Beloved listeners: as we’ve said in the past, AMT doesn’t tend to discuss current events, as we know a lot of you turn to the show to give yourselves a brief break from dealing with reality. We hope you’re holding up and finding ways to be productive. Meanwhile, here’s Answer Me This! Episode 386, a hearty plateful of low-stress chat about topics including:
lava lamp blobfulness
your neighbour’s dirty doormat
sitcom sets
Magnums vs Soleros
the Jolly Butcher vs the Jolly Postman
butchers’ dummies
retrieving the sex toys you left at your ex’s house
and
wedding snubs.
Today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for Apple and Android – we consider combining two 1990s fads: lava lamps and Mr Blobby.
Hear our other work:
• Helen makes The Allusionist, an entertainment show about language, and Veronica Mars Investigations, recapping every episode of Veronica Mars from the beginning.
• Olly hosts many podcasts, and you can find them all at ollymann.com, as well as his recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary.
• Martin makes music which you can hear palebirdmusic.com, on the Pale Bird podcast, and on Spotify etc. You can also join him in contemplating the work of every song by Tom Waits Tom Waits in Song By Song.
This episode is sponsored by:
• The Great Courses Plus, the streaming library of courses on topics from yoga to mystery fiction to formal logic to dog training. AMT listeners get a free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com/answer.
• Squarespace. Visit squarespace.com/answer and get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with the discount code ‘answer‘.
Buy AMT episodes 1-200, our six special albums including the all new Home Entertainment, and our Best Of compilations from 2007-2015 at answermethisstore.com.
We’ll be back with AMT387 on 2 July 2020, and there’ll be a Retro AMT episode in your feeds on 21 May.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT386 Child-Friendly Rating: 67%. Mostly pretty clean, except there is this question about sex toys, so it just depends on whether you want to run the risk of having to explain to your child what those are. •••
In the last episode, we decided that a relationship with your first cousin who also happens to be young enough to be your child equals ICK. But Sarah writes:
I utterly adore your podcast. So imagine my chagrin when, in the last episode, you guys ranted about the unsuitability of relationships such as mine. No, I am not dating my cousin. But my girlfriend and I are 23 years apart in age, precisely the same as your anonymous questioner and his girlfriend. Answer me this: what’s is so wrong with that?
Jenny and I are coming up on our five year anniversary. We have a circle of mutual friends that doesn’t suffer from the fact that they’re of different generations. Jenny is only seven years younger than my mom and nine years younger than my dad but that didn’t stop them from welcoming her into our family, something Jenny really appreciated as her own family, believing same-sex relationships to be wrong, have distanced themselves from her.
Come on, guys – you’re too smart to believe that age difference in a relationship is inherently wrong or icky or exploitative.
We agree that age difference isn’t inherently wrong, but this is influenced by the age of the youngest half of the couple. For example, although Courtney Stodden and Doug Hutchison would always seem an insanitary pairing, the 35-year age gap wouldn’t have appeared as bad had she been 26 or 36 when they got married, rather than 16.
Had our questioneer been 54 and his cousin-lover been 31, perhaps we would have been more generous to him (although, obviously not, because SHE IS STILL HIS FIRST COUSIN), and if children were not involved. You don’t mention, Sarah, whether Jenny has children that are almost the same age as you. Children are prone to being freaked out by their parents’ relationships, but surely more so when the new partner was in the same nursery school as them. (And even more so when said partner IS A BLOOD RELATIVE.) You see the difference between your relationship and his, we hope!
Mark from New Zealand chips in with an equation:
In terms of what a minimum age for a partner is, the standard creepiness rule: don’t date under (age÷2)+7 seems reasonable, so on that score your mid life crisis cuz-banger falls a bit short.
Plus: even a customised Segway won’t bring back Olly’s childhood joy; Helen will consider being your late mother’s marketing consultant, but only for actual MONEY not some old shoes; and click here to see the picture of Martin the Sound Man that brought all the boys to the yard – however do bear in mind that it IS just a picture of a 34-year-old man drinking a strawberry milkshake, nothing special. Martin’s new album, on the other hand, is very special – it comes out next week so preorder your copy HERE.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) Helen complains about one of her legion linguistic bugbears: the word ‘umami’. Then turns it into a song, in an effort to make her like it better.
You know what we do like a very great deal? No, NOT pig sex; your QUESTIONS. Email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
Answer Me This! Podcast 