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you're listening to Luke's English podcast.
For more information, visit teacherluke .co .uk.
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to Luke's English podcast.
This is episode number 895.
And if it sounds different, or indeed looks different here in this introduction part, that's because I'm recording this bit out in the street.
I'm sitting on the terrace of a restaurant in the street.
I can't be in my podcasting room this afternoon.
I won't go into all of the reasons right now in the introduction because it would take too long.
But anyway, that's why it sounds different.
But this episode that you're going to listen to was recorded a few weeks ago.
In fact, probably a couple of months ago now in my podcasting room.
And it's a conversation with a friend of mine, a returning guest on this podcast.
Her name is Anna Brooke.
She was on the podcast originally for the first time, when was it?
Last year, in April last year, 2023.
And she's back this time, which is great.
Now, the title of the episode is Books, Farts and Ghosts.
Books, Farts and Ghosts, which gives you a basic overview of what you can expect from the conversation.
so Anna is a writer she's a travel writer and also more recently she's become a writer of books for children so in her appearance last year she talked about her first book called monster bogey a book about a monster made of bogeys what are bogeys those are the green things that come out of your nose
and in that episode we talked about her book we also talked about the subject of snot and bogeys and taught you some words and phrases related to that because, you know, where else are you going to learn these things?
This time, she's back on the podcast because she's written another book.
It's a sequel to Monster Bogey.
It's called Monster Stink.
It's available wherever you get your books, published by Chicken House Publishing.
And Monster Stink, yes, is the sequel to Monster Bogey.
But this time, there's a new threat in this one.
And the threat is in the form of a sort of powerful gas now I'll let Anna describe the story in a few moments when I start talking to her and you can listen to what she has to say about it and understand it you know it's another book for children ages probably about seven and above anyway the gas so the threat comes
in the form of a sort of nasty gas in this book and so that leads us to talk about well gases specifically the sorts of gases that come out of humans.
Farts. I'm talking about farts.
So we talk about farts and stuff, which is admittedly a slightly disgusting subject.
It's not the sort of thing that we all talk about all the time, but it is something that we all do, don't we?
Yes, even you. I know you say you don't, but I know that you do.
We all do. It's a normal human bodily function.
Farting. So, what are all the words that we use in English to talk about this?
What are the kind of medical, formal words, the standard words, the more slang expressions for farting?
And what about the behaviour around this fairly disgusting behaviour of farting?
So, we talk about all of that.
So, this is your chance to learn that key, crucial farting vocabulary.
and then in the second half of the episode i talked to anna about something that i've wanted to ask her for a long time uh on this show and that is uh some of the creepy stories that she has to share because so this is like the third subject anna has had several weird experiences that she doesn't really
know how to explain now maybe they are ghost encounters encounters with ghosts we're not sure but i ask anna to explain these strange experiences that she's had and it's really interesting and creepy and even while talking to her in this episode i was getting like shivers down my spine it really spooked
me out a bit and that leads to a conversation about ghosts and the unexplained and the supernatural which i found really interesting and fascinating I hope that you do too there's a guy in a Volkswagen Golf a sort of a souped up Volkswagen Golf in front of me at the at the traffic lights as soon as
those traffic lights go green he's going to make loads of noise as he drives off so I think it's probably time for me to wrap up this introduction let's get started let's listen to Anna Brooke talking about her book talking about the universal subject of farting and the spooky subject of ghost encounters.
Here we go. Welcome back onto the podcast.
It's nice to be back, Luke.
Yeah. Do you remember the last time?
Do you remember how long ago it was?
It was over a year ago, wasn't it?
That's right. It was in April of last year.
So it's over a year since you've been on the show.
That was in episode 818.
um and so yeah you're back again hello hello um let me just read out a couple of comments from listeners okay these are the top comments that appeared on youtube um uh for your last appearance episode 818 um foxtrot r .u said what a lovely guest you had for us luke thank you so much time flew by i like
anna's laughter oh thank you foxtrot r .u that's nice isn't it uh camilla I can never read out anyone's names especially on YouTube especially very long ones like yeah anyway I love Anna's positive energy oh thank you Camilla I'm going to try and read it Camilla Rogowska 9229 9229 there's like 9 ,229
Camilla Rogowska's apparently yeah this is the 9229th of them and never mind another person said what a what a lively and funny conversation i enjoyed it a lot thanks luke and anna oh that's lovely that is nice isn't it that's heartwarming yeah okay so anyway it's nice to have you back so last time
you talked about your book monster bogey yes um so well how's that going so it's going really well um yes a monster bogey came out a year and a half ago almost and last year last august monster stink the sequel came out which i shall hold up for the people who are watching this on the youtube video
um yeah so yeah monster stink i think you can probably imagine what that one's about so the first one monster bogey yes should i should i give a little yeah so monster bogey for those who didn't hear the the previous podcast um is about a little boy it's a so i'm a children's book author and it's about a little
called frank who picks his nose and makes a big bogey tower um that gets struck by lightning and gets turned into a bogey monster um and so by the end of this book without giving too much away um there's the the family who are involved in the story have become musicians and are performing on stage and that's
where this book monster stink picks up there's um they're competing for the best music competition in the world and um you can imagine all sorts of things are going to go wrong on the way and the baddies just so happen to be in the competition too so that's kind of the background for monster stink okay
so the last one the last one was all about this this monster that was created from bogeys nose bogeys yeah monster stink well where does the stink part of that come in so well bogey's sort of been accepted now even though he's made of snot you know people don't find him as revolting as you might think
yeah and so the stink part without giving too much away is a molecule changing gas that smells smells foul okay and uh yeah a molecule changing gas that smells foul yes right so this is a powerful kind of bad gas it's seriously noxious yeah okay where does this gas come from can I ask you can it comes
from the baddie i can say that the bad the baddie the bad guy the bad guys the bad guys bad guys yeah what they like they they manufacture it somehow with a machine or something like that or it gets a natural it's a natural gas or an unnatural oh no it's an unnatural gas very very unnatural okay yes
all right but it's not i mean i'm going to get straight to the point here is it a fart Well, how to say it?
So there are farts in this book.
There are lots of farts in this book.
But is the stink a fart?
Who knows? So this is a second monster, essentially, right?
But it's a gas -based entity?
Yes, I suppose so. I wouldn't really say it's a monster.
It's a weapon. Yeah.
It's a gas -based weapon.
okay which you know we all have within us but yeah we all have the potential the potential especially after you know after you've eaten beans on toast yes or yeah or a nice hot curry yeah yeah okay all right then well great so uh i mean bogeys previously and sort of gas this time more disgusting stuff
for us to talk about oh yes um and so this is available now is it monster oh yeah monster stink's been out since august yeah so you can buy that now that's in the shops all over the world um or on amazon if you if it's not in your local bookshop yeah okay and it's for which age group again so again it's
seven plus okay seven to elevens probably all right then great great um and how how do people how have people received monster bogey and monster stink really well so i i know this is coming out after when i'm not supposed to talk about a competition i've won but this podcast will come out after the date
of the competition so i i will say it so it's just one um it's something called the dip dap award which in britain you've got the national literary trust um who do lots of brilliant work to try and get people reading and writing children reading um and um and so for the first time ever in doncaster
which is in the north of england they decided to set up a competition that um celebrates the the link between the authors and their illustrators and of course my books were illustrated by a brilliant um um Australian um artist called Owen Lindsay and we were in this competition for being like you know
everyone's there's Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake very famous you've got Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffield very famous so these sort of duos and it so happens that Monster Bogey has won the competition oh well done so it's incredibly exciting because it's children who have voted so i think lots of schools
in doncaster received the book and they did it in class and my book was there our book with owen was their favorite book fantastic so uh so it's great so i'll be going to i will have been to britain by the time you listen to this everybody um to to get the award well done congratulations that must be
that must make you feel good that the kids voted for it because you you write it for the kids i mean you write it partially for yourself because i am a big kid i never really grew up yeah but knowing that there are children who and it's just and my aim for writing something very silly and very funny
was to try and engage children because nowadays of course you're in competition with video games telephones television all sorts of multimedia that we it makes it sound old but it wasn't really around so much when we were little and so and we know that especially in britain reading levels have dipped
quite a lot and so i really wanted to try and do some funny stuff that would invade engage kids and knowing that they have been engaged and that they enjoyed it uh enough to choose it yeah over lots of other books so that's uh that's yeah fills me with immense joy excellent very happy for you lots of hot
air yeah um what about the parents because i mean some people might uh see uh the a book about uh bogeys and a book about uh kind of about farting but not really about farting well there's lots of farting in it there's farting in it okay uh how do the parents feel about this well i would like to think
that a lot of parents will see the joy that it will bring their children yeah i don't know do our grown -ups really very standoffish about disgusting stuff i suppose some are i just got there was one comment from a listener who who said um what was it will this not encourage how do the parents feel because surely
the for example a book about bogeys about picking your nose is is going to encourage children to pick their nose and this is what parents always trying to stop their children pick from picking their nose you know um so um is my book gonna stop they're gonna make their child give them i don't this is what this is what this this listener
was concerned about that it's going to cause a sort of a rampant nose picking uh you know among children there's a word for when you can't stop picking your nose it's in the book really rhino pleximania or something like that um i'll don't quote me on that even though it's in my book buy the book and who could look
it up look it up in the book then quote yeah then quote me um no I don't think it's that bad is it children children pick their noses naturally if you if you look stuff up about nose picking I think there are some there's some scientific thought that in fact I mean in my book I tell that I say that the kids
shouldn't eat their bogeys because that's really disgusting yeah um but there's some scientific thought that thinks that the bacteria that is are in your bogeys are actually very good for populating your gut right and so it could be nature's way of making sure you have a very wide variety of flora in your
gut this is very and that would make sense yeah for your microbiome yeah exactly yeah yeah but i think that everyone knows right parents and kids know that they're just fun books and um that i don't think it's going to it's not really encouraging children to pick their nose.
A lot of the stuff that happens in the book is that as a result of Frank, the character picking his nose, this monster is created.
So it does create quite a lot of sort of problems.
And it's surreal more than anything else.
I mean, has anyone's bogeys ever come alive?
I don't think so. And also, if you take it from a completely different angle, if you write a story or read a story about a murderer, It doesn't mean that the person who's reading it is going to become a murderer.
It's just... It's just...
You learn lots of things about life through stories.
Like, you know, if you're...
Like, maybe you want to become a police detective and trace and hunt murderers or a forensic scientist and learn how to work out who the murderer might have been.
This book, you know, it's just...
It's just fun silliness.
Yeah, I think kids know the difference between the world of books and the real world.
And also, I sound defensive.
It's like I'm giving you a really tough BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview.
But in fact, one of the things that I wanted to do with the bogey monster was make him very different to how people would expect.
You'd expect a creature made of snot to be disgusting and perhaps a little bit scary and initially you know he you might think he is scary as you read the book but you discover that he's a miracle of life he sort of in he's the embodiment of the mysteries of life you know what makes something come alive
who knows we still don't know even today and he and in in both the stories um he's able to communicate with animals telepic I can't speak telepathically and and he's a really kind creature well maybe there'll be a moment in Monster Stink where things will go wrong oh god really but that was the that was the thought
process initially okay okay I think it's fine I don't think it's gonna encourage children to do terrible things like pick their nose or fart I was gonna say and can you actually even fart on demand i can't i can't i know some people can because you can play your farts like an instrument can't you really
there are some people there are there was there there was some guy i can't remember his name now who who made a living from farting and he he did i think he did an edinburgh show and stuff like that i'd seen it yeah and he used to use talcum powder on his underpants so that you could see so you could see
the farts because you do need a bit of an explosion yeah because if it was a very very quiet one at least you'd have some visual support exactly so he yeah so he'd learn to control his farts for entertainment purposes you know a sort of a extravagant entertainment show where he did all sorts of tricks
and things with his with his farting so i think it's possible to learn how to fart on demand but i suppose it would be muscle control but you would need to have eaten enough stuff that would create wind yeah presumably but you know um so this is this is the point this is where we're going to start getting
into the world of farting and gas okay because you know which you might want a nose peg which other podcasts are you going to get all of the vocab for farting i don't know but i don't know someone had to do it and i it's me i've taken that responsibility i mean it's all just a lot of hot wind isn't
it absolutely um so you you can burp on demand yes that's slightly easier to burp right yeah burping is obviously when gas comes out of your mouth farting is when gas comes out of your bum listeners you know but uh you know potentially listeners don't know what the difference between a burp and a fart
is but um so you can burp on demand by sort of like i mean i could do it now but that would be too far that would be too much i learned to do it as a kid but you kind of like bring some air in which you then release expulse so maybe um that's how uh you can fart on demand you somehow bring air in and then
you then you let it out again rather than it being genuine already like it's rather than gas that's come from your intestines do you think i think it's probably that somehow you suck it in and then blow it out again you can train that end to like suck air in i think you can train all sorts of your end
to do you've opened my mind to some terrible thoughts of how that might happen.
Yeah, but I don't know.
I'm no expert in that.
Since we're on the subject of farting, Anna, now, like in Monster Bogey, you had a glossary at the back of your book of made -up bogey words, different types of bogeys.
You've got the same thing at the back of this book.
Now, I thought that before we go into your glossary of made -up fart vocab, that we'd first of all look at real fart vocab because you know my listeners need to know this and they need to know the words for how to describe the gas that comes out of someone's bum right because you know this it happens
i'm sorry it happens in the world so you've got to know how to talk about it exactly it's like uh it's like i just just thought apparently in um in certain places north of our globe um there are um people who have like thousands and thousands i'm maybe exaggerating but lots and lots and lots of words
for snow right and i don't know what the like the the amount of words we have for snow but uh i don't think we have quite as many for farting but maybe we should i think we've probably got more words for farting than for snow honestly really in british english yeah i think so in snow for snow it's like
you just got snow snowflake powder snow then it goes into the world of poetry doesn't it sort of describing the snow in like a white blanket getting into the world of similes and metaphors and stuff crisp as something but I think we do have quite a lot of words for farting as we'll see so the first
thing is just simply the word fart which is a noun or a verb to fart or a fart yeah yeah then you've got this more more formal word if you go to the doctors yes because you have a farting problem this is the word you should probably use which is a flatulent i'm feeling rather flatulent today doctor can you
help me right right so the doctor says yes anna um what seems to be the problem today well i've i've just been having quite a lot of flatulence um doctor yes flatulence and to be flatulent right okay also other options you've got you've got gas well I don't know if you actually have gas but you've got
the word gas so that's gas or to have gas or to be feeling gassy right you can feel gassy yes that's true that's kind of that can be that can be for burping or for farting can't it really yeah if you've eaten something and you're I call it gassy after that.
Wind also. So gas or wind.
But you can have wind, to be fair, meaning that you're farting.
And it's usually accompanied by the word terrible.
Oh, I've got terrible wind.
Oh, I tell you what, I've got terrible wind after that lunch that we had.
Yeah. Okay. Have you got wind?
Oh, I've got terrible wind this afternoon.
Don't know why I'm doing it in that voice, that accent.
Because that's the way you say it.
Not you, but I mean, in general, oh, I've got terrible wind.
It always comes out with a strange voice.
Yeah. To break wind as well.
Yeah. Meaning to fart.
Which is interesting, if you think about it.
Yeah, it is. Like, to break wind.
Why break? Why, yeah, why do you break the wind?
This is a deep philosophical question.
It is. It's quite poetic.
Is it because there's a natural airflow in the room, and then when you fart, you break it?
I don't know. No, I think it's more like the wind is the fart that comes out.
You're making wind, but to break wind...
A break speed, you know.
It's like in that sense.
A breakneck speed. A breakneck speed, yeah.
Well, that's going so fast that you break your neck because it's so fast.
But I think it's to give the sense that the wind happens suddenly.
You don't want to mix breakneck speed with breaking wind.
No. You don't know what the consequences might be.
You fart so hard that your head comes off.
Yes. So anyway, a fart, to fart, to have flatulence, or to be flatulent, to have gas, to break wind.
And then we get into slightly more slang words, slang terms, to guff.
Yeah, that's one of my favourites.
It's quite vulgar in a way, isn't it, to guff?
Did you just guff? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's quite rude sounding.
It's not a swear word, but yeah, it's quite vulgar.
It's quite onomatopoeic, isn't it, as well?
Exactly. Guff. It sounds like what it is.
And then we've got a couple of phrasal verbs.
To let off. Which sounds quite posh.
I always imagine that one in a sort of...
I just let one off.
Did you just let off?
Yes. You need the royal off.
Off. Did you just let off?
It's awfully awful.
You're letting off.
To let one go. Sorry, I just let one go.
To drop one as well, you can say, can't you?
To drop one? I just dropped one.
Okay, all right. I'll add that to the list.
There's a scene in the Beatles documentary Get Back.
Do you know about that?
Yes, but I don't remember a fart thing.
It's like eight hours of the Beatles in the studio and very intimate moments and stuff, and there's one moment where...
It's Peter Jackson, isn't it?
It's Peter Jackson, yeah.
There's one moment where Ringo farts, in that they're all sitting around having a meeting star it's ringo fart and ringo's they're all having this meeting discussing whatever it is that the project they're doing and ringo's sitting next to george martin who is like they're quite sort of posh older uh
producer always in a suit and stuff and they're talking and ringo just turns to george and goes i've farted like that and he goes i thought i'd tell you before instead of keeping it secret i thought i'd have to tell you just lovely just a hilarious moment to drop one did you say to drop one yeah yeah
okay so ringo dropped one in front of george martin um and george martin didn't seem didn't seem to be that bothered you know it's just well i imagine once you've spent several weeks in a room with the same people yeah you know there's a there's a big chance that you would have that there would have been
a lot of that floating around in a way it's quite charming that ringo uh felt that he had to admit it as well because he could have kept it secret yes it meant he felt confident in who he was yeah he yeah comfortable in himself it was it was a celebrity fart i mean let's face it on like the level of farts
i reckon i reckon i reckon that some people will be so obsessed and mad about their celebrities that they would rush to a celebrity just to breathe in one of their farts i think if ringo did fart and you caught it in a jar He could sell it.
Yeah. You could probably sell it for quite a lot of money, to be fair.
I think so. Yeah. So to blow off is also a bit like let off.
It sounds old fashioned.
Did you just blow off?
Yeah. To Trump. My grandparents used to say blow off.
Did they really? They did, yeah.
OK. To Trump. Oh, yes.
Yeah. This is the one that...
In the States, it doesn't seem to ring true to farting.
But President Trump in Britain.
he's like one big fart isn't he fart man yeah yeah so yeah to trump in the UK a trump is a fart and trumps used quite a lot in England for farting well it was when I was little it can be yeah yeah you know I I started using the word fart quite late in life for I would say until I was a teenager I was trumping
how many years were you trumping then 15 years or something yeah something like that okay before you actually started yeah you have to you know work your way up to that it was it was almost it's not rude anymore to say the word fart but when we i don't know but when i was little it was a little bit
rude oh i see so you're using euphemisms yes so we we avoided the f word yeah and uh and used trump or used imaginative forms yeah okay but in the states it seems that they don't use the word trump to mean fart so they the whole nation is unaware that he's a fart man yeah um now what about a fart which um
doesn't make a noise which and sometimes those are the worst ones quite often to be honest yeah they can be the smelliest oh yeah do you did you call these the same thing that we used to call them a silent but deadly uh i don't think i would have spontaneously have said it but it was used all around
yeah i exactly what a silent but deadly is oh yeah silent but deadly okay another euphemism is to to the expression to cut the cheese who cut the cheese i love that one i didn't use that one but i love it it's disgusting though isn't it yeah but it's it's very visual and olfactive like he can it's great that one
you can imagine a very pungent cheese and if you cut it you know you kind of reveal yeah you you get the the odor you get the the sloppiness of it almost potentially that's actually another thing i need to add is the expression to follow through which is disgusting for sure but it happens but it does happen
sometimes to follow through this means when someone farts but then you know gas is not the only thing that comes out that something else also comes out, maybe accidentally, you know.
Yes, terrible, terrible thing to happen.
I have a friend. It really wasn't me.
It's a friend, okay.
It really wasn't me, it was really a friend.
It happened to on the metro.
Oh god. Yeah, the Paris metro.
He slash she farted.
It was a he and he followed through.
Oh dear. And how do you get out of that?
Was he far from home?
He was on his way home but there were like six or seven stops.
Oh god. i just can't imagine how awful you'd feel and i don't know whether it was crowded i mean i hope for him it was because then no one would have seen and everyone would have thought would have suspected each other and not necessarily him yeah the more people in the train in a way is a bad thing
because there are more people who get to smell that but also in a sense you get the anonymity of being in the large crowd of people and you're less likely to be identified as the as the culprit in that situation can i just very very very briefly interrupt this this vocabulary session yeah to tell you
my best i think it's my best fart story was um one day is and it's not even to do with a human fart and it's sort of it's going kind of following through with the following through theme as well so uh there was a there's a cafe in paris which is a beautiful cafe which you know you know this cafe yeah
we yeah it's uh oh it's yeah yeah and um oh yeah and it was this story you know this story it's one of my favorite stories oh my god it's a disgusting story listeners and um they used to not serve food in the evening and so the first night that they were serving food i went with my husband and a guy
that we didn't know very well we were meeting him for the first time and as we were sat having our drink waiting for food there was this dog a man and a dog who walked in and there was this absolutely terrible smell the a revolting repulsive disgusting whiff filling the air and both me and my husband because you
know when you married after so after a certain number of years sometimes even like with very close friends you like on totally on the wavelength you just look at each other and you know that you're both thinking the same thing and we sort of looked at each other and we were both thinking it was the guy
sat opposite us and so didn't want to say anything and suddenly this dog walked over to this table and started pooing in the middle of the restaurant and the owner saw what was happening and shouted no and everything happened in slow motion he lifted the dog into the air and his poo came out mid air
and dropped to the floor and went on this woman's hair and splattered on the floor so the fart was the dog that's the fart part of the story and the dog followed through in the air oh god and we just thought it was hilarious I thought it was like if you saw that scene in the film you wouldn't believe
it was real yeah it was just it was just one of life's precious precious moments wait it went into the woman's hair oh yeah what did she do run screaming she didn't notice it straight away so it sort of flopped down oh no right next to her table and she thought she'd got off scot -free which means to
get off without a problem to get off scot -free and uh and it was while she started to try and forget that everything was happening and she was tucking into her food again that her friend opposites and he said oh you've got some in your hair and i mean the restaurant was devastated yeah and the man the dog
got kicked outside which was sad for the dog because i think that man should have looked after it better and taking him outside it why you know but anyway that's the wow what a story yeah it was brilliant incredible yeah um very entertaining good thing you didn't get any collateral damage on either
of you but i but i bet the guy who we were we were eating with thought it was us because it was it was really so present around our table it was it was almost it and we didn't and we didn't necessarily think of the dog straight away it was obvious that it had to be someone in the vicinity three humans
and a dog of course it was that's a tricky situation where there's there's a smell and everyone's looking around going who was that who did it yeah um in fact this this leads on to this other thing which is where someone has farted and you're trying to work out who it is now and there are certain little
rhymes do you know about these little rhymes i think people say yeah so if someone first of all someone says hey have you farted no and then in order to sort of defend yourself you have to say who's the the one who smelt it dealt it and then i'll say the one who said the rhyme did the crime and then
i would say um who who denied it supplied it and then there's no nothing you can say back yeah you can't there's nothing yeah you got the last word so who uh who smelt it dealt it meaning the one who smelt the fart is actually the guilty person yeah like you dealt it like a pack of cards yeah you dealt
there you gave it you made the fart yeah and then whoever said the rhyme which is he uh who smelt it dealt it so the one who said the rhyme committed the crime yeah and then also you've got uh the one who denied it supplied it i like that one i didn't know that one but i shall use it yeah so it's great the dialogue
could be hey you farted no i didn't it must have been you who smelt it dealt it ah no no no whoever said the rhyme committed the crime no no the one who denied it supplied it and you can just keep going back and forth like this i wonder what you'd say yeah no there isn't anything that's it yeah you
finish it off i think that's that's that's as far as it can go once you once you've once you've said that then you and you still and the irony is you're still no closer to finding out who did it yeah it's just a little little almost like a little dance around it yeah it's almost like a legal it's a diversion yeah
you just divert as far as you can go until everyone forgets that it's even happened um what about i've got i've got a joke for you which you might have heard before so let's see who who is it there's like the the queen is um entertaining uh a dignitary from a from a country like what's it could it be
this king of sweden the king of sweden okay let's have that i don't know that there is a king so the the queen uh so the king of sweden uh is on a state visit to the UK and uh he's with the queen and they're riding down the mall uh in front of Buckingham Palace in the horse -drawn carriage right the full
you know the full uh royal treatment yeah so they're sitting there behind these horses they're going along and one of the horses farts quite loudly and obviously the queen is devastated and very embarrassed and she says to the king oh i'm terribly sorry and the queen goes oh that's all right i thought
it was one of the horses i've been trying i might have been racking my brains because there's um and again i can't remember the person but anyway there's a very famous person who went to a dinner and who farted and who said to the woman next to him that said you just have to say it was me and I thought
that was a really good technique to try and get out of them so he's farted next to a woman and then he says to the woman oh you have to just tell everyone it was me very clever very sneaky that's not admitting guilt That's not actually admitting guilt.
Oh, no, that's doing something mean.
That's projecting the guilt onto her.
That's mischievousness.
While also giving her the option to blame him.
Yeah, a very complicated little social dynamic in that one.
To be used, perhaps.
Possibly, yeah, one to use in the future.
What about your quiz of made -up fart words?
Okay. So just to be clear, this is where you've come up with your own names, your own original names for different types of fart.
Oh, yeah. okay and uh so your names are sort of it's interesting because you're kind of playing with language like shakespeare oh thank you thank you write it in the comments um but um let's see because a lot of these i guess will be sort of onomatopoeic as well i suppose meaning that they will sound like
the thing they're describing so you you give me the give me the word and i'll try and guess what kind of fart it is okay so the first one is a fizzy whip Fizzy whip?
Oh, my gosh. Because fizzy would suggest like fizzy water.
A whip is like what Indiana Jones has.
God, oh, I don't know.
I suppose whip would suggest it's sort of fast, and fizzy, I suppose, is like lots of bubbles.
You're on it. You're on it.
It's a fast -moving bubbly fart that pops out in a succession of small explosions.
should you find yourself fizzy whipping it is best to move away from any naked flames or your pants might catch fire that's a thing isn't it that that you can do you can actually ignite you can set fire don't don't try this at home but it is possible to set fire to your farts if you feel a fart coming
and apparently my brother did it when he was a scout on a camping trip yeah and they didn't set fire to their tent fortunately um but uh he said the flame was green oh yeah yes it must be the gas perhaps methane methane wow how fascinating yeah it's dangerous though isn't it because you can set fire
to your clothes oh yeah it's very dangerous yeah but still yeah you can make your own little candle the irony of his camping trip was a little green candle the irony of his camping trip was that they didn't set fire to anything through their said alighting their farts but there a tree next to them got
struck by lightning and they had to like abandon the campsite really yes my god maybe all that farting like set off some sort of electric storm or something caused the tree to get struck by lightning and fall onto yeah perhaps who knows so i got that one right you got that one right well done yeah this is this is my
favorite invented word for a fart a fluffadora oh it's a very pretty word and that's why it's funny because sometimes the humor in the british language comes from totally it comes from bringing it in from an angle that's totally unexpected and uh yeah yeah like the juxtaposition of something quite beautiful
with something revolting quite disgusting yeah fluffadora fluff suggests like um sort of like um something very soft a bit like um uh the fur of a little rabbit or something like that so quite fluffy it's a little rabbit fart yeah like a little soft maybe even slightly warm uh pleasant and and um harmless
uh fart ah alas no so a fluffadora is an almost silent expulsion of air don't be fooled fluffadoras are proper whiffy in fact some have been known to knock people out if you smell one run unless it's your own in which case grab a nose peg so it's not that different from um from the silent ones being
the worst ones silent but deadly yes okay okay um here's the thing uh is this true that often we cannot bear the smell of other people's farts but our own farts sometimes can be quite almost enjoyable do you know what i think i have a theory about this unproven by science i think that you can sometimes
work out the health of your gut from the smell of your farts and we know that we fart every day you know a lot of it seeps out without us noticing yeah uh and i think those moments where it comes out and you you you smell it we sort of have an innate ability to work out whether we've eaten something
we shouldn't have done you know whether whether we're i don't know sometimes if you've got a poorly tongue you know there's all sorts of uh i think it's i think it's useful for us to not have an aversion to our own fart smells in order to assess our health it's like an evolutionary sort of reason why
we actually kind of like sometimes we'll intentionally smell our own farts because maybe it's a sort of like a way to work out if we're fit or not and i and there's another thing i'm going to go a step further i think most people look once they've been to the loo and had a poo yeah I think most people
check it because you need to know how healthy you are and yeah especially especially the Germans because German toilets are different toilets in other places the bowl a different shape well yeah so it stays there longer a lot of toilets in Germany maybe it's not just Germany I don't mean to just I don't
mean to point the finger at the Germans but I have heard this I think this German listeners can confirm or deny that quite a lot of German toilets are designed in such a way so not a normal toilet right?
I say normal. I mean a sort of toilet that we're familiar with it kind of goes down into a pool of water immediately right?
But some toilets in Germany there's a platform where the poo goes onto the platform before it's sort of washed sucked down.
If you then flush the chain a stream of water will send it off the platform into the bowl to be flushed away but it will sit on a sort of platform where you can have a good look at it.
Well maybe that's a good thing.
Yeah I mean it's not necessarily, if you're doing it for that reason, I mean if you're doing it to check your health and not for some other reason although go ahead.
To put a little candle in it Yeah I mean do what you want It's your poo.
Happy birthday! Yeah it's your poo, you do what you want but I think that that's the reason that you can have a look and just check that you're okay which is you know not not a bad thing it's quite a good idea to let's face it there are lots of things about the human body that are taboo and it shouldn't
be because we've all got one we and everyone does the same thing every day and it they are real indicators of health like on a serious note yeah you need to know what's going on in your gut what comes out because what you put in comes out so it's good to see whether what you put in is good for you or not yes
it's a good point there you are yeah i mean your doctor will tell you that you you should be aware of uh the condition of your stool indeed yes your don't don't make a mistake and sit on your stool it's not don't sit on your stool unless you have a stool to sit on above you above the stool just to complicate
things just in case it wasn't clear a stool can be a thing that you sit on whoops whoops all right like kind of a seat with no back on it but a stool is also another word for a poo there you go we've moved into we we followed through we have followed through yeah yeah anyway right let's let's have a couple
more words you want to do one or two more words before we move on so um um yeah let's do a couple um yeah so So how about a link?
Just a link? A link.
That's the word. That's the word.
A link. A link. Like a link in a chain.
Indeed. I suppose a link would be like a succession of poos that are connected together.
Small poos connected together in a sort of chain.
That would be an explanation, but it is, alas, not this one.
It's not right. So a link is a good -natured little bum pop.
Bum pop. Another word for a fart.
Uh -huh. A bum pop. Yeah, all right.
whose squeaky expulsion makes you and whoever you are with giggle.
Its name derives from its ability to create a positive link between two people, two or more people.
Very good. So there.
It's a bonding over a farm.
It's a bonding, yeah.
It's like, oh, is that you?
I see, and then you're best friends, aren't you, after that?
Yeah, yeah. And you've shared, you've shared.
And sharing is caring.
Yeah. Okay. Right, one more.
and then we're going to change the subject listeners yeah promise yeah all right okay this is my this is my favorite and very timely singers we're in paris and you'll see why in a minute uh this uh whoosh hurdle whoosh hurdle whoosh is definitely an on an onomatopoeia it describes a sort of sound like
a whoosh like if a pigeon flew past your head it would go whoosh like that um a whoosh hurdle hurdle is an is like an olympic um uh track and field event isn't it where you have to jump over those hurdles that's right as you're sprinting along you jump over the hurdles oh okay a whoosh hurdle right
so is this a fart that comes out when you're when you're doing something for example if you're climbing over a fence you know and you you cock your leg to get over the fence and a bit of gas comes out you know what i think it would be i would apply it to that Yeah.
But in the in the book, it's a very specialist fart used only by dishonest athletes to blow over their opponents obstacles during hurdle races.
Oh, I see. If you are whoosh hurdled by a competitor, it's very hard to prove as the wind usually carries the fart away, thus destroying the evidence.
So we'll be farting so, so strongly that you would like knock over the hurdles and it would make the other athletes fall over.
but there's nothing to prove because it would have disappeared straight away Strategic competitive Olympic farting It's an Olympic fart No one ever talks about this everyone's always talking about doping and performance enhancing drugs but no one ever talks about farting in the direction of your competitors
What about if you're doing judo or something and you Oh it must happen in judo It must happen that you fart on your competitor's face and maybe that gives you an advantage yeah but is that within the rules though isn't it i don't know i presume i presume that you you're allowed to fart it's a natural
process they can't stop you it's your body isn't it yeah you know that's what a certain movement you can't control everything unless you become a fart controlling athlete and it really does become like you'd have to use it in a closed closed area closed arena so it'd have to be a small place so like
yeah and one -on -one fighting perhaps like boxing ring yeah judo i'm i'm curious if there are any um martial arts out there that have utilized farting because surely they that could be i mean you know there's martial arts that have explored every single facet of what the body can do yeah you know like
like trying to find the best most uh efficient way to take down your opponent surely guffing in their face that's you can train to fart on command like the guy you saw with his talcum powder yeah but you didn't put talcum powder in so it wouldn't show yeah presumably you can combine if bruce lee had
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Um, okay, now, um, I wanted us to move on to something kind of different because because this is another thing i wanted to talk to you about and that is scary creepy ghost stories because you've got some interesting things to talk about and i just think it's fascinating but i was thinking how can i
how can i link uh from uh there you are i just did it yeah yeah how can i go from uh talking about farts to talking about ghosts and i think that i've found a i think maybe i found a way basically how are ghosts similar to farts they both hang in the air they both instil a sense of dread and fear among
everyone they can send people running screaming from the room we're not sure of their origins we don't quite know where they've come from some people deny their existence they often seem to appear in bedrooms and it's very awkward if you get stuck in a lift with one yes so i have to agree that is the perfect
perfect bridge between the two we've now moved from farting to ghosts so why are we going to talk about ghosts anna well i think it's because i believe that i have um seen one and actually live in an apartment in paris where there's been some very strange activity that i've not been able to explain i
i believe it's a ghost people listening they may not but what is for sure is that this is very weird very weird happenings um very unsettling and uh and quite fascinating like asks lots of throws up lots of questions so you told you told me about this before briefly and i found it so fascinating i thought
this i would love to just uh record you talking about this on the podcast so okay so well you feel like your apartment is haunted yeah but i don't think it has always been haunted um because i've lived in the apartment for 10 years it's you your husband and your son and our son yeah yeah you don't have to
give away names and stuff if you don't want but um you your husband and your son right you've been living there for how four ten years ten years and it was just about a i would six months to a year before the pandemic our neighbours so we're on the third floor our neighbours on the fourth floor had
started doing work in the house like um i don't know renovation work and suddenly after i don't know whether it was straight after they'd finished the renovation work or during the renovation work I can't remember they're a couple with no children they're in their 60s there are there are no children
living upstairs and we would start hearing a the pitter patter the sort of very distinctive pitter patter of a human child running along the corridor so our our flat has um has a long corridor and all the rooms go off it and of course this being Paris all of the the floors below and above have the similar
layout and so we would hear this running and it was always at 10 o 'clock about 10 o 'clock at night to begin with um and it would occasionally go over where we have our bedroom but you would you would hear this this pitter -patter and our son at the time was three um and it was a very similar noise to
his feet the the the noise that his feet make when he runs from his bedroom to our bedroom and we started making jokes about very horrible jokes about all the they've let the children out the cage at 10 o 'clock at night you know because there weren't any children yeah and then we started asking our
neighbours if they had also heard children running and that some of them had and so one of our neighbours was on the fourth floor um not above us so opposite the other apartment and they had heard a child running on the fifth floor but the apartment was empty on the fifth floor and they also thought
this was really weird anyway so this we just sort of i don't know what we thought it was we just made these jokes about the cages of children and um and then um and then the pandemic oh no hang on sorry i've missed out one one detail so I asked our neighbour downstairs whether she'd heard running and she
said she had and she presumed it was our son because of the the footwork the three -year -old footwork yeah and um until we'd gone away and she'd still heard it in our apartment oh so even when you were away she was still hearing still hearing a child sound of a child's footsteps yeah yeah and it's always
running and it's the you know you become familiar with the sound of your apartment your house that you live in and the the number of steps you can make was practically always the same and it's the about the distance of the hall like when you when you run down the hall anyway so she was hearing this when when we
weren't there the pandemic hit everyone was in the apartment in their apartments and um and i would say it was and if you if you're interested in ghost stories if you hear about during the pandemic there were lots more people who reported sort of paranormal experiences um during that time and perhaps
because we're we're in our own spaces and we couldn't get out you know but the what say the place that's safe becomes not so safe because we don't know what's going on in the world maybe it's all you know psychologically induced who knows but anyway during the pandemic um we would still hear this running at night.
And one night we heard what we thought was our son running down our corridor and whack the chair that's on the desk in the corridor.
And it was so loud and real, the chair had moved, that my husband got out of bed and said, oh my God, are you all right?
Expecting to see our son.
And when he got there, there was no one there and our son was fast asleep.
and since then so after so since then we've had on and off we've had spells on and off where we've heard this running and we're thinking you know could it be could it be a you know and until we'd have the chair move in our flat we're thinking could it be a cat could it be a dog but it really did feel
very human and why would you hear it in other apartments and not just ours almost as if it's sort of moving through the through the building somehow yeah and uh and then during the pandemic we were in our lounge and my son who wasn't aware that we were thinking there's a ghost running through our flat yeah
you hadn't talked to him about him he's like three and a half yeah by then by now yeah and uh and it's at those moments where you know the vocab starts coming they just are able to start telling you things they've they're thinking they've seen he And he said, Mummy, a boy just walked past the door with light
coming out his head.
And I said, All right, great.
Okay, that's interesting.
Thinking, oh, that's really odd.
And also, I feel, I've always felt that I've sort of attuned to paranormal energy.
I don't know. Until that, until, it's hard to explain.
There's another story I'll tell you after this about actually seeing something.
But until then, I'd always been able to feel that I could sense things, like lots of people.
And I hadn't sensed anything at that point when he saw this boy apparently walking past.
And not long after that, he also said, a different day, he said, Oh, mummy, a dog has just walked through our room and gone through the wall.
and i said oh what did it look like and he said it was white with a pink bow and i said which part of the door which part of the wall did it walk through and he pointed to a part of the wall where there isn't a door so we waited till he'd gone to bed yeah and that evening we tapped on the wall and where he'd
seen the dog go through the wall it felt it sort of sounded like wood as if they'd been a door there before so there's like around it it's it's solid and then when you tap there it goes like that yeah it sounds like that's a thin part of the wall where there used to be a door or something and it would make
sense that there had been a door there because our lounge was sort of it had two doors in it yeah that um uh there's no need to have because um there was been a wall that had been knocked down yeah and if you and if you look in our neighbors flats their doors aren't side by side they're more spaced
out okay so anyway so that so there's that and since then we've still here from time to time running and my husband has had a weird a really unsettled really unsettling thing he was walking between he was standing so you've got the kitchen on the right the bathroom is this small parisian apartments
folks kitchen on the right bathroom in front of you my our son's bedroom on the left he's standing in the in this hallway he's standing in the middle he's just come out the bathroom yeah and he felt as if something walked through him from the kitchen to the bedroom and he he didn't feel frightened by it
but he just thought it was odd and I was like how he's like I wasn't sure I should tell you I can understand why it's like in in in our son's bedroom and in sort of cycles our son is get scared I mean lots of children get scared you know there's nightmares or in some children have night terrors so we've
never had that fortunately but but he always seems to get scared at moments where I kind of feel there's something different about the about the the apartment and just last night um he woke up at three o 'clock in the morning and ran down and came to see us and of course his footsteps don't correspond
to the the the footsteps uh that we used to hear um because he's now seven and these are like proper toddler sort of so the the the the weird footsteps that you hear are definitely sort of like a younger child like a three -year -old or something yeah three four and your son's now seven so the footsteps
sound very different so we know it's him running down the corridor and he's thundering like an elephant yeah and he was scared because he'd felt someone stroke his head and it had woken him up so he came into your room yeah you said what's the matter and he said someone just touched my head yeah and woke
me up so we've told him also you must have been it must have been a dream but part of me is thinking oh my goodness what if what if there is there are weird things going i mean maybe it's not a ghost maybe it's um i don't know maybe it's a time warp and uh they say time doesn't exist don't they say
that okay we have all of our times uh at the same time yeah and uh what if um there's some sort of crossover you know yeah you mean like like sort of parallel universe situation where things sort of one one universe uh crosses over to the other one briefly or something yes or even someone who might have lived
in our apartment before as maybe he thinks we're ghosts i don't know i'm saying all these sort of random things no it's very interesting to speculate on on what all those things might mean and i mean when whenever you uh talk about or you know whenever people talk about these sorts of unexplained phenomena what tends
to happen is people jump to conclusions about what it is because they're so desperate to find an answer.
Like I was about to ask you, what do you think it is?
And then, you know, you would start speculating, but you always hear in these sorts of stories, someone then says, I think it's this.
And then they give a reason, they give their answer.
But the fact is that we don't know what this is.
And that's what's so fascinating.
And as a storyteller, of course, for me, I think I find it particularly interesting from a storytelling point of view, what could it be?
Makes you think, who is it?
What could it be? I do know that of course we live in a very our part of the 11th arrondissement it's a Jewish area and we know that there were lots of families who were deported from our area and we know that there were families in our building who were deported tragically and so I don't know part
of me thinks could it be some sort of something left over from the war era um i know that there was a heavy resistance um i think there was on um on boulevard voltaire um there's a building that's modern now but it used to be a cinema and it was where it was one of the resistance headquarters they used
to um i presume go and try and talk things through in the dark secret meetings in the cinema yeah when paris was occupied by the nazis yeah yeah so uh so who knows what horrors went on and i part of me if if if entertaining the idea that it is a ghost of of someone who was a human at some point and who was a child
i think it's really sad i mean if if if his soul's still there i'd like to be able to help him him i say him oh do I know something in my subconscious help it move on yeah I know that yeah this is this is one of the things that people often say about ghosts or spirits or something that you know this is a kind
of common theory or common answer which is that it's some sort of trace left over from a person who lived before yeah who maybe died in very traumatic circumstances and as a result they moved on to some other life you know the afterlife um in the wrong kind of way and their spirit is still stuck in our
world or like or like um the other thing is that sort of wall like you know like you can play a cassette back and and everything in the world is just energy and who's to say that where we live and the events that happen don't get sort of leave an imprint an imprint in the walls and somehow some people
perhaps um just have the right um ability to tap into those energies to kind of see the replay of something you mentioned a cassette because so um you know when we used to use cassettes to record our music my age yeah for example you had a c90 like a cassette that you'd you record some music on it but then
when you're fed up with that music you record some more music on top you you record over the top of the other thing but when you do that a number of times the the the the cassette gets sort of worn down a bit the sorry the tape gets worn down a bit and when you listen again you can actually hear traces
of the previous music that you had on it coming through in the background a little bit so you mean it's something like that that previous lives potentially even leave some sort of imprint or trace on yeah who knows who knows who knows it's like why when you walk into a room can you often tell straight
away even if you've never met anyone in the room before you can you all somatically know who to gravitate towards it's because there's some sort of energy um event going on that are that we're able to tap into you know subconsciously and who's to say that a certain type of people don't just into that kind
of recording or i'd yeah i mean another thing that we know is true is that the version of the world that our senses um show to us is a tiny little sliver a tiny portion of what's actually going on that our view of the world is actually very very small because it's what our eyes ears and you know our
nose our five senses what they actually deliver to us And there are actually other ways to read the world that we don't have, you know, like, you know, if you just think of certain animals that use sonar.
Think of, yes. They have a different, they have a totally different view of the world.
But even it goes even bigger than that, that, you know, basically our understanding or our reading of the world is extremely limited.
and there are probably all sorts of other dimensions that we aren't really able to see, hear, touch, smell, whatever.
So there's basically a hell of a lot of stuff that we just don't know.
And we don't know everything about our brains.
Yeah. I think we use, we know we use about 10 % of them.
There was a, there's a really, I love this program.
There's a program on Netflix with a psychic called Tyler Henry.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
it no it's called the hollywood medium okay and um and in one of the episodes they there's a new a brain neurologist who puts an apparatus onto his head while he's doing a reading and shows the parts of his brain that are lit up and it's like a firework display and uh it's it's fascinating because it
shows that his brain was illuminating parts of um parts of the the tissue that usually isn't illuminated in those circumstances and um yeah i just that's like a sidebar i just find that utterly fascinating that is interesting i don't know if that that's proof that they're actually communicating no no no not at all
but it's just proof that even today with our science we're learning there are people who can illuminate parts of the brain that other people can't but who don't isn't it possible though that if you took someone who wasn't a psychic and put them in a similar situation for example a situation where they're
in front of an audience and they're having to be potentially creative or they're they're searching for you know like the act of uh apparently doing a psychic to communicate the act of trying to communicate or accessing parts of the brain that are sort of uh how do how do you describe maybe the more
creative centers or the more subconsciously creative centers or something that might be it might result in the same kind of brain activity you know I mean yeah I'm about all these things I think I'm probably I'm a sceptic I'm a sceptic but I still I think scepticism still should include the idea that there
are a number of possible reasons for this like you know the scientific way of looking at things is to say look we know this much but there's all this other stuff that we don't know yet and it might be possible for us to actually work out um what's going on when it comes to things like uh ghostly encounters
or psychic readings or these also these other things you know it might just be a matter of time before we learn about that stuff like you know in the past when people got sick people thought it was like evil spirits but it wasn't until people actually worked out that that That was, you know, bacteria that was that was causing
that. We were completely unaware of the existence of bacteria for such a long time.
So, yeah, very interesting.
I've never actually had a I mean that your your experiences for it's pretty creepy.
Does it does it not make you scared and do you not feel uncomfortable at home?
So there were moments recently when, yeah, I've been feeling uncomfortable at home.
but um i don't mean to no no no no no but generally speaking i i think our apartment's got really good vibes yeah um yeah it's very very odd you said before that the if there is a person or a child or something that you get the sense that this child maybe likes you or maybe your family maybe maybe yeah
who knows yeah who knows but you don't get the sense that it's a sort of malevolent no uh a malevolent entity entity or present not at all no yeah honestly if there was I wouldn't be living in that apartment you would get out I would get out see the thing is if your life was a Hollywood movie what would happen
is this that you'd the beginning of the film would be you escaping from this apparently haunted house and going to live somewhere else and it would follow me and it would follow you and then some sort of like ghost exorcist would say oh we've studied the house it's not the house it's you yeah yeah it'd
be horrible um i've never had a an encounter with a ghost but i've had a few things that were weird oh yeah like i lived in a house in liverpool uh at university with about nine other students it was this big house with about four floors um on its own in a street oh that's weird in itself two spaces
on either side that we think were destroyed during the war because a lot of the houses in this part of town...
Liverpool got bombed a lot and a lot of the residential streets ended up getting hit by bombs as well.
And a lot of the houses...
There's a lot of gaps in the streets.
Oh, so they just never rebuilt the houses that had been bombed, presumably?
Was it what era did the house date from?
I don't know. They're probably Victorian, I suppose.
Were they like terraces?
Terraces, yeah. But these were these ones.
I think this one was like a semi -detached or it would have been.
But anyway, like on a street of terrorist houses, there was this big house and a few other big houses.
Some of them connected to each other, but ours wasn't connected to any other houses, which was just a bit odd.
Yeah. First of all, it was a weird house and a bit of a crazy house as well with, you know, a lot of crazy student behavior and stuff like that.
but um anyway this large house and um there used to be this bouncing ball sound oh yeah and um we all could hear it like a football or a tennis ball was it yeah it was like i would say it was like like a football okay so quite a quite a dull it was like this do do do do okay oh yeah like when the ball
slows down do do do oh yeah like someone had just dropped um a not a properly pumped up plastic football yeah yeah and it just goes like that and where where would you hear it so we would all hear it i was on the ground floor and then other people on the upper floors but it was loudest at the top of the house
so the person who slept under the roof could hear it the loudest was there an attic or was it there was crawl there was so there was a there was a loft room okay one of the one of the students lived in the loft room and there was some crawl space around the loft room and it freaked us out so much that we
all investigated and went into the crawl space to look around to see if there was something like a ball cock you know like a thing you get in a toilet which has a plastic ball that goes down when the water goes out of the you know one of those systems a floating plastic ball or something like that but there
was no indication of anything like that no window that was half open that was banging in the wind just nothing at all to suggest this noise but then at night you would just sometimes hear and was it at different times at night or the same time or no different times it wasn't every single night at the same
time it was just sometimes you know in the morning we'd be you'd come down in the morning and everyone would say did you hear the the ball last night and was it was it a sound that would keep you awake was it loud enough to it didn't keep me awake because I was downstairs um I don't know if it kept
the others awake um I think it just it just scared and disturbed them in particular yeah I didn't hear it that much but then every now and then I would hear it and it sent it would send a chill down your spine it's inexplainable it's unexplainable and it just sounded like a ball being dropped really
weird right really weird yeah well so my previous apartment do you want to say about that because this one really scared me so when I moved to Paris I had nowhere to stay I was And I moved just before New Year.
So at a New Year party, I just said to everyone who was there, I'm looking for an apartment.
If anyone can help me, I'm, you know, open for it.
And this guy said, oh, I live in Le Valois -Pรฉrรฉe, which is just on the outskirts of Paris, west of Paris, sort of touches Paris, really.
And he said, I live on the second floor and the ground floor is free.
it used to be my grandparents flat i'll check with my mom i'm sure she'll want to rent it out so i got my first apartment in this beautiful sort of your typical parisian facade and then you'd walk through and the other side of the courtyard was an old in french they call it an hotel particulier it's
like a sort of um it would have been a grand house that belonged to one family at one point and was turned into apartments and it overlooked this courtyard that had rose bushes and i mean the rose bushes hid the bins it's not it wasn't as good it wasn't as uh as sophisticated as that but it was it was very
pretty and i got this ground floor and overlooked the courtyard and i moved it and when i visited the flat i thought it looked it was quite big for one person for paris it was like 55 square meters i was like well my friends at the time we're living in you know like 20 square meters and um moved in and when i
moved in the atmosphere changed in the flat and i felt observed and i thought it was because the concierge was a bit weird and he'd walk around the courtyard a bit and i was on the ground floor and i was a you know 20 20 something alone in her first apartment living in a foreign country but I just couldn't
put my finger on it and the day and the day I'd moved in my best friend had helped me set up the bed and I'd chosen to put my bed on the on this specific wall and neither of us slept well that night and so I said oh I've got to move the bed onto the other wall I can't sleep can't sleep here and anyway
so I was sleeping uh where I moved the bed to was opposite the door to the lounge which was in front of you and then there was the window out into the courtyard on the right okay and um and after i think it was it was in april one april um i woke up in the night and i saw a man at the end of my bed
and it was so real i couldn't see his features it was very like a sort of it was like a shadow with density very very odd but he was so real to me that i grabbed the lamp next to my bed pulled it out the wall and started screaming in english get out get out and this thing ran to the window and disappeared
and the window was closed yeah but just disappeared yeah so i thought i dreamt it yeah i was like just just a dream it was really just a dream yeah and then a few months later wait did you after that happened did you like you go straight back to sleep or did you lie there going was that just a dream
did i just yeah the second one but eventually your the necessity for normality to to come back yeah overtakes the fear because when you think to yourself that that i must have just imagined that there's no way that just happened yeah it's not possible that i just saw something um and um and so i um
yes i went back to sleep anyway time time was going by and i saw it again oh he was standing in exactly the same place and i told i screamed again told it to get out and this time it ran into the lounge and disappeared and at this time i got up put all the lights on i really checked like and um yeah
it was it was very scary anyway so in our apartment in this apartment um when my parents came to visit and they had they brought the dog with them the dog would never go in the bathroom and we thought it was hilarious and so we would we're probably not very nice for the dog we loved her we'd like shove
her in the bathroom yeah and watch her run out it was like she really didn't want to be in the bathroom yeah because you like just need to give her a bath or something like that and the dog's just like she's like no way yeah yeah and it was one of these weird french bathrooms where you walk in sink
and then there's a shower in the middle of the room where you walk and you have to go up a step through the shower to get to the toilet at the end it was like a a thin narrow bathroom i mentioned this because the guy who's who his family i was renting the flat from um he was he was a weird guy actually
he he worked for the ministry of defense and had a gun and whenever i would go up he would get his gun out and polish it in front of me very odd but anyway yeah very good wasn't it wasn't a happy it wasn't a happy um necessarily a happy sort of uh place in the end no and um anyway he joy joy didn't
know anything about what had been going on and i'd looked after his cat so i was taking him his keys back and then he got his gun out anyway um was that his attempt to like impress you possibly who knows and it had the opposite effect yeah and um anyway so so i so i ended up talking about the apartment
and he told me that his grandfather had died in the apartment and that he'd had a stroke in the bathroom.
Oh, God. And then he told me that when they'd done the wake...
Which is a kind of, like a sort of a...
When you laid the coffin out.
It's like a funeral commemoration get -together awake.
Yes, around the body.
Right. So where they'd laid his body out was where I'd put my bed the first night.
and didn't feel comfortable sleeping yeah and where I saw the figure yeah was where his coffin would have been because I was now just opposite opposite again again listeners there was no proof to anything I can just say what I thought it was what I I lived but I thought it was putting those all those
facts together and and I and I didn't feel at home at all in that apartment and I stayed there for two years which seems like a very long time when i look back but again it's not all the time it's not it's not every day you know you don't feel like this massive threat and you're always telling yourself
oh it's in your mind but anyway i say there two years and when i moved into central paris i halved the size of my apartment like 25 square meters and i slept for the first time it felt like in for two years i was like i didn't i didn't feel observed i uh i was like oh my goodness suddenly just the vibe
i could relax the vibe of the of your new apartment was just calm and peaceful i was allowed in it whereas that one i don't think i was particularly welcome yeah how interesting really strange uh i've got to i've got to share a couple of other things now as well so um i've told this story on the podcast before
i've got a couple of ones actually um not necessarily well not necessarily supernatural but just creepy right So once I went to stay with my friend, this is after I'd been away in Japan for a couple of years and I came back to London and, you know, I was just like finding my feet again in London.
And I went and stayed at my friend's house and he lived in this, again, another old Victorian tall terraced house on the street where Charlie Chaplin had been born and grown up.
And by the way, just as a sort of fun fact, but it was in a place that used to be a very poor, run -down part of town anyway um old victorian house and we spent the evening in the living room one of these long living rooms where you've got it's kind of like separated by these doors so there's a dining
room here and living room here and at the time presumably it would have been like it would have been the front room when they would have entertained guests and the back room would have been for living and they'd knocked it through yeah it was that and but the result the result is that he used one end
of it as the living room and the other end was a sort of like a space that wasn't really being used and it was kind of like dark and there were just general objects in there and there was a window at the back end of that that looked out onto their small garden with trees and bushes and stuff like that.
But the lights weren't on in there anyway.
So we'd spent the evening in the living room talking to his flatmate who was talking...
I don't know how we...
Because it was nearly Halloween.
We were talking about like creepy stuff like this.
We ended up talking about things like this.
And his flatmate was talking about how his girlfriend used to talk in her sleep.
And she wouldn't just talk in her sleep.
She would sleepwalk as well.
In fact, there was a time when she walked out into the street and it was it was like dangerous.
Dangerous. He had to go out and get her and persuade her to come back in.
It was like difficult to wake her up and stuff.
And she was confused and she would wake up and she'd be a bit upset and stuff like that.
And he told us about this time when she was in they were in bed and she sat bolt upright in bed and started having a conversation.
with someone apparently at the end of the bed right and he was a way he woke up too and he was just kind of like observing this her sitting up eyes open asleep but talking to someone and he was listening to this one side of this conversation it turned out she was talking to her grandfather right and apparently
her grandfather was standing at the end of the bed and she was having a conversation with him i bet that was quite nice for her in her dream i suppose so but for him it was terrifying because she's having a conversation with a with someone who's not dead grandfather who's not there you can't see yeah
so he told us this story which kind of like you know um freaked me out a little bit anyway we then everyone went to bed and stuff and i slept on the sofa um that night but it wasn't i didn't feel very comfortable not just physically but just i felt a bit freaked out after all these stories and also the room
was just a bit unnerving because there was this long dark part of the room which I couldn't really account for oh yeah unfamiliar and sort of shadowy yeah and you know what it's like if you've watched a horror film and then you have to go to the toilet when you walk past an open when you walk past a window
at night where there's no curtains oh yes you don't want to look out you don't want to look out you don't want to look in a mirror either at night you don't want to look into a dark room I think we condition ourselves as well like we if we think about scary stuff you are more likely to be scared yeah
yeah yeah and at the end of this room was this window no curtains and I could see like the shadows of trees sort of against the window and stuff like that and so it was just uncomfortable and around this time in my life I used to get this thing in the middle of the night where I would wake up but I
couldn't move oh sleep paralysis sleep paralysis exactly I used to get that which is very frightening yeah I used to get it a lot I had it once I used to get it all the time and i used to get it in my apartment where i would wake up and i was convinced that there were people at the door trying to get
in and i couldn't move i was literally frozen and i used to get it really strong where i'd be lying there and i would have this really strong sensation that there was someone in the room standing over me but i was like desperate to move and tell it to go away but i was completely paralyzed um and it's
a you know about it it's it's a phenomenon that happens that when you go to sleep your body floods your your brain gets flooded with chemicals it floods your body with chemicals that basically stop you moving in your sleep sleepwalk like your friend's girlfriend exactly yeah and put yourself in danger
when you're asleep when we're dreaming our body doesn't really move that much because your body is inhibited during sleep by this chemical that basically stops you from moving but it's possible to kind of wake up when you're in that state and you can partially be awake you can be aware of what's going
on but you physically you can't move are still frozen because yeah you know your body is telling it's your brain is telling your body not to move because because you're asleep and it does create a sense of fear yeah people often report the sensation that there's someone there and people often think
people are sitting on them yeah that's why they feel a great weight yeah exactly people report feeling like someone is sitting on their chest or something like that so I used to get this quite a lot but that night I got it I was lying there in bed and I got this really overwhelming sensation that someone
was standing over me but I couldn't move I couldn't turn round and you just have to kind of like wait and then eventually you fall asleep again you know just slowly sort of drift back into sleep so that happened which was terrifying and then first thing in the morning in the half light I woke up to
this sound going on and on and on like that and what was it and i you know after the night i'd had i was already freaked out and i was like what the what the hell is this you know and i was kind of getting up trying to work out what it was on the mantelpiece above the sofa where i was sleeping there
was a clock a plastic clock right i looked at it the hands of the clock were spinning around around wow so the clock was going and the hands were spinning around on it that's really weird and that would it really scared me i was like what the you know how did you tell your friend well no they they were in bed
it's like but did you tell them after oh yeah i told them after i worked out what it is oh right i worked out what it is there's an explanation so none of this is supernatural but at the time it was terrifying yeah so i grabbed the clock and i was like what is this an alarm you know i was trying to
trying to turn it off there was no button because because he was doing it while you were there yeah the hands all right yeah i was just there i had it in my hands the hands of the clock were turning i was trying to make it stop trying to make it shut up and in the end i pulled the back out and pulled
the batteries out and it stopped uh anyway long story short in the end the this what do you think the explanation is for that the short circuit was it no it was one of those automatic clocks that readjusts itself right what so it is it was it was at the time you were like daylight saving oh so it had
gone oh it was it was great it was october it was like you know it was that's a great expression the clocks went back um that that night and so the clock is like one of those i don't know what you call it but like a satellite clock or something yeah that that automatically changes is readjusts for daylight
that we can get ourselves in these states where we are going to see the paranormal where there actually isn't anything yeah yeah yeah exactly so it's a combination of someone tell me telling me a scary story about sleep walking having sleep paralysis being in a creepy room and then having that having
this weird clock thing yeah going back to uh talking about grandparents um appearing when the first time my husband um came to england to stay with um well we weren't married at the time as a boyfriend to stay at my parents house we were in we were in our bed and i woke up in the middle of the night
and saw my grandma sitting at the end of the bed what and the reason i'd woken up was because she she had a little picture um of a cat and that was hanging in my bedroom that was one of the one of the things that i had that belonged to my grandma and the picture fell off the wall woke me up and when i
looked i saw her sitting on the bed and it wasn't it didn't feel weird it didn't feel scary and my feeling was she was telling me that my husband was a keeper oh yeah like all right this is the one and i uh and then i just went straight back to sleep again wow but it i was i was awake because the picture
had fallen off and it had woken me up and then i saw her and then the next day i put the picture back on the wall that's interesting really weird that the you interpreted this as as her saying as a sign to say he's good you should you should uh stick with this guy yeah yeah and she was right and she
was right yeah yeah exactly um yeah really interesting very very odd just one more thing right so i used to live out in the kind of in the countryside in solihull warwickshire area right and we used to my brother and i used to go out into town in birmingham we'd have to get the train but the the nearest
train station was about two or three miles away and so you'd have to walk through the countryside so you get the last train home from and then walk back in the dark yeah you'd go from birmingham moore street all the way back to this little station called lapworth station and then you'd walk back through
the countryside in the dark back to the house and it would take maybe an hour.
An hour, yeah, three miles, yeah.
And a lot of it was through country lanes where there were no streetlights.
Cool. And in the middle of the night and a lot of the streets had trees all the way over the top.
Yeah. And walking through country lanes in pitched blackness in the middle of the night is genuinely really scary.
It's horrible. Unnerving.
Yeah. Yeah. And especially if there's no full moon, you know, when the full moon's out, it's actually quite bright.
It's very bright. It's surprisingly bright.
Well, living in cities, you don't realise how important the moon and the stars are when there's, yeah, the light.
But so, like, one of the creepy things was that the walk would go past this country house called Badasley Clinton House, right?
And it's like a National Trust house and stuff.
and there are all these ghost stories about baddest in clinton house including it sounds like a setting the name sounds like a thing for a ghost story sounds like a sherlock holmes story or something like that so one of them one of the stories there is a true story that uh the the uh lord of the house
or something came home from being away and saw his wife um with some other man and he flew into a rage and murdered him uh in the living room and uh his blood was spilled on the wooden floor and the blood stain is still there to this day you can even see it now when you go around the house yeah and other
things is that it was one of those houses that had priest holes in it yeah which were for listeners who don't know about this during the time of the catholic and protestant sort of like the during the civil war a lot of catholic priests would have been hunted and and caught and killed essentially and they
would have hidden in And a lot of these old houses had these priest holes, little hiding places.
And a lot of the times secret tunnels, some of them, weren't they?
They sort of some of them were like cupboards and some of them had little little tunnels where they could get into a bigger room that was hidden.
I've heard that something like people would get trapped in them or that people would get found in them and things like that.
So it's like weird stories associated with this house.
And you have to walk past it in the middle of the night and you go up this hill.
covered with trees with the house on the right and i remember once walking up this hill feeling very nervy were you by yourself by myself yeah um it's not so bad when you got someone with you but when you're on your own it's really horrible i remember going up walking up this hill feeling very very
nervy and at some point looking back down and this is at about half 12 maybe one o 'clock in the morning looking back down the hill i'd just come up and seeing a torch waving around ah so someone else was someone else was walking up the hill too oh yeah but but when you're by yourself that's really scary
this is not someone who'd taken the train because they're i was like the only one on the train or this you know who was out no one had been walking behind me so there was just someone down there i didn't think it was a ghost or anything it was just like shit there's a person there and that's really
scary sometimes people are more scary than ghosts Yeah, exactly.
So I just ran, I just ran almost the entire way home.
And another thing, my brother used to do that walk too.
And he had an experience on exactly the same road.
He was walking up in total darkness and you can't see even really your feet on the ground.
you know you're just kind of walking yeah up this this hill and walking along and he suddenly had the sensation of someone walking past him someone out of the darkness just walk right past him oh wow so he's walking up there and just someone else walked right past him he heard the footsteps and he could sort
of like there was no one no there was someone there so just some random person in the middle of the night was walking along and they just crossed paths with each other just this guy just appeared out of the darkness and walked right past him like really close he didn't see him until the very last minute
wow that's funny that is yeah you could imagine that that would be scary that would be scary whoa jesus yeah you know and they didn't stop and go oh mate or anything like that just like kept going maybe the other guy was thinking oh my god this i can send someone i need to get home yeah yeah it's not just
made me think of another family story we have when my um so we as you know we used to live in birmingham as well and uh and before my parents moved up to yorkshire and um and my dad would do a lot of commuting which is when you work in one place and you live somewhere else so he would have like a two
-hour drive so he would often stay in in yorkshire during the week and then come back to Birmingham weekends before we moved house.
And one day he was on the motorway and he was particularly eager to get home.
It was Friday night and he was fed up.
He wanted to get home for the weekend.
So, and he was, so he was going along and he, there was a lorry in front of him and he tried to overtake it.
And the moment he tried to overtake it, my granddad died in the I think he would have died in the 1980s.
He was very young. He worked in an asbestos factory and had lung cancer.
And, yeah, he was taken away too young, 66 or something, 65, 67 maybe.
Anyway, but my granddad always used to wear brill cream, which is a cream for your hair that had a very specific smell, very, very strong smell.
I don't know if you ever smell brill cream.
it was like that generation of sort of like you know your guys of a certain uh a certain generation will often would use it to slick their hair back they'd have their hair slicked back so that's right yeah so my granddad it was that and my dad suddenly got this massive smell of brill cream yeah and it
was so overwhelming that he didn't overtake this lorry yeah and uh he sort of thought i don't know what that was and catch sort of carried went to overtake again and the smell of brill cream came back and by this time he's thinking this is very odd it really does smell like dad like yeah um and but he
thought nothing we should have tried to push the thought aside and went back to overtake this lorry for a third time and at that point it was so overwhelming this smell of brill cream that he had to pull over into the hard shoulder which is what you call the lane on um on on motorways where you where you're
set where the cars it's sort of if you need to stop lane isn't it if you need to stop yeah you can go over onto the side it's called the hard shoulder yeah so he pulled over in the hard shoulder and the moment he would have overtaken the lorry there was a huge gust of wind and the lorry blew across
the road whoa so he felt that he had his dad looking over him that day yeah who knows who knows coincidence it's all down to what you believe isn't it what you sense what you believe I mean you know yeah it could be that people are suggestible you know I think we're very suggestible aren't we and also the people
who are open to the idea of sort of ghosts or some explanation these events will confirm that that's true whereas people who are sceptical of it those events will not necessarily convince them but just convince them that maybe there's just other stuff there's other stuff that's right And also, if you
if you believe in ghosts, if you, you know, you leave you, you've got your grandparents watching over you.
There's something incredibly reassuring about that feeling that protection that's not there when your parents have died, but feeling that it's ongoing and perhaps that you you will also go on after death.
All of that's very reassuring.
So like the situation where with the lorry that was blown over to the other side of the road briefly, that could just be a coincidence.
could be it was the third time he tried to overtake it your dad's like inexplicably could smell the this brill cream but that's I mean that's weird though but that could be I mean who knows that could be something else an olfactive memory or or it could just be the smell from the truck because maybe
the truck the wheels of the truck the the tires friction caused a certain chemical to come off or something that was in the truck is a you know smelled like built brill cream or or something you know and um so there's that they just smelt brill cream and decided not to overtake but then the truck veering
over to the other side of the road these two things are not necessarily yeah they're not necessarily connected you know but we make the connection yeah um it's like when you look at you see faces in rocks well yeah in trees our brains are trained to make associations yes survival yeah um this is why
yeah you show someone a random pattern and your brain will rearrange it to make it look like something yeah you look at clouds in the sky and your brain will see the you know a rabbit or a rabbit or an elephant or or something like that because yeah exactly we are we have the it's called pareidolia that is like
seeing shapes in things which aren't really there um so yeah that might account for a lot of these sightings and seeing things out of the corner of your eye.
It's like when you wake up in the middle of the night you look over to the chair in your bedroom with a jacket over the back of it.
And immediately it's someone.
And it looks like a person sitting there.
For a second until, yeah.
Yeah. I suppose it is survival instinct, isn't it?
Because you would have to act quickly if someone really was in your room.
So your brain tells you a falsehood first in order to get you in gear just in case it is real.
The humans that see things in the grass or something are the ones that survive.
Exactly. Even if there's no animal there, the humans who are more cautious and who are more easily scared are probably the ones that survive.
Yeah. So that's built into our DNA, this kind of mechanism that helps us survive.
Seeing things that aren't necessarily there.
The mind plays tricks.
Yeah. All right. well what an interesting uh journey we went on in this episode but you know you bridged it so perfectly yeah i guess so um all right well yeah i look forward to reading your ghost story next time do you know um and so i i want to write a ghost story yeah i've got i'm not going to talk
about it here but i've got ideas because yeah i've got a couple of stories one of which will be linked to our flat so i'll say it now rendezvous in like five years when i've written it and uh when it's found a publishing house but yeah great okay well monster bogey and monster stink available now in all
good bookshops okay listeners check them out if you want you know if you've got kids seven plus who would like a fun uh story that they will actually want to read because it's about farts and bogeys you know then go for it get yourself a copy exactly i'll even sign it if you if you contact i don't know
you're allowed to contact you yeah sure if you buy the book and you want a book plate let luke know and we'll sort it out luketeacher at hotmail .com there you go all right then nice one cheers bye okay so that was anna brooke talking to me again on luke's english podcast thank you very much to anna for her
contribution in this episode and uh her book monster stink is available now from chicken house publishing it's available wherever you get your books monster stink the sequel to monster bogey recommended if you want a fun book for your kids in English, then this could be a good choice for you.
Okay, you'll find a link in the description for more information.
All right. So okay, I needed to explain then why I'm doing this in the street.
I don't know, I don't really need to explain.
I just sort of wanted to.
Because at the beginning of the episode, you heard me saying that I was recording this introduction out in the street.
It's probably very noisy.
Apologies for that.
Basically, it's July it's the Olympics at the moment the Olympics are happening now normally I do these recordings in my pod room in the relative uh quiet uh of of my podcasting room right but it's mid July and I'm with my son this afternoon who is currently asleep in his push chair right I took him out
for his uh afternoon nap because he sleeps he normally falls asleep when you push him around.
So I just put him in the push chair, walk around the streets and he falls asleep.
And then I can sit in a cafe like this and maybe get some work done or just have a coffee or something like that.
And this week he's not in crash.
So, you know, either my wife is looking after him or I'm looking after him.
And my wife and our daughter have gone to the Olympics.
They've gone to watch handball they're watching handball matches at the olympics this afternoon which looks really great so i've been so i'm left with uh junior over here and so yeah it's his nap time so this is my opportunity to record the introduction to this episode i'm trying to get all these recordings
and things done before we go away for our holiday in august this is being published in august um this you're probably listening to this in august at some point or maybe afterwards um and so by the time you're listening to this i'll i'll be on we'll the we'll all be on holiday having a lovely time not recording
podcasts uh being on holiday um so that's why i'm outside and it's boiling hot and actually um what's paris like at this time with the olympics you're asking me well it's actually much quieter than everyone expected it to be all the local parisians were all terrified that having the Olympics here would be
incredibly disruptive.
But it's actually pretty quiet here in the city, largely due to the fact that I guess so many Parisians escaped the city to avoid all the inconvenience of having the Olympics here.
And also, I guess everyone else is like at the events, right?
They're at the different places in the city watching different sporting events and stuff um the opening ceremony was last friday and uh it was you know awesome they did the opening ceremony in paris itself they actually did it we were all wondering if it was going to happen whether they would actually
manage to do it they did it uh big opening ceremony in different locations in the city all based around the river and it was that was awesome the fact that they managed to do it around the river that was really cool the the ceremony itself was it had its some moments were absolutely brilliant other
moments were a bit weird like the great moments were the horse riding across the the the surface of the water the galloping horse across the river celine dion singing from the eiffel tower at the end was really great um the the the passing the torch from person to person and then lighting the torch
that was great um and just the views of the different parts of Paris and and so on lots of great moments a few weird moments like the blue the guy painted blue uh lying down on a plate of food that was a bit weird so the ceremony was all in all good I was impressed by the fact that they managed to actually
do it on the river in the city like they planned to a little bit incoherent at times like i wasn't sure what was going on quite a lot of the time but nevertheless still really cool to see that happening all the teams on their boats and everything sailing down the river really ambitious and interesting
opening ceremony i hope that the olympics in general will go well it's still the beginning and so there you go that's what's going on here Thanks again to Anna for this episode.
I really enjoyed talking to her and hearing her stories and stuff.
The spooky stuff at the end was fascinating, I think.
And I'm really curious to know if any of you out there have had any kind of similar experiences.
Have you ever had strange encounters, strange experiences, spooky moments that you could tell us about?
I always find that sort of thing fascinating.
I'd love to hear your comments or read your comments.
I think that's about it now.
I think I'll stop this exit part, this ending part.
And I'll speak to you in the next episode, OK?
Thanks so much for listening.
Thanks for watching.
Have a lovely afternoon, evening, morning or night.
And I'll speak to you next time on Luke's English Podcast.
But for now, on this very noisy street, it's time to say goodbye.
Bye. Bye, bye, bye.
Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.
For more information, visit teacherluke .co .uk.
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