Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Barstapa!
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is James.
Okay,
my fact this week is that when the bird poo import industry first reached the UK the smell was so bad in Southampton
that the entire urban population fled to the hills.
Was it in one go?
You know when you watch movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon where you just see people flocking away from cities?
Was there a traffic?
I just got one guy with a cold gun in the other direction go what the fuck are they doing?
So this is it's guano so it's in the olden days you would get this bird poo and it would get brought into the country and they would use it as fertilizer and there is an English historian called Frederick Pike who wrote the modern history of Peru so he was writing about the Peruvian guano industry and he said
that the stench was so miserable that the entire population of Southampton left the town.
It might be true, it might not be true, this is what the historian says so it's quite a good source.
It certainly feels like it's an exaggeration mode isn't it?
It does.
I'd eat all of my clothes right now if every human in Southampton evacuated and went up a hill.
Well surely we'd know about that.
It's true but have you ever been to Southampton?
I have but I don't know what you're saying about it but I'm going to say I don't agree.