If your neighbours want to set up a catering business but you don’t want them to waste their money because think their food is sludge, can you stop them? Should you stop them? We face this question along with other matters, including:
taking butter from a cafe Popes learning Italian Danish wedding traditions morning suits “pip… pip… pip… pip… pip… piiiiippppp” on the radio “young, dumb and full of cum” in Point Break David Bowie emerging from a church wall and dropping your phone into a toilet at a festival.
Become a patron at patreon.com/answermethisto help with the continuing existence of AMT, and to get an ad-free version of the episode, plus bonus cuts from the show, AND you get our new Entertainment Experience: Petty Problems, a live YouTube version of the show where we are only answering questions that are trivial, unserious, minor. And the best part is, because it’s live, and you can hang out in the sidebar chat, you can weigh in on the problems in real time – and if it’s your Petty Problem, give us instant feedback. It’s going to be fun! The first edition will be 10pm UK time on Sunday 15th June, so go go go to patreon.com/answermethisto sign up so you can attend, and pose us a petty problem.
Got questions for us? Send them in writing or voice note to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com – remember to include the formula “Helen and/or Olly, answer me this”, and let us know a name (pseudonyms are fine) and pronouns to use for you. Next episode will land in your podfeed 26 June 2025.
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Helen‘s entertainment podcast about language, The Allusionist, returns in early May with a season about four-letter words; she and Martin are also doing live shows in Toronto on 1 June and Montréal on 9 June, get tickets via theallusionist.org/events.
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. •••
Jake in London concurs with Olly’s advice in the last episode about the lineup in wedding photos:
Following the discussions in AMT316 about having couples in the official wedding photos who broke up shortly after, I thought I’d share the now comical story of the latter happening at my dad’s wedding a few years ago.
At the wedding me and my brother were asked to be joint best men, which we were pretty pleased with. Our girlfriends were also invited along: I will point out here that whilst me and my partner had been together for several years (and still are), my brother and his girlfriend had only been together a couple of months.
As they have loads of photos taken on the day, me and my brother were naturally in the majority of them. Some of the nicest ones were taken right outside the wedding venue, with my dad and his wife, me and my girlfriend and my brother and his girlfriend. As my brother’s girlfriend was the smallest person in this group of six she was naturally placed front and centre, she was also placed front and centre in all photographs she was in on the day – fucking loads!!!
Within a couple days of the wedding, my dad and his wife had decided on the photos that they liked the best and that they were going to get enlarged portraits of, the biggest of which being one of the photos of the six of us. In the time in between them ordering this blowup and getting it back, my brother and his girlfriend split up. As she was front and centre there was no way of cropping her out and there were no photos of just the 4 or 5 of us. As a result, the massive canvas print hangs proudly on my dads sitting room wall, with all six of us smiling out.
The final irony of this is that my brother has subsequently been in a long-term relationship for the past few years, and his new girlfriend has regularly frequented my dad’s house, meaning she’s always greeted with the smiling face of his ex-girlfriend eyeballing her in the sitting room.
The lesson is, if you are going to have people’s new partners come to your wedding, make sure they’re on the fringes of the photographs and not front and centre.
Also on the wedding tip, an anonymous lady from London writes:
I was just listening to AMT316 and I feel compelled to provide an alternative view on behalf of myself and other ‘expensive randoms’ who plague the existence of listeners like Elizabeth.
I am facing a summer of successive weddings with my boyfriend and I have barely met ANY of the couples whose nuptials I have been invited to celebrate. I do appreciate being thought of, but I haven’t really been given the option to turn the invites down (one of them my mother-out-law RSPVed to on my behalf before I was given the invitation, which doesn’t even have my last name on it because neither of the marriers knows who I am).
So answer me this: what can I do to entertain myself in a hotel in the middle of nowhere all day before I am required to turn up at these numerous receptions at 8pm (after my boyfriend and everyone else involved has spent all day drinking)?
Readers, can you go to the comments and give her some suggestions? Try to come up with something more ingenious than ‘masturbation’, ‘minibar’ and ‘reruns of Columbo‘, even though those are all decent ways to while away her time.
In Answer Me This! Episode 316, we have two very different questions concerning overpreparation for death. We also have:
cobbler problems
quinoa
wedding +1s
retirement climates
free salad vs free prawn crackers
cat shit vs cat sick
Mike Oldfield
Metallica Monopoly
soiled lost property
and
popular onions.
Plus: Olly will go on a cruise, as long as it’s free; Helen’s first musical memory is of a cool saboteur; and Martin the Sound Man wants you to slice your own apples and peel your own bananas, you big babies.
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available for iStuff, Android and Windows devices), we continue AMT315‘s discussion of facial hair, and at long last hit on the format that’ll make Olly and Martin into YouTube stars. Or might have, ten years ago.
Thanks very much to Squarespace.com for supporting this episode, and for giving you 10% off their website-building and -hosting services for a year if you use the code ‘ANSWER‘. If you’ve ever wanted to launch your own website/podcast/blog/online gallery, deploy the code and GET ON WITH IT.
Answer Me This! Podcast 