Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things a Fish, coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name's Anna Tyshinski and I'm here with Alex Bell, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray.
Once again,
we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,
here we go, James Harkin.
Okay,
my fact this week is that in 1683 some people were ice skating in the Netherlands when the ice broke away and they floated all the way to Essex.
Well, it happened according to some people.
So this is from a book called The Thames and its tributaries by Charles Mackay.
It's an old book and he says it's reported that this happened.
He says that some skatesliders upon those large icy plains were unawares, driven to sea and arrived living,
though almost perished with cold and hunger upon the sea coast of Essex.
Okay, and you know what, I don't really believe it,
but it is a kind of thing that happened and it's kind of related to the mini ice age that happened in the 17th century when it got really,
really cold and basically the sea was freezing and all the rivers were freezing and they had these frost fares in London and there was lots of crazy stuff that happened,
whether this happened and I don't really know, but I believe it.
I want to.
Did they put a sail up?
Yeah, how big was the ice shelf?
Well, that one sentence that I said is the sum total of all the information I have about this fact.