Thank you for downloading more or less from the BBC. This is the version of the program

first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to more or less, the program which

dances daringly with the data that surround us in the news and in life.

In this week's program, we look at who gets more of our money,

animal charities or human ones. We consider whether Britain is poorer than almost all

American states and we celebrate coincidence.

The chance that there's going to be something in common somewhere between two people

is pretty good, you know, and very often remarkable,

eyebrow-raising, hair-raising. But first, as you may know, more or less always encourages loyal

listeners to email in with their statistical queries. There are some requests and ideas we ignore.

They're the ones from our editor, Richard Vaden. The man has a mind like a sewer, honestly,

but recently we received one email from Vaden. We were about to market a spam and then we realised

it wasn't from our editor, but from his mum, Kay Vaden. Ruth, she's a lovely woman, isn't she?

She is lovely and we definitely listen to the editor's mum, if not the editor.

We do indeed. She's a particularly loyal listener who, it turns out, had an interesting question.

My husband had problems with his kidneys and they gradually got worse and in the end,

they put him onto the predialysis clinic and said he had end-stage kidney failure,

and if he didn't have a transplant, he would need to go on dialysis. They talked about all the

different options about kidney transplants, and I hadn't realised that there was any chance

that you could do a live transplant if you weren't actually a blood relative.

But they said, oh yes, they would do tests and see if I might be a match. And so then I had various

...