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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.
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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'll 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 guest 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 What Did You Do Yesterday?
1:03 - 1:09
I'm Max Rushden and David O'Doherty is here too. Hello and welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?
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Today's guest, alphabetically, is the final... I mean, I guess he does... His name covers the entire alphabet.
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It's Andy Zaltzman. That's not why we booked him. It wasn't just for alphabetical reasons.
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We're desperately trying to get a Q. I haven't booked Nigel Quasi. Or Quentin from your football team.
1:31 - 1:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Andy is one of my oldest friends in comedy. You may know him in the cricket gear from the last series of Taskmaster.
1:44 - 1:56
He is celebrating at the moment the 18th anniversary year of The Bugle, the satirical, beautiful podcast that he and John Oliver started.
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And now I do it sometimes. Nish does it sometimes. You may also know him from Test Match Special.
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Max, describe to people what Test Match Special is. I mean, it is heritage sports broadcasting.
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It transcends cricket is what it is. It is the BBC's cricket coverage. You know, their ball-by-ball test match coverage.
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And it has an amazing history of amazing broadcasters talking about the cricket, but also talking about buses and cakes.
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And he is, as you will establish pretty early in this episode, he is the uber nerd that they turn to for nerdy stats.
2:36 - 2:42
And you will discern from this episode that he is not faking this. He is not bluffing when he's doing this.
2:43 - 2:47
I think we established that. They're not the right guy. Yeah, Andy is never going to appear on Love Island.
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And you were like, wow, this is different to what I thought his personality was.
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He's going on tour. He's doing some shows in Australia while The Ashes is on, which starts on, well, I started, this is out.
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When I think it's out, I think that it started two days ago. So hopefully England are doing okay.
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Wow. Listeners, I've never seen Max do that face before. His eyes were squinted just.
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He was performing a high-level mathematical combination. Yeah, that was just some thinking. It's my thinking face.
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But if you go to Andy Zaltzman, two Zeds, as in Z-A-L-T-Z-m-A-N.co.uk. Z-A-L-T-Z-Z.
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He really wanted to be the end of the alphabet. So he put Z-Z on his surname.
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Andy Zaltzman.co.uk. He's doing a few gigs in Australia while he's over here.
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And then he's got a UK tour coming up next year. This is what Andy Zaltzman did yesterday.
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Andy Zaltzman, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday? Thanks for having me. Finally. There's a part of me, because I presume you're going to come to Australia for the ashes.
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Yes. So I was hoping this might be a I was on a plane for 24 hours episode.
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But I don't know yet. No, it's not. I'm flying out in five days time, arriving the day before the cricket begins.
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Oh, good. Well planned. A recording annoyingly scheduled for two days before the cricket begins in London.
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So I'll be working on the stats aided by significant jet lag. But yes, I will be heading south shortly.
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To our listeners who have no interest in cricket, for example, me. He does this a lot.
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He explains things that everyone knows about. When he said, are you coming out for the ashes?
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It's not a funeral scattering that they are both attending. It's the stupid name for a stupid cricket tournament.
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Thank you. We have listeners in America, Andy. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you have listeners who are not cricket fans, then this podcast is worthless.
4:52 - 4:59
And all your listeners are losers. Interestingly, Andy and I have been to many funerals together.
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We can't talk about them because obviously we didn't go to one yesterday, but there's so many.
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What's weird is Andy just talks about statistics while he's at these funerals. Just talking about what the longest funeral was, the longest that the speech has ever gone on.
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He knows all those ashes statistics. Thank you. Got some sensational funeral-based databases. Coffin sizes, speed of cremation.
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It's good stuff. Hey, come on. Let's get down to business, Andy. Where did you wake up yesterday, please?
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I woke up in my bed at home. I reckon around about 7-ish, 7 a.m.
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Uh-huh. Okay. I've had children now for almost 19 years. Prior to which my general getting up time as a stand-up comedian was significantly later in the morning stroke early afternoon.
5:54 - 6:08
And I don't think I've fully adjusted to parenthood yet in almost two decades. I mean, I devoted myself to finding a career purely in order to avoid having to get up at 7 a.m.
6:08 - 6:14
And in that, I appear to have failed. What wakes you? Is it commotion in the house?
6:14 - 6:20
Or is it the light of the Lord? You know, what is it that specifically wakes you at 7?
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An alarm? And please tell me, Andy, it's not your 19-year-old screaming because they've done a shit and you have to.
6:26 - 6:31
Because, like, I've got a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old, and I keep saying I'll be out of the woods soon.
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And if it's a 19-year-old getting up at 5 in the morning to play Fisher-Price train sets, I'm going to be very sad.
6:37 - 6:52
They're fully house-trained, my children, 18 or 16. No, it's an alarm. And I have an app on my phone in which, when the alarm goes off, to turn the alarm off, I have to do a set of puzzles.
6:52 - 6:56
And you can set what puzzles it sets you. Whoa! Wow! It's very effective, actually.
6:57 - 7:00
So I have three different sets of alarm. The first one is just one quite simple puzzle.
7:01 - 7:05
The second one is two slightly harder puzzles. And the third one is three slightly harder puzzles.
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So I can often go back to sleep after the first one, but I very, very rarely blast through all three without getting up.
7:13 - 7:20
And remember, Max, Andy's a puzzles guy. So I'd say level three is like Fermat's last theorem or something.
7:20 - 7:29
It involves you having to take out a whiteboard and carry the five. Yeah. Accelerating particles and that kind of stuff.
7:29 - 7:36
Yeah. Build the Large Hadron Collider. That's just a long tube, isn't it? Okay, so the alarm goes off at seven, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
7:36 - 7:42
And you pick up your phone. No, it's the cricket music. It's do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. It's Booker T and the MGs.
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It's nice, although I did have that on the playlist for the disco at my wedding.
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It absolutely got the dance floor packed, I'm telling you. Interruption. I did a festival in Seattle in about 2010, a comedy festival.
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There was a music festival as well. And I got the airport bus from the hotel to Seattle airport with Booker T from Booker T and the MGs.
8:11 - 8:20
All right. Who we ended up having, because he's a jazz guy. We ended up having, my father's a jazz musician, so we had a good old jazz conversation.
8:20 - 8:35
And then we talked about that song. So to the listeners, the BBC theme music to the cricket for 30 or 40 years was an obscure Booker T and the MGs album track.
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And Booker T's joke to, if there was a new member of the MGs with him, was when they did a gig in England, he wouldn't tell the new member of the band that this is his most beloved track ever in this very specific country, among this very specific demographic.
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So the new bass player would just start playing it and the room would explode.
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And that was how Booker T got one of his big kicks from cricket. That's my only cricket statistics slash fact.
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And I've said it in the first five minutes of this podcast. Right. You've left yourself nowhere to go.
9:15 - 9:22
So what's the first puzzle? So you look at the phone, the alarm goes, the Booker T plays, and then it's a Sudoku?
9:22 - 9:30
What is it? Just a question, like a riddle? It's just a sort of basic sort of four by four grid and you have to sort of match up colours.
9:30 - 9:35
So, you know, press the top left and it's red and then you have to sort of match up the two reds and the two blues and all that.
9:35 - 9:41
So it doesn't take very long. It's quite simple. Simon, similar to the game Simon is what I'm going to say.
9:41 - 9:58
Yes. But it gets your brain working. Not always enough to stay awake. But as the puzzles get more difficult, I have one where I have to copy out a sequence of sort of 15 letters and numbers, which when you're quite sleepy on a phone is a bit tricky.
9:58 - 10:01
Do you have to memorise them? No, no, no. You have to copy it accurately.
10:01 - 10:11
But if you make a mistake, it tells you off. There's an open ended one, which is just the First World War was inevitable owing to conditions in Europe at the time.
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Discuss. And it's just three blank pages then. You have to talk about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France for it and all these things.
10:22 - 10:26
I tell you, I mean, that is worth a quadruple espresso discussing the origins of the First World War.
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Clemenceau wanted a harsh piece. That's the Treaty of Versailles, damn it. So yesterday, how many puzzles do you do before you decide?
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I'm puzzled out. Well, a total of six. It took me three alarms to actually wake up.
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Six puzzles, basically, before I was vaguely conscious. Wow, this is extraordinary. And so the first puzzle is the colours.
10:44 - 10:49
That's it. The second is write down the numbers. What's puzzle three? Multiple choice capital cities.
10:50 - 10:55
Okay. Yeah, that's great. How many? How many do you have to do? You have to do six.
10:56 - 10:59
Okay. And there's like six choices for each one. And did you get them all?
10:59 - 11:03
Did you get them all? Yeah, that's not too tricky because it'll say, you know, what's the capital of Azerbaijan?
11:03 - 11:09
And it'll say things like London, Brasilia, Baku, that sort of thing. So it's not too tricky.
11:09 - 11:20
I also have an... If I absolutely have to get up, I have what I call the nuclear option, which has quite complicated mathematical equations, including square roots and brackets.
11:20 - 11:27
And I've never slept through that one. I've never... No guest's brain has ever been more switched on by the time they actually get out of bed.
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So how long does this whole puzzle fiasco take? With the puzzle stroke snooze alarm, I reckon probably 20 minutes.
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So I reckon I was probably up by... Well, sitting up in bed at 20 past seven-ish.
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And when Andy sits up, his brain is so attuned, it just sees matter as just numbers.
11:49 - 11:56
He just sees double helixes of DNA instead of people. He just sees numbers. That's all he sees.
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But it's so heavy that he falls asleep again. Do you bounce out of bed then?
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Or do you sit there for an hour getting over the fact that you've woken up your brain with this kind of double fuel injectors?
12:14 - 12:22
I think yesterday I did a bit of work before I got up. Now, the reason for this, you say this cascade of numbers.
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Like you say, I'm going out to the ashes next week in my role as a statistician on the radio.
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But I went to bed the previous night halfway through building a spreadsheet because that's the kind of rock and roll life that I lead.
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You know, not for me, drink, drugs, groupies. I like to sit down with an Excel spreadsheet and calculate historic trends in test cricket.
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So I'd left one half finished when I fell asleep at about 1 a.m. I woke up and thought, I'd better get this done.
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I've got to ask the questions also. What historic trends are we looking at here?
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I know there's a lot of stats in cricket. So is this specifically trouser width?
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You know what I mean? Use of helmet, things like that. I've got spreadsheets for those.
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I've got spreadsheets for beard, bushiness, moustache, prevalence. Both of which have actually had a bit of a recent resurgence after some difficult times.
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This one specifically was looking at how Australia have performed in home series over the last 45 years.
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And looking for trends. It's rock and roll stuff. I mean, if your listeners, as you mentioned, not all of them are cricket fans.
13:38 - 13:45
Just purely me describing this spreadsheet must have turned them. No, this is good. And if I could just jump in, David, I know you're a cricket expert.
13:45 - 13:50
But as the host of the new podcast, The Guardian Ashes Weekly, if you're interested, if we could book you.
13:50 - 13:58
And I don't know what your BBC rules are. That would be useful. Is this purely on Ashes home series or Australia home series?
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Well, I mean, look, Max, obviously I built it to do both. Oh, I see.
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Click tab one. Click tab two. Of course you did. Yeah, that was my one piece of personal development.
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I'd like to say my one piece of personal development during COVID lockdown. What I really mean is my one piece of personal development probably in the last 20 years was learning how to use Microsoft Excel for cricket stats.
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Which I'm not sure is what Bill Gates. I don't know if he sat down and developed it himself.
14:26 - 14:30
I'm not sure we have this in mind for it, but. I really feel it plays to cricket strengths.
14:30 - 14:39
It is worth saying for the tape that the job that you have on Test Match Special, which is sort of the most historic cricket broadcasting possibly in the whole world.
14:40 - 14:49
You know, you're sort of there all day and you have the commentators and then they throw to you or you put your hand up, I guess, and say, oh, here's a nugget of information about this.
14:49 - 14:53
So you are working all day and your predecessor, was it, is it Bill Frindle?
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Bill Frindle, yeah, yeah. This is a legendary position in broadcasting. It's worth pointing this out.
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Yeah. I mean, thanks for talking that up. I mean, it's basically sort of professionalized hyper geekery.
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But I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of it. That's who I am. And I'm not going to change.
15:09 - 15:14
He used to carry a literal suitcase and trolley full of books around with him everywhere.
15:15 - 15:25
But now it's online through the magic of the Internet. It's all AI now. All Sossman does is, all right, AI, tell me who's ever hit the ball the farthest.
15:25 - 15:33
And also, yeah, with statistics in sport, as in economics and politics, if you say it confidently, no one generally questions you.
15:34 - 15:42
That's always the fallback pollution. Previous guest on this podcast, Jonathan Wilson, which doing something and he'll say, well, that reminds me of Hungary in the 1940s and says some footballer.
15:42 - 15:44
And obviously, there's no one on the panel that's going to go, actually, I'm not sure.
15:45 - 15:50
I agree with you. I think Lobanovsky actually, you're just a cut in on his right foot, to be perfectly honest.
15:50 - 15:55
So how long does it take to finish this spreadsheet? Well, finish. What does finish mean?
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I don't know if there's anything truly finished. Good point. Okay. How long do you work on this spreadsheet while you're in bed?
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About half an hour. Then I have to actually get up and get what passes for my day going.
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So I reckon half an hour sitting in bed and then it's time to move out of the comforting warmth.
16:16 - 16:24
If I can just jump in there on the subject of never questioning statisticians because their geekery appears to be at such a high level.
16:24 - 16:33
We didn't question Max when he said he's hosting Guardian Ashes Weekly, which is actually a look inside crematoria in England.
16:34 - 16:46
And what's up, what's down, popular urns, stuff like that. I assumed it was something to do with the funerals of specifically players for the Cleveland Guardians team.
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Also, just quickly, I mean, surely with Jonathan Wilson, it'd be more likely Hungary in the 50s than the 40s, wouldn't it?
16:53 - 17:00
That was really when that would have been. Oh, my God. Imagine if we got them together, David.
17:00 - 17:17
Imagine if we got them together. The world would explode, wouldn't it? Okay. So I presume we park the numbers for a small moment and you start doing more relatable stuff for the audience in terms of getting out of bed and sort of eating some things.
17:18 - 17:21
That sort of carry on. Am I unusual in doing a spreadsheet before I get out of bed?
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I thought everyone did that. I think Omid Jalili did one. I'm trying to think of our other guests who did a spreadsheet.
17:28 - 17:37
Ania Magliano, she did two hours of the different sorts of googly's versus Yorkers, the different swing balls.
17:37 - 17:44
Those two are not mutually exclusive, David. Okay. So we up? Are we getting dressed straight away?
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Are we showering? Are we breakfasting? What's happening? Getting fully dressed might be overstating things.
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I chucked on a pair of tracksuit trousers. Yeah. No one's ever called them that before.
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Breakfast. Then that was a bit of a highlight yesterday, actually. Okay, good. It was quite a bonding experience with my elder child as we made jerk omelets.
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Wow. Very simple. Just a jerk spice mix. Chuck it in a hot pan. Then put a bit of butter in.
18:09 - 18:15
Mix up an egg with a bit of pepper and some more jerk. A single egg in quite a big pan.
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So you get a flat omelet that cooks very quickly. That is an excellent breakfast ready within about a minute and a half.
18:22 - 18:33
No cheese? No cheese. I mean, you obviously can soup it up if you want, but if you just want a high-speed hot breakfast with a bit of a spicy kick, I can highly recommend that.
18:33 - 18:38
Unbelievable. So it's quite thin, crispy. Yeah, yeah. Do you sort of roll it up when you eat it like a cigar?
18:38 - 18:44
I just flip it, actually. I mean, the first one came out, I mean, aesthetically was an absolute abomination, but it tasted good.
18:44 - 18:47
Sure, the first one always is, right? It's like pancakes. The first one's always bad.
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As Aristotle said, all food ends up looking the same. So you can't be too fussy about it.
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Is that the name of your eldest? I would please say yes. So who does the cooking?
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Do you cook or does your child cook? We both cooked a couple of omelets each.
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Okay. Yeah, my older child does quite a bit of cooking. Generally, eggs and avocado with chili oil on toast as their speciality dish made approximately three times a day for about the last two years.
19:14 - 19:18
But now branching out into omelets. So that's good. That's the problem with the young people, isn't it?
19:18 - 19:32
All the bloody avocados. Not like me. When I was 19, I had a huge monopoly-esque property portfolio because I was simply living off the jerk omelets and not these.
19:32 - 19:36
That's it. Trying to wean them off avocados so they can one day become a trillionaire.
19:37 - 19:43
Yeah. Do you take a plate each and sit at the kitchen table? Or it feels like it's a kind of omelet on the go vibe?
19:43 - 19:50
Yeah, it was sort of alternating omelets. Right. I don't know, some sort of 1980s arthouse film, I think.
19:50 - 20:04
But yeah, sort of one at a time. Do you attempt to bring up as a conversation starter, you won't believe what I've been at today, putting obscure cricket statistics into tiny cells on a Microsoft Excel sheet?
20:04 - 20:09
My children and wife have known me long enough to just assume that's happening. No, I haven't actually verbalise it.
20:10 - 20:17
So like the idea of sort of alternating omelets, it's almost like a sort of game of poker where it's like, who's going to fold?
20:17 - 20:25
So you keep making an omelet, you stare them in the face, you eat your omelet and then you see they eat their omelet and then you just keep going and going until it's three in the afternoon.
20:26 - 20:31
You're both totally egg bound. I'm imagining the scene in Cool Hand Luke. Yeah. Yeah.
20:31 - 20:37
Do you know where he eats all the hard-boiled eggs? But instead of the hard-boiled eggs, just frying them up just a minute each.
20:38 - 20:45
It makes the scene a lot longer. You would have to say. Yeah. But I reckon he could probably have done more eggs had he done it that way.
20:45 - 20:50
They go in basically like pages in a book then. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. We've now fuelled.
20:51 - 21:04
Yeah. And where is this roller coaster of a day going to go next? Well, the next few hours are not particularly exciting because I had two deadlines, one of which I've met, which were both cricket related.
21:05 - 21:12
Yeah. So one I'm doing during the course of the Ashes, a daily quiz question that's going out as a kind of micro podcast for the BBC.
21:12 - 21:17
So I had to write and record the first batch of them to go out before the series.
21:17 - 21:27
So they go out, they start on Monday. So that involved more stats research. So and the quiz questions are sort of not just nuggets of fact.
21:27 - 21:32
They're questions where people have to like take a guess at a statistic, kind of ballpark it.
21:32 - 21:36
Run one by us. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be an actual, but and see which of us.
21:36 - 21:44
Me with my just innate feeling for quizzes. Okay. I can't run one past you that I've actually recorded because that would.
21:44 - 21:49
Well, hang on. This won't be out until it won't be this weekend. Two weeks.
21:49 - 21:53
All right. Okay. We could have the first five questions, I think would be totally fine.
21:53 - 22:04
Okay. Right. Well, let's start with the first question that I did, which would have gone out as you listen to this a little while ago before the series actually began.
22:04 - 22:16
And that question is in all cricket between England and Australia in the ashes since the Second World War, which team has scored more hundreds and by how many?
22:17 - 22:24
Okay. David, can you, I know you have spurned cricket from your soul due to being an inadequate human being.
22:24 - 22:34
So the ashes probably involves five games of cricket, five matches. Yeah. And each one of those, is it a four day affair?
22:34 - 22:41
Five. There have been times that it's been longer. So that's 20. Then it's every second year as well.
22:41 - 22:46
Yeah, basically twice every four years. Yeah. The question is who, which team has scored most hundreds?
22:46 - 22:56
Yeah, I know, but I'm doing the basic groundwork here. So since the end of the Second World War, we'll call that 75 years.
22:57 - 23:09
Yep. So therefore there's been 33 of these. I would imagine there's a hundred probably once per test match.
23:10 - 23:24
So 150. Okay. 160. So the answer, and I would imagine Australia have been probably better generally at cricket than England for most of that period.
23:24 - 23:33
You could have broken that news a bit more sensitively, David. I was going to say Australia lead by 25 centuries.
23:34 - 23:40
Right. That sounds like something someone would say in a sci-fi film. Well, socially, that is not true.
23:40 - 23:44
I think actually it's quite a good get. I mean, I don't know, but I would say Australia.
23:44 - 23:48
Yeah, I think David's might be on the money. I'll go lower. You can't do this.
23:48 - 23:56
I don't know anything. I'll give you a further. That's been 212 matches in all those series since the Second World War.
23:56 - 24:01
You can factor that into your calculation. He's got 25. I'm going Australia ahead, but lower than 25.
24:02 - 24:08
Well, the correct answer is Australia are ahead by 7,600. 7,600. I was so shit at cricket.
24:11 - 24:22
Is a century a bit like a hole-in-one in golf, where people who don't know anything about golf think there's one hole-in-one a year, whereas, in fact, there's like five in every tournament.
24:22 - 24:26
No, there aren't. Just no one talks about them. No, there aren't. There's three in every tournament.
24:26 - 24:30
No, there aren't. Is that statistically true, David? I mean, you said it confidently. I think that's bollocks.
24:31 - 24:35
Okay, I'm going to put in. I think three a tournament. Golf stats are outside my pay grade.
24:35 - 24:39
Have you not got a spreadsheet for this? I do not have a spreadsheet for holes-in-one.
24:40 - 24:45
We'll look at the British Open. Yeah. Here we go. There's no average number of holes-in-one.
24:45 - 24:51
There have been 26 recorded aces in the last 38 years of the British Open. Okay, fine.
24:51 - 25:02
That doesn't prove anything. No. So a century is 100 runs. By one player, yeah. You can save this stuff, Andy, for when you're on TMS.
25:02 - 25:13
Yeah, yeah. I'm making notes, actually. This has been very helpful. You'll know as ultimate's really stuck for questions, and it's a century in cricket refers to how many runs.
25:13 - 25:25
Is it? Seven? A thousand? Well, I mean, in answer to your question, Australia scored just over one per match in that period in England, about two every three games, roughly.
25:26 - 25:31
Oh, so you were pretty much spot on there, David. That was good. Okay, so we write this quiz, and that's the deadline you meet.
25:31 - 25:46
And what's the deadline that you don't meet? Well, I'm working on a newspaper article previewing the ashes involving similar but different statistics that, as we record, well, in fact, as soon as I've finished talking to you guys about these issues of great social and political import,
25:47 - 25:52
I will finish that off. But the research for that also took up a good chunk of the morning.
25:52 - 25:59
The omelettes fuel you through that. Have you had any coffee? Yeah. Generally, I operate on a two coffees per day strategy.
26:00 - 26:11
Me too, yeah. One, obviously, to get, you know, first thing, one after lunch. But the key is multiple cups of tea in between, and I have a bit of a class A tea habit.
26:12 - 26:17
Do like a good cup of tea. Are we saying twinings, English breakfast? That's what I'm saying.
26:17 - 26:30
I generally use leaf tea. I got addicted to high-grade teas. My brother gave me like a tea brewing device where you just put the leaves in and then put the water on, let it brew,
26:30 - 26:32
and then you plonk it on top of a mug and it comes out the bottom.
26:32 - 26:38
And that opened up the entire world of leaf tea without the hassle of it being stuck in a pot.
26:38 - 26:46
So that changed my life about 15 years ago. The main totally unnecessary luxury expenditure in my life is high-grade teas.
26:46 - 26:53
So I met a good Yunnan around about 11 a.m., I reckon. Took one in for the wife who was working at home yesterday.
26:53 - 27:00
And there's no finer way to pass 10 minutes in the middle of a morning than communing with the ancient art of tea.
27:00 - 27:06
What was the tea? Yunnan? That's a good name for tea, isn't it? Yunnan, which is, I think, a province in China.
27:06 - 27:12
Not my nan ground down and made into a paste. Yorkshire tea would be Yunnan, wouldn't it?
27:12 - 27:19
Yunnan's tea. So do you buy a big, like, big vat? Have you got, like, cupboards of just leaves just falling out?
27:19 - 27:25
I have quite a lot of little pots of not huge vats. Yeah, I've got a very good supplier.
27:27 - 27:39
It's even better than that. He's got an orangery filled with Yunnan plants. And he goes out there, man from Del Monte style, when it looks good.
27:39 - 27:45
In cricket, they have tea, don't they? It's still cold. In a test match, you stop for lunch.
27:46 - 27:52
And then what time do you stop at? Generally, in tests in England, lunch, play starts at 11.
27:53 - 28:04
Lunch is 1 to 1.40. And tea is 3.40 to 4 o'clock. But, you know, that's, I think, one of the greatest things about it as a sport, that it has genuine meal breaks built into it.
28:04 - 28:15
So I know you're a big cycling fan, David. Would the Tour de France not be better if they stopped for two hours for a massive great lunch in a French bistro halfway up a mountain?
28:15 - 28:27
I think it would make it a better sport. And seeing them then struggling, carrying that added poundage, from eating foie gras and chicken gizzards and all that kind of stuff,
28:27 - 28:34
and fine cheeses, that would make it a better sport. It would be lovely to see them out there with their trip advisors with the app.
28:35 - 28:47
Just what does anyone fancy today? And big arguments breaking out among the team as to whether they want sushi or a full ramen, and then cycling tens of miles off track then
28:47 - 28:54
to find this specific restaurant. Do you think they actually have tea during tea in cricket?
28:54 - 29:01
I imagine these days they probably have some sort of high-performance isotonic drink, whatever isotonic means.
29:01 - 29:05
Yeah. I don't know, actually. Village cricket, you definitely have a good cup of tea.
29:05 - 29:10
Yes, because, I mean, I was famously, you'll know, the wicketkeeper for Ashwell in the early 2000s.
29:11 - 29:16
Ashwell in Hertfordshire? Yeah, Ashwell in Hertfordshire, yeah. That's where my grandparents lived. I used to spend half terms in Ashwell.
29:16 - 29:21
That's right. It's the centre of the universe, this podcast, yeah. Little stepping stones across the...
29:21 - 29:27
To the wreck. Yes, well, I scored. We needed five off two in the quarterfinal of the Cambridgeshire Junior Cup.
29:27 - 29:31
We were obviously Hertfordshire, but we were playing the Cambridgeshire Cup, and I hoied one over Long Island.
29:31 - 29:36
It was my... I was in the back page of the Royston Crowes. Probably my greatest...
29:36 - 29:47
Everything sounds made up about this. The Royston Crow. No, but as a single moment in your life, the way I connected with that ball, nothing has had that singular amazing feeling.
29:47 - 29:53
But the thing about tea was, genuinely, you would, you know, I must have been 24 or something.
29:53 - 30:02
And I would... If I was keeping straight after eating, like, 10 chocolate mini rolls and three cups of tea, five ham sandwiches, it did affect my game.
30:02 - 30:06
A completely mad idea that even at that level that you would be doing that.
30:06 - 30:09
Well, I think that might explain why England have been less good than Australia at cricket.
30:09 - 30:18
I think we're just more committed to the meal breaks than they are. I mean, I'm just guessing, but I would guess that Australia have had 75 more centuries.
30:18 - 30:32
And the answer is... My question is this. So if you are doing a century, you could be out in the middle of the cricket pitch for hours, tediously tapping away all these ones.
30:32 - 30:42
What happens if post-tea, maybe you have had some isotonic stuff, maybe you've had a coffee as well, and nature calls.
30:43 - 30:52
Is there a genteel way? Does the umpire signal a poo coming out of the back of one of the players and everyone just stands around?
30:52 - 31:02
I don't believe there is a specific signal for that, David. You do occasionally see players running off the ground, particularly if they're suffering from food-related illness.
31:02 - 31:18
Yeah. No, I mean, generally, cricket operates on an extremely high plane of human existence, in a sort of sphere of ethereal perfection where bodily excretions no longer occur because it's just so divinely awesome, David.
31:18 - 31:24
You should know that. OK, so now we've done our work. We've had a good cup of your nan.
31:24 - 31:37
Do we stop for lunch? Lunch yesterday, I actually went out for lunch with my wife, who David knows, and we went to a very nice Thai restaurant near London Bridge Station.
31:38 - 31:45
We don't get that many chances to meet for lunch, but yesterday worked out. Yeah, so that was a date, a hot date.
31:46 - 31:51
Did you arrive together or did you make it feel like a date by one of you turning up later and going, is it handy?
31:51 - 31:57
You look even better than your picture. It's like that. We've been together for 30 years.
31:58 - 32:03
I just don't think either of us could pull that off. That kind of compliment without sounding sarcastic.
32:03 - 32:09
Certainly she couldn't pass that compliment off towards me without sounding deeply sarcastic. I mean, like a proper date.
32:09 - 32:15
I was there 20 minutes earlier because she got caught up in a meeting and then had to cycle across London.
32:15 - 32:22
So I never really dated. I met my wife at university, so I missed out on the whole sort of dating world.
32:23 - 32:33
You know, it was nice to feel that sense of being stood up. So I was sitting there for 20 minutes doing a crossword on my phone, thinking, well, this must look bad.
32:33 - 32:41
You with a single helium balloon with a red love heart that's just slowly deflating as the 20 minutes go on.
32:41 - 32:48
Are you still just in tracksuit trousers as you described them? Have you changed into full cricket whites?
32:48 - 32:58
Not full cricket whites. No, I save them for really special occasions, anniversaries, birthdays. But no, I put on quite a funky shirt.
32:58 - 33:04
Yeah. And non-tracksuit based trousers. I mean, slightly sad you aren't just there in bare chest tracksuit trousers.
33:04 - 33:08
That is a very punchy way to go to a Thai restaurant in London Bridge.
33:08 - 33:20
Yeah. So what's the order? What's the lunch order? Well, so I said my wife would caught up, but also it was, I think, we had a sort of 2.45 booking and the kitchen shut at three.
33:20 - 33:24
So I had the onerous responsibility of having to order for both of us. Oh, yeah.
33:24 - 33:30
And that's the kind of, like I said, we've been together for 30 years, but if anything can break a relationship, it's inadequate ordering at a Thai restaurant.
33:30 - 33:34
And she's given you no instructions. She's not said, look, I want a pad Thai.
33:34 - 33:38
No, I did message saying, what would you like? But she was on a bicycle and didn't see it.
33:38 - 33:46
So, you know, I went for a couple of prawn skewers. Yeah. Some pickled vegetables.
33:46 - 33:52
I love a pickle. There is nothing in life that cannot be improved with the application of vinegar.
33:53 - 33:57
But maybe an open wound. No, well, you've just got to see through the pain.
33:57 - 34:01
And it also makes, if you then get peckish and you want to feast off your own wounds.
34:02 - 34:13
Sorry. I did a curry and a braised pork thing, which I think had been cooked long enough that it became kosher, but I haven't checked the latest regulations.
34:14 - 34:33
The first time I met the Helen Copters, incredibly impressive and intimidating coterie of three brothers, I had a similar thing to this, where I'd come from a gig and arrived at 8.45 and the kitchen is about to shut.
34:33 - 34:39
I'm being very upstanding in meeting them. So, sorry, sir, can you just order now?
34:39 - 34:42
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, give me a look. And I was like, I'll have that.
34:42 - 34:49
And I'd ordered the duck jungle curry. And I should have known because the waiter was like, are you sure?
34:49 - 34:56
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what I hadn't seen was, I think, the five chili symbols beside it.
34:56 - 35:12
And then I proceeded to attempt to be charming for the next hour while in the most incredible discreet pain where sometimes I would just go to the bathroom and stick my tongue in the Dyson Airblade to try it.
35:12 - 35:20
But I style it out and I've never been able to taste anything since. Is it a successful lunch?
35:20 - 35:27
Have you run out of stuff to talk about? No, not yet. I reckon that's still at least another 25 years away.
35:27 - 35:32
By which time we'll just be sitting in a nursing home. And by that point, I mean, it's already reached a point.
35:32 - 35:45
I mean, basically just put on old sports highlights on YouTube. It's quite hard to envisage not living forever now, I think, because generally it's lack of incentive that does for people in the end.
35:45 - 35:53
But if there's unending YouTube sport. Yeah. My dad's 86. And not in nursing home, you know, as right as rain.
35:53 - 35:59
And he loves cricket so much. But he obviously can't remember, you know, the score from a game in 2012 or whatever.
35:59 - 36:06
So sometimes I'll just get a text that says, Alan Lamb's batting well. Or, you know, Triscothic's really on the face.
36:06 - 36:10
And I'll be like, what year? What year are we on? And then I can get into the conversation.
36:10 - 36:15
You're absolutely right. Frankly, I can't wait. They're going to be the best days of my life.
36:15 - 36:20
I'm looking forward to them. My father was a big rugby fan. He had dementia for the last sort of 10 years of his life.
36:20 - 36:26
And he could barely remember anything. But one of the last times I saw him, I took down, he grew up in South Africa.
36:26 - 36:34
And I took down on my laptop, showed him some sort of grainy black and white footage of South African rugby in the 1950s.
36:34 - 36:43
He recognised every single player from this grainy black and white footage of people he'd probably have seen on newsreels more than in real life.
36:43 - 36:50
And he knew them all and couldn't remember what he had for lunch. It is amazing the way that sport operates in the human brain.
36:50 - 37:00
Yeah. I had a not dissimilar thing with my, the last time I saw my grandmother, I don't know if it was dementia or what, but she was a very good age.
37:00 - 37:07
And I went to see her in the hospital and she was like, oh, there he is.
37:07 - 37:14
Just sort of quite nice generic stuff, as in probably couldn't remember exactly which one of the family that I was.
37:15 - 37:23
There he is, the handsomest one of all, just classic sort of granny chat. And we talked about just nice things.
37:23 - 37:33
And in the course of all of this, she had the Irish times on her lap and was just filling in the cryptic crossword.
37:34 - 37:43
A crossword. To this day, I have never finished. And at some point during our nice gentle conversation, just placed it down in front of me.
37:44 - 37:52
Absolutely done. So, yep, it's a magical place that people can go into towards the end.
37:52 - 37:57
So now we've had our Thai meal. 2.45 is a late, this is a late lunch.
37:57 - 38:01
Are we having, do we have a bottle of? Oh, great question. A singer? Vodka.
38:01 - 38:07
A singer? Full bottle of vodka. Having a bottle of, having a Jeroboam of Smirnoff.
38:08 - 38:13
Neat. Just shot for shot. Like the old Turner omelette, but you and your wife going at it shot for shot.
38:13 - 38:20
Bottle on head. Glass on head. Next one. You, you, you, you. No, I'm not very good with daytime drinking, to be honest.
38:20 - 38:30
And my wife had something she had to get to afterwards. So I had a small cocktail with a weird bit of sort of dried mango in that was surprisingly good.
38:30 - 38:34
That was all. So then we're back home? We're straight back home? No, not back home.
38:34 - 38:39
Then an exciting expedition to buy some trousers, which is something I don't do very often.
38:39 - 38:47
Oh, okay. This is exciting. As someone else who very rarely goes to buy trousers, like it's got to be, they're all a husk.
38:47 - 39:00
There's nothing. It's windy down there. No, I'll tell you exactly what it is. Zaltzman's still wearing his trousers from, when was the last time the Ashes was in Australia?
39:00 - 39:07
Four years ago. Yeah. And the fact that you're now going back, you've realised, I better up my game here.
39:07 - 39:14
But also, you're going to need an airier light, almost like a linen. Yeah. Well, that's pretty much bang on, actually.
39:14 - 39:19
It was sort of a pair of sort of smartest trousers that work in hot weather.
39:19 - 39:30
I hate clothes shopping. It is one of my least favourite activities. I firmly believe the world would be a better place if clothes were just issued randomly.
39:31 - 39:39
Not everyone wearing the same, but just you were sent one set of clothes for the year, randomly selected by a computer, and that was you done.
39:39 - 39:45
Everyone would be happier. They'd be less stressed. I mean, think of all the time wasted shopping for clothes.
39:45 - 39:52
This is why we don't have Leonardo da Vinci's anymore, because he didn't spend all his time shopping around for trousers.
39:52 - 39:57
He just got stuff done. He built helicopters and painted nudie men, all that kind of stuff.
39:57 - 40:01
Oh, is that it? There's no characters in art these days, are there? You remember the da Vinci's?
40:01 - 40:18
There's no personalities in art. Or tennis. Yeah. You, of all the people I know, Andy, I think I would, I'm not a stylist, but I would love to give you a makeover.
40:19 - 40:31
Oh, right. Okay. I'm intrigued, David. What would you, um... Maybe goth. I'd make you into a goth, but there's a specific sort of goth called a fluoro goth, where you have kind of a neon piping,
40:32 - 40:39
sometimes with actual flashing lights in them that go down the side of your trousers and huge rubber boots.
40:39 - 40:50
All right. So it's like a road traffic safety conscious goth look. The one rule is you're not allowed to reference it at all in the Test Match Special commentary box.
40:51 - 41:00
I had quite a long discussion with one of my kids quite recently. I think maybe when the Ryder Cup was on, because I don't really sort of watch that much golf.
41:00 - 41:07
I was watching a bit of the Ryder Cup, and we started discussing whether a goth will ever win a major in golf.
41:08 - 41:15
Is that the last barrier to be broken in sport? A goth winning a major?
41:15 - 41:22
But it's even better if a goth is the stylist or the captain and decides that they all have to dress as goths.
41:22 - 41:31
Ian Poulter doesn't really feel it. Rory's there on the 13th tee. Somebody I know, I don't know if this is a proctual story, but somebody I know, and I can't remember,
41:31 - 41:38
like a friend of a friend said he went on a stag do, and they dressed the stag, and they all dressed as goths.
41:38 - 41:46
They're sort of boring, like generic people like me that wear T-shirt and jeans every day, and they all dressed as goths, and they went to Camden, and obviously no one gave a shit.
41:47 - 41:51
And so they were all just there going, we look ridiculous, but just no one cared.
41:51 - 41:57
Like, we're just like, everyone else is a goth. So, like, what a great use of that.
41:57 - 42:10
Max, where, Andy, to undergo this goth transformation for the ashes? His questions would then become, of the 25 centurions who are from Australia, how many of them are dead now?
42:11 - 42:15
I'd be like, Andy, why do you have to bring death into all of your cricket statistics?
42:17 - 42:21
Okay, do you find the trousers? Yeah, where do we go? Where do we go?
42:21 - 42:27
Well, it's a little shop in Covent Garden. A little shop in Covent Garden. You may well know it.
42:27 - 42:34
It's called Uniglow, the massive generic trouser shop. It wasn't that massive generic trouser shop.
42:34 - 42:45
It was a much smaller generic trouser shop. I then walked. So I got a train to Charing Cross, walked from there to Covent Garden, then walked then back down to Embankment after buying the trousers.
42:46 - 42:51
And around that part of town, there were loads of pubs where I did stand-up gigs.
42:51 - 42:57
Oh, right. So every corner, I'd turn and think, oh, I did an open mic spot there or something.
42:57 - 43:03
It was sort of haunted by a distant person, quite a nice way. This is the thing with haunting.
43:03 - 43:09
Haunting gets generally a negative rap, but actually that sort of haunting, I think, can be quite positive.
43:09 - 43:18
And I think generally hauntings are, I think, better than they used to be. I think partly because reality is so terrifying that actually ghosts are, by comparison, less frightening.
43:18 - 43:22
This is good goth stuff. Yeah, he's straight to death. He can't help himself.
43:24 - 43:33
Can I just go back to the trouser buying event? Oh, yeah. Okay. Did you just walk, sort of like Jack Reacher, just walk in and pick one pair of trousers and buy it without trying them on?
43:33 - 43:39
Yeah. Or did you take three or four pairs and take a look in the very brightly lit changing room?
43:39 - 43:42
What was your, because trying trousers on, you have to get your shoes off as well.
43:42 - 43:50
That's a nightmare. It is a complete and utter nightmare. People don't realise how tough life is these days having to take shoes off.
43:50 - 43:53
I agree with you. I agree. Those cave people, they don't know how good they had it.
43:54 - 44:04
They can get whipped trousers on and off like Buck's face for Neanderthals. Put on your looking elk skin wire fronts, paint a picture of a bison and that's, you're on your way.
44:04 - 44:10
Well, it's a shop I've used before. So, I looked at it online and thought, I'll go and just try them on.
44:10 - 44:13
So, I did that. I bought them and the whole process took around about five minutes.
44:13 - 44:19
And that, that is how to do, that's the only type of clothes shopping that I can really stand in and out.
44:19 - 44:28
Here's a very personal question. Are we talking 49.99? What? As in 49 inch waist and 99 inch inside the leg?
44:29 - 44:34
Yeah. I've heard, you're an interesting, you're an interesting shaped man. I've always been told this.
44:34 - 44:40
Zaltzman is shaped like, do you know those guys outside garage forecourts, the sort of inflatable man?
44:40 - 44:48
They're his exact dimensions. So, I guess, in fact, I met my wife to go home together.
44:48 - 44:55
We then saw our elder child on a train going the other way and they waved at us like a loon.
44:55 - 45:06
Great. That spruced up the journey. That was nice. What Andy's not telling us is that they had stolen the other train and were in the driver compartment with a look that said,
45:06 - 45:12
I'm taking this to Scotland. Would be hard to do that, wouldn't it? Like provided, because you'd need all the signals to be, to steal a train.
45:12 - 45:15
I think it's easier to steal a car and get to where you want to get to.
45:15 - 45:21
The question is really, could you take a train off the tracks and just drive it up a road?
45:22 - 45:28
I think that'd be difficult. They're hard to steer. I think generally that's considered a high tariff manoeuvre, I think.
45:29 - 45:32
And if you can put it off, great. It's more than a minor fault, isn't it?
45:32 - 45:40
I think it's a major fault. You know you've had a big night in London when you wake up and the tube is just parked outside your house.
45:40 - 45:49
Oh God. What have I done? So we're home for dinner? Home for dinner. Dinner cooked by our younger child.
45:50 - 45:55
In fact, he and his girlfriend cooked us a vegan curry, which is very good.
45:55 - 46:00
So that's quite a nice phase as a parent when your kids start cooking for you.
46:00 - 46:04
Yeah. Mine are not doing that now. So this just seems quite close to lunch.
46:04 - 46:07
Do you have to like eat more out of courtesy than you would want to eat?
46:08 - 46:12
There was an element of that. We did have a late lunch and dinner was round about half past seven, I guess.
46:13 - 46:17
So yeah, I mean, certainly went easy on the rice. That was a key move.
46:18 - 46:31
If your four-year-old were to make dinner, Max, seeing as his favourite food is just dry, so dusty oats in a bowl with nothing on them, I think that might be what you would get then.
46:32 - 46:37
That possibly, he might push to plain rice if he was feeling extravagant. Okay, yeah.
46:38 - 46:47
Maybe it's just a phase. I don't know. And is, I don't know how long the girlfriend has been part of the family, but is she looking expectantly as to like hoping for compliments?
46:48 - 46:52
Could you power play and, you know, spit it out and say, this is disgusting, Janet.
46:52 - 46:57
Yeah. Get out of my house. No, we didn't play that card. We're saving that enough, obviously.
46:58 - 47:13
Yeah, of course. It was nice. So we didn't have to force it. You didn't produce a spreadsheet of all of the various exes meals that they had made and then you planted them on a graph on the wall.
47:13 - 47:26
What do we do in the evening? Well, a bit more of the cricket stuff that I hadn't finished earlier on in the day, including recording the sound, the audio for the quiz questions which you can find via BBC Sounds if you're into cricket.
47:27 - 47:36
played a little bit of Bagatelle, Victorian Bagatelle, which is a very niche game. I bought this table on eBay about seven or eight years ago.
47:36 - 47:44
The table itself is a folding thing. It's about 100 years old. It's a sort of Q-sports game where you have a little ball and then there's numbered cups at the other end.
47:44 - 47:51
It's about eight feet long with green bays and you have to pop the balls in the little cups and you get different points for the...
47:51 - 48:02
And I can't remember quite why I bought it on eBay but it's an extremely satisfying game also because it's made of basically wood with felt on it and the wood has warped over the years so it doesn't run flat.
48:02 - 48:07
So it's a bit like a kind of golf green where it's got all these kind of slight slopes that...
48:07 - 48:19
Local knowledge. Yeah, and a lot of local knowledge but I find it really calm so you've got eight balls and you've got to try and get the ball in the appropriate hole and there's a black ball as well that starts on the table and that's worth double.
48:19 - 48:23
I mean it's very, very niche. There's a little bit of info on it online.
48:24 - 48:30
It used to be very popular apparently in the 18th century and declined gradually over 150 years.
48:30 - 48:38
You don't say! I think there's still a competitive league in the city of Chester played in various pubs but nowhere else in the world.
48:38 - 48:43
Well actually the Saudis have gone into it in a big way. The Saudis have bought it out.
48:43 - 48:53
Oh I see so it's sort of sort of snookery. Yeah, but the difference snooker is unbelievably fucking difficult whereas this is quite simple.
48:53 - 48:57
Is the whole family playing? No, just me. Just me but it's probably quite calming.
48:57 - 49:05
The game takes like you know a minute or two but it's quite calming. You've got to hit the ball softly so it's I highly recommend it.
49:05 - 49:12
It's a very therapeutic thing to play if you can be asked to buy a knackered 100 year old piece of junk on eBay.
49:12 - 49:28
with a break. My question here is maybe it's not really easy and maybe in fact you are the most gifted player that's ever you are the Tiger Woods of Bagatelle which is one of the most useless sporting talents of all.
49:28 - 49:42
If it had been any other sport you would be living high on the hog right now but because it's an obscure Victorian foldable table game this is the only opportunity the world will ever find out.
49:43 - 49:53
It's worth speculating what your world ranking is. What do you think it is? I've got to be top billion and that might be the only sport I'm top billion.
49:53 - 49:58
No, no, no. You're one of top billion. How many people are playing Bagatelle? It's not a billion.
49:58 - 50:03
More than one. Top 100. He's in the top 100. I think you're in the top 100. Bagatelle.
50:03 - 50:09
And you got ranking points last night, you know, so that's good. How long did you play Bagatelle play for?
50:09 - 50:18
Like I say each little end takes a minute or a minute and a half two minutes maybe if you really think through the shots and work out the numbers.
50:19 - 50:22
You can be Ronnie O'Sullivan on it or you can be Peter Ebdon on it.
50:23 - 50:30
Got it. I see. The crowd booing you for slow play. Oh no, him again.
50:31 - 50:37
When you end up slow hand clapping yourself in a game that no one else plays they know that life has taken a few wrong turns.
50:38 - 50:44
I'll probably play for about 15 minutes I reckon. Beautiful. Put up some solid numbers nothing spectacular.
50:44 - 50:47
Is this just before bed or is this sort of have we got some TV time?
50:47 - 51:04
Yeah, this would probably be about 11 11.30 and then elected not to watch the final episode of a TV series that I've been watching with my wife which is slightly hampered by the fact that generally when we watch television it's quite late and we're both quite tired and we almost
51:04 - 51:11
inevitably one or both of us falls asleep before the end of an episode when we can't then be asked to then watch it back.
51:12 - 51:23
So we both then sort of make our way through the series did you choose not to watch it because you're not going to watch it or you chose?
51:23 - 51:33
I think I will watch it I just didn't what's the series? The series is the iris thingy what's it called?
51:33 - 51:44
You've not got all of it you've not followed all of it you've been asleep for part of it the titles each episode we generally watch one thing at a time you don't really need to remember the title just say should we watch that thing we're watching it's the
51:44 - 52:05
iris affair that's it yeah which has been good you're not desperate you're not clinging on for the last episode clearly it's kept us going through the first seven these are pull quotes these are the quotes this is the poster it's kept us going when we're awake
52:05 - 52:22
and is it true that in order to go to sleep and this is sort of self-defeating you have to do three puzzles as well just when you're starting to doze off once again you have to match colors and numbers and to be honest David that is closer to
52:22 - 52:41
the truth than would be ideal I'd often do crosswords to get to sleep something that is distracting enough to stop me thinking about other things I might be thinking about whether it's cricket stats or comedy or whatever but also dull enough that it doesn't over engage you
52:41 - 53:00
so I find cryptic crosswords quite a good way of getting to sleep god what a super brain if I start to encrypt crosswords I just end up punching the pillow really hard is this king the original question mark go fuck yourself that's not a quiz question which is
53:00 - 53:16
what I want from a crossword clue actually one of the answers was go fuck yourself yes it was 2 4 8 I think it was an anodrome or something what time do we nod off I reckon half 12 ish I think it's a productive day it's a good day I do love
53:16 - 53:32
the testimonial for a tv series between us me and my wife were awake for all of it that's above average actually some of the tv series I've given up on game of thrones I watched one episode gave up me too breaking bad half an episode
53:32 - 53:45
gave up on that west wing oh I didn't get anywhere with that because my wife started watching it before me and I couldn't be asked to catch up so actually the fact that I've got through most of this series puts it way above some of the greatest most
53:45 - 54:04
popular tv of recent times please remember he's trying to tell us that these series are dull and yet he will sit through 46 hours of cricket for the next perhaps the greatest thing you can do it's possibly the greatest thing you can do way way more than 46 hours
54:04 - 54:17
way more yes I mean that feels like a good day it's productive you had some good family time like with both kids and you had a date in the middle of it and you got your work done trousers it's a sensational dad you bought some trousers
54:17 - 54:30
what a day you had a communed with memories of my early comedy career which you know I try to shut out because the most you know the most striking moment in my early comedy career was being defeated by David O'Docherty in the so you think you're
54:30 - 54:40
funny in the final of 1999 a scar that burns me to the core of my soul on a daily basis sorry Andy you'll be really pissed off when you find out he's the statistician for the ashes now
54:44 - 55:01
other people in that final Josie Long Russell Howard we've now had four of that sacred group all on what did you do yesterday well there we go I'm glad to be one of them an unsettling end to a lovely day but one in which I am the champion
55:01 - 55:06
so we're leaving it there Andy Zaltzman thanks for telling us what you did yesterday pleasure
55:16 - 55:38
Andy Zaltzman there can I say David I don't know what is funnier or where you expose sort of less knowledge. Is it you talking to Andy Zaltzman about cricket or you talking to Angela Scanlon about waxing her bits? I can't I can't tell. Since we've recorded the episode
55:38 - 55:56
in the brief time Andy has sent me a photograph of his bagatelle table oh wow which it's like a Viking banqueting table but yeah looks like a snooker table then and I guess yeah you have to land the balls in the little egg cups and is
55:56 - 56:15
there a more perfect moment in this or any episode we've done than a man just retreating to his bagatelle room on his own just to gently roll some balls into some holes I mean that's living isn't it it's funny isn't it without trying to turn this podcast into
56:15 - 56:27
anything meaningful because I don't think it is yeah but just how people are living in the same day you know if you think of some of our previous guests I'm not going to name any names right but
56:27 - 56:44
Andy Zaltzman has done more brain work while he's snoozing than a little I would say a huge selection of quite successful people but you know I love a selection of you know an increasingly difficult puzzles to get him out of bed he's just and I only really know
56:44 - 57:00
Andy I know Andy best from TMS and yeah it is so on-brand this is the most on-brand way for Andy Zaltzman to wake himself up that's the I think in a way the beauty of this podcast is Joel Dommett James Buckley at no point did they use
57:00 - 57:23
an Excel spreadsheet to calculate to plot patterns in cricket statistics moving across a hundred years James had a spreadsheet for when he drinks his first 660 milliliter bottle of Stella I don't think so but they're all beautiful people yeah all different people yeah we're all different guys oh no
57:23 - 57:42
Max has had his two cans finally philosophical Max has come in if you would like to get in touch with this podcast this is how to do it to get in touch with the show you can email us at what did you do yesterday pod at gmail.com
57:42 - 57:51
follow us on instagram at yesterday pod and please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform and if you didn't please don't
57:54 - 58:06
Thank you David. I'm in it for life. Thank you Max in it for - number four - life pointing at the world around me. Thanks for doing it. Bye Andy thanks Andy