62 minutes of me talking about the word Gantry, enjoy !

Psychogeography, Derive, Alienation, meaning Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Love the crown molding.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  No FiOS? Yeah... no thank you.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies, made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 1:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Swelter heavily in the bent gantry, you gelded Emmets. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. Why am I using the word "gantry"?

• 1:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  I just scrapped an entire podcast about the etymology of the word "gantry." I frequently mention that this podcast is about... is about failure. Not just failure, but having the time to fail. And sometimes, I'll write and record an entire podcast, and it's just not good enough, and I'll scrap it. And that's what happened this week, when I tried to do a podcast on the etymology of the word "gantry." I thought I had it out of my fucking system.

• 1:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm just fascinated by the word "gantry," okay? But it's not interesting enough to merit an entire podcast.

• 1:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wasn't gonna talk about it.

• 1:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  So gantry is an interesting word because

• 2:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  because you don't hear it much and when you do hear it,

• 2:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  it's just one of those words that it reveals something about the person who's saying it. If you heard a person say gantry in everyday parlance, chances are that person works with electrical equipment of some description. A gantry is a type of balcony. You'll hear someone calling a balcony a gantry, but that's, that's not correct. So a balcony, a balcony is about pleasure and leisure. A gantry is about function. If you're driving now along the motorway and you look up at a, a large motorway sign or lights and then in front of that sign, there's a little balcony, it's not a balcony, that's a gantry.

• 2:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Same, big giant billboard, big advertisement on the side of the road. And sometimes if you're lucky enough, usually very, very early in the morning, if you're lucky enough, you get to see the person putting up the new billboard with a bucket of paste and a roller. Well, that person, little metal grate that they're standing on in front of the billboard, they're standing on a gantry. Are you walking around a city now? Is there any construction going on? Is the economy doing well? Is there construction? Look for a crane and follow all the way up to the top of that crane where you see the little cabin, where the crane operator is.

• 3:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And outside that crane operator's door, the little metal grate could call it a balcony. It's not, it's a gantry. If that crane operator needs to, needs to get out of their cabin and walk along that long arm, that big terrifying fucking walk, looking down on the city. The metal grate that they'd be walking on is called a gantry. What if I meet a stranger and for whatever reason, we point up at a balcony? A balcony knows that that's for pleasure, it's for enjoyment, it's an architectural feature. If one of us pints up at a balcony and calls it a gantry, then I know that person works in some technical capacity.

• 4:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  I use the word gantry because I work in the live entertainment industry. If I'm at a gig, I'm sound checking, I'm up on stage. And when I'm up on stage, I'm like, can we change the lights? I look up to the ceiling and all the lights are up there. Can we change those lights? No problem. Let me just climb up the ladder there and I'll walk along the gantry and fix the lights. Because that's the balcony that's in front of the lights, not a balcony, it's gantry. And the word just always stuck out, gantry, gantry, what a strange word. But also in Limerick, when I was growing up,

• 4:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  there's a clothing brand called Gant, okay? And you couldn't walk around with a jumper that says Gant on it. Because in Limerick City, Gant also means vagina, which gives us in Limerick a complicated relationship with the word gantry or the word Gant. It's a Limerick City specific word. I've never heard it used outside of Limerick City. I've heard Limerick people try to use the word outside of Limerick City. It's never been understood. Gant is a Limerick thing. When Limerick people would go to Dublin or Cork and see people in Gant, jumpers, Limerick people would laugh and pint and everyone would say, what the fuck are you laughing and pints at? Your jumper says Gant. And then I just start thinking, gantry, what a strange name for the technical balcony.

• 5:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  What an odd name, gantry, why is it called a gantry? So Gant is, is an old French Norman word that means glove. But then the word gantry emerges in Middle, Middle English, not Old English, but Middle English, to mean a stand or a rack. And it appears to be one of those things that reveal power structures in the English language. The Normans were French, they conquered England in 1066. So words that connote consumption, ownership and wealth tend to be French.

• 6:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the words to do with labour or poverty or hard work in the field tend to be Saxon, English. I've spoken about this before, food. Poultry on the plate, that comes from French poulet, chicken in the field. It's beef when it's on the plate, because a French Norman person is eating the beef. Then it's a cow when it's in the field, because it was the Saxon English who were raising the cows. So you have a power structure within the English language itself there. But with gantry, gant means glove in old French. And then you see this new word appear in Middle English around the 1400s called gantry,

• 7:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  which doesn't mean glove, but it means frame or a stand. So I went down a research rabbit hole and it would appear that, so like, the Normans, just French Vikings, effectively, William the Conqueror, 1066, the current fucking royal family over there in England, right? I think 60% of the wealth in England is, can be traced directly back to 1066 and the fucking Normans, okay? But then, so the Normans didn't like, they didn't invent surnames, but, so before the

• 7:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Normans, you, you could have a name like Ethelrod the Barrel Maker, because your name is Ethelrod and you make barrels. But then maybe you stop making barrels and you just become Ethelrod of York. And your second name there is kind of fluid. Well, when the Normans conquered in 1066, they were obsessed with recording everything. Like William the Conqueror did this thing called the Domesday Book, which was just this massive survey of England. So the Normans went up and down England, recording the names of everybody.

• 8:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Ethelrod the Barrel Maker became Ethelrod Cooper, Cooper being the, the French word for making barrels, or Fletcher, if you made arrows, or if you worked with metal, you were called Smith, or if you made candles, your second name became Chandler, is your second name Webb. Well, you were a weaver. Skinner worked with Farr. Some people got names based on, on physical characteristics. If you were tall, you might have been called Long. If you were tall and unemployed, they, they wrote Etherod Long. So a lot, a lot of the names that people have, it's this colonizing force came over called the Normans.

• 9:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they went up and down England and was like, what the fuck do you do? I make barrels. All right, Cooper. So like with food, right? You're venison, venison on the plate, deer in the field. It's another example. So like with food, the people eating the food are Norman. They're using French, but then the people raising the food are using Old English. So you have a class structure emerges with, within the English language. So with the fucking gant and gantry. Gloves were a luxury item in medieval Europe. So the people who are purchasing the luxury item, the glove, they call it a gant. Gauntlet is another one that still has that old French origin. Gauntlet, big fancy metal gloves that only knights wear.

• 9:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like what's posher than that, a gauntlet? But then the people making the gloves for the rich people, they start to hang the gloves on this rack called a gantry. So now gantry starts to enter the, the English language, Middle English. Then time passes and gantry starts to mean any kind of rack that you're hanging tools on, like a rack or a frame. And then by the time you get to modern English, it refers to like a frame or a balcony used exclusively within like technical contexts. If you're using a gantry, you're probably working. There's no such thing as a pleasurable gantry.

• 10:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's called a fucking balcony. You're using a gantry, you're working. But then what, why glove? Glove then is, is an Old English, Germanic word. That's a Saxon word, pre Norman. So why in the English language are we wearing gloves and not gants? The, the working word survived, the glove.

• 10:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the posh word didn't. But then I'm thinking, why, why in Limerick is vagina called gant? What's going on? And then you start to think, you know, gant, French glove. There's a bit of onomatopoeia going on with glove there. But what business is a fancy French word doing, surviving in Limerick there? And I thought I had my hot take. You see, Limerick actually did have a thriving international luxury glove industry in the 19th century. Limerick chicken skin gloves. These were incredibly thin, soft gloves that were stored inside a walnut shell.

• 11:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they were so expensive and fancy that they were only purchased by European royalty. Queens and princesses used to wear these gloves on their hands to keep their skin soft. These Limerick chicken skin gloves. They were made out of the hides of aborted unborn calves. And from about 1760 up until the 1830s, these were being exported from Limerick. They were world famous as a luxury item, these luxury fancy Limerick gloves. And they would have implied a lot of the working class people of Limerick making these chicken skin gloves. So I was thinking, there you go. Fancy glove industry. Maybe that's how we picked up the word gant.

• 12:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I couldn't find proof. I came to a dead end and I would reckon, I think the word gant. So a lot of Limerick slang words. Bure, which means girl or woman. Shade, which means police officer. Sketch, I think, I think sketch too, which means look, take a look. A lot of these Limerick words. They actually come from gammon or shelta, the language of Irish travellers, which again reveals power structure in language because Irish travellers are an incredibly marginalised group.

• 13:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's possible that the gant comes from that. So if anyone knows any Irish traveller words and you've heard of gant, please let me know. But yeah, if you're out for a walk and you see a billboard and you look at that little balcony in front of it, or you look up at a crane and you see that platform outside the cabin of the crane and you go, that's called a gantry. You can trace all that back to 1066 and the old French word for glove. But even though it's changed context so much, it's still deeply attached to manual labour. Anyone who looks up at a balcony-like structure and refers to that as a gantry,

• 13:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can approximate what that person's job is. And I find that fascinating, but it's not grounds for an entire podcast episode. So I scrapped it, scrapped it the other day. And I was a bit annoyed. And what I do to to come up with ideas for this podcast, to process my thoughts, to

• 14:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  achieve flow, is I go on walks. I've been mentioning my walks quite a bit recently. I was even on the fucking radio, I was on the radio before Christmas, on the Pat Kenny Show.

• 14:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Pat Kenny, who's a seasoned broadcaster, I was on promoting some gig. I'm contractually obligated to promote gigs. So I was on the Pat Kenny Show promoting Vicar Street or Belfast or something.

• 14:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Pat Kenny, who's a seasoned broadcaster, I'm talking 40, 50 years. He asks me, do you have any plans for Christmas? And I answered honestly, I just said, yeah, I'm gonna go for some walks. And that answer was enough to provide

• 14:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  a situation that a broadcaster is never allowed to happen on radio. Radio silence.

• 15:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  There was a period of about, maybe a second and a half, where nothing was said, there was just silence on the radio. Dead air, that's called, in the industry, and it must never happen. But it happened, because I suppose it was, it was the wrong answer. You're not supposed to say that on the radio. When, when, when the presenter, it was like three days before Christmas. When the presenter on the radio says, what are you doing for Christmas? You're supposed to say, go for Christmas drinks, spend time with family. I don't know what the fuck, but I answered honestly and said, no, I'm gonna go for walks, because that's what I did all Christmas. I went for a walk every single day. Mindfulness walks. No distractions, not looking at my phone, not even listening to anything.

• 15:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just checking in with all of my senses. What am I seeing? What am I smelling? What am I hearing? What am I feeling underneath my feet? And at all times, breathing in diaphragmatically.

• 15:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I breathe in and feel my tummy expand for four seconds. I hold it for two seconds, and I breathe out for six seconds. And that there is, that's based in neuroscience. I'm doing this to, to let my brain and body know that I'm safe. To experience the feeling of safety.

• 16:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Some people call it resetting your nervous system. Nervous system regulation. I just prefer to experience the, the feeling of safety. Because I'm on high alert as default. I don't know why, but I think since Covid. Covid wasn't great, so I'm on high alert as default. And I just want to get back to that feeling of safety and breathing mindfully as a continued discipline. That's a proven way to get to that point. And yes, it's working. I've been doing that now as daily practice for six or seven weeks.

• 17:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And things which used to be emotionally triggering for me, they're not anymore. And I mean something as simple as...

• 17:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  An uncomfortable email. If an email comes into me with some bad news, I don't overreact to that email. I don't immediately experience fear. I don't start to catastrophize about, I don't fantasize about potential terrible outcomes. Those catastrophic thoughts still come. But I notice them. Oh, I'm thinking about the worst case scenario here. I can see that, I notice that. That's not real, that's just a piece of fiction that I'm after writing in my brain right there. And I notice it that way, but I don't feel it. I don't feel the catastrophe. My breath doesn't become short, my heart doesn't pound.

• 17:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then I move on and just respond to the email and say, fuck it, we'll see what happens. I can't control what's happening in this email, but I can control how I respond to it. Two months ago, I wasn't doing that. I was reacting emotionally first. So the fact that I've gotten to that place and that I'm there because as daily discipline, I'm walking and practicing mindfulness, that's wonderful progress. That's great progress. And it lets me know my nervous system is returning to a place where it understands that it's safe. And when I say nervous system there, what I mean is not just my brain, but the connection

• 18:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  that my brain has to my body. Very simply. An email comes in, threatening information. I physically experience that as my chest pounding and then a gut wrenching, like something grabbing my belly. That's my nervous system. My amygdala in my brain detects a threat. The hormone of adrenaline is suddenly released. Blood is then directed to my muscles and my heart. And then digestive control is disrupted and my body says, get the fuck away, run. Something bad is happening. Then I very quickly think, uh-oh, I feel like something bad is happening. Something bad must be happening. Better catastrophize and think of the bad thing that's happening to justify this feeling.

• 19:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a nervous system that doesn't feel safe. That's been my default. I think since Covid, since all the big frights of lockdown. That's been my default. So I'm working on my default, going back to the reality. The reality is I'm perfectly safe. And this email here, it doesn't make me unsafe in any way. And the only time I should be feeling that heart pounding shit is when I'm cycling my bike and I slip on some leaves and I'm now falling off the bike. That's grounds for a pumping heart. And then without even thinking, like my, I just break my fall when I come down onto the ground. My muscles just do that.

• 20:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that actually feels a bit exhilarating afterwards because the very emotional response was appropriate to the situation. In that moment, I was actually in a bit of danger. So this week I was disappointed because I'd scrapped the podcast. So I went on a, on a walk. But it's not just mindfulness walks that I do when it comes to writing this podcast. I also, again to use another French word, I engage in what's called a derive. It's a French word that means a drift, to drift. It's an anti-capitalist way of going for a walk. I'm conscious of how pretentious that sounds, but I did my master's degree in this shit and I find it very useful.

• 20:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, to walk in a derive is, it's a bit like automatic writing. It's like, it's like a stream of consciousness way of walking. The derive, it was formulated by a French philosopher called Guy de Bord in the 1950s. And de Bord's theory was that cities, not just cities, that the built human environment.

• 21:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are built around capitalist utility, that roads and buildings in a city, they're not built for people, they're built for the flow of goods and services. Cities optimize traffic flow, labor, discipline. Try and have an enjoyable walk in Los Angeles, you can't. The whole city is built around, built around cars and transport. It's overwhelming. Contrast that with a, an older European city that's built with humans and walking in mind. It's a different experience. And together, walking through a city can create the feeling of, of alienation, which is, it's a Marxist term and what it refers to is what capitalism does to us as

• 22:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  human beings as something unnatural. You're alienated from your labor. You might work a job just to receive money, but you don't actually experience any meaning from the job that you do, it's just a way to receive money. You do it because you have to. Then you want to, you have to pick when you can socialize or meet friends and that's all around. You know, when, when you're not working, when they're not working, how do you meet up? Now you're alienated from others. Are the friends that you do have, they're at work. So you can't tell is this a friendship or is it something more strategic? Or neurotypical or neurodivergent, everyone does a bit of masking at work. You're performing your work personality.

• 22:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Too much of that will alienate you from yourself and from other people. Alienation is the grind. It's the forces of capitalism that we don't question. And when I say don't question there, it's, it's, we accept these things as natural, as inevitable. Alienation is, is when, when your life is structured around survival in a system that you don't control. The pain and lack of freedom of having to pay insane rent because getting a mortgage just isn't possible. That's, that's not natural, that's policy, that's the financialization of housing. It doesn't have to be that way. The terror of, of losing your job for no reason or not having a full-time contract and not being able to predict and plan.

• 23:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was, someone decided that. It's not how it has to be. Unions and rights and contracts and a social net and social housing, these used to, these used to exist. They don't exist because of policy. And I suppose the big one with alienation, it's when,

• 23:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  when your, your job, your status, how much money you have, becomes tied to your sense of self-worth. You look at what other people have, and you then assume that you're, you're less than them. You're, you're locus of evaluation. Instead of simply,

• 24:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  you have worth just because you're a human, which is, that's the reality. That, that's, that, that is the hard reality. All humans have equal worth. Do you have worth just because you're you? And someone else might have a better job, or a better car, or a better whatever the fuck. But none of that has to do with your actual, your worth. But yet, we have a system that'd have us, not only have us believe otherwise, but thrives on the alienation. Thrives on the lack of self-worth. Because under capitalism, it sells you the solution. And the solution is consumerism. Advertising doesn't sell you a product that sells you a better version of yourself. And that's the cycle of capitalism. So back to Guy Debord.

• 24:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  He argued that the, the way that modern cities are designed, that they, they actively produce and enforce the feeling of alienation. Because cities, the way they're designed, they move workers to jobs. They move consumers to shops. They move goods efficiently. They prevent lingering, lightering. They prevent freedom of thought. So when I go for walks,

• 25:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  for my mindful walks, I incorporate the derive, the drift into my walk. And how I do that is when I walk around Limerick City, if I find myself following a usual path.

• 25:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'll go the opposite direction just for the crack. I'll walk through alleyways. I look at the tops of buildings. I look up. I follow curiosity. You know, this week, I was very upset about the gantry podcast that never happened. But as I was walking, I started to think about how utterly capitalistic a gantry is as a structure. You've no business on a gantry unless you're working there. A gantry on a crane is for construction. The gantry at a venue is for the lights. I went wandering alleyways looking for gantries that don't serve a purpose anymore. I found one in a little alleyway called Griffith Row, the back of a marvelous Limerick restaurant called Canteen.

• 26:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  You see, there I am now servicing capital again. At the top of Griffith Row is Costello's. You can see Costello's, Costello's. You'd remember this from earlier podcasts, fucking years ago. Costello's was a great Limerick nightclub that closed during the pandemic. Costello's wasn't capital, it was a public house in the truest sense. There was a man at the door called Flan, and you had to give him five euro in cash. That was it. The price never changed. And if you didn't have a fiver, he'd just let you in anyway. So it was more of a suggested donation. You could have eighteen year olds in there, you could have eighty year olds in there. There was a man in there called Flappy Mickey. Head to toe, white denim, tight white denim, head to toe.

• 27:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  He used to drink pints of milk and would only speak about the band Status Quo. He was either twenty-five or fifty-five, and you couldn't tell because of just this thing that was going on with his skin. The smoking area was a pitch black concrete cage that looked out onto an alleyway. The remnants of, of the old textile factories of Limerick. Alleyways where you'd witness the ghosts of Victorian Limerick women making luxury gloves out of the fetuses of aborted calves. The music was, they could play three Pixie songs back to back. You weren't allowed in with holes in your jeans. Because Flann at the door thought that meant you were a punk and punks were trouble. But punks hadn't been seen since the seventies.

• 27:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  You couldn't dance because the carpet was sticky and everyone used to just bump into each other because there was no lights. And in the corner, there was a little couch where people would abuse aerosols. It was a portal to the other world that disoriented your sense of space and time. But if you've gone up the castles, you've gone too far, so you have to come back down. But I found myself down the little alleyway, Griffith Row, which used to be called Theatre Lane. And I was staring up at this old cardoned off rusted gantry at the top of a building. It was the gantry that used to serve at the back of the Theatre Royal. A theatre from Limerick that was built in the eighteen twenties, hasn't been used since the nineties.

• 28:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Charles Stuart Parnell spoke there, the man who organised widespread rent strikes in Ireland in the eighteen hundreds. Oscar fucking Wilde. Emily Pankhurst, the suffragette, Roger Casement, the founder of modern human rights. The Limerick Boat Club was founded there in eighteen seventy, the boat club that I'm named after. The prodigy played there in the nineties. The Father Ted episode, My Lovely Horse, was filmed there. And now I'm just staring up at this, a dead gantry, a rusted dead gantry that's cardoned off, that's dangerous, that's a hazard. And I got annoyed and I said, I'm trying to get away from fucking gantries and now I'm staring up at a gantry. I looked up and I said, that gantry has been stripped of its role within capitalism.

• 29:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It doesn't generate income anymore. There's a beehive across the way from it on a rooftop, it's supervised by bees. That was relevant to me because it got me thinking about the Brecht Baja, which were an early medieval Irish legal text from the seventh century within the Brehan laws, where bees were legally viewed as a, as a public good rather than a commodity. Under the Brecht Baja, nobody owns the bees, the bees decide who they own by swarming. The honey produced, it wasn't valued for, for speculation or hoarding or accumulation of honey or the resale profit of honey. The honey was valued as. Food, medicine, for ritual purposes, for hospitality.

• 29:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  A pre-colonial system where the bees, they're semi-autonomous, they're not property and they have natural rights. A system where there's no capitalistic alienation. And I thought, fucking hell, all that from an old gantry. A gantry that no longer has a purpose under capitalism. That gantry is now just a balcony. I found two crack pipes underneath it, so people were using it as shelter to smoke crack. But when I looked at the old building, this is a building from the 1820s. I realised that gantry is now a book. It's a staircase that very clearly used to serve as an old theatre and you can use it to tell the story of 20th century history.

• 30:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I promised myself this wouldn't be a fucking podcast about gantries. But here's the thing, because it's an old rusted gantry, it's decommissioned infrastructure, it's lost its exchange value. It doesn't generate revenue, efficiency or circulation. There's an old Irish text called the Dinschenkes, 1,200 years old. It's place lore. It's why places in Ireland have their names because events are stored there. Before writing, the poets would memorise myth, stories, laws and permanent structures in the landscape, like a very old tree or a river or a stone or a mountain, became memory nodes.

• 31:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  The poets would read the landscape and to remember the stories, the stories would reveal themselves through the landscape, through objects in the landscape. And that old rusted gantry is now a memory node. You can stand there and tell the story of the theatre and all the people who visited there and everything that happened. Those stories don't generate capital, can't be commodified, they're shared amongst everybody, they're collectively owned. The rusted gantry is now, it's a tree, it's a river. It has meaning now and that disrupts alienation. And then I thought, jeez, that'd be a great art project. I wonder, could I get commission doing that? And then I'm back into capitalism again.

• 32:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Speaking of capitalism, it's time for me to fulfil my contractual obligations and tell you about my upcoming gigs. But first, let's have an Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina, I've got a...

• 32:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  A little, a little punnet of chewing gums that doesn't have a top. I'm gonna, I'm gonna shake these around and hopefully the chewing gums will not jettison from, from the punnet. Let's go. You're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit.

• 32:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Don't have an Ocarina.

• 32:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just not feeling the Ocarina recently.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Soft, cushy, plush, cozy. Soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallow-y, warm. Soft. Socks, underwear, tees and more. Bombas, everyday comfort worth obsessing over. Visit bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash AUDIO. One purchase equals one donated, always.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you. It just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last? And if you're worried about after hours leads slipping through, QUO's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  It's the number one rated business phone system on G2 and over 90,000 businesses already trust it to stay reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/tech. That's Q U O dot com slash tech.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Love the crown molding.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Soft, cushy, plush, cozy. Soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallow-y, warm. Soft. Socks, underwear, tees, and more. Bombas. Everyday comfort worth obsessing over. Visit bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S dot com slash AUDIO. One purchase equals one donated, always.

• 36:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Talking chewing gums. That was the chewing gum pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting. Directly via the Patreon page because this podcast is my full time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I have the time and space to deliver a podcast each week to remain consistent. To fuck a podcast up, scrap it and then record a new one. Even though this is kind of about gantries.

• 37:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, this is not as gantry centric. Gantries are merely being used as a device to explore Marxist themes of alienation. And the derive, all right? So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. For that, you get four podcasts. But you know what? If you can't afford it, if you're suffering under alienation, if you don't have a job, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen to this podcast for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast, whether you pay or whether you don't pay.

• 37:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I get to earn a living. I'm happy with that. What's most important to me is having the capacity to show up each week and do what I love doing and make sure that I'm passionate and congruent. So if you want to support this podcast directly, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This is a listener funded, independent podcast. I am not beholden to any advertisers. There's no editorial input or say on this podcast whatsoever. I put out what I want to put out. All right, upcoming gigs. This January the 23rd, I'm up in Waterford at the Theatre Royal. That's sold out.

• 38:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  31st, I'm in at the Spirit of Kildare Festival. That's almost sold out. Wednesday, the 4th of February, Vicar Street. Pretty sure that's sold out now.

• 38:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're literally talking. I think that one is sold out, but fear not, I've added a second Vicar Street date. On the 20th of April, there's a second Vicar Street date and there's tickets available for that. The 12th of February, Belfast Waterfront Theatre. We're down to the last tickets there. Galway on the 15th of February, Letterland. Very nearly sold out. Killarney in the Ainek, my beautiful broom closet. All right, that's the 28th of February. Couple of tickets left for that. March, Carlo, is that sold out?

• 39:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Carlo at the Visual Arts Centre on the 14th of March. 26th of March, I'm down in the Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival. April 4th, Castle Blaney. I don't know if tickets are even out for that yet. I know they are, yeah. And then Limerick, the big one. On the 9th of April, come along to Limerick at the University Concert Hall. I'm sure there's other gigs over the summer, we'll get to those in time. But let's chat about England, Scotland and Wales in October 2026. A lot of these tickets went over Christmas, so if you are coming to this tour of England, Scotland and Wales, get your tickets now, because a lot of them are going quickly. London's nearly sold out completely.

• 40:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  October 26th, what have we got? Starting on the 18th, I'm in Brighton, then I'm off to Cardiff, then the Warrigat Centre in Coventry, then Bristol, Guildford, can't wait for a bit of Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. That's all happening there in October 2026. Looking forward to going back to Nottingham, really enjoyed it the last time. And I was unaware that Boots, the chemist Boots, was born in Nottingham. I did not know about that. So I'll be doing an extra special visit to Boots in Nottingham. So this week's podcast was actually supposed to be about geopolitics.

• 40:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  People have been asking me to speak about Trump in Venezuela and I want to do an entire podcast about American interventions, the interventions that the US has led in Central and South America. My research is done, my writing is done. How, how do I intend to do a podcast about US, the history of US interventions? Fuck interventions, destabilization, I shouldn't be using the word interventions, they don't intervene, they destabilize. How does that turn into a podcast about gantries? It's because of the derive. I follow a feeling

• 41:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  of curiosity. I follow stream of consciousness. I follow where creativity takes me. I try not to go back to a fixed path. Even when I know what a podcast is about, if I find myself wandering, I chase that feeling and that's what I've always done. Something within me is telling me not this week. I think it's probably Iran. Last week it was Venezuela, now it's Iran. I'm not, I'm not massively informed on Iran. This is my reading and please correct me if I'm wrong. There's no goodies or baddies here in any of this.

• 42:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Iran is, it's fairly clear that Iran is theocratic fascism. The, I don't think the people of Iran have the privileges of the type of freedoms that we in, in, in Europe take for granted. So there's people there who want fucking change. The media is reporting that there's 2,000 people dead, 2,000 protesters dead. On the other hand, you have the US and Israel clearly doing an influence campaign, clearly gearing up for an opportunity to, to

• 43:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  bomb Iran, clearly and explicitly wanting regime change in Iran. But here's the thing, like the US and Israel, history would tell us that what they want is regime change.

• 43:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then destabilization, chaos, chaos, violence and destabilization. So that they can extract resources and gain geopolitical dominance. That's what Israel and the US do. I do not believe that Israel and the US want an outcome which benefits the people, the human beings of Iran. It's very difficult to get, to get trustworthy information at the moment. Google's broken, Google's fucked. Five years ago, I did use Twitter. Twitter used to be great for reliable information, for knowing what journalists, what people to follow. That's gone.

• 43:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I don't trust, 100% trust, a lot of the corporate media, Western corporate media when it comes to Iran. Because right now, they're going to be fed fuckloads of US propaganda, which is then fed to us as news. You don't know what to trust. You want to root for the people of Iran. What do the people of Iran want? And if you're Iranian and you listen to this podcast, please give me a shout so I can recommend, who, who should I be following? Who should I be listening to here? Who is a good source of information? Because I want to be very cautious that I don't, that I don't offend anyone or talk

• 44:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  out of my arse or unknowingly become a mouthpiece for propaganda because I'm being fed misinformation myself. So I think that's why this week I didn't go down the geopolitics route. And instead I went down a little alleyway. And that's the nature of the derive, to wander, to not follow the predetermined route and instead to, to wander and ramble, to disrupt, to momentarily disrupt alienation and find meaning. Another journey I took yesterday when I was going on my walk after I'd gone down that lane, the theatre lane.

• 45:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I found myself wandering down a place called Joseph Street. Kind of weird old Victorian Limerick. It's just near the barracks, the army barracks, which used to be a British Army barracks. Because Limerick was a garrison city. So you have all these red brick row houses, little cottages that soldiers might have lived in. And there's parts of Limerick, Limerick City, especially around Joseph Street. And it doesn't feel like Ireland. It feels like being in Sheffield or Birmingham. Limerick is weird as an Irish city in that way. There was, there was a good bit of loyalism in Limerick.

• 46:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of Limerick people were very happy with the British presence, with British soldiers. Because it drove a little mini industrial revolution and provided people with employment. British Army uniforms were made in Limerick. So I was walking down this Joseph Street area, tiny little streets, small red bricked, one storey Victorian houses, little bungalows, soldiers cottages you'd call them. Kind of Angela's ashes territory around there. And when I'd look at old footage, there was a lot of pubs, a lot of pubs in that area. Because there was a lot of soldiers and there was a lot of people getting work from the barracks and from the soldiers.

• 46:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  And even when you'd see songs being sung in the pubs, footage from the 50s and 60s. They weren't singing Irish trad. It felt more like, like a fucking East End pub. There was like vaudeville songs being sung or operas. But I ended up on the derive down Joseph Street. Because something pulled me there. I followed a feeling. I didn't decide I'm gonna go up to Joseph Street and get a look at the red brick buildings. I followed a feeling and it took me there. And when I got there, I remembered. This is where my dad lived when he, when he was in his early twenties and he moved to Limerick. When he moved to Limerick from Cork, he stayed here when he was a young fella.

• 47:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then it dawned on me. Fuck it, he died 20 years ago this week. My dad died 20 years ago this week.

• 47:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'd kinda half forgotten, cause it's twenty years ago, twenty years is a long time, and there has been, at the middle of January this week, over the years, this week has passed, and, and I'd have forgotten, I'd have forgotten, oh fuck, that's, this is the week that my dad died, cause so much time has passed, and I think that's the emotion that pulled me down Joseph Street this week.

• 48:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I was walking around all the little red brick Victorian cottages, wondering which one did he stay in, cause he used to tell me fucking hilarious stories.

• 48:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  He used to stay in this little, in digs, he called it.

• 48:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  This would have been, I'd say, the nineteen fifties, my dad was old, my dad be ninety now, he died when he was seventy, he had me in his fifties, but he lived in, in Joseph Street in the nineteen fifties as a young fella, in digs, which was, you didn't rent out an apartment then, there was no apartments.

• 48:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  There would have been widows, there would have been widows, or spinsters.

• 48:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And their house, they would, they would rent out rooms in their house to young men who were working, so my dad lived in digs in Joseph Street, up in a, a tiny attic, the tiny attic of a little bungalow in these Victorian red brick cottages. And he lived there with about three or four other lads, I think it was a woman called Mrs Murphy, and she was old, and she had a tiny dog by the name of Toby, a little Jack Russell, who would just bark and bark and bark. And my dad and his friends, they all worked out in Shannon Airport.

• 49:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shannon Airport would have been fairly young at that point, but they'd have kept mad hours, because they're working in an airport, so they might have to sleep during the daytime cause they worked all night, but they couldn't sleep cause of this fucking dog downstairs, this tiny dog barking and barking, and there was one lad there in particular. And he just couldn't handle the dog barking. He'd go fucking nuts. And he used to wait for when the little dog would go asleep downstairs. And when the dog would sleep, then this fella would go, I have to sleep now because the dog's asleep. At least he's not barking. So he got into bed. And he was in the nip. And he's like, the dog is sleeping downstairs now, so I'm gonna sleep up here.

• 50:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then he went to sleep. Up beside his bed was an alarm clock. I've definitely told you this story before. Beside his bed was an alarm clock, one of the old ones. Old alarm clocks that you have to wind up. So there's mechanisms in it. There's moving parts.

• 50:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he's in bed, nude. Alarm clock goes off. And he's like, fuck, fuck, fuck. I don't want to wake the dog. The dog wakes up, he'll stop barking. So he grabs the alarm clock. Shoves it under the bed covers. But as he shoves it in towards his crunch.

• 50:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  The fucking moving parts on the alarm clock. Start to get stuck into his pubes. And they're winding and winding and fucking now he's got an alarm clock stuck to his bollocks with these, he's, he's running around the gaff. The dog is awake and barking. And he's running around this tiny Victorian bungalow, bollocks naked, with an alarm clock covering his dick, making a loud noise. And he's to run downstairs to the old one, Mrs. Murphy, screaming at her, get a scissors, get a scissors. And I think she had to cut the alarm clock out of his balls. And my dad used to tell me that story when I was a kid. I used to fucking love it. And it ended up.

• 51:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  You see, my dad, my dad died when I was, I was so young that he never got to see any of my career, nothing, no professional work I've ever done. He, he had no idea that I'd do okay for myself. He died when I'd just gotten out of school and I, I failed my leave insert, which is a death sentence in Ireland. And.

• 52:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  All of the indicators would suggest that I was gonna have a very difficult life and wouldn't amount to much. Because, look, as you know, in Ireland, if you don't have a fucking leave in sort, things are very difficult. And one thing in fairness to my dad, and he said this on his deathbed, not to me, but to one of my brothers. And he said about me, I'm not worried about him, he's gonna be fine. And I always cherished that, because he didn't say it to me, he said it to one of my brothers. Which means he believed it. And I always cherished that because it means, even though all of the signifiers from society,

• 52:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  from the system were saying that I wasn't, that I wouldn't be okay, that I wouldn't be fine, that I didn't have a leave in sort. My dad recognized something in me, where he went, no, I'm not worried about him. He's, he'll figure out a way. And he was right. But he never got to see anything I ever made. Prank phone calls, songs, podcasts, nothing. No idea, because I was just a young fella, just straight out of school and then he died. But that story about the, the alarm clock and the testicles. I ended up using that in the first ever, the first ever television pilot that I wrote,

• 53:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  which was for Channel Four, and I'd been in my early twenties. I took that story about a man being in bed and the alarm clock getting stuck into his balls and it moving around. I took that. It was for Channel Four, it was a pilot for Channel Four, I think. Fucking ages ago, probably fifteen years ago. I had a character who got into bed in the nip, same circumstances. The alarm clock gets stuck in his pubes, it's twisting and twisting and moving around. He's running around with an alarm clock over his bollocks. But in my story.

• 54:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  The alarm clock and his, the alarm clock sent his sperm back in time. So that his sperm impregnated his own mother. So effectively he became his own dad. But then by becoming his own dad, he'd been an absentee parent to himself. So he had to engage in a journey of becoming both a father and son to himself. And then he broke his back by trying to sit on his own lap. And I have to say, I'm very, I'm very proud of that. Cause that was a long time ago and I'd have been, I'd have been quite young doing that. And I'm very proud of the madness of that idea. Didn't get commissioned, of course, because it's fucking mental, but there you go.

• 54:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then I was, as I was walking around the Joseph Street again, I was thinking back to the other stories he used to tell me. So the same house, the same dog. And the same fella. So after the incident with the alarm clock and his bollocks, he was fucking furious. And he hated this dog, this little jack russell downstairs who'd just yap and yap and bark.

• 55:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one day this fellow was up in bed.

• 55:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think it was late night and the dog starts barking, little jack russell downstairs. And he'd had enough. He said, fuck this. So he crept downstairs and got the jack russell and brought it up to the attic. And opened the window.

• 55:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And threw the dog out the window.

• 55:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now here's the thing, it's a bungalow, so it's, it's not, wasn't that high up? You're talking about eight feet. It's still not a good idea to throw a little dog out a window. But the context, he did it knowing that like the dog wouldn't die. Still shouldn't have done it. But it's, it's, he didn't fuck it out of a three story window. It was a really small old Victorian bungalow. So anyway, look, he gets the dog and he throws the little jack russell out the attic window. Furious and he shuts the window and just gets back into bed and said, that fucking dog, you won't bark now.

• 56:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then like two nights later, my dad is up in the local pub.

• 56:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there's a kerfuffle in the corner, there's all these people gathered around, and they're listening to someone telling a story.

• 56:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  And my dad looks and there's a man there, and his arm is in a sling.

• 56:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  And he's there telling everybody,

• 56:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  how he was walking home one night in the dark, and Mrs Murphy's Jack Russell came from nowhere and jumped into the air on top of him and broke his arm. So the, when the dog was thrown out the window, it landed on him. But he, he didn't think that the dog could be thrown out of the fucking window. He thought the dog actually jumped eight or nine feet into the air and attacked him by landing on his arm. And I always remember that story from my dad, and that's, that's another one of my dad's stories that I ended up putting into my work. I have a short story in my second book, Boulevard Rain, and it's literally, it's about that, it's about, it takes elements of that story, the dog called Toby.

• 57:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think I write it from the dog's perspective of being thrown out the window and breaking a man's arm. But that's what drove me on my derive, my wonder, my drift this week.

• 57:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Finding myself in a place in Joseph Street. And only when I get there do I realise what pulled me there. It was

• 57:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  my unconscious mind telling me, your dad died 20 years ago this week. Cause the thing is too, like I'm not hard on myself for forgetting, cause I have forgotten in the past. It was very painful when my dad died, fucking awful.

• 58:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I'd only just become friends with him. I was only just old enough to see him as a fellow adult. I wasn't a little child looking up at my dad. I had a little bit of meeting the human being, the person. And then he died suddenly from a brain tumour. Now I'm an adult man and I struggle to remember him or to hear the sound of his voice.

• 58:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or to think of what he looks like. It's all fragmented, it's all unreliable. It's all from the frame of reference of being a child and I'm not a child anymore. I'm a middle aged grown fucking man. And I relate to the world as a middle aged grown man. And it's difficult to remember somebody when my only context is speaking to them as a little kid or as a teenager. And I don't know what it's like to have an adult conversation with my dad. I haven't a clue, but Joseph Street there became a memory node. The landscape revealed the story to me. The landscape brought those stories back. The place brought the stories back.

• 59:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause I might have trouble remembering. I've no idea what he smells like, like it just, just, that just hit me there. Like the senses. I can faintly remember his voice visually. It's his legs for some reason, cause he used to wear these cream pants, but maybe just the height that I was, I'm remembering childhood shit. The texture of his jumper, maybe the colour of his hair. It's all bits and pieces pieced together. Nearly the touch of his jumper, but I can't rely upon that. And then I, no smell. I can't remember what he smelled like. The most detailed information that I have are those ridiculous silly stories.

• 1:00:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause that's the power of storytelling, that's the power of narrative. The set of conflict resolution. I can never forget those. And I suppose me putting them into my own fiction. That first TV pilot fifteen, sixteen years ago. And then in, in my book of short stories in 2019 or whatever it was. Putting his stories into my work is, it's like me trying to fucking let him know what I've been up to. To honour his prediction, to honour his prediction that I'm not worried about him, he's gonna be okay. To let him know, do you know what, you were right. And I suppose a part of me that.

• 1:00:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wants his approval to impress him because he was always very supportive of

• 1:00:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  not just my creativity, but just me being a lunatic. Because I was a lunatic. I mean, fucking autism, eccentricity, whatever you want to call it. He was a bit of a lunatic as well. But he used to just say, he's an artist, he's an artist. This is the way that artists are. And that was a lovely way of framing. Neurodivergence. And I personally still frame it that way. I know I'm diagnosed as level one autistic according to the DSM. But neurodivergence is a spectrum. And I'm diagnosed autistic because that's the criteria that I fit. But like, if you were to ask me, what am I? Am I autistic? I'm like, no, I'm whatever lunatic artists are. All right.

• 1:01:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Lots of artists are quite eccentric. They might say or do strange things. And this appears to be the price that you pay in order to have access to creativity. And that's, that's how I feel. That's what I that's not in the DSM, you see. Probably because it services capitalism. That's probably fucking why. But that's my neurodivergence. That's my own diagnosis for myself. It's whatever that mad artist thing is, I'm okay with that. And that's what my dad was okay with. That's what he would say about me. When I was a teenager. When I wouldn't wear my uniform in school because now I realise it was a sensory fucking thing. Or deliberately getting kicked out of class because I knew it meant I could go and draw

• 1:02:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  or come home and listen to music. So I just want to leave you with that. That was the end of my derive this week.

• 1:02:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  My unplanned walk. Where I follow what feels right rather than the predetermined path. All right, dog bless. I won't make any promises about what next week's podcast is going to be about. In the meantime. Rub a dog, wink at a swan. Gen you flick to a snail.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Love the crown molding.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  No FiOS? Yeah... no thank you.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.