Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week

coming to you from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber and joining me as

the three QILs, please welcome to the stage Andy Murray, James Harkin and Anish Zinsky.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last

seven days and no particular order. Here we go starting with you. Andy Murray. Andy, my name is Andy.

My fact this week is that the first ever pencils we used to draw on sheep.

It's the fact and I found this out last month at the Cumberland Pencil Museum, which is an amazing

museum. If you're ever in the area you have to go, it's in Kessik and it features, among many other

things, a giant collage of Chris Evans made of pencils, which is the most nightmarish thing you

could. It's so amazing. Yeah, so first pencils we used for sheep. And so why? Well, the story is,

and it's not sure how much this is half-mith, but the story is that some shepherds found on a

load of graphite which had been turfed up in a storm. The tree had been blown out and there was this

sort of black shiny stuff in the roots and they realised that it made marks and stuff and

the tur they started using it to draw on their sheep. And the first ever pencils were just lumps

of graphite wrapped in sheepskin. Okay, that's good. I did slightly have an impression that they

were sort of writing novels, just hand your sheep into a publisher. So when did someone decide

that we can now take it off sheep and put it into other uses? Well, that initial discovery was

in the 16th century and there are some people who say that it went back earlier, people say that

the Aztecs might have found it and used it as a market a few hundred years before, but there

isn't too much evidence about that. Yeah, but it was a massive market, wasn't it? If you stole

graphite you would be sent to Australia as punishment. Yeah, and they used to have armed guards,

shaperoning their horses and carts with a graphite down to London, didn't they, from Cumbria?

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