Brian.

Four minutes after 12. It's true. It really is true. There's a proper guarantee there that you will know more by one o'clock than you do now. Boom. Of course, whether or not you are grateful for the information or it proves of any use of talk to you in the future, well, that's not part of the guarantee. Neither is how long you will retain the information for. So by five past one,

you might have forgotten all the stuff that you've learned between now and them, now and one o'clock,

but the guarantee is absolutely cast on. There's no way you can listen to Mystery Hour in its

entirety on a Thursday afternoon and not learn at least one thing that you did not know before.

The way I make that guarantee is by doing this. You see, I issue an invitation to everybody listening to ring in with their question. One of them is bound to be something that you don't know the answer to. Ogo, it follows that you will know more by one o'clock than you do now. 0845-6060-973 is the number to call if you would like to join in. If you're new to this, the way it works is thus.

Very simply.

You know the newspaper columns, where a reader will write in and say,

Dear Q&A or Dear Notes and Queries,

why is it that when we attend a, I don't know, a christening we do this,

why do we do that? Where does that come from?

I was on holiday last week, and I saw this.

What does it mean? What does the origin of this phrase? We only allow one of those a week and we don't really take any motoring-based questions. And you don't know the answer to it. You're not allowed to use Google or Bing or any other search engines to get an answer to a question someone else poses because although it sounds a little pompous, you won't think it is when you've heard it.

This is actually an attempt, a very unfashionable attempt, to celebrate proper education,

the fact that we can go through our lives picking up bits of interesting information from the most unlikely places.

It might be our job.

It might be our actual education, but it might not be anything so formal.

It might be a hobby. It might just be a complete coincidence. Sometimes, not often, answers will have been gleaned from watching

relevant programs on the telly. The point is this. Absolutely any sort of question is permissible.

The only rules that will see it excluded involve repetition, which is fairly self-explanatory.

If it's something we've dealt with recently, we probably won't deal with it again. And dullness, which is fairly self-explanatory. If it's something we've dealt with

recently, we probably won't deal with it again. And dullness, which is a very subjective

...