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Chapter 1: What classic episode is being revisited in this podcast?
Hello, Search Engine Nation and all the ships at sea. Summer is finally, actually, truly here. And this week, we are celebrating by bringing you one of our very favorite classic episodes of Search Engine, an enjoyable, well, enjoyable for us, hopefully for you, quest after a very silly question.
It's a story about kings and queens and the places they allegedly cannonball, a story which took Search Engine's team of crack reporters across the Atlantic. I hope you like it. We'll be back next week with a new one for you. Or if you just need to hear something new from us right now, we actually have a fresh new episode on the Incognito Mode feed.
It's a story that is about the pursuit of greatness and spicy noodles. But in order to hear that, you would need to be a subscriber to our Incognito Mode, which you can find at searchengine.show. Most human beings start asking questions at about two and a half years old. Our first questions usually begin with, what? The quintessential toddler query, what's that?
The more sophisticated how and when questions, those developmentally arrive around three. And then between three and five, the deluge, the constant questions, the why questions. Why is salami so hard to stop eating? Why do people lie?
If you can think back, you can probably remember this age, when your parents were like perfect search engines, capable of handling almost anything you threw at them. And you also might remember the few times they'd refuse. When you'd ask some question whose answer they weren't quite ready to share, and you'd get an, it's complicated, or maybe a, when you're older.
I can remember, I swear, decades later, the frustration of that strange, invisible wall, In fact, I was reminded of that wall quite recently. A listener had a question about something that felt honestly very basic, very answerable, but it just wasn't. It was an unpatchable hole in my understanding of the world.
And the more we tried to answer it, the less it seemed like a fun lark, and the more it made me want to howl with rage. Made, actually, the entire staff here howl with rage. Why couldn't we know this? Why was it being kept from us? Check, check, check. It started in a stylishly appointed one-bedroom apartment not far from my house.
Hi. Hey, how's it going? How's it going? Welcome.
The listener whose home we just entered, his name was Chris. Chris sends me a lot of questions. They tend to be especially good. And the question he had this time was about the British royal family. Well, sort of.
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Chapter 2: What sparked the curiosity about Buckingham Palace's secret pool?
Because it's like you're living in the part of Washington, D.C. that all the fancy buildings are, but that's just your home. Like, yeah, I live in the Pentagon, the White House, the Washington Monument. It's not a home, but it is a home. It's like the home for the fanciest people in Britain.
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the White House is a really interesting thing to compare it to because the White House, I just have zero curiosity about what it's like in there. I feel like I know it's like boring wallpaper. It's four poster beds. You know what I mean? And it just looks small and rinky dink compared to this. Let's Google the number of rooms. I feel like it's close to a thousand.
Oh, Jesus.
775.
That's fucking insane.
That's crazy. Like, we're in my apartment right now. It's approximately three rooms.
775 rooms is a lot of rooms. It's a lot more than three. But what had specifically piqued Chris's curiosity is that even though British taxpayers have funded all 775 of those rooms, very few rooms can be seen by the British public. The White House, you can visit, you can tour. If you win an election, you could live there. Buckingham Palace is different.
It belongs to dynasts of one family forever, and the vast majority of its many rooms are only accessible to that family and their many servants. You can go on a tour, but you won't see very much. As Chris tumbled down this rabbit hole, he found that his curiosity was particularly drawn to one mysterious room.
One thing that I surfaced in my research about Buckingham Palace was there's a pool. Obviously there's a pool. That's a very commonplace amenity. But there are no pictures of the pool. No one's outside of the royal family seems to have seen this pool. It's a very private amenity. Wait, no one's ever taken a photograph of the pool in Buckingham Palace? It does not exist on the internet.
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Chapter 3: Why is the Buckingham Palace pool considered a mystery?
And so I was picturing something like opulent and golden and maybe like... maybe there was an elephant there somehow. But you're like, oh, it might just be kind of a crappy pool.
I think so, because I guess, you know, obviously Buckingham Palace does pomp and grandeur and circumstance, and they wear that on their sleeves. But I think that one of the things particularly about the Queen was that actually, you know, rumor always had it that in her private apartments, actually those rooms were really shabby with, like, threadbare carpet and really old-fashioned wallpaper.
And there was this amazing thing back in 2003 that, A reporter from a tabloid here called The Mirror newspaper managed to get a job as a footman at Buckingham Palace. He worked there for two months. And they kind of did it ostensibly as a like, this is a massive security breach. I could have poisoned the queen thing.
But actually the thing that everyone remembers from that story is that he got photos of the queen's private breakfast room. And it's like, I'll send you a picture, but it is like super shabby. And she's eating her breakfast out of Tupperware. Really? Everyone was just like, the queen is eating breakfast out of Tupperware. Like she's eating cornflakes out of Tupperware.
And that was the thing, like no one had ever seen that before.
Heidi sent me a link to the story. And in the photos, I could see the weirdly dingy room. There's a plastic princess phone and FM transistor radio on the table. I have to admit, it gives me a feeling I've never felt towards the royals. A warm feeling. They seem human. The queen here living like a retiree who just needs to make her pension last.
which I think is basically the situation of the monarchy. Like they actually, you know, their estate is huge and kind of enormously expensive to maintain. And they're having to constantly scrap for taxpayer funding to kind of maintain these state rooms. And so the queen was notoriously frugal, you know, with her own sort of stuff. And so that's my hunch.
I reckon this ball is rundown and embarrassing and they don't want anyone to see it for that reason. But I mean, I could be completely wrong. Maybe there is an elephant.
Our listener Chris had imagined that because the pool was hidden, it had to be fabulous. Perhaps there's an American bias that expects that anything hidden must be special, exciting, better than what's here. Heidi's view was that, like many backstages, Buckingham Palaces could be less glamorous than what the public got to see. In any event, we had another path to try.
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Chapter 4: What findings emerged from the investigation into the palace pool?
I was standing on the steps. Obviously, I'm walking directly up to it to try to look in, but it's very opaque two-way glass. Oh. My assumption is you're inside the pool and you can look out on the beautiful back gardens of Buckingham Palace, but from the outside, you cannot see anything. The panes just look like ink-stained squares of glass. which was honestly so tantalizing.
Like a quarter inch of glass is what was separating me from the answer to this question that I had been thinking about for months. That's so frustrating. It was so frustrating. And to make matters worse, we start the second tour and the tour guide, who's like this kindly British woman from Essex with long gray hair. And the first thing she says is,
If you look to your right, there's the indoor swimming pool. I've actually swum in it. What? The new king has actually turned down the temperature a few degrees, so I'm swimming in it less, but there's the pool house right there.
And so for the rest of this 90-minute tour, I'm thinking the whole time, please say more about the swimming pool, please say more about the swimming pool, please say more about the swimming pool.
But instead, she's pointing out, like, the rare shrubbery that they have lining the gardens, and she's pointing to the rose garden and the marmalade plants and the tennis courts, which are actually kind of cool, if a little dingier than I would have expected.
And at the end of the tour, I'm kind of trying to play it cool, but I go up to her and I ask, like, hey, you mentioned that you had swum in the Buckingham Palace swimming pool? Yeah. Like, I'm so curious. What's it like in there? And she tells me, it's just a normal swimming pool. Four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there are any accidents.
There's a squash court in there as well. And immediately gets drowned out by like hordes of other people on the tour asking her questions about the rose garden and marmalade plants. And that's the only information I get from her.
Wait, four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there's accidents?
I don't have any like decoder ring to interpret these words. These are just the precious few words that I gleaned from this like wealth of information before she was cut off from me forever. Okay. So what we had here was like, I mean, as you said, the mission was to bring the swimming pool, like one more moat into the light of public view. I feel like we'd done that.
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