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Podcasts, there are millions of them. Some might say too many. I have one already.
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I don't have any, because there are enough. Politics, business, sport, you name it, there's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day.
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But nobody is covering the most important topic of all. Why is that? Are they scared?
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Too afraid of being censored by the man? Possibly, but not us. We're here to ask the only question that matters.
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We try and say it at the same time, Max. What did you do yesterday?
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What did you do yesterday? What did you do yesterday? That's it. All we're interested in is what the guests got up to yesterday.
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Nothing more. Day before yesterday, Max? Nope. The greatest and most interesting day of your life?
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Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it. I'm Max Rushden. And I'm David O'Doherty.
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Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday? Hello, and welcome to today's episode of What Did You Do Yesterday?
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And David, our first night of the realm. We are moving into new territory here.
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We are a prestige podcast that has been pretending to not be a prestige podcast with all the constant talk about bathrooms, et cetera.
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And now, oh, this is big. Yeah, this is serious academia here. And that's good for me.
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As, you know, the erudite intellectual, I would say, oh, that's not fair, is it?
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We've established that I know nothing. You're incredibly well-read. But on paper, I'm part of the intelligentsia.
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So it was nice to have someone I could sort of share. It was on a common ground with me, I would say, with Dame Mary Beard.
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So she is renowned classicist, but also broadcaster. I mean, as a professor, she's done her full academic thing and written all these amazing books.
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But I think she, more than anyone else, has brought the classical world to us.
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Yeah, to the masses. And actually, for the tape, we've just recorded the episode. So the episode is part of history now.
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So that is good for her. She's about to launch a podcast called Instant Classics with Charlotte Higgins, I believe.
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And they will go through what various people from classical civilization did yesterday. Vanessa, did you set an alarm?
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Did you set a sundial? Did you do that? But that's a great episode, isn't it?
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I really enjoyed it. And, you know, there are some bits where we veer into, you know, actually interesting things, which is rare for us.
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This is what Dave Mary Beard did yesterday. Dame Mary Beard, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?
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It's absolutely delightful to be here. And I think you might cut the dame, please.
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Okay, sure. Sounds a bit too panto, doesn't it? You're just another normal Joe. We wanted to find out what a knight of the realm, if their day was the same as just normal people like us.
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And already we've cut the dame. You're happy with just Mary. And finally, it's so great for me to have another historian on the podcast.
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Yeah, I know. One of the things I did yesterday was check out your CV.
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So I know all there is to be found on the web. It's unlikely we'll get to my dissertation on can you build a model of empire by comparing the British in India and the Mughals in India?
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Unless you read it yesterday, Mary, we can't really focus on it. Sadly, sadly. I just didn't have time, Matt.
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I didn't have time. No, I understand. I'll send you a PDF. PDF, don't worry.
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I'll put it in the show notes. I'll put it in the show notes. You've got a tutu.
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I was more an exam person, you know, Mary. Anyway, let's get down to business.
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What time did you wake up yesterday, Dame Mary Beard? Every time you say Dame, I'm going to shut up.
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I woke up at six o'clock. Oh, wow. Hang on. I've got to ask the question.
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Morning or the evening, Mary? Have you been on a big night out, slept for 18 hours?
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If only it had been the evening. That would have been something to talk about to you guys.
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But I'm afraid it was the morning because I was going to London. You know what happens when you set your alarm for 6.30?
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You always kind of wake up earlier because you're thinking, is the alarm about to go off?
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So I woke up at six. I went and had a quick pee and I went back to bed and got up at 6.30.
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Okay, good stuff. And does Mary Beard immediately get the phone from under her pillow and start looking at people on Instagram?
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There is no way. I have to say, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I get the phone.
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I get the phone from under the pillow and I start looking at, sadly, I'm just not a great Instagram person, but I always check to see what emails have come in.
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I do a bit of doom scrolling, you know, whatever time of day it is.
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I think it's quite nice actually to, I was sitting in bed, I had the radio on between six and 6.30 thinking I don't have to get up yet.
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And I could just kind of get through some of those emails and come down and feel that the day had started and I'd done some of the stuff.
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Do you listen to talk sport, Mary? It's totally obvious, isn't it, what I listen to.
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I listen to the Blasted Today programme and, you know, occasionally get cross. Who was doing it yesterday?
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Was it a good two? Who was the two on the Today programme yesterday? Do you know, I have no recollection.
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I can't even remember who it was this morning. I can't even remember whether they were men or women.
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You know, it's just somehow, it's so much wallpaper that I simply don't recall. That's what they'll be putting on the adverts on the buses of the Today programme when they so
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much wallpaper. I can't remember a thing. Nick Robinson will be delighted. But I think what's funny about it is there's been a revolution really in the Today programme because you used to think, oh my God, there's a woman presenting.
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And that was only about 15 years ago, you know, or, oh my God, there's two women presenting this morning.
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And I think actually it's quite an achievement that you just don't now think about that.
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You think, oh, it's the presenter. Who was it? I can't remember. So what time is the train?
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How long does it take for Mary Beard to really get the brain up and running?
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The confession is, you know, I don't know what you think about the trains to Cambridge, Max, if you ever still come here, but the last four times I've gone to London, the trains have been either cancelled or delayed.
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So I was doing a series of interviews yesterday, and we'll come on to that in a minute, but I thought, I'm just not sitting on that train when it's half an hour late.
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I'm panicking that I'm not going to get there. So I was, you know, being such a fretter that they sent a car.
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So the car came at 7.30. This is actually big time. That's what happens to you when you're 70 years old and they really want you in London and they think, God, the poor old thing, you know, is she going to manage?
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They think, let's send a car. That's exciting. I mean, my parents are very much using now the Liverpool street line when they come to visit because it's a bit slower, but, you know, it's not as busy as the King's Cross.
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I mean, King's Cross one is a good, it does get there. Well, it's brilliant.
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It's absolutely bloody brilliant when it works in 50 minutes, but the times it doesn't, you sit there thinking, oh no, they're going to be cross and what can I do?
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Perhaps I could kind of get out at Finsbury Park. Run from Finsbury Park. What is Mary Beard running through North London like this?
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This is extraordinary. Pushing fruit sellers out of her way like Indiana Jones. So the privilege of the old lady, you know, she says, I really don't think it's a good idea to go by train.
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This is good stuff. OK, so it's 6.30. We're out of bed. Are we having breakfast?
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Are we having coffee? What are we doing? We don't have breakfast. I've got a very nice little coffee machine, well quite big coffee machine, and it makes decent cappuccinos.
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So I was pouring two cappuccinos into me, doing more email on my laptop downstairs before I went to 7.30.
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What coffee machine is this? What are we rocking, Mary? It is a very favourite De'Longhi.
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Bean to cup, as they call it. Bean to cup. And you press the button.
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Which says cappuccino, and then a cappuccino comes out the other end. That's what you want, isn't it?
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It does what it says on the tin. It produces cappuccino. If I could just step in here, my criticism of these machines and the genre of machinery, it's quite loud.
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It's a bit too loud for me in the morning. That's the only downside. It is loud, and I think that, you know, if you were to say, suppose I had the whole barista kit at home, would I be able to make a better
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cup of coffee after a bit of practice than what my instant machine does? The answer to that must be yes.
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Yes. But think of the effort, you know? You'd have a barista there, Mary, wouldn't you?
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You know, now that is luxury far beyond having a driver to take you to London when you're fretting.
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Could you also send the barista? It's not surprising that they've never come up with the sort of coffee equivalent of a tea's made because you would simply be woken by the grinding of the beans five minutes before the alarm was about to go off.
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That's a very good point. Thank you. We'll have to take that out of Dragon's Den, even though we have already invested two million pounds of our own money in the coffee made.
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We were hoping you would be the face of it, Mary, you know, and we thought we'd soft sell it.
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Seems like you're not interested. OK, so what sort of emails are you get? You know, it's all kind of great.
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Can you come and write a book about this? It's not people just emailing you saying, what pots do they use in Rome?
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Well, look, it's kind of everything, you know, and I'm still on X and quite a lot of those questions come from X.
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You know, some of them actually are really, really nice. You get people who say, look, I'm in Rome and I'd really like to go and see a site that wasn't so crowded or ever.
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You know, sometimes you think, oh, God, do I really have to answer this? And you think, yeah, I do.
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They've written to me, I'd go out, you know, putting my views about Rome about to the general population of the country.
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You know, I can't then say if they ask me a question, I'm not going to answer it.
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You know, that's what I do. Please do. Please do. Imagine saying, oh, fuck off.
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I can't be asked today. That's what I do. But sometimes it's really worth it because you say, oh, where are you staying?
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And you get a little bit of it. Then you say, I'd go there. And then later in the day, what happens?
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You know, you get a selfie they took of themselves saying, that was the best place I've ever been.
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And you think, that's weird. It's worth it. That really is worth it. I am intrigued by the idea of, you know, being lost in Rome and contacting Mary Bird.
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I need to get to the Coliseum. I'm at the Trevi Fountain. Do I go via Circus Maximus?
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At that point, I do usually say, I think Google Max is better than me.
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But if you want a suggestion of what you could see on the way that would be interesting, I'm happy to do that.
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What a service. And just for our listeners, it's still marybeard1 at gmail.com. The barrier is you've got to find out the email.
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OK, so now we've done our emails. We've had two coffees. We're not having any food.
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Do you get a text to say your driver is here? Yeah, that was lovely.
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So I trotted. It takes two hours to get to London, you know, 7.30 in the morning.
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I have to say I listen to podcasts most of the way to London. And what are we listening to?
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Because obviously we're a history podcast, I guess, aren't we? We're quite modern history. We are a very recent history.
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Modern history, modern history. Modern history. Did you listen to us? There's two things I listened to.
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One, I thought, gosh, I'm going to do that podcast tomorrow. I better listen to it.
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Please tell me it wasn't the Nish Kumar episode. It wasn't. I chose Richard Osman, actually, is what I chose to listen to.
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But then also, I mean, we'll come on to this, but I'm going to be starting a podcast of my own.
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And, you know, I listen to some podcasts, but I'm not a kind of real expert in the different varieties.
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So before... Before our podcast starting, I've been trying to, you know, do a kind of a bit of a tour of different sorts of podcasts and to see, you know,
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what I think works and what I think doesn't. Mary, from what I know of you and your work, I very much doubt you're going to be doing one of our kind of waffle type podcasts.
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Oh, you'd be surprised, David. You'd be surprised. We shall see, right? It's not going to be about yesterday.
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That's for sure. Do we... Chat to the driver at all? Is there... Yeah. Cambridge is very nice and traditional and there's a nice traditional car company and, you know, the driver and you have a chat about what you've been doing and, you know.
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Are there three little bottles of still water and a Werther's Original in the car?
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I'm not sure about the Werther's Original, but there's three little bottles of still water.
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And I always think, I don't think I need this water and maybe I'll just leave it for the next person.
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So, you know, I drank nothing, but you can power your phone. Yes. Kind of counted it as work.
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You know, I think that I wasn't listening to podcasts. I was doing research on podcasts.
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Of course. You listened to the Osman episode. What other podcasts did you listen to?
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I listened to The Ancients because I'm doing an ancient podcast. I wanted to kind of get a...
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See what the competition's like. What the style was. Is it rubbish? Is it terrible?
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They're all very good, aren't they? There he's leaving one-star reviews on Apple podcasts. Not at all.
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You know, happily, you know, many flowers can bloom and there's different sorts and, you know, and I listened to a bit of The Rest Is History just to check out what those guys are doing, the blokes.
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I don't think that's going to catch on, that one. I don't think it's going to.
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Oh, no. I mean, you know, they were hoping for, you know, an audience of millions.
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Well, so, Mary, you might know this. There was a historian who went online and criticised loads of other books.
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Was it Orlando Figus? Yes, it was. Oh, it was. That's rotten stuff, isn't it?
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What it was was that he went on Amazon and he gave one-star critical reviews.
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I think he'd admitted this. I think this is not libelous. I think it was all admitted.
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And he apologised. But he gave one-star reviews to the rivals. That's so funny. What I thought was amazing about that was not that he did it, because I've never done this myself,
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but I can imagine what it would be like to come home first thing in the morning, come home last thing at night, a bit worse for wear and thinking, getting a laptop out,
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being a bit disinhibited and doing that. What I can't imagine is not getting up first thing the next morning and thinking, oh, my God, and deleting them.
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I can forgive most people for saying stupid things online, because who doesn't? I just can't understand why, if you'd done that, you wouldn't, delete it.
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That's what's weird. But do you, because in the comedy world, I don't know, it seems that they're a really lovely community.
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They all know each other. David knows all the other comedians. The broadcasting world, we don't really know each other.
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You just sort of hear a bit of their show, and most of us are bastards and go, God, what their show's rubbish.
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Ours is going to be better than theirs. You never go online and say, God, the show before us is shit.
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But do you read other books and go, this is a bit weak, this is a bit flimsy, this one?
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I mean, I think that, but I'd never say it. Yeah, of course. I mean, partly because, why bother?
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You know, thinking's one thing. You know, having a quick chat with your mates of an evening, you know, over a bottle of wine, saying, God, I thought that book was dreadful.
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That, you know, also seems to me fine. But kind of telling the world what you think, that's...
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The only time I do it is because I've written some children's books, is when another retired premiership footballer releases a book that is so bad that is pure...
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I mean, it probably didn't have much to do with the writing of it, but that's the one time I have no problem in going, the world did not need Frank Lampard's latest...
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Happily for me, retired premiership footballers don't tend to write books about ancient learning. I'm sure it'll come, but they don't.
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I have to say, I find the whole celebrity children's book world absolutely extraordinary. Yes, I know.
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Because people clearly think, because it's for children, it's therefore going to be easy. And I think this must be the most difficult kind of thing to get right.
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You know, you can write 500 pages on ancient Rome, writing 50 pages on ancient Rome for kids.
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I just don't even imagine how you'd start to do that. But if you read Steve McManaman's The Real Caravaggio, it is an incredibly in-depth...
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He's actually done a lot of research. Fair play to Macca on that. Can I just make a point here?
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So being from Dublin and spending some time in England, I'm very surprised that Cambridge is two hours from London.
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I imagined it was closer and kind of that was the reason why Cambridge was there.
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Is this to do with rush hour? It's to do with rush hour. I mean, you know, you do it at one o'clock in the morning and it's an hour and 15 minutes.
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It's 45 minutes on the train. The normal people still get the train. 45 minutes on the train when the train runs.
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It's a long time. And it is hot, yeah. When it does, you think that was the right decision to go on the train.
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Okay, so we're in London. Where are we going, Mary? Well, we're going to do, because I've got this podcast about the ancient world, about the ancient world and how it works in the modern world, et cetera.
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It's called, by the way, Instant Classics, and it's about us and the ancient world and all sorts of things.
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You know all about this, don't you? You have to, and you're very pleased, to give it a bit of publicity and talk to some journalists.
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Like yesterday morning, talking about how you do ancient Greece, ancient Rome, myth, theatre, plays, togas, how you do it on a podcast and why it's important.
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And that is great to do. It's absolutely great to do, but it's kind of exhausting, you know, when you do interview after interview.
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And everybody is really nice because I don't know what they're going to say, but they don't actually come and say, look, we're really going to, what we want to do is really hammer you.
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You know, we think that it's, you know, so it's very positive. It's a pleasant way of spending a morning.
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And you mostly don't have that kind of opportunity to witter on about what you want to witter on without somebody saying, excuse me, I, you know, it's my turn to get into this conversation.
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So it's very, at that point is reaffirming, but it's kind of tiring. Well, hang on, you must be famished here, Mary.
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What's, have you had anything before you start this? I was very well provided for with a tiny bit of breakfast when I got to the interview location.
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What was this, like a mini sausage? Some oatmeal kind of stuff. With strawberries. Yes, it was very nice.
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Thank you, Holly. Thank you, Holly. Mary, I know that, you know, a lot of your work is about the relevance of classics today, and you will be delighted and horrified to know that my housemate here in Edinburgh at the moment is the wonderful Nish Kumar.
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And Nish and I independently in our shows, which are after each other in the same venue, have jokes about the wanking man in Pompeii.
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Oh, right. There is this skeleton cast of human remains, which could be interpreted, which a comedian is kind of bound to interpret.
20:05 - 20:15
But I'm hoping that on our podcast, we can perhaps take that subject on, you know, once we've got into it and maybe examine the evidence a bit more carefully.
20:15 - 20:25
Are you saying he probably wasn't? Jury's out. The jury's out. I see. Okay. So how many of these interviews have you got to do?
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I did four yesterday. Is this sort of recorded or are these print ones? Who have you got?
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Mostly press, but we did another podcast because I'm co-presenting this with Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian.
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And so we did a podcast kind of setting out our store to another podcast.
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Right. And which was the other podcast? I can tell you this. I think it's Intelligence Squared.
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They've not asked us on, if we're being honest. Don't worry. I'm sure they will one day.
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The square root of intelligence. This has been on several times, however. They will. They just haven't got around to you guys yet.
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They're working through the B team first. So you've done four interviews. You've had a tiny bit of oatmeal.
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Then it's lunch. Then it's lunchtime. Okay. So we're having a fancy, where are we going to?
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Well, me and my kind of co-presenter, we thought, look, we're going to need a bit of a break.
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And so got out the Google Maps, found a nice Greek restaurant just nearby. Booked a table and it was absolutely brilliant.
21:28 - 21:35
I'm a Moussaka chef by trade. So I'm hoping, I mean, it's quite heavy for lunch, but it's the king of the Greek dishes.
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I'm afraid I had it. I had, I have to say, I had stuffed vine leaves followed by Moussaka.
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And I had some Assyrtiko wine. A brand of Assyrtiko I'd never had before. It's a bit brown, but jolly nice.
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Brown wine. It had been in clay pots, they said. Been in clay pots. Such is Mary's commitment to the classical world, that everything is served in urns.
22:00 - 22:15
That's it. The vomitorium takes place. That's it. Of course, we spent absolutely appropriately, Charlotte and I spent most of lunch talking about the Odyssey, because one of the things we're going to be doing on this podcast is we're going to have a book club,
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which reads the Odyssey all the way through and talks about it for the next, I don't know, nine months, year, however, long it takes us.
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So we were kind of getting ourselves into Odyssey book two. And is Homer's Odyssey a page turner?
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Is it every bit as good as Grisham? You will have to listen to our book club and you will find that it really is a page turner.
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And of course, the Christopher Nolan movie is coming up next year. So I reckon that everybody's going to want to know what the real Odyssey is like.
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So that's what we're offering. I've got some breaking news because I got in the WhatsApp group with my mum and dad to say, have you guys ever met Mary Beard?
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Or do you have mutual friends? You know, the academic circles of Cambridge. My dad says, sadly not.
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Her programs are brilliant and witty. Presuming you're a TV fan, no doubt you'll contact her direct.
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Love to know her response. He seems to think I was asking if he had Mary Beard's number.
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But here's an interesting, you'll remember this. When Cambridge United got to the quarterfinal of the FA Cup against Crystal Palace in 1990, my dad didn't have a ticket.
23:21 - 23:25
And so he rang the club to say, look, I've been going for years. I haven't got a ticket.
23:25 - 23:28
Can you get me in? And they found him a ticket in the press box.
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And he was next to Trevor Brookings, Sir Trevor Brookings, former England international. Mary, I don't want to insult your intelligence.
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You're aware of Trevor Brookings. But my dad would always take a book to games because football can be boring.
23:42 - 23:51
And at the time, my dad was reading Plato's Republic. And so I have a signed copy of Plato's Republic that in the front cover says, good luck with everything, Max,
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Sir Trevor Brookings. Oh God. You know, that's good old Cambridge United days. I have to say, I haven't been to see Cambridge United play for many a decade, but I used to go with my son when he was young.
24:06 - 24:11
Oh, okay. What era is that? When was that? It's around that time. You know, he was, it was in the nineties.
24:11 - 24:15
Wow. The glory long ball, John Beck era. We'd have been in the Abbey together.
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Yeah, we must've been. I didn't go that often, but it's, I've been to see no football team live more often than I've been, to see Cambridge United.
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The only other one I've been to see is Shrewsbury Town. Two greats, two giants of the game.
24:30 - 24:36
Two absolute giants. It's a bit of a shame because Cambridge won 2-0 at Bristol Rovers in the Carabao Cup first round last night.
24:36 - 24:41
I was very much hoping you'd say, and then at five, I got the driver to take me to the Memorial Gown Bristol.
24:41 - 24:50
Mary's the only person who has a copy of the book on Stoics that's signed by David Beckham.
24:50 - 25:05
Mary, just so you're aware, if you're making more book recommendations for Max, he has two small children and he spent, we believe, a year to read Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club book.
25:05 - 25:12
So the idea of him settling into Aristophanes or whatever, I think. I think you could do worse than Tales from the Odyssey.
25:12 - 25:21
I wouldn't, I don't know how old they are, Max, but I wouldn't necessarily try what we're going to do, which is quite for grownups, but there's some jolly good stories.
25:21 - 25:29
Right. He's three and a half and six months. Well, for three and a half, you know, six months, don't know, but three and a half, the three and a half year old could take the Cyclops.
25:29 - 25:33
Yeah, I think so. He's pretty shy. You know, he's on to Captain Underpants next stop.
25:33 - 25:38
Where are the pictures? Don't worry, Ian, we're reading the Odyssey before you go to bed.
25:38 - 25:42
How many glasses of wine have we had, Mary? Are you a little bit squiffy going into the afternoon?
25:42 - 25:48
What I decided as I got up at sort of six-ish, I was allowed, I try to avoid drinking at lunchtime.
25:48 - 25:56
I mean, that's about old age, isn't it? You know, have a few glasses and then go back to the library in the afternoon.
25:56 - 26:04
I now can't even imagine how I kept awake and perhaps I didn't always, but I used to think this is fine.
26:04 - 26:09
So I had, well, two very large glasses would be the euphemistic way of doing it.
26:09 - 26:14
And a moussaka makes it, that's a tiring deal. It was a tiring deal. And I thought, you know what I'm going to do?
26:14 - 26:26
This was all planned, of course. I thought I am going to use the car drive back to have a kip so that when I get back to Cambridge, I'll be up and about and can start the day.
26:26 - 26:32
But actually I found it quite hard to go to sleep. It must've been the moussaka, I suppose, you know, a bit heavy on the stomach.
26:32 - 26:50
I listened to more podcasts. I'm slightly disappointed that Mary didn't go on the news agents, absolutely loose after half a bottle of brown Greek wine and just really start going off on eras of classical civilization.
26:50 - 26:57
She has no time for it. Ripped into Maitlis. Okay. So we're back home, back to your front door.
26:57 - 27:04
This is nice. What podcasts have we listened to on the way home? Same ones, you know, I listened to David Olusoga and Sarah Church.
27:04 - 27:13
Well, a bit more of the same, really. I have a question here. Mary, have you ever gone down the audio book direction?
27:13 - 27:17
I mean, some of your books have been audio books. Would you ever listen to one?
27:17 - 27:23
Some of mine I've read myself. That is a, that's a kind of a milestone reading your own book.
27:23 - 27:33
But partly because it takes forever. And partly when you actually read it out to microphone, you think, why did I say that?
27:33 - 27:50
So it kind of reveals to you my recommendation now, though I've never followed it myself is that before any author's book actually goes finally to press, what they ought to do is they ought to sit down and they ought to read it out
27:50 - 27:57
to themselves from A to Z. Are you, now to when you're doing the audio book, put in some caveats going, I don't think that now anymore.
27:57 - 28:09
Sorry, I would have written that differently, but it's too late now. I think that were a couple of times when I just decided unilaterally to alter it without saying, I thought,
28:09 - 28:19
oh, let's make this better. Max, I know you're the, you're the professional journalist here, but I have an actual question for Mary, which will be very unusual for this podcast.
28:19 - 28:32
We just joked about reading the Odyssey to, you're three months old. Mary, did you have something read to you though, when you were very young that sparked off this whole thing?
28:32 - 28:39
I think I did have the, I had the stories from the Odyssey read to me, but I don't think I have to confess.
28:39 - 28:46
I don't think it's what sparked it all for me. What sparked it all for me is something absolutely straightforward.
28:46 - 28:56
And it's a, it's a moment that I've never forgotten is that we lived up in Shropshire and my mum thought we ought to, we ought to go and see the capital city when I was five.
28:56 - 29:00
Cause I'd never been the first, hadn't hardly been to Shrewsbury. We were living outside.
29:00 - 29:07
So she got a driver. She got a driver. We went to Shrewsbury and we got, I think it was a steam train, right?
29:07 - 29:12
I remember the smell of it, right? It was brilliant. And we went from Shrewsbury.
29:12 - 29:18
Then it went to Paddington and we had a kind of long weekend in London.
29:18 - 29:23
And my mum insisted that we went to the British museum. I wanted to see the mummies.
29:23 - 29:28
Cause that's what kind of five-year-olds want to see. And she said, well, yeah, we'll go and see the mummies.
29:28 - 29:34
She was a village school teacher. So she said, we better go and see something about Egyptian everyday life too.
29:34 - 29:40
Don't just want dead Egyptians. We want what they did when they were alive. And so we went to look at that.
29:40 - 29:49
You guys won't remember because you weren't alive, what museums were like in 1960, if you were a kid, you know, the cases were very high and it, you know, child friendly.
29:49 - 29:58
It wasn't. And she spotted in this case, she says, Oh God, the back of that case, there's a piece of Egyptian bread.
29:58 - 30:09
You know, it's three and a half thousand years old. Stuff the mummies. I mean, a piece of bread, you know, more than 3000 years old.
30:09 - 30:12
That's how I really want to see it. But it was at the back of the case and I couldn't see.
30:12 - 30:16
And we were a bit encumbered and I was a bit heavy and she couldn't lift me up.
30:16 - 30:22
Really. At that moment, a guy walked past. He seemed terribly old, but he is probably about 40, I guess.
30:23 - 30:29
And he said, was I wanting to see anything in particular? And I said, yes, I want to see that piece of bread at the back of the case.
30:29 - 30:34
And he must've been a curator and he put his hand in his pocket. He got keys out.
30:34 - 30:43
He opened the case. Wow. And he brought out the bread. Right? Wow. I couldn't touch it, but he put it right in front of my nose.
30:43 - 30:48
And that for me, that was the moment, you know, it was, it was kind of time travel.
30:48 - 30:57
It was face to face with a piece of bread that old. It'd be great if you just got out some sun pat and just go on and eat it.
30:57 - 31:02
You could have pretended anything. And I, maybe I was very gullible that they were all fakes anyway, but I don't think so.
31:02 - 31:07
You know, so I think actually it wasn't great literature that turned me onto the ancient world.
31:07 - 31:12
It was this piece of bread and okay. It was Egyptian, not Roman, but you know, same thing.
31:12 - 31:18
Wow. It was the first ever sourdough starter. And if you leave it for 3000 years, it does become a great sourdough.
31:18 - 31:25
It lasted well. It had lasted well. No, David, good question. Although we can't, we didn't use that in the episode because it didn't happen yesterday.
31:25 - 31:33
It happened again in my head yesterday. Perfect. Cause I'm always remembering it. Yeah. Why do I care about this stuff?
31:33 - 31:37
The bread. Okay. So we get to the front door. We open the front door.
31:37 - 31:42
What time are we now? Three o'clock, five o'clock. About half a three, quarter to four.
31:42 - 31:47
At that point, I think, didn't have a kip in the car. Why not have a kip now?
31:47 - 31:51
Ah, yes. But I don't actually, you know, by this, you know, the moment passes, doesn't it?
31:51 - 32:02
So I, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing kind of the sort of chores that sometimes you don't want to do.
32:02 - 32:07
I mean, work chores, not cleaning. You're not grouting the toilet. Not grouting the toilet, you know.
32:07 - 32:18
And so I'm doing a big event at Kew Gardens and they wanted me to do a little voiceover for an ad they're doing.
32:18 - 32:27
So I thought, look, this is a perfect opportunity to do something like that. And it, it took me forever because they'd sent me a text to read and it said,
32:27 - 32:35
cannot be any longer than 30 seconds. Right. And the first time I read it, it was 35 seconds.
32:35 - 32:47
Oh yeah. Oh God, I got to get a bit quicker than that. It took me about 12 or 13 goes to get this bloody text down to 29.5 seconds.
32:47 - 32:54
So that took about half an hour. Max, what Mary isn't telling us here is it was the, rain as much as anything.
32:54 - 33:05
Maybe I was speaking slower or just repeating words. Now, let me see Q gardens, lovely gardens.
33:05 - 33:11
And you know what? There's this meeting today with, you know, the whole media team at Q gardens going, what are we going to do?
33:11 - 33:19
She's dribbling. Oh, I love the gardens. All right. You know, we can't use this, but how on earth can we tell Mary?
33:19 - 33:25
Mary might have a problem. What do we do? Can we tell someone? I tell you what I was doing.
33:25 - 33:33
Richard Osman's doing it. So I was saying, you can talk to me and Tom Holland about ancient Rome and there'll be a TV moment with Richard Osman.
33:33 - 33:39
So I hope he's grateful for this. Have you had sign off? Have they said that's great?
33:39 - 33:44
Or have they said there was one point when I, as you remember, I was the voice of Gaviscon for many years.
33:44 - 33:52
And at one point I was, you know, just doing my Gaviscon work, you know, Tom and Tim like food on the go, but for Tom, that means heartburn.
33:52 - 33:56
And for Tim, that means, that means indigestion. Sometimes it's the other way around or both.
33:56 - 34:04
And I was just doing the read as normal. And clearly someone walked in and just went, couldn't we have a slightly more educated voice on this?
34:04 - 34:07
And they didn't realise I was just sitting there listening. It's really fun to go.
34:07 - 34:12
I can't hear you. I can't hear you in here. So have you had, have they said that's okay, Mary?
34:12 - 34:18
Have you had a kind of thing? I got a thank you. I got a thank you, but I had said, because I'd done a previous version, which then they'd changed.
34:18 - 34:24
They obviously are cutting down the time. So I said, I don't think I can do another take of this.
34:24 - 34:39
It's kind of this or nothing. So that was that. Personally, I can't wait for Max's audio book of his tutu thesis on, some people say the Mughal Empire was like the British Empire.
34:39 - 34:46
That is so bad. When he sent it to me, I'll send some frank opinions back about whether it would make a good audio book.
34:46 - 34:50
I just didn't write it in time. And then I just sort of thought, oh God, I've got to write this thing.
34:50 - 34:58
And it's so many words. It's too many words. So I just, I wrote it off like two books and then I went into like the Indian Institute with all the,
34:58 - 35:06
you know, fancy books of Indian history and I just opened loads and found bits that looked like they could fit and then like the appendix was absolute bullshit.
35:06 - 35:12
I'd completely made up that I'd read any of these books and I think whoever marked it saw right through.
35:12 - 35:21
Most academics are not stupid. I discovered that the hard way. You know, people think, oh, she's a silly old thing.
35:21 - 35:34
It'd be easy to pull the wool over her. Oh, it's not likely. My thesis, can I just say, which was on philosophy of music and was kind of based around this lovely idea,
35:34 - 35:49
which was, I'd read somewhere the children around the world when they're mocking each other go, nah, nah, like that minor third sound and so someone had written this theory of music based on major scales and minor scales.
35:49 - 35:55
Anyway, towards the end of my three books that I read to read I had to write this absolute piece of rubbish.
35:55 - 36:02
Basically, I'd read something from 10 years after the original source text that had said, yeah, this is all disproven now.
36:02 - 36:08
This is the most Western view. The idea that there's eight notes in a scale, et cetera, et cetera.
36:08 - 36:16
So I effectively had to write an appendix to my thesis debunking the work that I had just done, but it was too late and that's a two-two as well.
36:16 - 36:25
I'm going to say, you know, I might have given that a first because, you know, the idea of self-criticism, you know, I've written but now let's see it another way.
36:25 - 36:28
I think... Can I just say for the record, I ended up with a two-one after all these slams.
36:28 - 36:35
That's important to say. Oh, this is so petty. It is petty. You know, I don't want Mary Beard to think I got a two-two for goodness sake.
36:35 - 36:40
Just leave the podcast. Mary Beard's just given me a posthumous first on mine. Yes, I have.
36:40 - 36:46
So congratulations. We need a photo of you throwing your mortarboard. You're the one wearing a full mortarboard, David, to try and impress Mary.
36:46 - 36:51
I don't know why you've done that. I've referenced it, of course. Okay, so what time are we at now?
36:51 - 36:55
We've done that voiceover for Kew Gardens. So we're now kind of about quarter past four.
36:55 - 37:09
Then I had a kind of nagging kind of worry because it was only the day before that I'd finished, actually kind of, you know, done the last full stop on the last chapter of my next book.
37:09 - 37:16
And I'd saved it, sent it off. And I thought, should I read that last chapter again?
37:16 - 37:23
You know, I'd been so pleased because I'd been struggling with this chapter for six weeks.
37:23 - 37:28
What I was saying was all right, but, you know, in the end, I just thought this is a bit boring.
37:28 - 37:32
It's just a bit boring. Is that a caveat you do in the audio book?
37:32 - 37:37
This might be a bit, the bit coming up is a bit boring. I don't like being boring.
37:37 - 37:47
I had eventually, you know, the cost of mental agony, really, you know, going to bed and having, you know, there's nothing worse.
37:47 - 37:55
You guys know this when you're writing a book. There's nothing worse. Than going to bed with fewer words written than you woke up that morning.
37:55 - 38:04
Because what you've done is you've crossed stuff out you haven't added. And, you know, I'd been going through that, you know, so the chapter was getting shorter and shorter by the day.
38:04 - 38:11
Then I'd kind of somehow got my act together. I thought, okay, and I talked to a few people and they were quite helpful.
38:11 - 38:17
And right, okay. And so I'd actually, it'd take me about a week, but I'd redone it and finished it.
38:17 - 38:28
Final full stop. Save and sent her off. But by the time I got back, I thought maybe I should have just, you know, I've got plenty of time.
38:28 - 38:32
You know, it's not going to go to press tomorrow, but maybe I ought to have another look at it.
38:32 - 38:41
And so what I first did was I read it through. I made some few changes, but I thought, you know, I breathed a sigh of relief, really, because I thought,
38:41 - 38:48
okay, I'm not sure it's perfect, but it's fine. And it kind of, you know, the demons went out of my mind a bit at that point.
38:48 - 38:55
Okay, that's good. So on the front of the book that you've written, you can have a testimonial from yourself that says, not perfect, but fine.
38:55 - 39:01
What's this book about? It's about why on earth we're interested in the ancient classical world.
39:01 - 39:12
My only fear, Mary, here is because you had given the essay in, it depends if the lecturer lets you resubmit it, because they might drop 10%, in my experience.
39:12 - 39:24
There might be a penalty, but I'll take the penalty. So what happens then with writing a book is that you've had all this kind of up to the wire stuff,
39:24 - 39:31
you know, and then nothing happens for months. You know, by the time it actually comes out, it was months ago when you were actually writing it.
39:31 - 39:35
But anyway, I think we're starting that process now. And so I'm going to forget it.
39:35 - 39:40
For the record, I think, although I let it pass when you said, you know what it's like writing a book, guys.
39:40 - 39:44
And I went, yeah, I have never written a book. I do write a column every fortnight.
39:44 - 39:51
You write a column, well, you know. 950 words. And I look at the blank, laptop, and I go, I can't do another 900 words.
39:51 - 40:02
So a book is beyond me. Is the answer, and don't give away the end of your book, ancient civilisations, is it, I mean, clearly it's more complicated than this, but you know, when you get somewhere that's really old and you just think,
40:02 - 40:10
how the hell did they do that then? Like, is the sort of real basic, but that is when you see the, I don't know, the pantheon or whatever, and you go,
40:10 - 40:21
how they do this that many years ago? It's partly that. I think it's actually, and this, I suppose, is what, you know, went back to, me encountering the Egyptian bread in the British Museum.
40:21 - 40:30
I think there's something about the sheer wonder of it, you know, that this is so many thousand years old and yet it's still here.
40:30 - 40:38
Or somebody, you know, a Roman emperor 2,000 years ago wrote this and we can still access it.
40:38 - 40:49
And there's all kinds of reasons for being interested in the ancient world. But for me, it's that kind of mind-blowing, mind-boggling, fulfillment, excitement.
40:49 - 40:57
I mean, you know, people often think how kind of head-splitting it is to think what being on the surface of Mars would be like.
40:57 - 41:07
And I find myself thinking, I think that about ancient Greece or ancient Rome. How could you ever imagine what it was like?
41:07 - 41:12
You know, it is very near in all kinds of ways. We can still touch it and feel it.
41:12 - 41:18
We can look at the bread and we can read the stuff. But it's 2,000 years old.
41:18 - 41:25
And we're both so near and so far. And it makes such a difference to us.
41:25 - 41:35
And yet, in some ways, it doesn't matter at all. Part of the reason for doing this podcast, I think, is because I don't think anyone really's life is any more interesting than anyone else's, right?
41:35 - 41:38
It doesn't matter who you think. We're all doing the same shit, right? That's right.
41:38 - 41:46
And when you sort of think back to even Nero or whoever, they're still having to go to the toilet and thinking what's for breakfast, you know?
41:46 - 41:55
And that's part of the... The familiarity. You know, you go to Pompeii and you sit on one of the lavs and you think, how many Roman bottoms sat here before me,
41:55 - 42:03
et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, doing the same thing, that's sharing. And then you think, that's one side of it.
42:03 - 42:12
But they're completely different. You know, if a Roman walked into my house, I wouldn't know what to say to them.
42:12 - 42:18
It's like they're from another planet. Ciao. Try ciao, you know, style way. And they'd look a bit puzzled.
42:18 - 42:31
And I think there's this kind of simultaneous similarity, sharedness and complete difference. And the thing that kind of often brings it home for me is that nobody in Rome knew what they looked like.
42:31 - 42:37
They could occasionally put on, you know, women put on, I'm afraid it sounds very sexist, but it's true.
42:37 - 42:41
You know, they had a bit of shiny metal and that helped put on their eye makeup.
42:41 - 42:49
But they didn't know what they looked like, except in a pool or a bit of polished, brass or something.
42:49 - 42:56
You think, what on earth would it be like not to know what you look like?
42:56 - 43:03
What would that mean to how you lived your life? I mean, particularly since Zoom and everything, we spend hours a day looking at ourselves.
43:03 - 43:07
Yeah. And not even looking in the mirror, we just turn on the Zoom call or what we're doing now.
43:07 - 43:16
And we're always seeing ourselves. We're seeing us as others see us. And what would it be not to recognize yourself?
43:16 - 43:22
Is that me? It's those kinds of things, which I think, what difference does that make?
43:22 - 43:26
For me, it's kind of, it makes a head hurt trying to think about it.
43:26 - 43:36
This podcast has never got this interesting, Mary. That's why there's silence. But, you know, some people think, oh, you know, of all these big questions that you have to get your head around about ancient Greece and Rome,
43:36 - 43:47
how did the Roman Empire fall? You know, I'm quite interested in those questions, but I'm not half as interested in those even bigger questions about what it was like to be somebody there.
43:48 - 44:01
A friend of this podcast, amazing surrealist comedian Sam Campbell, came to visit me a few weeks ago and the Romans in their infinite wisdom decided to leave Ireland to our own devices.
44:01 - 44:18
But we headed straight to Newgrange, which is, it's a 4,500 year old, our sort of Stonehenge-y thing where you go into a tunnel and they simulate what happens on the shortest day of the year where basically a laser beam shoots up a corridor,
44:18 - 44:30
at which moment I decided it would be funny to wet my finger and stick it in Sam Campbell's ear, which I haven't done since primary school, which I think really added to the moment for him.
44:30 - 44:43
But even the idea that these technologies were known and were lost. Newgrange is obviously amazing and I've not been there, but I did go to Orkney quite recently and I hadn't been before.
44:43 - 44:52
And the Neolithic settlements on Orkney, there's a whole culture, which I realised I didn't know much about.
44:52 - 45:02
I'd always thought about the Neolithic as, let me confess, being some flints and then kind of mock-ups of men in animal things, you know, bashing out stuff.
45:02 - 45:10
The idea that you could go to a whole Neolithic village, you know, and there were kind of places to put the crockery and whatever they had on beds.
45:10 - 45:24
You know, I think the Romans are far enough away, but this, I did think then, and I think you could say the same for New Grange, really, that we always think about the British Isles from the South as if something, you know,
45:24 - 45:28
culture starts in the South and spreads North. You know, that's how the Romans came.
45:28 - 45:35
That's how the Normans came and all that. Actually, try thinking about it from the West and the North and coming South.
45:35 - 45:43
And suddenly you've kind of, you've upturned your view of how history works. Wow. Right, so you have.
45:43 - 45:46
You've done a full stop. Lesson over, lesson over. Yeah, let's crack on with the day.
45:46 - 45:51
Can't use any of that stuff. No, it was great. You've finished the book again and you're delighted you've finished the book again.
45:51 - 45:55
It's time for, surely it's time for another glass of wine to celebrate. No, not quite yet.
45:55 - 46:03
I've got, I had two more things to do. There was somebody who'd sent a book proposal and I thought, okay, you know, this is the kind of thing that you fit into these odd hours, right?
46:03 - 46:07
So I read the book proposal, I commented on it and I thought, check that off.
46:07 - 46:17
And then my son, who works on Middle Eastern history, had sent me a recent chapter that he'd written of a book that he's about to write.
46:17 - 46:20
And he said, he said, oh, it doesn't matter when you comment on that, I'd really love to know what you think.
46:20 - 46:24
So he's the one who we used to go to Cambridge United to go. Of course, yeah.
46:24 - 46:29
Was it about that? Was it about after John Beck and trying to play, when John Beck tried to play a passing game?
46:29 - 46:40
Sadly, lower league football didn't come into it very much. It was about an extraordinary dissident journalist living between Cairo and Paris in the 19th century.
46:40 - 46:44
And so I read that or I read part of it and I kind of wrote to him and I thought, right, okay.
46:44 - 46:48
And he good? Well, I think he's good, but I'm his mum. No, true. True, true, yeah.
46:48 - 46:52
And I corrected some of the, you know, what I thought were the infelicities of style.
46:52 - 47:01
And, you know, and he's got a very good eye for the subject. He's just written a great book about fake ears and the occult in the early 20th century.
47:01 - 47:06
Just to be clear, that's fake ears, not fake ears, just in case. Fake ears, yes.
47:06 - 47:18
F-A-K-I-R-S. Holy men of the electromagnetic age, as he puts it, right? It will never cease to intrigue me how the apple does not fall far from the tree for Mary.
47:18 - 47:34
Yet, Max's father, this eminent medic, has spawned this guy who waffles on about football for the apple has fallen so far from the tree that people wonder whether someone might have kicked the apple down the road.
47:34 - 47:40
I see that point, but my son thinks the apple has fallen a very long way from the tree.
47:40 - 47:53
Because he thinks, I work on all those boring old Greeks and Romans. He is working on the culture of the Arabic world he teaches Arabic, he's interested in theatre of the early 20th century,
47:53 - 47:58
Arabic feminism, and he thinks it is a million miles from the Greeks and Romans.
47:58 - 48:07
Okay, sorry. I apologise to everyone. If he were here, that's what he'd say. Okay, so you do his book, you've done your book, you've done his book.
48:07 - 48:12
Then there's the question, you know, I had these two large glasses of wine, am I going to...
48:12 - 48:22
Crack on. Am I going to crack on? And what we have at home, I've been trying to be a bit abstemious recently just because I think it's good to take time off.
48:22 - 48:29
Yeah. But we've got some of those, you know those little bottles of wine you can buy in supermarkets which are kind of one big glass?
48:29 - 48:34
Yeah, yeah. I sometimes get them. We started to buy them because there's something terrible.
48:34 - 48:39
Sorry, this programme's going to make me sound like a complete alky and I promise you, far from it.
48:39 - 48:45
You get 17 of those bottles and you pour them into a bucket and then you go apple bobbing and then you pour it in and put it on your head.
48:45 - 48:50
You know what, I mean, there's something like everything oh, I'll just open a bottle of wine and I'll just have a glass and put it back in the fridge.
48:50 - 48:57
Terribly easy to say oh, I'll just have another glass. Sure. Whereas if you open one of those they're often not very nice so that also helps.
48:57 - 49:03
Yes. But you kind of think right, that's what I'm going to have. Screw cap, I'm opening it, throwing it away and that's it.
49:03 - 49:08
So that's what I did. I thought, that's right. Just one tiny Jacob's Creek. That does the job.
49:08 - 49:13
I'm afraid it did the job. Yeah, have you had any dinner, Mary? Yeah, we had moussaka earlier.
49:13 - 49:23
This is the kind of marital dilemma, isn't it? You know, I'd gone and had a go great Greek lunch and the husband had sat here and I had a cold pork or something.
49:23 - 49:31
I don't know. So he's kind of up for supper and I think the last thing I need is another meal, right?
49:31 - 49:38
So we compromise. We compromise when there's still a kind of inch of wine in this little bottle.
49:38 - 49:47
We compromise on cooking the asparagus that we'd bought. And so he has a very large plate of asparagus and I have kind of two spears.
49:47 - 49:50
That's not enough. If I've not had a big lunch, just a plate of asparagus.
49:50 - 49:55
I don't think you've compromised enough there, Mary. Well, I also let him get out some cheese.
49:55 - 49:59
It was very nice cheese and he had some cheese, bread and cheese. What cheese was it?
49:59 - 50:04
Was it just a normal cheese? What was it? It was barambigo, you know, the British brie.
50:04 - 50:13
Really nice. Wow. So he had a bit of that and some asparagus and packed up with the bread, you know, so that, you know, he felt full.
50:13 - 50:19
Now I'm really hoping you then both get the projector down and watch Fast and Furious 8.
50:19 - 50:25
I'll tell you what I did. I then thought, oh God, I've got this podcast tomorrow.
50:25 - 50:33
By this stage it is, must be eight o'clock, right? It's got this podcast. It's going to be, what did I do yesterday?
50:33 - 50:39
Am I going to remember? So I sat down for a quarter of an hour and I wrote down in my little notebook what I'd done.
50:39 - 50:52
So that when you said, what did you then do? I had it, right? If anybody else is thinking of appearing, I fully recommend the writing down everything you did so you don't forget it.
50:52 - 51:00
I thought you were going to say that you had panicked that there was insufficient content so you'd robbed a car or something like that.
51:00 - 51:06
You do think, is there enough here? You know, is there enough? I'd also been assured that it should be true, right?
51:06 - 51:14
So you will notice that I have, you know, the true kind of boredom of the last half of my day has, I hope, come out.
51:14 - 51:19
You know, and I have not, I've not invented a car chase or anything like that.
51:19 - 51:24
Very bearded a car chase, go on. By the one-way system of Cambridge, I'm in for it.
51:24 - 51:32
Beards in a chariot. I've been totally honest and you can, you know, you can see what the life of a retired academic is like.
51:32 - 51:36
It is, you know, sitting down with their laptop, you know, reading people's book proposals.
51:36 - 51:43
But I felt very pleased because I thought, otherwise I'm going to get up in the morning and I'm going to think, what did I do when I got back?
51:43 - 51:50
Right, so I wrote it down. Then I thought, you know, and I'm afraid we're quickly coming to the end of my day.
51:50 - 51:56
I got up at six, remember? And it was really hot yesterday. And I thought, what do I do now?
51:56 - 52:01
You know, you can't go to bed at half past eight, right? You know, can you?
52:01 - 52:08
Oh, you can. Barry, you're talking to a man here Napoleon-like, he can sleep in a drawer at any given moment.
52:08 - 52:16
What the husband said, because, you know, our house is, you know, an old house and it's not terribly sunny and so it's not that hot, but it's still, you know,
52:16 - 52:25
you think, I feel a bit sort of debilitated. In our bedroom, we've got one of those old colonial style fans in the ceiling of our bedroom.
52:25 - 52:34
It is amazing. You know, it is amazing. You know, and you instantly, you put it on full blast, cool air appears to come from nowhere.
52:34 - 52:39
So he said, why don't you go work on the bed? You know, why don't you go?
52:39 - 52:48
Because then you could have the fan on. It would be, this debate has taken, you know, in the way that marital debates are quite slow, you know, we're pressing quarter to nine probably.
52:48 - 52:54
It's 1am. It's pressing quarter to nine. Okay, that's what I'll do. I'll be really nice.
52:54 - 53:00
And once I got on the bed, I took my laptop. Mary, is there not a time when you just kick back?
53:00 - 53:06
It's... Well, that was the lunch. I mean, okay, we're talking about the Odyssey, but it was the two very large glasses of brown I said to go.
53:06 - 53:10
Okay. That for me is kicking back. Maybe you have better ways of doing it, David.
53:10 - 53:16
That's for me, right? Yeah, okay. And, you know, people are always wanting you to be on their podcast and things.
53:16 - 53:21
And so you have to do the prep. Question, Mary. Do you have enough cushions?
53:21 - 53:28
Because I find working on the bed sort of not quite perfect angle and looking down a bit.
53:28 - 53:36
It's not ideal. And you want to be right under the colonial fan, right? What I do is both the husband and I have two pillows on the bed.
53:36 - 53:47
So if I do that, what I do is I put one pillow underneath the laptop and an extra one behind my back and then it's fine.
53:47 - 53:56
I recommend it. You need to elevate the laptop. Yeah, I've actually put my laptop for this episode on a few history books and a Robert Harris novel.
53:56 - 54:04
I mean, that's sort of history, isn't it? Which one? Conclave. Oh God, I think that is really good.
54:04 - 54:12
Is it a good one? Yeah. And the film was very good too. I'm not going to say which is better, but both are well worth a look.
54:12 - 54:17
I just thought that would help. That sort of, you know, the laptop would feel the historical vibes.
54:17 - 54:21
Okay, so what are we working on now? This is an endless, never stop working, Mary.
54:21 - 54:35
Well, now, what's changed really in the life of the academic over the last 10 years, particularly I think since COVID, but before, is that almost everything that you want to read in academic journals,
54:35 - 54:40
you can get on your laptop. Sure. You used to have to go to the library.
54:40 - 54:43
I'll get up early and I'll go to the library and I'll look that up.
54:43 - 54:48
Blow the dust off an old manuscript. If I blow the dust off, I think no one's read this for a long time, et cetera, et cetera.
54:48 - 54:58
White gloves as well, yeah. That is a revolution for me. You know, you can think, you know, I've got to read some of those boring old articles about the second book of the Odyssey,
54:58 - 55:03
which is what I'm thinking about at the moment. And I just do, I just click on them and there they are.
55:03 - 55:06
But there's a, I'm afraid there is a kind of nasty follow-up to this story.
55:06 - 55:14
I think, right, okay, it's going to be good. I'm going to get through this and I'll save them in my little file on my laptop so I've got them, you know,
55:14 - 55:19
safe and I can come back to them. So I start doing that and I think I'm getting on quite well actually.
55:19 - 55:32
But then I don't remember very much until kind of the 10 o'clock news is playing on the radio because I've put the radio and my husband is wanting his pillows back.
55:32 - 55:39
I've just dropped off, you know, and it's 10 o'clock. Love it. This is kind of granny bedtime.
55:39 - 55:47
I mean, I can't imagine 30 years ago the idea of saying that I'd sort and dropped off at 10.
55:47 - 55:58
You know, I would have been so embarrassed. Look, I put Ian Rushden to bed at quarter to seven last night and I'm lying in the bed next to him and I definitely dropped off at seven.
55:58 - 56:02
So dropping off at 10 is not a crime, Mary. In my eyes, it's a dream.
56:02 - 56:08
That's what it is. So, you know, and I think, well, that was the day then, you know.
56:08 - 56:17
And that's it. And that's it. So I'm afraid, guys, that's all you get because as far as truth goes, there's, you know, unless I were to get, you know, really economical with it,
56:17 - 56:22
there's nothing else I could say that I did. Got up in the middle of the night and went and had a pee.
56:22 - 56:31
I don't know whether that was before or after midnight because I did it. Mary left out the six episodes of Love Island she watched on her phone throughout the day.
56:31 - 56:39
The secret's out. Well, Mary, thank you so much for coming on. I hope you enjoyed it.
56:39 - 56:45
Well, I did. And I was, I thought to start with, this doesn't sound like my kind of podcast.
56:45 - 56:49
Really. Lots of people say that. Once I'd listened, I just thought, it's quite a clever idea.
56:49 - 57:03
It is quite a clever idea because it's hard to lie. You know, if you interview people, you know, the temptation to embroider in just a straight interview to make yourself look a bit better than you are.
57:03 - 57:09
And also you won't get more sort of aggressive. It's two Frosts you've got here.
57:09 - 57:17
So, you know, we are going to get the truth. One is Frost and one is Tom Cruise and a few others and a few good men going, you can't handle the truth.
57:17 - 57:25
So between us, we will, the truth will always out. This is, I think, the success of this podcast, Mary, and why we're so grateful for you being here.
57:25 - 57:40
But also I think it's important because in 3,000 years time when this civilization is almost entirely lost, what if this podcast is the only thing that remains and some child like the young Mary Beard,
57:40 - 57:46
this is their piece of bread where they try to imagine what this life was like.
57:46 - 57:57
I was going to say that I hope you're archiving it, you know, give it to the Bodleian or something like this because this is fantastic historical material.
57:57 - 58:01
One day in my life. There it is. That's the quote. That is the quote.
58:01 - 58:16
Thank you so much, Mary. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mary. Pleasure. So there we are, David.
58:16 - 58:19
And what was that quote at the end? I mean, you've just heard, listeners have just heard it.
58:19 - 58:24
She gave me a first. She gave you a first. That's all I could get for...
58:24 - 58:29
This is an amazing moment of history or something like that. Whatever she said, can we remember what she said?
58:29 - 58:40
Strap that on the podcast. That's great. I was really interested in that bit when she was just talking about, you know, people not being able to see themselves in ancient Rome and, you know,
58:40 - 58:51
how people existed and stuff. It's really... And the mundanity is what we are doing to the origin story, which I know you didn't approve of because it didn't happen yesterday.
58:51 - 58:54
I felt... It was good, yeah. That was good journalism from me as well. I think so.
58:54 - 58:58
Well done, David. Yeah. Give yourself a pat on the back. Did you want some affirmation?
58:58 - 59:03
You're doing a really good job, David. Well done. Keep it up. But thank you to Dame Mary Beard.
59:03 - 59:10
Yeah, listen to her podcast, Instant Classes. I mean, even though we are both doing history podcasts, I don't think I either step on each other's toes there.
59:10 - 59:16
I think that's okay. We'll do our best. If she gets Tom Rose and Tal on there.
59:16 - 59:21
Stay in your lane, Beard. That's what we'll say. Very sad that she doesn't know mum.
59:21 - 59:25
It's just amazing that my parents don't know. You know, she's got some mutual friends somewhere.
59:25 - 59:30
Mum will know. When mum gets back in touch, we'll find out. If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, here's how.
59:30 - 59:37
To get in touch with the show, you can email us at whatdidyoudoyesterdaypod at gmail.com.
59:37 - 59:44
Follow us on Instagram at yesterdaypod. And please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast.
59:44 - 1:00:46
And if you didn't, please don't. There we are, thanks David, in it for life. We're branching out, it's exciting times, isn't it? Not only is everything showbiz, everything is history. Everything is history. Everything is showbiz. What we hope is, we carry the people that only want to hear about shit with us, to these different fields. In it for life, thank you very much Max. Thanks David.