Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski,
and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that when Britain declared war in 1914,
they accidentally did it in the wrong format and they had to swap the letters,
otherwise Britain would not technically be at war.
Wow, what kind of format was it?
I don't know, I don't know if it was in landscape or in some kind of, what they declared with a painting.
Yeah, or emojis, I don't know, I have no idea.
But this is from an article in the Times Literary Supplement, which is great by the way,
highly recommended, and there was a British diplomat called Harold Nicholson who was working at the Foreign Office,
and one day he was told, we've declared war on Germany,
but we screwed it up and we sent the letter which doesn't quite say the right phrase, I think.
I think what it was,
was they thought that Germany had declared war because they intercepted some thing over the radio waves,
but actually Germany hadn't declared war,
and so the letter said, we accept your declaration of war,