Interview with the Surprised Eel Historian

Interview with the Surprised Eel Historian

Content warnings: 

Discussions of: Environmental harm, Harm to animals,
SFX: Music

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Transcript

DAISY: Hello all! It’s Daisy. Today we have an interview with the one and only surprised eel historian, and I’m as excited as you are to dive in, so I’ll keep this brief. One, we had some audio issues and end up needing to redo a lot of my audio so I apologize for any weirdness that results. Two, we’ve hit 10,000 downloads! Thank you all so much for your love of our silly little eel show. Three, I’m afraid this will be the last bonus content for a while. Lou and I are very busy and we’ll be focusing on our work and on Season 2, so we won’t have time to make monthly content. If you miss us, keep an eye on our socials. Okay that’s all for now, let’s get into it!

[Music] 

DAISY: Okay dear listeners, this is your notably esteemed eel Enthusiast Daisy McNamara and today we have a very special guest with us. Do we want to do names and pronouns at the start for everybody?

JOHN: Sure.

DAISY: All right, so you know me, Daisy, she and he pronouns.

 LOU:  I’m Lou, they/them pronouns.

JOHN: And I am John Wyatt Greenlee, um he/him. Um, I am an eel historian. maybe one of the only eel historians in the world.

DAISY:  Which is the coolest job that anyone can have.

LOU: [NOISE OF AGREEMENT]

JOHN:  It’s not so much a job at this point because it doesn’t actually pay me anything but it’s still kind of fun.

DAISY: Just the passion. You love eels that much, I respect it honestly. [LAUGHS]

JOHN: I do! 

LOU: Yes I have no eel related income at the moment, this is just- the- all the eels are for fun.

JOHN: All the eels are for fun, oh well it, it leads to income in other ways,  and we can talk about that later on, but like it’s um, yeah.

DAISY:  Awesome so, you have introduced yourself as the eel historian, so will you just tell us a little bit about yourself? What else do you do besides eel history?

JOHN: Right yeah so, um I have a PhD in medieval studies, I’m a medieval historian, um and historian of maps and cartographic history, and that led me to eels in ways that I think we’ll probably talk about later on, um but uh so I, as far as eels go I am primarily interested in the ways that eels sort of are reflected in the role they play in, in cultural production and the ways that we – people think about eels and use them as part of culture. So I’m less interested in- like the sort of natural history of the animal and more in the sort of human cultural history with eels. Um, so, academia being what it is right now, I don’t actually have a job teaching or anything else like that, um or researching, um so this is what I wrote my, my doctoral dissertation on, was eel history in England from about 500 about 1500 or so. But at this point what I do for work is I draw maps. I’m uh, I, I draw um, sort of custom maps on commission, um mostly for academic history books and things like that.

DAISY:  That is very cool, we will get into maps later. And I feel it with the academia. [SIGHING]  I’m also on the job hunt.

JOHN:  I gave up on that.

DAISY: Yeah [LAUGHS] Fair enough, honestly, it is so hard right now.

LOU:  I, I am still in Academia I’m a data manager for clinical trials, so-

DAISY: [OVERLAPPING] Ugh, for the birds

LOU:  If I can possibly avoid ever leaving Academia I will do so [LAUGHS]

DAISY: It’s hard lines, it’s hard lines. Okay so we talked- you mentioned this a little bit, if you want to go into detail: Why eels? What- what got you interested in them, besides them being the most perfect creatures as we all know?

JOHN: Right well, I didn’t know anything about eels until partway through my doctoral work. I thought I was going to write my dissertation about sort of, maps and spatial production and the way that people think about and reproduce space and what that means. And, um, for a very, for a non eel related uh, paper I was doing some research looking at maps of London from the 17th century, um, I was interested in like, thinking about spatial production in London around the time of the Great Fire.

 And what I noticed on a number of these Maps, uh of of London these sort of big, pretty City View maps is they- a lot of them had these two ships on the Thames labelled “eel ships”. and that stood out to me for a couple reason. One because, eels, I didn’t know anything at all about eels so that just seemed kind of weird. I think if they’d been like, herring or something like that maybe I wouldn’t have noticed quite so much.

But the other thing that really stood out to me about that is that- these they, they had a label. So the only other things on these map, there are lots of other ships on these Maps, um like, they- the Thames is like littered with them, with, with ships but none of them have labels. The only other thing- things on the map that have labels are big civic monuments like the Tower of London or the Globe Theatre or, neighbourhoods. So like, you know, so like big physical parts of the city that can’t like up anchor and sail away. And then you have these two ships with a label and I wondered why on earth they had like, well, how it had come to be that they were so important that they were like a- enough of a landmark that they showed up on these maps. 

And that sort of seemed like- I was trying to find a topic for a seminar paper, that seemed like a decent place to start, although when I went and talked to..my.. the professor of the class I was like I don’t know, that I’m actually going to be able to find enough material here, I have no idea what I’m like- what I’m doing with it, I don’t know what there is like, maybe it’s a really easy answer, I don’t know and I, like, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get 30 pages out of this. Um, and he said go ahead, just see what you can do, um, if it’s like 20 Pages, it’s 20 pages and that’s fine like, that’s how historical research goes sometimes, right like you pull on threads and sometimes there’s something really interesting there and sometimes nothing there.

And so I wrote the paper trying to get a sense of like, what what these ships were doing there and, and why, and it was a really interesting topic but by the time I got done (and I got to 30 pages pretty easily), by the time I got done, I had a lot more questions than I had answers and it was- they were really interesting questions and so I wanted to kind of keep pulling on that thread. Um, and so I thought- I still wasn’t thinking of like, that as like the primary focus of my research though, um, until I started actually writing writing the dissertation, my initial thought was that I was still going to write about like, sort of, spatial production in London in like the early modern period, and ummm, and that I could use these ships as a- as an entry point. Right, as sort of a first chapter, um to get to thinking about, um, of unusual versions of- of space and contestation and national identity, because they’re Dutch eel ships, they’re not English, as it turns out.

So I was thinking about like all sorts of fancy academic ways, of, of, sort of, packing what’s going on, on these maps as a way to get into a broader topic about spatial production. Um and and then I started writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and like at some point I looked up, and I realized it was like 130, 140 pages into this thing and I was still writing just about eels, and I hadn’t gotten very far. Like, I hadn’t gotten up to the ships yet, I was still just writing about like- because what I wound up doing was like trying to figure out like, okay so these ships are really are important enough to be landmarks, why are they important enough to be landmarks? 

LOU: [OVERLAPPING] Obsessed with eels [LAUGHS]

JOHN: And you start sort of pulling on that thread and what, it turns out that eels are super important in, in English cultural history over the previous like, thousand plus years. So I then- I was trying to like, cram all of that into one chapter, and it just didn’t work, it was like a 140 page chapter and so I went to my-

DAISY:  There’s just so much to say about eels.

JOHN: There was! And so I went to my dissertation-

LOU: Your introduction that had then expanded to an entire thesis

JOHN: Yes 

LOU: Okay [LAUGHS]

JOHN: And so I went to my dissertation commit- I went to my  committee- I was like 

LOU: Hey guys, um I’ve written the thesis!

JOHN:  So it’s- it’s uh, we’re just doing eels, is the thing [LAUGHS] it’s just going to be about eels. Because I’m like halfway through the length- what I anticipate to be the length of this, and I haven’t gotten even up to where I wanted to start so and they were-

DAISY: Oh, so that’s why you’re the surprised eel historian, it was a surprise even to you!

JOHN:  Yes, and that- that’s the, that’s the- the surprise in the, in the Twitter handle there is like I did not anticipate this at all, but it wound up being a really fascinating topic, and one of the things that like- one of the reasons that I, I sort of followed it up was, um, you know, it’s, it’s a PhD dissertation is four, five years worth of work. You have to be able to get up every morning and be really interested in the thing, or most mornings at least and, and sort of be willing to-

LOU:  At least not go insane, yes. 

JOHN: Yes, yes exactly um, or you know and- and a lot of people get to the end of their doctoral program and they’re like sick and tired of their topic, they’re like oh my God I never want to think about this thing ever again. I ..really ..love my topic like it was really fascinating, I kept learning things. And, the reason that you know me at this point is because like, while I was doing that, over the course of sort of writing the dissertation and doing research I would tweet like, random weird eel facts that I found in archival records, um, and part of that like, eels are kind of intrinsically funny-[LAUGHS]

LOU: Yes.

JOHN: Um, so a lot of eel history is just sort of like and, and and, because culturally we’ve really moved away from eels as a part of our diet especially in the US, but um, even in England too, they feel distant and  indistinct and, and,  and, kind of othered and so, sort of pointing out to people that like, hey like the king of England used to order 40,000 of these for a feast, people are like “that’s crazy!” and so it uh, so I sort of started tweeting things out as I, as I found them in the archives and that developed into its own thing. And then at some point I looked up and realized I was like doing one eel history tweet a day with like, uh, memes and- and things and it developed a life of its own. And so that’s been really fun like, being able to take the the work I do as a medievalist and make it matter, in a sort of modern public context, it’s not always something medievalists get to do. Um, so that’s been fun to be able to take my work and and make it matter to people, um and we’ll probably get to this later but that you know- I’m sure everybody listening here knows eels are a critically endangered fish and it’s hard to get people interested in saving them because they’re not this sort of charismatic- charismatic megafauna

LOU: Yeah they’re not like pandas, or-

DAISY: They’re not like particularly charismatic, or particularly well-liked creature, people think they’re weird, people think they’re gross. Anytime I tell someone that like, eels are one of my favourite animals they just go why?

JOHN: Yeah, no they’re, they’re slimy and they’re weird and they’re gross, we don’t really have anything to do with them anymore, they remind people of snakes often, um and like the- my most common reaction when I tell people that I study eels is like “Oh I hate eels because I watched the Tin Drum* when I was a kid and it freaked me out”, and uh- and, and so yeah, so it’s really hard to get people on board with the idea of saving them but you know it’s- it’s- it’s terribly important um, there’s…

* Note from Lou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFSstdnfqjk for the eel scene from the Tin Drum: Specific CW for gore, death of animals, emetophobia.

DAISY:  There, there is an issue especially in parts of the US, Solomon David talks about this, who is a well-known gar scientist about the issues of getting people interested in saving these very cool, very important fish that are not as charismatic, and that we don’t have a value for that we don’t fish for or uh, I think he was talking about- I don’t know if you’re familiar with the relationship between red knots and horseshoe crabs but red knots are a migratory bird that survives off horseshoe crab eggs, and horseshoe crabs are very, very valuable species both commercially in making vaccines and just generally, but it’s almost impossible to get anyone to legislate protection of them because they are, they are creepy looking! [LAUGHS]

JOHN: Yeah.

DAISY: And they’re weird, so I believe it was red knot protection birders got involved in protecting horseshoe crabs in the interest of the knots, 

JOHN: Huh.

DAISY: You have to sort of-

JOHN: Yeah.

DAISY: -make it, it, it’s a way of marketing like this charismatic animal will survive, and then you’ll be able to save x amount of less charismatic creatures.

LOU: I’ve, I’ve seen this from zoologists as well, like, talking about charismatic megafauna and how that, the charismatic megafauna, protecting its environment has a knock-on effect on all the other biodiversity within that environment, so yeah maybe everybody’s like “Urgh, the pandas again!”, but actually, but, a lot of the conservation work that’s done to preserve the pandas also preserves the, the ecosystem around the pandas too so that I, I, I, feel like, eels are kind of like deliberately uncharismatic megafauna like, you can use the un-charismaticness of the eels to be like, oh look at these weird things, aren’t they cool, you know… 

JOHN: And that’s- I’ve done a lot of that of being yeah this sort of like, oh my god look how crazy this is, isn’t this fun, but it’s generally, it didn’t start out this way it started out just being like here’s a random crazy weird thing I found in the archive. But at, for- for the last several years a lot of the focus of the the work I do, and I still do eel tweets every day has really been, and I bring people back to this every once in a while, has really been like, with the goal of getting people interested in eels sort of, and thinking about them as something that’s worth thinking about, worth saving right? It’s like okay, we have this really long and complicated and interesting past with this animal, it’s a really fascinating animal with this crazy and- and- and amazing life cycle and you should know about it! And so you know like that’s, that is where I try to aim a lot of the work that I do, um, even if it doesn’t sort of look like that on the surface most days um, is, is sort of trying to get people interested in eels.

DAISY: Okay, all for it, that is-

LOU: Yep 

DAISY: God’s work as I’m sure we all agree. [LAUGHS]

LOU: Whatever you can do to raise awareness even if you’re sneaking it in by means of memes.

JOHN:  And then every, every once in a while I’ll do a more serious thread to be like: Hey! do you know that eels are critically endangered, and hey do you know they’re the most smuggled animal on earth and like, they need our help, man.

DAISY:  They do. So if we, we’ve gotten into this a little but our next question is: can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between eels and people as relates to your research? We’ve done that a little.

JOHN:  Yeah, so, like I said, that’s sort of the focus of a lot of the academic work that I wound up doing was sort of thinking about the roles that eels played in- and my focus tended to be on medieval and early modern England, um, and there’s a couple reasons for this. One, that you have to sort of pick an area, but also as it turns out the English history with eels is sort of more rich and complicated than most other countries, not all, the Netherlands has really interesting history as well and Eels are eaten broadly across the world and in Europe, but England has a particular long cultural history with eels that’s unique and part of it comes from the fact that they just eat a ton of them, um, way more- there are eels in archaeological like eel remains and archaeological sites all over the place in England in a way that there are not on the continent, they’re just sort of ubiquitous and this goes back at least to the Romans, there’s some evidence the Romans brought eel eating to England, um, that’s a little uncertain 

LOU: They brought rabbits, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they brought eels too 

JOHN: That’s interesting, well not that they brought the eels with them ,there were eels here but there um the the sort of-

DAISY: The custom? 

JOHN: Yeah the the archaeological evidence-

LOU:  Eating weird food was definitely a Roman thing 

JOHN: Yeah um there- there’s evidence of eel eating from archaeological remains and, uh on the continent um, where there isn’t in England, sort of early Iron Age um, and so it’s possible that- so the Romans did love their eels and it’s quite possible that they brought the idea of eating eels with them. The English before that seemed to have eaten a lot of amphibians and frogs and fish, but not a lot of eels, but, by the time you get to like, you know the sixth, seventh century they’re eating a ton of eels, the isotope analysis from, from, uh, from dental remains from South Saxons, in like the 7th Century or so shows that they were eating more eels than they were eating all other freshwater fish combined and all their marine fish combined, so like eating a huge number of eels. 

And so they’re, they’re an enormous part of the diet, um and they- we’ll talk about eel rents in a little bit, they wound up being a part of the economy in a lot of different ways, both in terms of like, people paying for rent in eels, but also, their, their rent in eels but also um, sort of, buying and selling eels, and partly because of this they, they wound up, their sort of general cultural ubiquity means that they show up in a lot of other ways, they show up in art and literature and language, there’s eels on the Bayeux tapestry, Shakespeare mentions eels in his writing more than any other fish, and uh, and you know, they’re- they’re just sort of everywhere the more you look, the more eels you find, And I said that England has a, a sort of unique cultural history with eels um, and one of the places you can see this is in art so- a lot of- there’s English reproductions of Continental Art Styles in the medieval period will often like, add an eel to them which is which is interesting and um, like, English portrayals of uh, St Christopher and St Christopher winds up on um, as a really important figure on uh, the like parish church wall frescos in the 12th century, um, there’s a ton of them all over England and a huge number of them in England have eels in the water some of them actually show St Christopher as an eel fisherman, so like instead of leaning on a staff he’s leaning on an eel spear. And this is unique to England, you see them sometimes in the water in St. Christopher images from the continent but much less often in England, it’s fairly ubiquitous, so like, the eels sort of show up in all of these places um, that that tell us among other things, just sort of point to their general importance. 

There are a ton of eel metaphors you know, at this point in English we have like one eel metaphor, there sort of, slippery as an eel right, which is negative and pre- sort of, premodern England a, a lot of eel metaphors, they use eels as metaphors for bad things, as we do, slippery as an eel is not usually, it’s sort of pejorative right, uh, but eel metaphors can also be good or bad and this is one of the things that’s been really interesting to me- actually sorry this is a bit of a tangent but um-

DAISY: Go off

JOHN: Is that, uh I have found that so, most modern historians don’t think about eels much at all because they’re not a part of our world so much, and so uh, most readings of eels in historical archives by modern historians have tended to be negative, they see like when they see an eel metaphor they assume it is a negative one rather than like, thinking that it might in fact be more nuanced, that you’re talking about a society where- that values eels and so is using them sometimes metaphorically as bad as like slippery as an eel is, I mean that’s a really old one that goes back to the ancient Greeks, and is usually bad but also can be- there are instances of like, they’re using eels for the sort of a good metaphor to mean something good. Um, and that has often been misread by historians who just look at, look at it through a modern lens and so they’re only thinking about eels in negative contexts so that’s been really interesting to me..

DAISY: That is really interesting.

LOU: I’m fascinated by the idea of St Christopher-

DAISY: [OVERLAPPING] I’m wondering- 

LOU:  -with the, with the- the eel trident, the ones they use for kind of, oh 

JOHN: Yeah 

LOU: I saw one of those recently in Ely um, they have like one as-

DAISY: [DREAMILY] Ah, the Promised Land. 

LOU: The promised land of Ely, yeah, they have like a decorative one in- one of their- on their eel trail with just like a sort of sculpture made out of, sort of three eel tridents all together and I’d never seen like an eel trident before, I had no idea how they were caught um, so the, the idea of having St Christopher was, you know like, you know Jesus slung on his back and, and big eel trident in one hand to find his way across the Ford is is very-

JOHN:  Yeah and there are four or five extant um, wall paintings of Christopher like as a, as an eel fisherman and they’re- they’re all in the fens which you would sort of expect.

LOU: Um, yeah okay.

JOHN:  But uh, but like that’s a you know that’s an instance of the artist sort of trying to make the Saints sort of personable-

LOU: Localize them.

JOHN:  Yeah localize and, and and make- like let people who come into that church be able to sort of identify with them.

DAISY: That’s really interesting. I’m wondering, and this is slightly off topic, I’m wondering what changed? With the attitude towards eels. Maybe just, with their ubiquity like, dwindling, overfishing and suchlike, maybe different environmental stuff, as we see less eels, I’m wondering if they started to be creepier.

LOU: Was it over the course of the twentieth century as the population started to crash that the view changed?  

JOHN: So, broadly yes. Um, I think actually I would point to a little earlier than that.

LOU: Okay.

JOHN: So, one of the, eventually we’ll get back to talking about eelships, but, these eelships that I was interested in originally, they’re Dutch eelships, so, they’re big floating aquariums, basically, they’re wellships, so, the holds are full of water, and they’re full of live eels. And so they’re bringing- they’re catching eels in Holland and then later in Denmark and they’re bringing them over to London and sort of, parking these ships on the Thames and then you go out to- you take a small boat out to the ship and they uh, they sort of scoop out your eels for you, and give them to you and off you go.  So, they start doing this trade in like the 1450s or so- something like that, mid- 15th century and they- these ships stay on the Thames until 1938, um, they- that’s when the last of them leaves, um, although by the time you get into 1930s like, they’re really not doing a lot of business, by then- you’re sort of, as you said, the 20th century is when you see a real, real sort of total drop off in, in eel- eel popularity.

But there’s a moment, there’s like a- a sort of 20-year Gap in the mid 17th century, um 15 years early so like between 1666 and 1681 where their ships aren’t on the Thames, it’s the middle of the Anglo-Dutch Wars um, the- the over the-

LOU: So Elizabeth the First is to blame for the uh, for the lack of popularity of eels then?

DAISY:  Yet another thing I can blame on the Monarchy.

[LOU LAUGHS]

JOHN:  Yeah,  so this- this is actually more Charles II-*

* In my defence, I am not an historian – Lou

LOU:  Um okay, later than that, okay. 

JOHN: Yeah uh, but, but um yeah so – so over the course of the 17th century,  there’s this sort of growing concern in London, you can see it play- you can see it sort of evidenced in a number of plays, and the way that eel ships in London are being talked about in- in- in London plays.

They’re  becoming more and more concerned about the Dutch sort of- control over the eel industry and, and sort of the, Dutch- the sort of weird semi- Sovereign Dutch space in the, in the Thames,  which is one of the things I was initially going to write my dissertation on like this, like you have these like, Dutch ships that are part of the city but also aren’t. And so you can see a lot of, uh sort of concern playing out here, and the Dutch wind up being at this point the sort of-  they have sort of, a de facto um, monopoly on eel sales in the city because they’re the only people that know how to make these ships, so the only people who know how to transport live eels in bulk. 

And London has more or less sort of outstripped its capacity, its local carrying capacity of streams and things to get its own eels, so if you want live eels probably you’re getting them from the Dutch,  um, from these ships.  And there’s sort of a growing concern about this is, sort of of early nationalist ideas and eel-sort of eel eating is a bit tied to English, early English senses of nationalism in some interesting ways. And so like there’s a lot of tension here and in 1666, the- these Dutch ships get kicked off the Thames, with- with a, a law sort of aimed at encouraging English eel fishing, um and they get invited back essentially in 1681, because it turns out the English can’t supply London with enough eels – is what it boils down to.

 DAISY: Too mad for eels.

JOHN: Yeah pretty much, um, there are a couple of, of anonymous uh, petitions to Parliament being like ‘hey look we’re draining the fens, which is our own native eel habitat, we don’t know how to carry these things in bulk, anyway, like we need our eels, and the only people that can get them to us are the Dutch, and we really need to invite these guys back’. And so they do so, so there’s this- but- there’s this like, 15 year gap where there aren’t these eel ships on the Thames and where London isn’t eating eels. Or not nearly as many. Um, and I think I can point to that as a real moment of shift. Before that there are- you’ve still got a really active sort of English eel culture, that is a little bit like – the best way I found to describe it is to think about it as sort of like, the way we would now think about England as having a tea culture like it’s important it’s a- really it shows up in the, in the culture in tons of different ways, it’s not necessarily always like- surface level but it’s always kind of there, and the eels are sort of that. Um so prior to 1666, you still see this. The eels are- show up in plays and in metaphors and in family crests and art and all kinds of things, and that goes away uh, once the- after the ships leave so they come back in in 1681 but there’s a real noticeable drop off in, sort of, other instances of eels and in cultural production right? Um, and it’s always hard to- you always have to take cultural production in early modern England with a bit of a grain of salt, because so much of it comes out of London that it’s easy to think about London as meaning England and it doesn’t, London is London. Um so-

LOU:  That is still the case.

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN: Yeah so but ,but that- it is it’s…it’s tricky, because that’s where we have like so much information um, but it’s- it is problematic to read London as being a stand-in for all of England that said- there’s a real-

LOU: As a Mancunian I entirely agree. 

JOHN: That said, there’s a real noticeable drop off after like the mid 17th century where suddenly you’re not seeing eels in metaphor, you’re not seeing them in plays, you’re not seeing them in art anymore. They’re just sort of – where you start seeing them showing up in literature is primarily in like, you get natural histories and then after a little bit you get like Isaac Walton’s history of anglers, that kind of book starts talking about eels as like a fish that we should study rather than something, because, all the eels in Shakespeare are used metaphorically, so there’s this real shift where I think what happens, is eels stop being a fish that everybody eats. So prior to the ship’s leaving, everybody from the king down to peasants is eating eels and by and large enjoying the- there’s a, there’s a real one of the- the little bits of history from here I really enjoy is right after the parliament kicks the eel ships off, the… The King has his, his eel procurer go over to to Holland and try to buy a couple of these ships because he wants his eels, and there’s no other way to get them. After the ships come back, people go back to eating eels, but it really becomes much more of a poor person’s food. It sort of over the course of that 15 years or so, I think it really picks up a lower class sensibility that it holds on to, so like-

LOU:  Yeah, That’s definitely a thing in the 19th century isn’t it?

JOHN: Yeah. 

LOU: Like, eel pie is down the, yeah.

JOHN: Exactly. By the time you get to the 19th century, yeah, right, when Mayhew’s writing about like the London poor, he’s writing about eels as an important part of the diet, is the second most commonly purchased street food after  dog meat (which is not dogs that you eat, but food for your dogs) so it’s a- the- so the Dutch come back, and they keep selling eels, and they’re by far the primary seller of eels in London, but it has become essentially a street food and not much else. And it kind of stays that way. By the time you get into the early 20th century it’s a real East End kind of poor persons food, you get Jellied eels,

LOU: That’s still how we think of it yeah. As kind of –

JOHN: Yeah, which is, it’s possible that there were medieval jellied eels but as- most of- cuz medieval people knew how to jelly things- but all the evidence we have for, like kind of starts in- in England starts in the 19th century. So it picks up this real lower class sensibility, and at- a colleague mentioned to me that it has sort of a reverse trajectory to a lobster, right? And it maintains that through the 20th century, and then in the early 20th century you get, sort of, increased access to a lot of different varieties of food, and better refrigeration and- and- and trucking, the capacity to, to you know to bring food from further away. And that broadens the- the diet for a lot of people and as generally happens when, when poor people can eat like the people they see as being above their station, they will do it, you know we always want to-

LOU: Conspicuous consumption.

JOHN: Yeah we always want to mimic the people that are sort of higher up the social ladder than we are, because we want to feel better about ourselves and so I think that’s- that sort of shift in the early 20th century broadens out the spectrum of the foods that people can eat, is a bit of a death nail for eel consumption in England. And in the US it just- they ate eels in the colonial period and a little bit after, but like it was never a a significant part of the culture so much, but in, in England I think that’s kind of where I would, I would point to that like, there’s a shift in the late 17th century and then you get into the 19th or 19th and 20th centuries, and once sort of poor people can eat like richer people, they do, and that’s sort of the end of the eel, so those eel ships stay on the Thames to 1938, but by the end they’re not really selling many eels and they leave on the sort, on the eve of this, of the second World War and they don’t come back. Uh, after the second World War, the Dutch start.. shipping eels into Yarmouth and sending them into  London by truck but in much smaller numbers, so it’s just not- not really kind of the same thing. So that’s…. I know that’s a really long answer to the, your question but I think that’s kind of the trajectory that I would point to.

LOU: Does a similar thing happen on the continent as well? Like, did the Dutch continue- does it fall out of  fashion for the Dutch as well or?

JOHN: Yeah so, the continental history with eels in the 20th century is a little bit different. So, one of the things that happens in the late 19th century is that they develop essentially a hot smoking process, so like if you buy a smoked eel, now it’s like this sort of savoury tasty fish right? It’s rich and fishy tasting, kind of oily but really like, smoky and good. Medieval and early modern smoking was a cold smoking process that is much more like drying essentially, it took a lot longer and you wind up with a fish that doesn’t really taste very good at the end of it. So in the like, mid to late 19th century the- on the continent they developed this hot smoking process for eels, and so eels actually- there’s a moment of like 50 years or so, between like 1880 and 1930 or so when eels on the continent are uh, like sort of um- uh what’s the word I want um, they’re fancy, um like they’re kind of in fashion. Yes, yeah yeah they’re uh, the sort of hot smoking process, makes them a fish that is fashionable to eat and people really enjoy, and like you know if you go to the North Sea now and like- wander- walk up the beach like, there’ll be people selling eels from carts and they like, they’ll be these kind of smoked eels, so it’s still fairly, fairly popular in like Northern Germany and in the, the Netherlands uh, but that for some reason and I don’t know why, but for some reason that sort of never catches on in England. And maybe because eels have the- sort of deeply ingrained sense of being a lower class food in a way that they don’t quite so much on the continent. They just have- they’re sort of less a part of the cultural history in general, so, yeah so in- the on the continent you get this sort of moment of like 50 years or so where eels are fancy um, again and that never happens in England.

DAISY: Interesting. All right-

LOU: Yeah, thank you. 

DAISY: What’s next on our list, ummmm we mentioned eel rent before. Can you explain what that is?

JOHN:  Yeah! Well it’s obviously it’s where you pay your rent in eels, doesn’t everybody do that?

DAISY: I will ask my landlady but I don’t think she’ll be happy about it.

LOU: Again I, I have never lived in the Fens or anywhere that would require it, so…

JOHN: So right, so um it is- what it- it’s kind of, what it sounds like it is paying rent in, in eels. So I’m going to back up a little bit time-wise. So in pre-Norman England, there’s not a whole lot of currency floating around, they haven’t minted a whole lot of coins, and the coins that they have minted, that the monarchy has minted, they tend to stay among the upper class – they don’t really use them to buy things, they kind of trade them back and forth as status symbols. Essentially.

LOU: The different kings I imagine running around at the time.

JOHN: Yeah and so if you’re a landlord, and you want to collect rent from your tenants which is the point of being a landlord, right? They don’t have money to pay you and so instead you collect your rent in, in, in-kind things, so in eggs or grain or honey or ale or eels. And it it turns out that eels are one of the most sort of numerous and, and common of these in-kind rents. There’re more eels being paid in rent in the Doomsday Book than there are, than there’s like grain being paid in rent. So part of my dissertation work was sort of like, trying to count up all of the eel rents and see like how many people were paying, and I can point to, by the end of the… the beginning of the 12th century, so like 1100 or so, I can point to a little more than 54,000 eels being paid in rent in England every year.

 And some of these are really small rents like 50 rents, 75 like, 50 eels, 75 eels some of them are really big. The Earl of Chester gets a rent of 75,000 eels every year from, I can never remember the name of the little town, it’s just a little town, it’s a little south of Lincoln but um, I don’t know what he did with them frankly.

LOU: Like but like- I- yeah I mean-

DAISY: It’s a lot of eels for one man.

JOHN: Is a lot of eels for one man and it-

 LOU: From fairly far across the country as well like, Lincoln is a reasonable distance from Chester as well.

JOHN: Yes and so these are being and, and I don’t know the payment mechanism there either like if he’s being paid like- if they’re going to like, local people that I have no idea-

LOU: Ship all these eels across Nottinghamshire to get to Chester.

JOHN:  And so these are, these are all eels that are being paid as- these are um not live eels, almost all of them they are salted and then smoked. So they’re generally caught in the fall during their downstream migration so they’re silver eels mostly, then they are salted and then smoked it’s just a cold smoking process, the process is, over a period of like two to three months so it takes a long time. And then they’re generally paid in the spring like, right about now, very often right before Lent, um-

LOU: In barrels, across or?

JOHN: Yeah, you put them in barrels, you can put them like like, then stack them down your wagon, and then you sort of cart them off to your landlord. And what he does with them- this is a question I get all the time- like, well like yeah, where- where did the Earl of Chester like put all of these eels? Like I don’t actually know-

DAISY: Maybe he just really liked eels.

LOU:  Presumably they ate them? Because they would have had to host a lot of people anybody, who was an Earl of anywhere would have had to host a lot of people, regularly all the time 

JOHN: Right, and they- they that’s, that’s part of it right? Like they do they- they’re- these are almost all eventually hopefully eaten, right? And when you start breaking down eel rents into like like so, like some of the, the big monastic houses like Ely collect a lot, like several hundred thousand eels a year in rent, um, from like all of their various places, which is a lot but when, you start breaking it down by like, okay so like 365 days a year and there’s like 60 monks here and they’re eating three times a day and then they’ve got these satellite places that they’re, may be sending eels to. When you start breaking it down, like that it becomes- I don’t want to say reasonable because that’s still like an enormous number of eels, but it becomes more 

LOU: They might be running a hospital as well or-

JOHN: Yeah it starts to become more like ‘okay like, I can see that’ it’s not just, if you start thinking about it in terms of like number of people and number of days and, and and sort of obligations and yeah. so like the Earl of Chester is going to have feasts. So you know King- King Henry and- and King John, Henry the third and King John, we have a lot of uh, they very often ordered eels um, from Cambridge and other places for- for the Christmas feast and they tended to order 20 to 40,000 at a time um, and so-

LOU: Presumably it’s the entire court that’s being fed there-

JOHN: Yeah, yeah so like you know, big feast-

LOU: A Lavish Feast of eels!

JOHN: Yeah 40,000, and like there’s not- there’s lots of other food too, it’s not just like an eel fest but it’s still, it’s a lot of eels. Uh, so I can point to about 1100, I can point to 540-some thousand a little more than that’s being paid in rent. I know that number is low, because a lot of that is coming out of the Domesday Book which doesn’t look at London, doesn’t look at anything north of the Humber, and- and misses things so like there’s been-

LOU: Because all of that had been burned during the Harrowing of the North if memory serves.

JOHN: Yep so there’s um, it’s more- it’s more than that, and like- part of the reason I know it’s more than that too is because like, sometimes in- in historical record what I’ll find like, I will know there’s a rent because I will find a court record saying like- like- talking about a rent that I didn’t know existed otherwise. So like in the 13th century the- it’s a landlord who sues the nuns at at an abbey, Sikewald [TRANSCRIBERS NOTE, THIS IS SPELLED PHONETICALLY BECAUSE I COULDN’T FIND IF THIS PLACE STILL EXISTS OR HOW TO SPELL IT] I think because they haven’t paid their eel rent in three years, and it’s not a big rent it’s like, 50 eels a year basically, um, but they haven’t paid in three years. So he takes them to court and sues them and that’s the first time I’d heard of the rent. Like it doesn’t, I don’t have a charter for it, it doesn’t show up in other places. So there’s a lot of places like that where like- like I said, I can point to half a million or so eels but I know it’s a lot more than that. And those are just the eels being paid in rent, those are the eels off the top, a lot of times those rents are being paid by fishermen who are paying part of their catch in order, you know, for the right to fish at certain fishing holes right so the eel rent numbers, while large are only sort of pointing us in the direction of the number of eels being eaten and that are sort of- being- moving through the economy in, in medieval England there’s a- just a lot [LAUGHS].

LOU: I’m, I’m a little curious, is there any information about eel rent in Scotland or Wales?

JOHN: I think there is for Scotland, although I haven’t really looked at it Wales not as much and that has to do with the fact that once you get past the Severn, there aren’t that many eels in Wales, and that has to do mostly with the geography. So Wales is a sort of, largely mountainous right, um, and so the waterway tend to be uh, sort of smaller streams with a- with a steeper slope essentially. I’m sure there’s terminology for that. And like so-

LOU: Essentially it’s not flat enough for them to migrate there.

JOHN: They- they are less, they’re less conducive as eel habitats right, they’re much harder to migrate up so eels tend to not bother. Um, so you have many fewer eels in- in like sort of central Wales than you do in- in- in England right? England is largely flat like I know it has-

LOU: Certainly on the eastern side yeah.

JOHN: But like it’s especially- like I’m sitting in the middle of the Rocky Mountains and the Western US-

DAISY: [LAUGHING] I was just thinking of the Rockies.

JOHN: It’s like, England’s pretty much flat and cut by so many big rivers right? Like that- it is a fantastic eel habitat in a way that Wales just isn’t, and there are eels, there are eels in Scotland and I believe there are eel rents, I just- it’s not a thing I’ve I’ve looked at particularly. It was one of those places where like, I had to sort of limit the-

DAISY:  You have to stop somewhere.

JOHN: It had to stop somewhere and had to limit the scope of my, my research and where part of what I wound up writing about was the way that it eels sort of- form a particular part of English premodern identity, and so, that, you know if I start wrapping Scottish people into that they’re going to be really annoyed at being called English.

LOU: Um no yeah, I’m, I’m sort of curious I, I wonder about things like the Forth and the Tay and that kind of thing as habitats, you have but maybe they are too- maybe it’s too mountainous even that that far south.

JOHN: Um so I think there are a number of eels in Scotland. The, the water’s a little colder which doesn’t help right? So eels are relatively sensitive to water temperature, so when you get-

LOU: Okay.

JOHN: It’s not a huge difference and I mean they’re- there’s eels in Scandinavia too so, they’re not super bothered by it, but it is a thing. So like you’re probably going to have fewer eels in Scotland then you have in say, Southern England, than you have in the Netherlands, I just haven’t looked at the history of it particularly. But Wales I can tell you like the geography of Wales is not terribly conducive to, to eels. And so you don’t get a ton of eel rents once you get past like, I said once you get past kind, of the Severn, and we tend to- we’ve talked about Ely some, and we tend to think about eels as being a particularly fennish kind of thing, not Finland but like from the fens, uh and that’s true, and it winds up being more true as you get later on but in early medieval England there are eel rents all over the country, it’s not just in the fens. They’re from you know. Cornwall all the way up to, to Northumbria so they’re- they’re really widely spread.

LOU: The general area of Northumbria is where I am currently, I’m currently in Newcastle-upon-Tyne 

DAISY: So go out there and get an eel Lou, what are you waiting for? [LAUGHTER]  Go fishing. Come back when you have an eel and not before. All right, thank you.

LOU: Okay yes, 

DAISY: Um, all right, in the interest of time we’re gonna move on to the next, though I could listen to you talk about this all day man-

LOU: Yeah I’m sorry, I keep segueing down rabbit holes here and there and-

DAISY: It’s too interesting! [LAUGHS] okay-

JOHN:  This is basically, basically what my dissertation did too, right? 

DAISY: All right, next question, which might or might not be related to what you do, but we’ll ask anyway. Um, do you have any thoughts on how eels remain important in the modern day, culturally or economically.

JOHN: Yeah so, culturally I don’t think they do, which I think is a bit of a problem at least in sort of what we might think of as Western culture and that’s not entirely true they do in, in pockets right? Like I’ll hear from people who grew up fishing for eels in, in, from their grandfather’s dock in the fens somewhere, and there’s- eels are an important part of the culture in like, uh, parts of Ireland and uh, sort of the North Coast of Spain and it’s like- there are pockets, but-

DAISY: We have a Newfoundland actor who when they first came in showed us the eel spears they grew up fishing with-

JOHN: Mhmm!

DAISY: Because there’s a- there’s still a decent amount of eel fishing where they are, which was very cool.

JOHN: So there are these pockets where it’s still important, but broadly it’s a thing that we’ve forgotten about,  it’s sort of faded into the cultural past in some unfortunate ways that we were talking about earlier. Like that’s where I try to like, kind of poke people to think about eels is by reminding them of the, sort of the history and the culture we have with the fish. So economically they’re- in, in spite of not being particularly culturally important in the West they are still sort of economically important. There’s the places where- like in the US eel fishing is really important in Maine, uh, where it’s- eel is I think the second most viable…. cash crop is the wrong word but like sort of um, livestock export

DAISY: Is that fishery 

JOHN: Yeah most, most valuable fishery and not just fishery but like also, um like land-based livestock as well, after lobster. You got lobster and then eel. And you know the there’s an enormous black market for eels. There, there’s a- a huge- huge economic need for them, or desire is a better word, there’s a huge economic desire for them in China and Japan and you know they, they’ve sort of overfished most of their own eels, so there, you know, most of the eels that are caught in Maine are not sold in the US, at least not initially. They are caught as elvers and then shipped down to New York, put on a plane and flown to China, where they’re grown in tanks and then shipped to Japan, and then butchered and then shipped wherever they are going in the world. So like if I go to a Japanese restaurant here and buy unagi, it’s quite possible that it came from Maine and had this like ridiculously long trip to get back to me. It’s also quite possible that it was illegally caught in, in Europe, in Northern Spain and smuggled in a suitcase to China, and- and grown that way, right?

DAISY:  We’ve all seen that news story.

JOHN: Mhm. Yeah so, I mean your listeners probably know this but the eels are like the most illegally trafficked animal on earth, it’s the largest black market for illegally trafficked animals on Earth,  it’s a 45 billion year estimated Black Market-

[DAISY WHISTLES]

JOHN: – Um it’s just an enormous- there’s a lot of money in it.

LOU:  I understand there are like, there are marks that you can get for like responsibly sourced eels um, that are better to go for.

JOHN:  Uh there are, and there’s some groups in Europe that are trying to really push for that. That’s tricky, right? Like cuz, they’re, they’re a critically endangered animal. That’s the other thing I think is really hard to get people’s heads around. The fact that so- every year there are something like a billion eels that come ashore in Europe right, like, little elvers, um, it’s hard to get people’s heads around the idea that like, an animal that shows up in numbers of a billion is critically endangered but they are, right, they’ve got this ridiculous life cycle journey-

DAISY: And their range is massive.

JOHN: Yeah.

DAISY: That’s what, a billion across their whole range, which is nigh worldwide it’s not just-

JOHN: Well no that’-s that’s- the that’s- the Euro- that’s the European eel-

DAISY: Oh, I see.

JOHN: So like that’s-

LOU: That’s basically like Sargasso to Europe kind of thing.

JOHN: Yeah the Sargasso, so like all pretty much any place in Europe and North Africa that uh, that touches on the Mediterranean-

DAISY: Oh, I follow you.

JOHN:  So that’s- that’s just the European eel.  But they’re still critically endangered because like the numbers, I don’t know what the numbers are for the ones that actually get back to the Sargasso, nobody does, but it’s much smaller than that, right. So it’s hard to, it’s hard to get people’s brains around that idea that an animal that is that numerous is also critically endangered. But you know, we’re talking about the black market so there’s something like an estimated quarter to a third of those eels are caught and smuggled illegally to- to uh- to China.

LOU: A quarter of a billion, wow,

JOHN: yeah so you know 250, 300 million of them just put in suitcases and off they go. So you asked about sort of, the economic impact of it. And I think the economics of it matter because they’re part of what’s driving the endangered-ness of eels right?  Um, there is a lot of pressure to- to in Europe, they’re not supposed to export them at all, um, outside of Europe um, so there’s a lot of pressure to smuggle there. In the US, in Maine, there are catch limits but there’s a lot of pressure to, to poach and to, to exceed your catch limits and that’s not great either. So um, I think that’s where, that’s where the economics of it are

DAISY: There’s a difficulty too-

LOU: Is it better just to not eat them ?

DAISY: This is from a biological standpoint, it’s- I don’t actually know if anyone’s been able to successfully breed eels in captivity except that it took ages -there’s this thing, the eel question of how do eels breed which was for centuries. So, I do not know if this is true, I’m spitballing but I would imagine the vast majority, if not all eels that are on the market are wild caught.

JOHN: Yeah no, they -they are- they have had- you can force them to, to fertilize, not even to fertilize eggs, but you can sort of take eggs and then fertilize them in captivity. So you can grow eels from eggs in captivity, but they don’t- they’re not particularly viable. Uh most of them like, they’re sort of weirdly deformed and it doesn’t- it does- they have not had much success with that yet. Um-

DAISY:  So there isn’t currently a farmed eel industry.

JOHN:  No, no any-

LOU: So is it better to- just not to eat eels, like you should just avoid it or?

JOHN: I think probably- there’s a cultural argument for eating eels, which lines up kind of closely with my sort of argument for talking about eel history, which is- basically goes that like there is an argument for encouraging people to eat eels in at least small numbers, because it makes it sort of brings them back into like-

LOU: Consciousness, yeah.

JOHN:  The world of people’s Consciousness right? Like where they’re thinking about eels and like ‘oh I like eels, I like eating eels, they’re really tasty, we should save them’

DAISY: Whatever it takes. 

JOHN: Yes.

LOU: Ah, the tuna argument.

JOHN: So uh it’s- I think that’s a viable- like I think that’s a reasonable argument to make, I don’t know where- I honestly don’t know where I fall on it. Like it makes sense to me, but also it makes sense to me to not eat endangered things, so uh, but you have to, you have to deal with not just like the conservation and the endangeredness of the fish itself, but also like, people’s reaction to it, so like getting people to think about eels maybe matters in the long term more than letting them eat some eels in the short term, but I’m not sure about that, frankly. 

DAISY: It’s a hard question. All right, oh we’re almost at the end of our questions. We’ve only been here for an hour [LAUGHS] It’s just so interesting and we keep asking questions and bringing you off topic, I’m sorry 

JOHN: No that’s okay! I could, I can talk about eels for a really long time.

[LAUGHTER]

LOU:  Yeah, I mean, mood. 

DAISY: all right okay, um, veering away from eels but talking a bit more about your current work and research, do you want to talk about maps?

JOHN: I love maps! [LAUGHTER] Um yeah so like I said earlier I, I meant to be a cartographic historian, sort of thinking about the ways that people understand their space around them and reproduce them and make arguments with maps right, like that’s one of the- the things that fascinates me about maps is we tend to read maps as being sort of neutral arbiters of a, like a cartographic or geographic truth right? Like you read a map like, okay this is what the world is. But maps are a text, they are a compiled thing that somebody has decided what matters that go on it, and what doesn’t. Maps are always arguments about how we should understand the world around us and what matters and what doesn’t. And it’s fascinating to me that as we have become more cartographically literate right, like we all walk around with maps on our phones all the time, like we have, we have lost even more sense that- of that Maps like- the more sort of digital and a part of our everyday lives they become, the more we trust them implicitly to be sort of, honest brokers of the world around us, and they’re not. They are- every single map you see tells lies about the world, they have to. And some of it is because if you’re looking at a map of the world right, you can’t reproduce a globe on a flat space and so any map has to decide what kind of projection it’s going to use to show the world to you, um you know, and there’s a lot of uh- there’s a lot of focus on-

LOU: Massively underestimate the global south don’t they, the size of the global south.

JOHN: Very, very often right like the Mercator map that we probably all grew up with in- in school from like the 16th century tends to show right, like it- it places Europe in the centre and the sort of north-south edges of the map are bigger and, and so then you get Greenland looking like it’s bigger than Africa and things like that.  And there has been a- a push back against that and people thinking about like, well there’s the sort of Gall- Peters map projection that shows like- sort of shows like things sort of skinnier and- and and sort of more true to sort of actual geographic size-

LOU: No love for the Dymaxion projection? [LAUGHS]

JOHN: Like but these are- but these are all choices that the mapmaker is making because, okay so the Mercator map has its problems in terms of how it presents the world and you can make an argument that it- it shows you a very like European-centric world but other maps- no other projection sort of, shows the world as it is either, they’re all making choices about what matters to show you. Like does it matter that I want you to see Africa as being larger than Greenland, does it matter that I want- like what matters to the map maker? So they’re all telling you lies and some of the lies are very benign, they’re just like they’re choices- they’re choices that the- the map maker is making about like how to make the map legible. So you may have a map say, that shows a river, next to a train track, next to a road right? And just in terms of like, their actual like- physical proximity to each other it may be 10 feet between each one, right? And like you’re drawing a map of that, and you would separate them out when you’re drawing the map so that your reader can read them, right, so they’re not just all like one on top of the other, in a way that if you’re thinking about them in terms of like actual scale that- that’s way off. But that’s a choice that you as a map maker are making to say like, okay like I- it matters to me that this world is legible and understandable much more than it matters to me that the things are precisely where they’re supposed to be like, in terms of like their actual geography. So there’s a lot of ways in which maps lie in very benign, helpful ways, but they all tell lies. That really fascinates me.

DAISY:  Yeah, that’s really cool. And maps are what you’re working on right now, if I remember correctly.

JOHN: Yes so the- I said earlier the sort, of the world of academia being what it is um, I I don’t have a job as a professor, anyway, which is kind of what I wanted when I went back to school, but um- so what I’ve sort of fallen into is drawing- drawing maps as a, as a career. So I have a business, um, drawing maps and most of the maps that I draw are for academic history books.  So people who were like ‘I’m writing a book about X Y or Z and I need a map to show these things that are in the book’ that’s what I do a lot of. Um, I also do some more artistic kind of maps, but the vast majority of that they do are for, for academic history books. So I’ve stayed sort of academically adjacent which is nice. It means- one of the fun things about it is that I get to sort of play around in other people’s research for a week or two, and then I don’t have to write the book at the end of it. I just- I just draw them some maps and they- they pay me and then we’re- we’re done. Um, but it- it is not what I intended to do but it’s really interesting and it- it’s, it’s fun kind of work.

DAISY: Isn’t that the way of the world?

JOHN: Yeah, you just-

DAISY: I didn’t expect to be making eel podcasts as my job when I graduated, but you know here we are.

JOHN: Here we are! You, you know, you- you- you go through the doors that are in front of you and you see where they lead, and that’s, that’s kind of how life goes, isn’t it?

DAISY: That’s true. All right, is there anything else we want to cover, any questions we have, Lou you had a lot of questions, you have any questions?

LOU: I mean I was- I was going to start asking questions about the- the problems with mapping and you know when you draw the line down the middle of a country and then a war happens as a result, but I suspect we probably don’t have time because it’s already half past seven.

DAISY: We are a little over- over our time, okay, because we could talk about this forever –

LOU: (CONCURRING NOISE)

DAISY: But then I have to edit all of it and I’m but one mortal man.

[LAUGHTER]

DAISY: All right if, we’re good, if we’re going to be wrapping up, is there anything you want to plug, any businesses that you want- want to advertise, perhaps a map making business?

JOHN: Right, so I do in fact have a mapmaking business,  it’s Surprised Eel Mapping. Um- so that’s easy to- to find and if any of your listeners need a map for a book project, or for a gift, or wall decoration or, or gaming, I do maps for all kinds of things so um they can-

DAISY: We’ll put a link in the show notes-

 LOU: Need a  map for your D&D Game?

JOHN: Yeah, no I’ve, I’ve done several for those, um, then yeah they can reach out to me and we can, we can talk and and see if I can help them.

DAISY: Awesome,  I’ll also definitely link to your website if anyone wants to read more eel stuff and more map stuff which would be cool.

LOU: The link will be in the show notes.

DAISY: Links will be in the show notes. If that is all thank you so much for listening, thank you John for being willing to let us- you just tell us about eels for an hour, again we could be here all day [LAUGHS] this has been-

JOHN: No it’s, it’s really- it’s really been my pleasure 

DAISY: Thank you very much! All right. For listeners- for our listeners, all our normal stuff is in the show notes you can find our social media, our Ko-fi, our merch store everything is as always in the show notes. With that, I’ve been Daisy 

LOU: I’ve been Lou 

JOHN: I’ve been John Wyatt Greenlee.

DAISY: All right! Thank you very much!

[Music]