This is a global player original podcast.

Hey everyone. Welcome to The Rough Corner. This is the first rough corner for 2024.

Very excited. This is the little pocket in between the main episodes of We Can Be Weirdos,

where I get to go through all the weird things that have happened to me over the last seven days,

get in contact with exciting academics from around the world to chat about their interesting

discoveries, as well as go

through the correspondence that you, the listener, have sent in. We've got a lot to talk about.

There's too much to talk about, in fact, for one episode. I'm going to save all of my little

personal bits of information for next week's rough corner, where I'm going to be sitting down with

Al, spooky owl, he'll be back,

and we can chat about all that stuff. But in the meantime, a lot of exciting things have happened

around the world in our absence. And one thing I particularly wanted to get into is a very

exciting discovery about somewhere that is nationally famous in the UK, possibly even globally,

if you're into the world of the occult

and the mystic and the oddities, and that is the Cern Abbas Giant. The Cern Abbas Giant,

it's that giant chalk man that sits out in a field in Dorset. He's holding a huge club. He has

quite a sticky-uppy penis pointing towards his face. You'll know it if you Google it. Have a look.

And there's been quite an exciting development in the understanding of the creation of this.

Because it's so shrouded in mystery, but two academics have published their idea of something new to do with this incredible mystery.

Dr. Tom Morecambe, a postdoctoral fellow of Oslo University, and Dr. Helen

Gittos, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford. And what the two of them

have discovered is that the Surin-Abus giant is not some sort of Anglo-Saxon, pagan character,

...