aerophon/r/ne/re I’m all in.

Thing 2 – Lego Typewriter

Talking of gadgets…

The levels of invention, problem-solving and patience required to build a working Lego typewriter are several thousand levels above my paygrade. But that’s exactly what a Dutch YouTuber calling themselves Koenkun Bricks did. You can read a bit more about it here. And if that’s whetted your appetite, other Koenkun projects include a navigation system, a pool table and a skateboard.

Thing 3 – Bouba-Kiki

‘Bouba’ is round.

‘Kiki’ is spiky.

First observed by Georgian scientist Dimitri Uznadze (‘Uznadze’ is sort of soft and squishy, I think) in 1924, it’s a human intuition that holds reliably true across cultures and ages, and has long been thought a clue to the origin of language, something unique to humans.

Except that apparently chickens make the same connections as we do.

Thing 4 – Met Art

I’ve just spent a happy half-hour exploring this collection of high-definition 3D scans of art objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The quality of the images is pretty amazing, and shows up well even on a phone screen.

Obviously going to see the real thing is the ideal, but if you’re prevented from doing so for reasons of geography or laziness, then this is a pretty good substitute.

Some favourites:

– Van Gogh Wheat Field with Cypresses

– Statue of Horus as a falcon protecting King Nectanebo II

– Standing Buddha with Radiate Combined Halo

Thing 5 – Dartboards

Ever wondered how the classic and familiar dartboard design came about? Ever wondered if there were any variations on it?

Wonder no more.

Thing 6 – List Animals

Pretty simple game, this. Just list all the animals. No cheating.

The kākāpō is a now notorious nocturnal flightless parrot, endemic to New Zealand and quite spectacularly predisposed to making life hard for itself. Flightlessness is all well and good if, like the kākāpō, you evolve in splendid isolation from land predators. But when humans come along, bringing with them rats and cats and stoats and so on, things get more difficult. As Douglas Adams put it in Last Chance To See (the book he wrote with Mark Carwardine about endangered species):

“Its reaction when confronted with a predator is that it simply doesn’t know what the form is. It has no conception of the idea that anything could possibly want to hurt it, so it tends just to sit on its nest in a state of complete confusion and leaves the other animal to make the first move – which is usually a fairly swift and final one.”

As a result, by the 1990s, the population was down to 51 individuals.

In the kākāpō’s favour as a conservation flag-bearer, it is extremely adorable. Adams again:

“If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.”

Look at this photograph and tell me he’s wrong.

This is Sirocco. Now 28 years old, Sirocco gained notoriety in 2009 by trying to shag Mark Carwardine (in the follow-up TV series he made with Stephen Fry).

The frustrating thing about trying to save the kākāpō is that it seems not to want to save itself. Among other factors, its convoluted breeding process is tied to the fruiting of the rimu tree, an irregular and infrequent event. But this year sees just such an event, and there are high hopes that it could see a crucial boost to the current population of 236.

There’s a kākāpō nestcam. Recommended.

Thing 2 – Line of Sight

On a clear day you can see forever. Well, just over 530km, apparently. That’s the longest line of sight in the world (from an unnamed spot in the Himalayas near the India/China border to Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan) according to Tom Buckley-Houston,who’s spent eight years making this map, which gives you the longest line of sight from anywhere in the world. You will, no doubt, immediately seek out place familiar to you, and you might wonder at the results – bear in mind that the distances mentioned are a theoretical ideal, and don’t take into account the massive Leylandii hedge baulking your line-of-sight potential. Good fun.

He explains the process here.

Thing 3 – Happy

From The Pudding, a map of happy things, by Alvin Chang.

Thing 4 – Trees

Always keen on the shapes of trees, the gnarliness of roots, and patient human endeavour, I am of course an absolute sucker for this collection of extraordinary tree-shaping from Atlas Obscura.

Thing 5 – Fish Doorbell

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – the Fish Doorbell’s back. I featured it last year and the year before that. It’s one of those things that merits an annual repeat.

Every spring, with the advent of breeding season, fish migrate to their spawning ground. Those looking to do it via Utrecht face a problem – namely, the Weerdsluis lock, which is mostly shut at this time of year. The solution is remarkably simple. Just install an underwater webcam to monitor the lock, stream it on the web, and set up a button so that viewers can alert the lock operator when a fish wants through. When there are enough fish the operator opens the lock.

Genius.

Thing 6 – Tube Game

Thanks (or no thanks, more like) to Londonist for sharing this game, in which you have to find tube stations on a map against a stress-inducing countdown timer.

With apologies to those of you who have no knowledge of or interest in London and its underground rail network. You lot can have this one instead: drag six things into the correct order.

In 2016, prompted by the resurgence of my childhood enthusiasm for birds, I set out to see 200 British species. The above book was the result. Ten years on, I thought it would be fun to revisit it. Throughout 2026 I’ll be going out, looking for birds, revisiting old haunts, seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.

Free subscribers will get a monthly post – a little vignette from that month’s birding activity. There might be occasional references to Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? – enough, I hope, to pique your interest, but not so much as to irritate you if you either haven’t read the book or have no desire to. For the benefits of becoming a paying subscribers, see below this month’s piece, which concerns kestrels.

Do Kestrels Kill Humans?

“Cause of death?”

“Kestrel.”

“Kestrel?”

“Kestrel.”

“I… umm… I didn’t know they…”

“Hmmm?”

“Do kestrels… kill humans?”

“Not directly, no.”

“Oh good. I mean, I’m not up with these things, but I thought… I want to say voles?”

“Yes, voles. Also shrews, mice, and occasionally moles and rabbits. They’ll happily snack on beetles and so forth, too. And they have a fondness for small birds.”

“Oh really?”

“Larks, pipits, starlings…”

“Are you going to list…”

“Finches, tits, sometimes even larger birds like blackbirds. I once saw a kestrel take out a collared dove.”

“Because the thing is…”

“Feathers everywhere. Like an explosion at a pillow factory, it was.”

“Could you…”

“But not humans.”

“Ah, right. Good. So…”

“What kestrels do is this. They dart into your view on pointed wing, just in the corner of your eyesight, fleet and nimble. Then they stop. Just like that. Stop in midair, without even asking physics for permission, defying everything you thought you knew about gravity, aerodynamics, everything. Just hanging there with no visible means of support. Insane.”

“Okay.”

“And there they are, silhouetted against the sky, head quite still, making tiny adjustments of wings and tail and using a combination of four vestibular and optocollic reflexes to keep the head still while the rest of the body moves, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

“I…”

“And all so they can use their amazing vision – well, amazing to us but quite run-of-the-mill to them – to spot their prey. Did you know a kestrel can see a beetle at a distance of 50 yards?”

“Oh. Ah. Fascin—“

“And their ability to see the ultraviolet range of the colour spectrum means they can track the urine trails of their prey.”

“I have a feeling we’re straying slightly from the—“

“It’s an everyday aerobatic miracle of unceasing wonder – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!, as the poet Hopkins put it – and I just… you know, I find it irresistible. I can’t take my eyes off it. I know plenty of people might allow such a thing to pass them by, but there are wonders everywhere, if only we take the trouble to look.”

“I… yes, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. But… so…ummm, I still don’t quite see how it… I don’t want to be insensitive, but… how did the kestrel… you know… kill…?”

“Well, watching a kestrel – or any other bird, really – is a terrific way to pass the time. Millions of people derive untold pleasure from it, and it can become a fundamental part of their lives, whether as a hobby or a more serious pursuit. It’s just a really good, healthy and harmless thing to do. And – it’s worth pointing out – free at the point of delivery. And a bird like a kestrel can be what’s known as a ‘spark bird’, one that triggers curiosity and a more widespread interest in birdwatching.”

“Yes, understood.”

“But watching a kestrel – and believe me I speak from bitter and recent experience – is perhaps not such a clever thing to do when you’re in the fast lane of the M40.”

“Ah. Yes. I see now. Well, anyway... welcome to heaven.”

So this is where we say goodbye to the free cohort.

For paying subscribers, there are extra goodies below the line. If you’d like to join them, this is what you’ll get:

– PDF and audio versions of that month’s chapter from Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?

– an extra piece with more detail about the writing of the book, behind the scenes stuff, trivia, whatever crosses my mind

– occasional chat threads where you can ask questions about any aspect of the book: birds, music, places, the writing process, anything that occurs to you

– a whopping 50% discount on the signed and dedicated copy of the paperback edition

PS While I do earnestly invite you to sign up for the assorted goodies listed above, do please get in touch if you really want to take out a paid subscription but can’t afford it. No questions asked. There will also remain the option to chuck something into my tip jar via Ko-Fi.

LEAVE ME A TIP

This month’s extra content concerns swans, Sibelius and Sir Peter Scott.

Read more

You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).

The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.

Lev Parikian: Hello and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian, and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre. My guest this month is Chris Coates. Hello, Chris.

Chris Coates: Hello.

Lev: Chris has what I, a feckless artist and flâneur, call a proper job, writing about social science and other things in higher education. But he is also, in his own words, a part-time idiot, and in that capacity, posts – and again his own words – niche drivel on Medium and Bluesky, where his speciality is the thoroughly entertaining Odd This Day. Chris, perhaps you can tell us a bit about that to kick us off.

Chris: Yes. When I joined Twitter in 2013, I noticed that there were people doing “here is some history that happened on this day” stuff. And there used to be – I don’t know if there still is – a thing in the Times called On This Day. And I have an obscure book from 1980 by Jeremy Beadle called Today’s the Day. So I was kind of aware that people are interested in what’s happened on this day in history. But a lot of those are fairly conventional so it’s like, you know, Queen Victoria was born, Queen Victoria died, you know, and obviously, on this day is, you know, “today is the day that Queen Victoria survived the eighth of eight assassination attempts” or whatever it is. And William McGonagall wrote one of his terrible poems about it.

Lev: Magnificent.

Chris: But the other thing was there were people on Twitter doing “here’s something obscure from history that you might not be aware of”. So basically, I just took those two ideas and biffed them together.

Lev: And it’s an inspired idea. And obviously you’re very widely read and very knowledgeable about all sorts of things, but it comes across in the way you write about them – but do you spend an awful long time trawling the Internet for these things or do they arise as part of your regular daily reading, shall I say?

Chris: Yeah, I do read a lot of obscure, random things. Yes, I’ve always quite liked that saying of Ken Campbell’s: “I’m not mad, I’ve just read different books.”

Lev: That’s a lovely one.

Chris: I’m an apprentice in the foothills of Ken Campbell’s heights of lunacy. Yeah, I do read kind of a lot of different things. I’m reading about the Surrealists at the moment by Ruth Brandon, I think her name is. It’s called Surreal Lives. And there’s already, you know, I’ve folded over lots of corners.

Lev: Oh, you fold over corners as well?

Chris: Yes.

Lev: I’m so pleased to hear it, because… people, you’ll get the book crowd, the baying mob of “books are sacrosanct” people coming for you on that, but I dog ear books as well, especially when I’m researching things, and this is apparently… and I also write in them in pencil… and this is of course disgusting, because when you have a book you must frame it.

Chris: Yes, I used to be quite like that myself. I lent a friend a book a few years ago, and we’ve known each other since university, which is like 30-odd years ago. And she and I used to lend each other books. And I gave her this book and she said, it looks like you haven’t read it. And then went, oh, yes, of course, it’s one of your books.

Lev: Well, I think this interest in the random and the obscure sets you up very nicely to be a guest on Six Things, because we quite like random, obscure stuff. And you have presented six excellent, some fairly random things. So let’s kick things off with your Thing Number One.

Thing 1 – Portsmouth Sinfonia

Chris: Thing number one is the Portsmouth Sinfonia. It’s kind of, it seems appropriate to have a bit of music. This is an orchestra with a difference, I think we can say. It was founded at Plymouth School of Art in 1970, I think. And one of the people who founded, or the principal personal who founded it, was someone called Gavin Bryars, which to somebody like me who knows almost nothing about music is a sort of vaguely familiar name but it probably means quite a lot to you. The idea was that anybody could join this orchestra, essentially, and you didn’t have to be the best musician. And apparently people who could play an instrument were encouraged to pick up one they weren’t familiar with. I’ve kind of come to these people fairly recently because it’s sort of been talked about on Bluesky because I think their first album has just come out on CD. So I’ve come to this fairly recently and I’ve just sort of fallen in love with it, because it’s… you know that saying about, I think it’s supposed to be the sign of a sophisticated mind if you can hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Well it’s basically a perfect example of that, because there is this kind of serious, or at least semi-serious idea behind it in that it’s democratising access to music and to playing music. And the idea is that anybody can feel that kind of communal joy of making a piece of music, you know, in a group with other people. And rather than feeling that – as I would, for example, you know, I have no musical talent at all… it’s got this lovely kind of idea behind it, and at the same time it’s hilarious to listen to. They were billed by their publicist as the worst orchestra in Britain, I think, or in the world or something like that. And the opening track on this particular album, which is called The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics… and they open with the William Tell Overture.

Lev: Excellent. I mean, not excellent, as it turns out. It’s interesting because I’m all in favour of that idea. As you may know, I’m a musician. I conduct orchestras, and I conduct amateur orchestras quite a lot. Community orchestras, non-professional orchestras, whichever way you like to describe it. My father was a very good violinist, a professional violinist. And so I grew up in a house of some musical sophistication. And so when the Portsmouth Sinfonia came on, presumably it was on Nationwide or something in 1971 or 1972. I was very young. But I remember seeing them and thinking, what is this? And there being a general sort of air of sniffiness around them. I’m all in favour of that joyful playing of music together. Absolutely. And I’m interested in the idea that anybody should have to listen to it – but I’m delighted that you get joy from listening to it because as a musician I find it almost impossible to listen to for more than about 30 seconds, simply because that’s my job, going, I have to make this better. And the conductor, I think, didn’t know how to conduct at all. He was just kind of doing gestures that he thought looked interesting – which actually, some people would say, describes many professional conductors. But that’s a different story. But it does raise questions. And I think the other thing is that you say you found them hilarious to listen to, but if you put this to Bryars or any of the other founders, any other participants, there’s very much a sort of defensive thing. “No, no, it’s not funny. It’s not funny. It’s a very serious thing.” “But surely you must realize that people are going to find it…?” “No, no, no, it’s not funny at all. It’s a very serious experiment in art.” It’s an art installation of a kind.

Chris: Yes, I wonder about that. There’s a couple of documentaries about them on YouTube as well. One of them is an old Radio 4 show. Julian Jenkins, I think his name is. And he interviews Gavin Bryars. He puts to him the point about people being asked to pick up an instrument that’s unfamiliar to them. And Bryars says, “I think that’s a scurrilous rumour put about by the BBC.” So I do wonder if Gavin Bryars just has a good line in poker-faced interview technique.

Lev: Yes, possibly. And of course, the joke’s on us because they sold out the Albert Hall, didn’t they? Or something. There were concerts there, and they got a publicist on board who was obviously very good at it and managed to spread the word. There is now, I don’t know if they’re still going, but certainly a few years ago, there was a similar project in Edinburgh, which is, I think it’s the brainchild of Alexander McCall Smith, the very popular author. It’s either his brainchild or he’s deeply involved in it. And they’re called the Really Terrible Orchestra. And it’s a very similar thing. You know, the maximum requirement is Grade Three. And he’s an amateur bassoonist, I think, and loves tootling away on his bassoon. They get together for their own pleasure, but as a by-product, they have turned into this sort of popular spectacle.

Chris: Yes.

Lev: So it does raise… I’m sure he… this was the 70s after all, so there was a lot of experimental art going on anyway. And it was an art school, it was an art school project originally, wasn’t it?

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Lev: And so it’s one of those things that becomes, you know, “well, anybody can do that.” “Ah, yes, but you didn’t.”

Chris: Yes. So I was trying to kind of work out a way to describe it so people know what to expect.

Lev: Excellent. I’ll look forward to this.

Chris: And it occurred to me, it basically it’s like a cross between that rising orchestral bit at the end of A Day In The Life on Sergeant Pepper, and that school band playing Jingle Bells that does the rounds on social media every Christmas. It’s just this kind of glorious chaos, but it’s not quite chaos.

Lev: That’s the thing. It’s people trying very hard to do it well, as well as they can. I think that was part of the joy of it. If you’re able to shelve aside any musical things, there is a genuine desire to do this thing well. It reminds me of the way I play cricket. I’m not good, and the team I play for, we’re... there are some people with some talent but we’re getting on a bit and sometimes the point is not to do it well but to do it really really badly, but honestly. To do it as well as you possibly can, but I wouldn’t expect anybody to come and watch me play cricket…

Thing 2 – Japan’s Master of Restoration

Lev: So the wonderful or terrible or execrable, whichever way you describe it, joyful Portsmouth Sinfonia… an excellent and very interesting and lovely thing for people to explore. Contrasting with thing two, which is not people trying to do things as well as they possibly can and doing it badly, but precisely the opposite, I think.

Chris: Yeah, it’s expertise on the most extraordinary scale. This is Japan’s Master of Restoration, which I happened upon on iPlayer. My children mock me regularly for watching obscure documentaries about bits of the arts and stuff. My daughter’s favourite refrain is, “oh, you’re watching another documentary about pen lids, are you?” Which I haven’t actually done, but yeah.

Lev: Well, yeah, but it’s a documentary that’s crying out to be made, quite frankly. I probably would watch it.

Chris: Yeah, indeed. I would as well. I mean, there’s the physics of, you know, putting the little holes in the end.

Lev: Absolutely.

Chris: Swallow the pen lid, you don’t choke. I mean, you know. Anyway, Japan’s Master of Restoration is, I think I described it in an email to you, as it’s like The Repair Shop, but set in Japan. And with only one expert and turned up to 11. The people on The Repair Shop are, you know, clearly some of the best in their field. They’re obviously, you know, brilliant people. This guy, Koji Mayuyama, is, they call him, apparently his nickname is the God Hand. And he’s just extraordinary. There was a bit– it’s about 20 minutes into the first episode – where I was genuinely shouting at the television, “How are you doing this? How is this possible?” Basically, he is a restorer of Japanese artwork and specialises in ceramics, which is a big thing in Japanese culture. And yeah, there’s a bit, 20 minutes into the first episode, I think, where he’s working on a bowl or a dish or something, and he starts rubbing glaze into a crack in the thing with his finger, and the crack disappears.

Lev: It’s not filming magic it is… they’re just, you know, recording what he does. His extreme speciality is, he’s a master at in particular matching colours.

Chris: People may well know about Kintsugi, which is where you restore something with gold, so you kind of make a virtue of the fact that it’s broken and you draw attention to the fact that it’s broken, and this is like the exact opposite of that

Lev: Yes, although I think at one point he does say that sometimes he gets asked to do things so that the repair isn’t actually invisible. But there are, you know, he acknowledges Kintsugi as part of what he does. And it kind of depends on what the client wants. But still, yes, that complete invisibility.

Chris: Maybe the second episode, there’s a vase anyway. They discover it’s one of a pair and the other pair is, I think, in the British Museum. But it’s got a huge chunk missing from it, which has been covered up with a kind of metal clasp thing. So he prises off this metal clasp and you’re watching him do these things and go, this is going to, you know, if I was doing this, it would be in many, many more pieces by now. And yeah, he just builds these whole new sections of things and makes them look like they are hundreds of years old. It’s just extraordinary.

Lev: It’s extraordinary technical skill and dedication and patience. But there’s also the detective work that he goes into to discover which bits have been restored by somebody else quite badly or been restored by somebody else quite well, and how he’s going to approach the repair and how he’s going to reproduce these things with whichever it is. Another element of it that I loved – I’ve seen the first two episodes, there are three, I think, is that right? – is that his son is his apprentice and is working in the same field. And there’s this relationship of master and apprentice, father and son. And there is, I think, underlying it, there’s obviously a deep, deep love and respect. But there is also this feeling that he is quite a strict taskmaster and expects perfection. And to wring a compliment out of him would be the ultimate. It feels like that any kind of, any kind of congratulation from him is very, very hard won.

Chris: Yeah.

Lev: Is that fair?

Chris: Yeah, I think so. Yes. And I think that relationship is lovely to watch as well as all the other stuff. Koji, the father, he kind of looks like an accountant and the son has got this kind of slight rock star thing going on. And he’s sort of a little bit more, not quite irreverent but sort of almost…

Lev: He went to art school didn’t he? And after leaving art school did he think “I’ll go and be an artist”, or was it always going to be “No, you’re going to join the family trade.” And Koji’s father before him was even more perfectionist, and he talks about him with reverence, you know, “Well I’m no good but my father was really good”, so you imagine his father before that would have been even more… And there is something mesmerizing not just about his skill but the way the film’s made which is… it allows for slowness as well… this slow unfolding of a story and just the quiet industry of watching him go about the work, and the thoroughness. “We’re not going to rush into it. We’re going to assess this thing and see what needs to be done. Consider all the possibilities.”

Chris: Yeah. And, you know, I love The Repair Shop, but there is that kind of, you know, “We’ve got to fit three or four stories in and we’ve got to tell you the story behind the object”, and all of that. And this is much more slow and gentle and just, you know, “Here, look at this.”

Lev: Yeah.

Thing 3 – Julian & Sandy

Lev: …from the Japanese restoration master.

Chris: One of my notes is “from the sublime to the fantabulosa.”

Lev: Excellent.

Chris: So this is Julian and Sandy, who, for those who don’t know, were two recurring characters in a BBC radio comedy sketch show from the mid-to-late 1960s. It was called Round the Horne because it was kind of centred around this guy called Kenneth Horne. It was a sketch show with recurring characters who popped up and Kenneth Williams did lots of silly voices. I love, love Julian and Sandy. They are resting actors. In their own words, they are filling in between engagements and they do a variety of jobs because it gives the script writers a chance to throw in different things each week so they can be estate agents or hairdressers or lawyers or anything. The big thing about them is that they are played by Hugh Paddick as Julian and Kenneth Williams as Sandy, who were both gay men. And they are just unfeasibly camp characters. They’re just wonderful. So the first sketch that they appeared in was in March 1965. It was called Rent-A-Chap and they play male domestic servants who turn up because Kenneth Horne has called this agency called Rent-A-Chap. Two male domestic servants are going to come round and clean his flat for him. So you have all these conventions of radio comedy, you have the sound effect of the doorbell and the door being opened and then you just get this this voice going, “Oh hello I’m Julian and this is Sandy”, and then Kenneth Williams goes, “Yes, we’ve come to do for you”, and basically four minutes of camp anarchy is unleashed.

Lev: Extraordinary innuendo.

Chris: Yes.

Lev: I think, we’re looking back at this from the distance of half a century, more than half a century, and I suppose for anybody who’s not familiar with this, it’s important to point out that at the time this was broadcast, homosexuality was still illegal…

Chris: Yes, yes.

Lev: …in this country and the standards of BBC broadcasting were of the highest decorum, and, you know, it wasn’t… I don’t think it was still the age of bow ties on the radio, and dinner jackets, but it was still not far off. There was still a formality and standards to be maintained and lines across which you would not cross. And they somehow managed not to cross them while absolutely pole vaulting over them at every possible opportunity, getting away with things that nowadays seem quite blatant filth…

Chris: Yeah…

Lev: … and yet somehow they managed to smuggle it past past the censors.

Chris: It was interesting, it was written by two straight men Marty Feldman and Barry Took… yeah… and I discovered them in like 1982 or 83 when I was 12 or 13, and at that time Barry Took was the presenter of Points of View. But they obviously they were both, you know, in show business. So they knew or knew about this thing called Polari. And nobody’s entirely sure where it comes from, whether it’s kind of circus people or sailors or whatever.

Lev: There seem to have been different versions of Polari, I think.

Chris: Yeah. It evolved in weird and wonderful ways, and by the time these sketches are happening it’s kind of known as the the gay slang. So, I’ve got loads of the lines written down…

Lev: Oh well give us a few…

Chris: So when they’re being agents for variety acts they talk about a muscle man that they represent and they describe him as “a great butch omie with thews like an oak and bulging lallies”. And presumably there’s a BBC audience just going, “Well, I don’t understand a word of that, but it sounds fun.”

Lev: The rhythms of it, I think the rhythm and the music of the delivery is a huge part of it.

Chris: It’s got that. It’s just intrinsically humorous and comedic, but there’s this BBC audience kind of going “Yeah I don’t know but it sounds good”, and then there’s this other audience of people at home who presumably know some Polari, and go “Oh my God they’re talking to me on the national radio”. I interviewed a guy once who was a student in 1964, and obviously, you know, he was 18, he already knew he was gay, and he graduated in 1967, the year that homosexuality was finally partly decriminalized, and he talked about listening to Julian and Sandy with his parents and there were these voices that… you know… and he couldn’t talk to his parents about it… yeah, it was extraordinary…

Lev: What did his parents… did they enjoy it on a different level?

Chris: I don’t know, actually. That would be really interesting.

Lev: They’d be sort of chuckling… “Oh, isn’t he a funny person?”

Chris: I think the thing about them is, at the time, gay characters were all... they were either tragic or they were villains. It was like you were Dirk Bogarde being blackmailed in Victim or in The Killing of Sister George you were this awful, awful woman. And these two are just, they are joy. They’re happy. They’re incredibly funny. And the thing is, they’re not the punchline. They’re delivering the punchlines. Kenneth Horne is, in every sense of the word, the straight man. And they take the piss out of him.

Lev: And his incomprehension is a huge part of the joke, isn’t it?

Chris: They pull the strings. They hold the power in it. And as they kind of bed in as characters, he goes and knocks on the door of the shop. And Kenneth Williams goes, “Oh, it’s Mr ‘Orne. Oh, how bona to varder your jolly old eke again.”

Lev: You do that very well, by the way.

Chris: Thank you. And they do things like, oh, yes, they go into alternative medicine one week. They say, “We are your actual homeopathic practitioners.” And then, “Yes, we’re not recognised by doctors.” All in the subtext, all in the subtext and the delivery. And there’s a wonderful one where they’re solicitors one week. And Kenneth Horne says, “Yes, yes, yes, but will you take my case?” And Julian says... “Well, we’re very busy, you know, we’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.” I think it’s probably reading too much into it, but you kind of get this feeling from the way the studio audience laughs… there is this kind of sense that public opinion is maybe slightly ahead of the establishment on this one. They’re kind of, they’re sort of laughing supportively. It’s quite lovely to hear. But yeah, and also, like you say, they get away with just... filth. I mean, there’s one where Kenneth Williams, as Sandy, is saying that Julian is a gifted piano player. And he says, “Oh, he’s a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright”, which is, you know…

Lev: This is a tradition continued, of course, by Humphrey Lyttleton on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

Chris: Yes.

Lev: Fantastic. It just got worse and worse and worse, or better and better and better, depending on how you view these things. Excellent. Thank you for bringing Julian and Sandy, who I think for people of a certain age – people possibly even of a greater age than us – that will bring back some lovely memories. And people who are not of a certain age might be interested to know how they used to do things back in the day.

Thing 4 – The Hunt for the Golden Mole

Lev: Tell me about this book that you’ve chosen.

Chris: This is The Hunt for the Golden Mole by an environmental journalist called Richard Girling. And it’s ostensibly about the Somali golden mole. But the subtitle is All Creatures Great and Small and Why They Matter. And there’s an illustration on the front of the book of a kind of montage of animals, none of which is the Somali golden mole, which is a clue to the contents and to the kind of thing you have to bear in mind as you read, especially the opening chapters. There is very little about the Somali golden mole.

Lev: He drops it in occasionally as if he’s been reminded to by his editor.

Chris: Yes, that element of it gradually builds up as you go through the work. But basically, it’s an excuse to talk about, you know, biodiversity and the importance of ecosystems. And it’s absolutely fascinating. The reason why the golden mole plays quite a small part in it is because there is one known specimen of the golden mole. It is about a centimetre long bit of jawbone. A little bit of skull attached with a couple of middle ear bones attached to that. And they were found in an owl pellet in a disused oven in Jowhar in Somalia in 1964 by a guy called Alberto Simonetta, who then described them in a paper in 1968. Because he was, you know, he was inspecting this thing that he’d found and it didn’t match any other golden mole’s jawbone – of which there are several other species of golden mole with various different names. And one of the other weird little facts is that none of the golden moles are in fact moles.

Lev: It is, as you say, it’s more like a history of conservation and the way we treat animals and have treated them in the past.

Chris: So, yeah, it kind of, it’s one of those things that could be a bit depressing, but it’s actually, you know, it’s wonderful and it’s fascinating. And there’s lots of funny stuff.

Lev: Yeah, it’s funny stuff and kind of grimly amusing, but also told with just the right level of anecdote, but richly told. And told with great curiosity, but also... he has a wonderful attitude to the whole subject, I think. The way he looks back and without judging things that were taken for granted in former days.

Chris: Yeah.

Lev: But also shining a light on them and going, well, we may in those days, back in the 19th century in particular, it was commonplace just to go out and kill things.

Chris: Yeah.

Lev: But some people killed them more than others.

Chris: Yes, yes. And, you know, things like the passenger pigeon was apparently 40% of bird life in North America.

Lev: Astonishing, astonishing abundance.

Chris: Yeah. Just madness. Locking out the sky. Flocks 55 miles long, apparently. I’ve marked a page because it’s just it’s just a good example of how he’s funny. But it’s just it’s the style in which he’s funny as well. So he’s talking about hunting and about the fact that, you know, big things like rhinos and elephants and stuff. People are like, oh, yes, I’ll go and shoot something big because it’s big. He says the special vulnerability of big animals is pretty obvious. “The smallest creature I have ever heard of being shot at was a spider at which my grandfather, who enjoyed his beer, aimed an air gun so unsteadily that he shot himself in the hand.”

Lev: Magnificent.

Chris: It’s just it’s splendid. And then he talks about the famous story of the the wolves in Yellowstone Park and then he shifts to talk about whether we should reintroduce the lynx to Scotland, because that might control deer, and he says the point is you don’t reintroduce an animal because it’s going to do X. You introduce it for its own sake…

Lev: …and then X might happen…

Chris: …X, Y, and indeed Z might happen later. So it’s about the unexpected benefits. And he talks about if you make a prey animal extinct, obviously you make it much more difficult for the predator, but there’s also you know there’s the scavengers who come across the carcass and there’s the bacteria and the parasites, and he talks about the the size of the system that you’re disrupting… it’s really really interesting and eventually he meets Alberto Simonetta and and he’s just a really lovely guy, it’s just a rather wonderful book.

Lev: It was written in 2014, is that right? Or something like that. So it’s still, it’s current enough, but there’s interesting ways in which the situation continues to develop in ways that he obviously touches on. But that thing that what Douglas Adams, of course, calls the fundamental interconnectedness of all things… you don’t know what effect that’s going to have until you do it.

And by then it’s probably too late, like the cane toads in Australia, which is now overrun by the things… and of course, as you said, the passenger pigeon which famously went extinct really a very short time in the grand scheme of things, just mere decades after it had this extraordinary abundance, and so yeah as you say it’s thought-provoking rather than depressing and that’s a tricky balance…

Thing 5 – He Dances For His Cormorants

Lev: And now moving on to thing number five, which is, I suppose, similarly linked because it’s about birds, but also specifically the relationship of a human with a particular kind of bird.

Chris: Yes, this is He Dances for His Cormorants, which you mentioned in one of your 100 Birds emails.

Lev: I did. I think you’d put me onto it, so I think I’m giving you the credit for it. But it’s, yeah, it’s a fascinating thing.

Chris: Yes, it’s a French documentary, I think, from 1993, which I watched when it went out with a friend of mine I was sharing a house with at the time. And somebody came around a few days later and had also seen it. And we were just amazed.

Lev: Oh, this is terribly exciting.

Chris: And so when the Internet was invented, I sort of went looking for it. A couple of years ago, I must have put the title into a search engine and it popped up on YouTube and I was delighted. Basically, a middle-aged man, I think in rural China, who lives on a houseboat with his family. He goes out on a bamboo raft every day, pushing himself along with a pole, with a basket on the raft, and six or seven cormorants. He gets to his favoured spot in the river, and he starts jigging about and sort of humming a little tune. It’s a bit like, it’s not entirely unlike Vic Reeves singing in the club style. It’s just this... he’s sort of jigging about. And sometimes he kind of slightly pokes the cormorants with his pole just to encourage them. And they start diving off, going for fish. And they come back up onto the raft. And obviously their instinct is, I’m going to swallow this fish. But he has tied a bit of reed around their throats. So they’re like they’re like Jerry in Tom and Jerry trying to swallow a whole cheese. You know, there’s a big bulge in their throats. And he hoicks the fish out and chucks them in the basket. And sometimes they get, you know, one of the smaller fish. And it’s just this wonderfully strange, charming documentary and an insight into this presumably vanishing way of life.

Lev: And presumably now probably vanished altogether. Who knows? I don’t know.

Chris: Well, there’s a follow up.

Lev: Aha, you have a follow up. Excellent.

Chris: I obviously rewatched it. Then I looked it up on the Wikipedia. And apparently the filmmaker has a bit of a reputation for kind of slightly manipulating events. And I mean, you know, documentary makers do anyway, but it’s enough to be remarked upon apparently, and Wikipedia says that this type of fishing is now only done for tourists, but this made in 1993, when China is already massively industrializing, and actually, going back to Douglas Adams, he and Mark Carwardine had written Last Chance to See a few years before this.

Lev: Yeah.

Chris: And had discovered that the Yangtze River was full of poison and the dolphin was now long gone. So it’s probably a kind of look into a vanished way of life, which is maybe being a bit staged for us. But it’s still, you know, largely how it would have been.

Lev: Yeah.

Chris: And it’s still lovely and quirky and strange.

Lev: A little side note on that, which is the question of truth in nonfiction. How far do you go to tell the true story and how many lies – little tiny lies – can you tell, as long as the fundamental story is true, and what is truth? I’ve been through this… one of my books was autobiographical and about my rediscovery of the love of birds, and of course not everything in the book happened exactly as I wrote it. I would conflate events, I cut things out, I put things that happened on four different days happening all on the same day, for example, which… that, for me, is storytelling, and trying to engage the reader into something that is fundamentally honest and true. There is a notorious recent example of a non-fiction nature book where this appears not to have been the case…

Chris: Indeed yes.

Lev: …which famously went out last year: The Salt Path. And that provoked a big discussion, not just in nature writing but in non-fiction writers in general, as to you know, how much massaging is permissible before you kill the subject. So that’s really interesting about how the documentary was made. It also helps for the lay viewer that the cormorant, and its friend the shag, is an intrinsically humorous kind of bird. They look odd. They’re beaky and they have this extraordinary way of swimming, these writhing kind of rubbery things underwater, incredibly agile and nimble. And of course, that’s a comedic thing that was exploited by, well, Isherwood in the poem about the shag – paper bags and all that – but also in the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life, where the school cormorant has had linseed oil rubbed into it or whatever it is. A peacock is too obvious for that gag. A seagull wouldn’t be the same. The school cormorant is perfect.

Chris: So I think that is an intrinsic part of the charm of this film. Not just the man and his endearing Reevesian ways, but also his relationship with the cormorants.

Lev: As you say, they get their fish in the end. He does keep them alive.

Chris: Yeah. I read a novel ages ago called The Fat of Fed Beasts by Guy Ware. It was one of the kind of things that was recommended in Nicholas Lezard’s Paperback of the Week thing. And there was a bit, it was just so lovely. I wrote it down in my notebook that I write bits of books down in. He described cormorants as having beaks shaped like a geisha’s eyebrow.

Lev: Oh that’s wonderful, that is very good. I might nick that – I’ll cite my sources… that’s really good.

Chris: Wonderful.

Thing 6 – Nancy Banks-Smith

Lev: So from cormorants to, again, no link to this at all, but this is… I’m so pleased you’ve chosen Thing No. 6 and it’s really mean to describe her as a thing because she’s a wonderful, wonderful and much underrated and neglected and ignored writer. And people are going to be trying to guess who I’m talking about. You can spill the beans at your own pace, at leisure. You can keep us guessing or you can just tell us straight away who Thing 6 is.

Chris: Thing Six is the entirely marvellous Nancy Banks-Smith, who I believe is now 97, and is a retired TV critic. She was TV critic of The Guardian for 40-something years.

Lev: Yeah.

Chris: So she was a journalist from like the 1950s onwards, and joined the Grauniad in 1970, apparently. They ran a celebration of her in 2010, which said – I wrote this down – “she created the art of TV reviewing as tangential knockabout comedy, a mode that set the agenda and has been followed ever since, but never equalled”. And I think the crucial thing to note about her is that she started at The Guardian in 1970 and invented this way of reviewing TV. Clive James started at The Observer in 1972. So I discovered her in the 1980s as a teenager because my mum decided we needed to get a newspaper so that I was informed about current affairs, rather than just sitting in my room and listening to music and watching stupid comedy shows on telly and stuff. And I went for The Guardian because it was my dad’s paper. And so I used to, if it arrived in time, I would read it on the way to school. And basically, Nancy Banks-Smith is the reason why I always turned to the arts and other pages, long before I ever went anywhere near the news and analysis, because she was just brilliant. She was one of those reviewers, actually like Nicolas Lezard – who did paperbacks in The Guardian for a long time. It didn’t matter if you had an interest in the in the thing being reviewed or had seen it, it just didn’t matter. She was just a joy to read. She writes these wonderful sentences – it’s like if PG Wodehouse was reviewing TV. Yeah, she’s wonderful.

Lev: Absolutely. It’s the best kind of writing, isn’t it? It’s something where you glance at it in a paper or magazine or on the internet and you go, “Oh, I’m not interested in this. This isn’t my... Oh, God, hang on. I am interested in this, at least for the duration of reading the piece in question.”

Chris: And I think she was kind of often at her best when she was reviewing soaps, because you could be irreverent and you could mock them while still enjoying them. So for the 30th anniversary of Coronation Street, she rewatched the first episode and wrote about it. And there’s a couple of bits I have to read out. Firstly, she says, “Ena Sharples arrives in a double-breasted battle dress”, which kind of tells you everything about Ena Sharples, if you’ve never heard of her. And then she goes on to Elsie Tanner: “Her strings of improbable pearls laid out on the shelving bench of her chest, and her smalls hung on a string by the fire. Elsie was the sort of woman brush salesmen always hoped would answer the door. Ena was the one who usually did.”

Lev: I think she’s a name that many people will not know. People who know and revere Clive James, who, as you say, his career blossomed in other directions, and now there’s volumes and volumes of his writing and his poetry and his criticism, and he became a general commentator for decades. And yet, Nancy Banks-Smith probably isn’t known by anything like as many people. Do we know anything about what else she’s done when she retired and what she did before that?

Chris: Not really. And I think, yeah, I’ve been sort of thinking about this in the last few days. I think it’s partly because, or I get the impression, it’s partly because she appears to have been more interested in the work than in the life. And it’s not a criticism of Clive James at all to say that he was interested in being a public figure. I think that’s a perfectly laudable ambition. But I get the impression that that absolutely didn’t interest her. Apparently, she’s one of the people who has turned down an honour. I think at some point in the 70s, she turned down an OBE or something. And in 2014, there was going to be a book of collected pieces of her writing. I think it was announced in the Faber and Faber catalogue for that year. And John Self, the book reviewer, said on Bluesky a while ago that I think he’d heard that she got cold feet. So I think... the impression i get from all of that is that she just doesn’t want that level of fame, she doesn’t want to be a public figure. So my great hope is that she has spent her retirement writing a memoir because there are some wonderful asides in her in her writing… so there’s one where she talks about being backstage in the wings at the Palladium while Vera Lynn is on stage. She’s standing next to Marlene Dietrich.

Lev: God.

Chris: And there was another one where the helicopter, which was taking Janis Joplin to Monterey in 1967.

Lev: Wow.

Chris: So she was sat next to this woman who was apparently, you know, incapable through drink and drugs.

Lev: In a helicopter.

Chris: Yeah. She saw her go on stage and, you know, tear the place apart.

Lev: Yeah.

Chris: So she’s clearly had a fascinating life. But I suspect she is very much not writing a memoir. I think she’s not interested in that at all.

Lev: No. But also, at the very least, as you say, you’d love to have a collected volumes. I think I’ve probably got somewhere in a scrapbook, a couple of her columns because my parents used to occasionally clip things out that they thought interesting or funny or whatever. So there’s probably a few of those, but unless you’re an inveterate archive researcher and burrower, then, you know, her writing isn’t nearly as readily available as, as we say, Clive James being the obvious example, with the similarities so it would be wonderful to have. Chris, thank you so much for coming along with your six excellent things – varied and humorous and serious and random and obscure. Niche drivel, if you like. And thank you, listener, for listening. You can find out more about the featured things in the show notes and we’ll put links where appropriate. I hope they bring you as much pleasure as they’ve brought me. Thank you for listening and see you next month for six more excellent and fascinating things. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: Thank you. It’s been fun.

Lev: Bye.

Chris: Bye.

Once upon a time, there was a very tall tree.

Let’s be specific. It was 5,000 years ago in the Fenland Basin of East Anglia, the tree was an oak, and by very tall I mean like whoa dude that’s some tree, I mean shit.

55 metres, if you want figures. Approximately a Nelson’s Column, to use traditional measurements. (For reference, an average modern oak probably grows to about half that height).

Sea levels rose, as they do, the forest floor flooded, and down came the tree, with – one can only assume – a not insignificant crash. It buried itself deep in the peat, and there it stayed, protected in anaerobic conditions from the kind of things that break down organic matter. Until 2012, when routine excavations uncovered it. And it quickly became clear what a remarkable finding it was. It yielded ten consecutive 13-metre planks of Black Oak – the black, I learn, comes from the reaction of soluble iron with tannins in the wood.

What to do with such a thing?

Make a table, obviously. That way the planks can be kept intact at their full length, and shown off to best effect while also serving a practical purpose.

The making of the table was far from straightforward. Excavation of the tree had to be carried out with utmost care; a sawmill, generously loaned by a Canadian company, had to be constructed in situ to saw the planks; drying them took nine months and yielded 1795 litres of water, reducing their weight by 1.8 metric tonnes. And the design had to be ingenious – a thing of beauty that could also be folded down and moved about the place with the minimum of fuss.

Since its manufacture in 2022 the table has spent a year in several English cathedrals – Ely, Rochester, Lincoln, and now Lichfield. It is a splendid thing and you can read more about it here.

Thing 2 – Toy Cupboard

Beautiful, this. A short film by Blair Stewart called Stephen and David’s Toy Cupboard, it’s about David McGurk’s tribute to his late brother in the form of an action figure.

I’ve explained it badly.

It’s about family love and loss and regret and creativity and I found it deeply moving.

Thing 3 – English

Hwaet!

This, by Colin Gorrie, is terrific fun, a written companion to Simon Roper’s exploration of spoken English through the ages I posted a few weeks ago. It is in fact, I read in the footnotes, inspired by that very post. So there’s nice.

It’s a straightforward story, but it spans 1000 years of English, getting 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

I was fine until about 1200, when it became more and more like reading a foreign language learned at school and dredged unwillingly from the memory banks. 1100 was mostly incomprehensible, although “strong” stood out and I could work out the gist of things like “manige gode men he hæfð fordone”, and 1000 was basically gibberish.

But don’t worry – Colin explains it all at the end. Lovely stuff.

Thing 4 – Spurious Correlations

This has been around for a while, but it’s always worth dropping in just to see what two completely unrelated things track uncannily close to each other.

These are some of my favourites.

Thing 5 – Sandboxels

Anything from Neal Agarwal is worth exploring, and the latest thing to appear on neal.fun is this, which he describes as “a falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, heat simulation, electricity & a lot more.”

But what is it for, Neal?

“I like making little cities and then adding tons of rats.”

Everyone’s different, of course. My scant memory of O-level chemistry immediately prompted me to add magnesium to water.

Then I made a chocolate mountain and added humans (the chocolate disappeared terrifyingly quickly).

Then I laid down a thick layer of mulch and a load of lifeforms. After an hour, everything seemed to be still alive, which I’m taking as a win.

Your instincts might be different – the lure of the ‘Weapons’ tab will, I’m sure, prove irresistible for many. But make sure you do the noises. You have to do the noises.

Thing 6 – Colour

This was one of the good ones.

A colour matching game. Not a new idea, but very nicely done. There are two basic skills at play: the ability to remember the colour, and the ability to manipulate the sliders towards that colour before the memory of it disappears from your head (which it does remarkably quickly).

I got 40.9/50 on today’s, by the way. Do let me know how you get on.