Riddles

Guy eventually engages in trickiness, via Enya and beans-on-toast.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-twenty-first episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from the centre of London Luton Airport. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 26th of May 2025.

We are sponsored this week by The Maywentery Golf Course. Welcoming men of all abilities since 1923. There’s a spring sale in the club shop, with a three percent discount across all items except for novelty dildo tees and novelty tee dildos. Minimum spend seventeen thousand pounds. Do not miss out on this. 

Today was supposed to be an ‘ama’ episode, but my now ex-producer Lee Buckingham forgot to turn the email back on so we didn’t get any questions. So let’s postpone the ‘ama’ until next week - email me at Undercover Intern Guy all one word, that’s undercoverinternguy@gmail.com with any questions or suggestions for an unemployed undercover intern with a talent for solving crimes.

Let’s start with a quote from Jenny Offill. Quote: Here is what happens in middle age: some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad. End quote. I dedicate this quote to my landlord.

My landlord turns out to be a big fan of Enya. I have nothing against Enya per se, but her most ardent fans generally turn out to be either health-food-shop proprietors, pilates instructors or cult leaders. Often all three. Enya lives in a castle, you know. Anyway, my landlord this weekend installed sound equipment that plays Enya’s Greatest Hits on a loop. If it was just ‘Sail Away’, I might be able to cope but it turns out that Enya has loads of other songs too. The ceiling shards have started falling down randomly, or maybe not randomly, which makes living there more risky than necessary. The heat and the mirrors are really becoming an issue, what with summer approaching. The final straw that broke the camel’s back is this moat that’s being built around the building to stop invaders. The landlord says that this is for my own protection and that Enya has a moat around her castle too. But I’m not a great swimmer and there’s not going to be any kind of drawbridge, just a ten-metre wide moat into which the landlord is going to put his pet sharks, which he assures me are a low-appetite breed and mostly vegetarian, acting mainly as a deterrent to would-be assassins. Their fins are worse than their bite, apparently. But I don’t trust him on this or anything else. I have moved out.

In a sense, then, you could say that I am now both homeless and jobless. And marriage-less. But I have my freedom. Freedom from the sound of tapping keyboards. Freedom from the mouse with dirty grey build up of finger dirt. From the keyboard with crumbs from past years’ sandwiches. Freedom from the timesheet. The intranet safety message. The passive aggressive email from the CEO thanking us all for our hard work in Quarter Two and urging us all to push even harder in Quarter Three. Enough already! We aren’t robots… My home is wherever my microphone is, which means in both a literal and figurative sense my home is this podcast studio just off the runway of the UK’s fifth largest airport. I have the freedom to speak to my listeners every week. I am running very low on cash and really could do with better monetising this podcast or winning one of these legal cases, but my Chief Legal Officer, Michael Webb, assures me that, fingers crossed, it’ll all come good one of these days. 

In the meanwhile, I have decided to do something really rather special to help with cash-flow and the lostprophets and to also give one fan a unique opportunity. This is what’s going to happen: between now and midnight on Sunday the first of June, you are going to bid for a very special prize. It will be a silent blind auction, so your eyes and ears are useless - just send your bid to undercoverinternguy@gmail.com and I’ll announce the winner in the next episode. You also have just over a month to keep voting for me to win The Interns’ Choice Award. I’ve found that I’m able to vote with dozens of different email addresses and identities, and it will help to keep me alive if you can each do your bit and spend a few hours each day voting.

Being jobless does allow more time for me to vote and also to be a podcast guest, so please email me at undercoverinternguy@gmail.com if you’re looking for an internship specialist to appear on your podcast. Ideally paid but so long as you are kind to me and provide a bit of food I’ll do it. I did appear on the most recent episode of ‘The Paris Intern’ but please don’t listen to it. My interlocutor was French and it’s not fair for an English person to be interviewed by a French person, it’s like getting a mouse to interview a cat. I might as well address the fact that I stormed out of the interview, but that was only after I was asked for the fifth time for my favourite beans-on-toast recipe. I know they were mocking English cuisine, and I’m the first to admit that French food is better, but at least Brits put up a decent fight during world wars, however hungry we get. For what it’s worth, grated English extra-mature cheddar and some British HP brown sauce on the side is essential for beans on toast. Use sourdough bread and only butter one piece, but butter lavishly. Put the Heinz baked beans on the unbuttered slice and let some beans escape and caress, but not entirely cover, the buttered slice. Add a dash of salt and pepper and serve with a lovely cup of milky Yorkshire tea and consume while watching a classic episode of Dad’s Army or Allo Allo.

Just a really quick update in relation to The Carpet Culture Center to Prevent Allotment Violence. They have secured funding to ensure that each allotment in London will be protected by a security guard armed with a rake, in line with the National Rake Association recommendations. I’m really not sure about this, will it promote a garden-tool culture in London? Will it just move the epicentre of allotment-based violence to other parts of the UK, like Skegness? Let’s keep an eye on this one. Something needs to be done though. I’m not sure if you saw the New York Times article about Allotment Fight Clubs in the UK? The average age of members is something like 76 and they’re usually fighting over like five inches of allotment land. Also their fist-fights sometimes last for hours or even days because they’re so old and frail, and they often just fall asleep in the middle of the fight and the winner is often just the one who doesn’t die of hyperthermia. Unfortunately, you get a lot of draws in the winter. You can watch on Youtube but it’s a sad spectacle and if you’re interested it’s better just to watch highlights, on mute to avoid Michael Owen’s banal commentary.

The ‘ama’ debacle means that there is time for a couple of riddles in this episode. For those of you who don’t know, a riddle is a question or puzzle that requires you to think "outside the box" to figure out the answer. So if I ask you, what is your name, that would be a question but not a riddle, unless you have learning slowness or dementia. But if I was to say, My first is in window but not in pane. My second is in road but not in lane. My third is in oval but not in round. My last is in thunder but not in sound. Who am I? That would be a question and also a riddle, the answer of course being …  Wo-at?

We’ve opened up the lines of communication properly now, I promise, and there might well be a prize for whoever emails first with the correct answer to both riddles. Right, the first one. Imagine this: You're an intern on a game show hosted by the racist bigot Jim Davidson. Before you are three doors: behind one door is a brand-new plug-in electric vehicle, sleek and silent, with no tailpipe emissions, and behind the other two, a pair of disease-ridden goats—charming, but not reliable transport and likely to give you a nasty rash. Jim asks you to pick a door, and let's say you go with door number 1. To amp up the suspense, Jim, who knows what's behind all the doors, gets his assistant, John Virgo, to open another door, say door number 3, revealing one of the goats. He then gives you a choice: stick with your original pick or switch to the remaining unopened door, door number 2. Here's where we throw the challenge to you. Should you stick with door number 1, switch to door number 2, or does it not matter? You must explain your answer.

The second riddle is as follows: Imagine you're an intern on an island with 12 men. Eleven of these men weigh exactly the same, but one man is slightly different in weight—he could be either heavier or lighter, you don’t know which. You have access only to a simple see-saw and can use it just three times to determine who the odd man out is and whether he is heavier or lighter. Here's the brain-teaser: How do you figure out which man is different, and whether he is heavier or lighter, in only three uses of the see-saw? Think quickly though, because there’s no food on the island and you’re going to have to start eating each other soon, so you want to eat the heaviest men first. Also, you can only use the see-saw three times because you’re going to need the wood to build a fire. Why are you on this island? Well, you were playing a rugby match in Uruguay or Chile or somewhere and hit a storm on your flight home and crashed on an uninhabited island near an old wooden see-saw. 

No cheating, and email me at undercoverinternguy@gmail.com with your answers. Can I just ask Irene from the walking tour to get in touch with me? I love you.

I just want to mention that I won’t be using songs at the end of the podcast so often going forward into the future. My legal team have their fingers crossed that I don’t get into any intellectual property issues with any of these songs, and advise that it’s a bit of a grey area but so long as I play no more than the first 4 minutes and 25 seconds of any one song and play them slightly quieter than my shouting voice, everything should be OK. That’s what you need in a legal team, isn’t it? The willingness to cross their fingers and hope for the best? They seem to be doing a lot of that recently. Apparently, Bob Dylan in particular is a bit of a litigious swear so I shouldn’t have stolen from him. Great artist though. But in any case, you don’t subscribe to me to listen to pop music. It’s just that I’ve been having some throat issues over the past few weeks as I’ve been taking fire eating lessons for self-defense purposes. I am a bit of a slow learner when it comes to fire activities and the throat blisters meant I couldn’t talk for too long so I’ve needed some musical filler. No longer though. I’m now a human dragon and the best one-lunged fire eater in the world. Please vote for me.

I’ve been your host and producer, Guy Snapdragon. Michael Webb is Chief Legal Officer and Legal support comes from Paul Tout, Simon Warwick, Murray Mackay and Matthew Rook. Accountancy from Graham Cree. Security from David Jarrett. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.