Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast The Fart Lamps of Sheffield are vestigal totems of anti Irish discrimination About this episode A history of sanitation and sewers during the industrial revolution Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 12,240 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Cleanse the bend in the hen, you sedentary Evelyns. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you are a regular listener, you know the crack. I'm sitting here in my office in Limerick City in the middle of a very glorious heatwave. An unnatural heatwave, unfortunately. Today is the hottest 26th of May on record and yesterday was the hottest 25th of May on record. So I have to parse that dichotomy while I'm trying to enjoy the fucking beauty. The leaves on the trees are all young.
1:45 Blindboy Boatclub? They're all a couple of weeks old. Things are as green as green can be. I went for a cycle yesterday down by the river. I nearly started crying. I nearly started crying with the, just the majesty, the majesty of the evening. Swarms of mayflies.
2:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Glistening off of this slanty fucking pinky orange evening sun. Heat battering up off the tarmac, getting quenched by this, this cold river breeze.
2:17 Blindboy Boatclub? That's carrying the smell of flowers that wanna fuck each other. So I'm in my office now, looking out at it, but also wanting to be outside in it. So if the weather is nice where you are, I would ask that, go and listen to this podcast on a little walk. Have a nice little mindful walk and listen to this podcast. I've got a hot take for you this week. It's a thread of inquiry. So as you know, in about, in about six weeks' time, on the 5th of July, I'm gonna be gigging over in Sheffield as part of the, the Cross the Wires Festival, which is a podcast festival at Sheffield City Hall.
2:56 Blindboy Boatclub? And the reason I'm doing that gig is my larger tour of England, Scotland and Wales in October. I was just really disappointed that Sheffield wasn't on that tour. I love Sheffield and I was pissed off that I wasn't. I did Sheffield last year and I was just annoyed that Sheffield wasn't on my tour this year. So I said, fuck it, I'll book a standalone Sheffield gig this summer, separate to my tour. So that's what I'm doing. But as I've mentioned the past few months, algorithms are changing on social media. So if you wanna tell people that you have a gig on, you can't just, like Twitter's gone.
3:39 Blindboy Boatclub? You can't post like just a poster on Instagram because no one will see it. So if you're plugging a gig now or plugging anything, you have to make a video. You have to do a reel in order for people to find out about your gig. So the promoters for my Sheffield gig were like, will you do a video? Just do a video on Instagram, please, to promote the Sheffield gig, which is grand. But I, I hate just posting a video and the content of the video is, what's the crack here's a gig, come to it. I really dislike doing that. So my job this week has been thinking, okay, if I make a little Instagram video to promote my gig in Sheffield, then I want to make a video that.
4:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Everyone would want to see whether the fuck you're going to the gig or not, or even give a shit about it. If I do that, then I'm okay with it. But this process of figuring out what I'm gonna make a video about, it led me down a wonderful rabbit hole. I started listing out things that I love about Sheffield. I have a fondness for the abandoned Debenhams, because it reminds me of Limerick's abandoned Debenhams. Can't do a video about that. The number one thing I do love about Sheffield is, it is my personal opinion that Sheffield Cathedral, which is in the middle of the fucking city,
5:01 Blindboy Boatclub? was once the site of an Anglo-Saxon pagan sacred grove. The reason I think this is because Sheffield Cathedral is this absolutely gorgeous massive cathedral that's about a thousand years old. But in the 8th century, at the site where the cathedral is now, they found this, this old stone Anglo-Saxon cross. It's called the Sheffield Cross. It's not in Sheffield anymore. You have to go to London to see it in the British Museum. And this cross too, they only found it in the 1940s.
5:40 Blindboy Boatclub? And it was, someone had found like this, this 8th century fucking carved stone cross. And they found it in, in a cutlery workshop, because Sheffield was massive with the Industrial Revolution. So someone had found this ornate stone cross, hollowed it out, and was using it to, to quench molten hot cutlery in water. So it had become, it wasn't sacred anymore. It was being used in a very utilitarian way, which is sad because it shows a people who are completely colonized by the Normans and disconnected from their, their pagan past. Whereas in Ireland, with our ancient artifacts, the people didn't know what they meant, but they understood they had,
6:24 Blindboy Boatclub? they believed that they had some type of power, like the Book of Duro, which would be a 7th century illuminated manuscript. This was found in the 1800s, like a thousand years later. It was found in the 1800s. And a farmer had it. And the farmer like couldn't read it, but would use it to dip into his cattle's trough to ward off illnesses in his cattle. So it still possessed a magical power to him, even though he didn't know how old it was or how important it was. But in Sheffield, the Sheffield Cross was just a very conveniently sized piece of stone that was being used in a cutlery workshop up until the 1940s.
7:06 Blindboy Boatclub? I love this old stone cross because of the, the art on it. It almost looks Irish, but it's not. It's something different. The patterns are Marcian, which was the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Marcia. It's like a Celtic cross, but all the designs are, are leaves and vines. And that's, it's really strange and it, and it's Anglo-Saxon. And the pre-Christian Saxons, when they were in the, the forests of Germany, they used to worship trees, the way that in Ireland, pre-Christian Irish people would worship at holy wells.
7:46 Blindboy Boatclub? And then when Christianity came in, they'd build a church near a holy well. The Saxons and then the Anglo-Saxons, their pagan mythology and belief was around the worship of trees and woods and sacred groves of trees. And I fucking love that because I like any, I'm fascinated by any religious belief that's connected with biodiversity. Christianity took that from us. Christianity was like, no, God made the earth, like the Garden of Eden for humans to exploit. I'm much more interested in, in beliefs that fear and venerate nature. Because then that means that we as humans then have
8:31 Blindboy Boatclub? a stories and culture based around respecting the environment rather than exploiting it. So because Sheffield Cathedral had this eighth century Anglo-Saxon cross that has leaves on it, I tenuously believe that that means it, it was a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon sacred grove. What am I basing that on? Fuck all vibes. Because in Ireland, we just know. Like I made a documentary on this shit. This is the one that I won the award for, where I was consulting like experts and scholars. But in Ireland, you just find an old church and the church is 5th century or 6th century. And they are right beside it, you have a well, a holy well.
9:16 Blindboy Boatclub? And then you can read about that specific well or find mention of it in old Irish texts. So we know, okay, before Christianity came, people worshipped these wells or these wells were very important. Then Christianity came along and they built the church beside it. The ground became consecrated and Christianity assimilated itself into pre-Christian beliefs. I prefer saying pre-Christian than fucking pagan because pagan is, it's a slur almost. So based on that, my vibe is that Sheffield Cathedral was built on an ancient Anglo-Saxon sacred grove.
9:58 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not an expert, so I can't, I can't assert that. I'd love to speak to someone like Professor Ronald Hutton about it, who might know the crack. I've gone deep into the research online. I can't find anything that confirms that belief. And unfortunately, unlike Ireland, it's hard to go deep into the history of pre-Christian Britain. Even place names and stuff. When the Anglo-Saxons came over, the Roman Empire collapsed. But in Ireland, we were, we were writing shit down. We were writing our mythology down. We were holding on to these things in books. There's a poverty of this information when it comes to England.
10:42 Blindboy Boatclub? So I was like, fuck it, I can't do a video about that. I can't do a video about my, my theory about the sacred grove in Sheffield Cathedral. Sheffield, by the way, today has more, it has more trees per capita than any other city in the United Kingdom, I believe, which is pretty cool. But the other thing that Sheffield has more than any other city. In England is its concentration of fart lamps. Before I get onto the Sheffield fart lamps, I want to draw attention to what's happening in my office right now. So the sun is setting outside, beautiful. Ah, that fucking lovely May evening sun where it's very strong but at a harsh angle and you get long shadows.
11:27 Blindboy Boatclub? I have a false widow spider, living on my window, on my office window. And the only reason I'm aware of this false widow is because the past week, when it gets to this time in the evening, the false widow, it's a little spider about the size of a euro, its shadow, the sun hits the spider and casts its shadow on my wall, massive. So on my wall, this spider's shadow is about the size of my hand. I've, I caught, the spider's name is Rod Stewart. I'm a huge fan of the early efforts of Rod Stewart, when he was with a band called The Faces. Listen to a song like Gasoline Alley, some of the best country blues you'll ever fucking hear.
12:11 Blindboy Boatclub? And I was, I was in my office, listening to early Rod Stewart, when I noticed the projection of that spider's shadow on my walls. I said, fuck it, well, he's called Rod Stewart now, and he gets to live on my window. Well, she, she, because it's a female false widow. The false widow is Ireland's only venomous spider. It's not from Ireland, they're from the Canary Islands. And the reason it's, it's there on my window, just with its web, trying to catch some flies, living its life, is because it's so hot. Over the past fifteen years, false widows have, have become naturalised in Ireland. The temperatures have risen, and now the false widow is up there on my window going,
12:55 Blindboy Boatclub? well, fuck it, I'm in the Canary Islands, what the fuck do I know, I'm a spider. It's a little indication of, of, of climate change. It's supposed to be too cold for that spider to survive, but no, now they're becoming naturalised. It's gotten hot enough for them. I suppose this does tie in with Sheffield fart lamps. So briefly, a, a, a fart lamp is, it's a methane destructor. They're old Victorian lamp posts that...
13:23 Blindboy Boatclub? They burn on gas from the sewer and they came about in, in British cities around the Industrial Revolution. And why Rod Stewart, the, the False Widow is relevant to this conversation is, I suppose another thing I could speak about with Sheffield is the, the peppered moth. Moths, they are pure indicator species for the human impact on the environment for a couple of reasons. Now, moths are everywhere, aren't they? Moths are, I call them autistic butterflies. Butterflies are neurotypical and moths are autistic.
14:04 Blindboy Boatclub? W- when a butterfly comes into your house, you, you almost feel embarrassed, but you feel honoured when a butterfly comes into your fucking house. You, you wanna, you wanna make it a piece of cake. You want to offer a tea. When a butterfly comes into the house, everyone goes quiet and marvels at how delicate it is and graceful it is. And if you're lucky, the butterfly might come in and stop on your kitchen counter and gently flap its wings and everyone is like, oh my God, what a graceful social animal. And then a fucking moth comes in and it's chaos. You can't predict where they're gonna go. They're in a consistent state of, they're stimming. They bounce off walls, you don't know whether they're gonna, they're gonna hit off your
14:49 Blindboy Boatclub? head or not. And then if there's a light, the moth, it becomes obsessed, just a hun- you, if there is a light on, you're not gonna guide that moth out of your house like you can with a butterfly. You're not gonna be able to catch it gently like you can with a butterfly. If there's a fucking light, the moth just goes nuts and focuses on that light and nothing else. Highly autistic behaviour out of the moths. And then, and then if you dare try and touch it, just even a gentle tap, all this fucking dust, a lot of dust comes off its wings, you're like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And then it's too late then, you've, you've permanently damaged the moth.
15:30 Blindboy Boatclub? So if there's a moth in your gaff, you just have to turn off the lights, go to bed, leave a window open and hope it's not there in the morning. Highly delicate creatures, highly sensitive creatures, not attuned to human interaction in any way. Butterfly, different situation. Open the window, gracefully pirouettes out, Ariana Grande.
15:52 Blindboy Boatclub? But moths only started doing that when humans created artificial light. And that's what I mean when I say moths. They're indicators of human interference in the natural environment. There's mention of moths flying towards candles in the Bhagavad Gita, which is a two and a half thousand year old Indian manuscript. And they speak about moths being obsessed with flames, the human made flame. So scientists, only in the past fifteen years, I think it is, went to figure out what the fuck is going on? Why are moths obsessed with light bulbs and candles and flames? What's going on here? And what they found was, moths use light to navigate.
16:37 Blindboy Boatclub? They tilt their backs towards a light source. So the light source is supposed to be the sky. So that's how moths know the difference between up and down. They read light. But as soon as humans came in with artificial light sources, in particular electric light, it completely disoriented the moths. So the moths are effectively, they're autistic animals. There's nothing wrong with the moth. They're overstimulated and disoriented by an environment that we've created for them.
17:13 Blindboy Boatclub? Moths, moths were an indicator species of the human impact on the environment of climate change. And also moths thought as a boat. The theory of evolution, one year before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and it relates to Sheffield, and I'll tell you why. So if you look at the industrial north of England, you can draw a shitty line from Liverpool, cross to Manchester, cross to Sheffield. That was the heart of the Industrial Revolution.
17:52 Blindboy Boatclub? By the eighteen thirties, that's when humans started burning lots and lots of coal and filling the atmosphere up with the carbon.
18:05 Blindboy Boatclub? The, the heat that I have outside my window right now, the reason that that fucking false widow is up there, Rod Stewart is up at the window right now. The fact that today is the hottest May twenty sixth that Limerick has had. You can trace all that back to the industrial north of England in the eighteen hundreds.
18:27 Blindboy Boatclub? And what happened with the moths was the forests that surrounded Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield had a population of moths and they were called the peppered moth. So the peppered moth is, it's not very remarkable looking.
18:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Its, its wings are white with black patterns, but I wouldn't even call them patterns. It's speckled. So it's, it's a, a white and black speckled moth. Now, the reason they're that colour is because of the trees that they'd live on in the daytime. So I remember I said earlier about moths and their sensitivity to light. Moths are nocturnal. They like being out at night time when it's completely dark and the only source of light might be the moon up there. So what the peppered moth used to do, and just say eighteen twenty, in the forests surrounding Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield.
19:29 Blindboy Boatclub? The moth used to just chill out on a tree, okay? Sleeping on a tree. But that tree had, would have lichen on the bark. Do you know when you look at a tree and there's, there's growth on the tree on the bark? There, there's lichen, like a moss, but it's not always green. Well, the lichen on these trees was like a grey, black speckled lichen. So the moth, the peppered moth, would just chill out on those trees and its wings would be completely camouflaged against the lichen on that tree. So if a bard is flying by, it's not going to see that moth.
20:11 Blindboy Boatclub? And that moth can just chill out in the daytime and sleep on that tree. And no bard is going to see it because it's perfectly camouflaged. But around 1848, naturalists who would go out collecting moths, collecting butterflies, they started to notice that these moths were changing colour. They were no longer finding peppered moths that had that familiar black and white speckled pattern on their wings. These moths were disappearing and they were being replaced with the same moth, but with a different colour wing. The new moths that they were finding were black or dark brown.
20:56 Blindboy Boatclub? And in 1848, they couldn't understand why. They're like, what the fuck is happening? It's the same moth, but why are they all black now? What's going on? All the moths are black. Where, where are the, the black and white ones gone? This doesn't make sense. But they recorded it and they didn't know why. And it took more than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, a geneticist called Bernard Kettlewell started to get interested in this, started to get interested in the, the sudden appearance of black moths around Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool in the 18, in 1848. And here's what had happened. So the Industrial Revolution, which was so new, which was so, all of a sudden,
21:41 Blindboy Boatclub? you have these new cities, these new giant cities full of hundreds of thousands of people churning out smoke and carbon and pollution and noxious chemicals into the air. The pollution from the English cities in the north was dissipating out into the countryside like a miasma. And remember that word miasma? Because it's relevant to the fart lamp discourse, which I'll get onto later. So soot from coal and sulfur dioxide.
22:11 Blindboy Boatclub? Was descending upon the forests of the north of England, the forests that were once worshipped as sacred groves by the Anglo Saxons. This soot was descending upon the trees and it was killing the lichen. So that moss, that lichen that was attached to the trees, the pollution was killing it. So now the trees just had exposed bark. Suddenly, all the peppered moths who were chilling out in the daytime, relaxing on the fucking trees. Now they don't have camouflage anymore and the birds are thrilled. The birds are going, fuck, yes. Look at all those dark trees and all those white moths sticking out like a sore thumb. So the birds started to eat all the, the, the moths now, the, the white and black moths,
22:56 Blindboy Boatclub? because they could see them. But the tiny number of fully black moths, which was rare, the small number of them, they didn't get eaten by the birds. They survived and they got to procreate. And then, over the course of like 10 or 20 years, the white and black peppered moth disappears. And now you just have all these black moths because they can camouflage themselves effectively on the trees that are ravaged by pollution. But the peppered moth phenomenon, as interesting as it is, I couldn't do, I couldn't make a video about that as one of my favorite things about Sheffield, because it's not unique to Sheffield.
23:38 Blindboy Boatclub? It was a, a north of England industrial revolution phenomenon, not just the north of England. It happened in, in North America too, with the peppered moth, which drew my attention back to the, the fart lamps of Sheffield. So about six months ago, seven months ago on this podcast, I was going over to London. It was, it was to receive an award and I didn't know whether I was, I was going to win this award or not. And as I've mentioned before, I don't like focusing on awards on external validation. So I made the trip about. Visiting the last, the last functioning fart lamp of London.
24:22 Blindboy Boatclub? And I went and I found it in an alleyway behind the Savoy Hotel. But afterwards I learned, it's a replica, it's not the real deal. It's not an actual Victorian sewer gas destructor lamp. That's what a fart lamp is. So in the eighteen hundreds, in cities in England, because of the Industrial Revolution, because of the amount of jobs, because civilization was changing, cities expanded rapidly. They expanded at a rate that the infrastructure of the cities could not keep up with. This created all sorts of issues. Housing overcrowding, poverty, addiction became a thing. Crime started to explode.
25:07 Blindboy Boatclub? The, the ills of society, of modern society, stuff that we now just take as normal. These things came about when capitalism forced humans to live in unnatural overcrowded situations in rapidly expanding cities. Something which was tested massively too, were sewer systems. So all of a sudden you have a city like Sheffield. In the seventeen fifties Sheffield had a population of seven thousand. So that's a little village. One hundred years later Sheffield had a population of one hundred and thirty five thousand, became a city.
25:46 Blindboy Boatclub? So it rapidly exploded in population in a, in a very short amount of time because of the Industrial Revolution, because of steel being made in Sheffield. The sewer system, right, people's waste from toilets, cesspits, was made very rapidly and without planning. So you have all this sewerage in pipes and canals underneath the city. But this sewerage then decomposes and it produces gas. Methane, sulfur dioxide, farts.
26:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Fart gas underneath the city. And that gas would just come out of the ground and the whole place would stink, like really badly. London had the same situation. The year of eighteen fifty eight in London was known as the Great Stink. Eighteen fifty eight was called the Great Stink because you had this rapidly expanding city and then an inadequate sewer system and a collection of gases that made the whole place stink. It shut down the government for a summer. The Houses of Parliament were so smelly that people couldn't go in there. So inventions, people started to come up with inventions to solve this.
26:59 Blindboy Boatclub? There were these big pipes, pipes that would come up out of the ground and the gas could dissipate from these pipes, but that was still fucking stinking. Sheffield had a unique situation in that it was a rapidly expanding industrial city, but there was a lot of hills. So the gas would accumulate underneath hills and become particularly concentrated. So this new invention came about the end of the, end of the eighteen hundreds called the sewer gas destructor lamp. Now, what I love about the sewer gas destructor lamp is that it's, it's like an early form of renewable energy.
27:37 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a light post that harnesses that same gas from the sewer farts. And then the gas goes up the light post and it's lit in a flame and the light on your street is provided by farts, by farts that are on fire. I love that. I find it fascinating. I viewed it as, isn't that incredibly forward thinking? Because like right now, global warming, it's, it's not just burning fossil fuels, it's also.
28:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Like cattle, cattle create a huge amount of gas, carbon dioxide and methane in particular, from their farts. There's a couple of billion cows in the world and their farts are enough to heat the planet. Methane will heat the planet a lot more than carbon dioxide will. Another thing that cows do is they... A cow urine patch. Cows will all piss in the same area of a field. And when they do this, their piss leaches into the soil and it creates nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas. But nitrous oxide is, it's a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you, when you burn fossil fuels.
28:58 Blindboy Boatclub? So when nitrous oxide gets into the atmosphere, it really traps in heat. So cow urine patches, there's so many cows. And the thing is, cows are not nature, that's the thing. Cows don't exist, cows are not real. There's no such animal as a cow in nature. We created that animal. Cows, cows come from an animal called an auruc, which was a type of wild cattle that lived in herds around the Middle East. But we domesticated those and created the cow. And it's, it's, a cow to an auruc is like a pug to a wolf.
29:38 Blindboy Boatclub? So when billions of cows piss on the earth and fart, that's industrial pollution, we might as well be burning coal. It's the same thing. They create a lot of gas, methane from their farts, nitrous oxide from their piss. And then the decomposing matter of all the dairy that they produce. So it's a lot of gas. And one of the most forward-thinking approaches at the moment that science is doing is trying to see, how can we harness all that gas that the cattle industry makes and burn it for fuel? It's going up into the atmosphere anyway. How can we make biogas from this and make it useful? And biofuels are seen as a, an alternative to fossil fuels. When it comes to industry...
30:23 Blindboy Boatclub? As far as I know, right now, trucks, airplanes, and big ships, battery and solar, right now, it's not powerful enough to power these big industrial vehicles. So they do need fuel, and biofuel made from the waste from the cattle industry is a plausible substitution. The gas is being created anyway, it's gone up into the air, why can't we harness it? Soar gas destructor lamps were the Victorian equivalent of this. They took gas from decomposing human shit and piss and farts and turned it into a lamp that had a flame that could
31:04 Blindboy Boatclub? light a street. And Sheffield has the highest, the highest amount of these lamps left. Sheffield has around thirty of them, and I think six or seven are still operational. And I went looking for these lamps, and I found them all on Google Maps. And not only that, there's a running route in Sheffield City, a running route, where you can visit all six operational Sheffield soar gas destructor lamps. So I'm thinking, brilliant, isn't that class? Isn't that worth celebrating? But when I looked at all the locations and went on Google Maps
31:41 Blindboy Boatclub? to visit each, each and every one of these soar destructor lamps in Sheffield, I noticed a couple of things. Most of them are at the top of hills. Okay, fair enough, the gas collects underneath hills. But then I started to look at the houses around them, and I thought to myself, when these lamps were put there in the Victorian period and the Edwardian period, and I looked at the houses around the lamps, I went, these houses would have been, you'd have had to have a bit of money to live in a house like this in the Victorian or the Edwardian period. These look like middle-class houses. Why are all the soar destructor lamps in Sheffield only in neighbourhoods where the people live in there?
32:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Would have had some money, would have been upper middle class. What's going on here? And then that led me down a fucking rabbit hole. I now view the lamps very differently. They are vestigial totems of anti-Irish racism. Now, I know what you're thinking. He brings it all back to the Brits, doesn't he? He brings it all back to the Brits and colonialism, doesn't he? I fucking do. And I'll tell you why. So just behind where I'm doing that gig in Sheffield, Sheffield City Hall, literally just behind it, there's this, an area, and the area is known as the crafts, right? Now, when you go there now, nothing special. Couple of office buildings, a few apartments.
33:11 Blindboy Boatclub? In the 1850s, that area was called Little Ireland. It was a fucking slum. It was a poverty-stricken slum that was so full of Irish immigrants that it was called Little Ireland. Now, 1850, what's happening in 1850? Well, from 1843 up until 1848, you have the famine, the genocide, the famine in Ireland, where our population dropped from eight million people to four million people. The ones that didn't die emigrated. A load of... You're talking the poorest of the poor here. The Irish immigrant in 1847
33:55 Blindboy Boatclub? would have been the equivalent of the people trying to reach Britain now on boats, the people who it is socially acceptable in fucking newspapers to say that those boats should be blown up. The dehumanising language that's used against people from Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia. That was Irish immigrants in 1850. We were the, the main... We would get to Liverpool and Irish people would try and find jobs in factories in the Industrial Revolution. And this led to the huge working-class Irish populations that you see in the north of England. People would walk from Liverpool to Sheffield.
34:39 Blindboy Boatclub? And when they got to Sheffield, they'd settle into the crafts, into Little Ireland. These people are escaping unbelievable oppression, fucking famine, they're dying.
34:52 Blindboy Boatclub? They're sick, they have typhus, typhoid, cholera. They become untouchables. Centered around this crofts area where there was a high level of criminality, drunkenness, addiction, and then also little industries, people making cutlery, people making tools. But attitudes at the time from the British ruling class was that if someone was sick and poor, it's because God decided that it was a judgment. I'm just gonna give you an 1848 quote from a fella called Charles Trevillian, who was an English civil servant, I believe, whose job it was to oversee aid during the Irish famine.
35:35 Blindboy Boatclub? But he said about the Irish, "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and turbulent character of the people. The judgment of God sent this calamity to teach the Irish a lesson." So the Irish are sick and dying and full of disease and filth and poverty and all of the disenfranchisement of society. They are this way because we're just fucking bad, inferior people and God decided this and there's nothing you can fucking do about it, you just have to put up with us. And that bothered us wherever we went, and it bothered us to Manchester, to London and to Sheffield.
36:18 Blindboy Boatclub? Just a couple of minutes down the road from the area of the crofts, you've got the Sheffield cholera monument, which it's when there was a cholera epidemic in Sheffield in 1832. The Irish were blamed for that, of course. In the 1800s, medicine, this is how I'm getting to the fart lamps. Medicine wasn't at a point where people understood what disease was, didn't understand what bacteria were, pathogens, viruses. The idea of there's actually tiny organisms that you can't see with the eye, but this is what causes illness, that was nuts. It didn't exist, it was insane.
37:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Instead, what you had was miasma theory. Miasma theory basically was...
37:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Disease is a thing, we can see it, it's all around us. But it's caused by bad smells. So if in eighteen fifty, and you're a middle-class doctor, English doctor in Sheffield, and you go into an area like the Crofts, Little Ireland, you step into an overcrowded slum where there's, there's no toilets. The people are subject to racism, so they're disenfranchised, they don't have opportunities, they don't have a social net, they can't climb upwards. They're highly traumatised because they came from fucking Ireland where they're colonised, highly traumatised because they're escaping a famine. You have all the, the recipe for social collapse.
37:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Crime, addiction, violence, vice, everything follows. And the whole place fucking stinks and everybody is sick. Everybody is dying of typhus and cholera, diphtheria and typhoid. But then the middle-class doctor walks in there and goes, "It fucking stinks here as well. All these sick, it fucking stinks." Because everyone's shitting in the mud. "It stinks here." The Victorians conflated correlation with causation. It was a sanitary determinism. "The Irish are full of disease and they're like this because they stink. And anywhere the fucking Irish are, it's stinking.
38:36 Blindboy Boatclub? And if you can, if you..." I had a friend of mine who went down to the Crofts last week and he caught cholera. He caught cholera from the smell. Like, think of a plague doctor. That old terrifying image of the plague doctors, where they look like a crow. They wear this mask with their eyes covered and this big, long, black beak. And then inside this beak... Was stuffed with strong smelling herbs like lavender and mint. It wasn't about keeping out germs, it was about preventing, you can't smell. Just don't smell the poverty that these people are in and then you won't catch the disease. They didn't know the plague was being caused by a fucking flea, an infected flea.
39:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Or that cholera is being caused by drinking water, drinking water that's not sanitized and that's infected with cholera. They didn't understand that. So my asthma theory was, disease is caused by a vapor. A foul smelling vapor in the air. Why? Cause look at this slum, it smells like shit and they're all sick, so it's the smell. And this, this didn't just happen to us in, in, in England. Like over in New York in the late, uh, what, eighteen ninety? There was a woman called Mary Mellon from Tyrone, and I, again, very poor Irish immigrant to New York. She became known as Typhoid Mary because she carried typhoid, but she was asymptomatic.
40:03 Blindboy Boatclub? So she had no symptoms and she was working in wealthy houses as a cook. And they couldn't understand, how the fuck are all these posh people getting typhoid? This area is clean, it doesn't smell, there's no miasma here, what's going on? And through Mary Mellon, who became known as Typhoid Mary, that's how we discovered asymptomatic carriers of disease. People who can carry a disease but show no symptoms. It was the miasma theory that caused them to miss that. So miasma theory. Disease, we don't know what bacteria is, we don't know what viruses are yet. So disease is caused by bad smells, bad smells from the poor, especially the poorest immigrants, the fucking famine Irish.
40:48 Blindboy Boatclub? This became a moral panic. A little bit like during the COVID pandemic when people thought that five G towers were emitting COVID.
41:00 Blindboy Boatclub? A moral panic based around fear that wasn't backed up by science, just a feeling. Or the earliest, earliest stages of the pandemic where Asian people, Chinese takeaways, were getting fucking attacked because people associated the early stages of Covid with, this is Chinese people who have this. I've found some academic journals, history journals, discussing that the Sheffield gas destructor lamps and the gist that I'm getting is there was a moral panic around the stench of sewer gas in the Victorian period.
41:40 Blindboy Boatclub? And this was exploited by capitalists who wanted to sell sewer destructor lamps. And this is why they were being put in wealthier, middle-class neighbourhoods. And there was a couple of different companies competing to make the best sewer destructor lamp. But because they were competing capitalistically to sell their fart gas lamps, they were releasing pamphlets with disinformation about the dangers of this miasma. Whenever there was an outbreak of typhoid or cholera like you had in 1932, or diphtheria or anything, it was blamed on the stench of the Irish.
42:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Coming from Little Ireland, the stench of sewer gas that you smell when you're in the city centre of Sheffield, around Little Ireland, you cannot have that stench popping up on the hills in the more middle-class areas, because as soon as that smell gets up there, everyone's going to get hit with cholera. So they started marketing these fucking lamps that burn the gas so that you don't smell it. And they worked. They worked in capturing sewer gas and burning it so that you wouldn't smell it in your nice, middle-class neighbourhood. They worked in that respect, but they didn't do anything to stop the spread of cholera, because cholera had nothing to do with the smell of farts. But also they become. A sign of a nice neighbourhood.
43:09 Blindboy Boatclub? In the way that, so if you're going around a city today, signifiers of middle classness, not someone being massively wealthy, but a person having a few quid in their pocket. It's no longer about the size of that person's house, because houses are financialised. So even the smallest little house, a house that used to be a council house a hundred years ago, could be worth half a million quid in most cities today now. So the signifier of wealth now is solar panels and electric vehicles and batteries.
43:47 Blindboy Boatclub? If you're in a neighbourhood and it's ex-council houses or ex-terrace Victorian council houses, and you see solar panels on the roof, then that signifies, oh, this is a middle-class neighbourhood. Gas destructor lamps in the Victorian period were a bit like that. This is our middle-class neighbourhood. There's no smells around here. There's no fucking paddies around here either, because there's no smells. You can't have paddies anywhere there's a gas destructor lamp. It was a way for the nouveau riche, English of Sheffield, to signify how separate they were to the filthy, dirty Irish, who couldn't climb the social ladder, who were down there in the crafts, living in their own shit like pigs.
44:31 Blindboy Boatclub? So the gas destructor lamps of Sheffield now have taken a new meaning on for me. They're totems of anti-Irish Victorian racism. That's what they are to me now. I know that's tenuous. I know there's going to be some English people rolling their eyes at me. I know I sound like a bit of a lunatic. There's a bit of autism going on in here, the old pattern recognition. This is a hot take, that's a very hot take. But when I formalise this hot take, I'm drawing from two things. The first one that I always draw from is that folkloric way of reading the landscape and allowing it to tell me a story, before we had this technology of writing.
45:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Every mountain had to have a story, every tree had to have a story. And you constructed the memory and histories of your people through the landscape. That's the oral tradition, the Irish oral tradition. That's what the filly used to do. That lake over there is not just a lake, because in that lake, there was a fish called the salmon of knowledge. But you see, that fish's name was Finton. And Finton wasn't always a salmon, because before he was a salmon, he actually came over to Ireland on Noah's boat. And see, now you're telling the whole history of Ireland, because someone asked you a question about a lake. That's the oral tradition. That's what I'm doing with the fart lamps of Sheffield. I can visit six lamps and tell you the story of the Irish famine and colonization and anti-Irish racism.
46:00 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm doing that because I like the crack of doing it. But the other thing I'm doing is I'm drawing on, on... There was a Marxist critical theorist called Walter Benjamin. And Benjamin used to, he would get seemingly disconnected cultural objects and place them beside each other until they reveal some type of hidden truth. And also, the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism, right? So those fart gas lamps, private companies built those. Competing fart gas lamp makers competed with each other to sell them through a fucking commodity fetishism.
46:42 Blindboy Boatclub? A culture would consume the aesthetic fragments of the thing whose suffering it's simultaneously refusing to confront. So you have a situation in Victorian Sheffield where there's a big huge slum full of starving, dying Irish people, and there's cholera epidemics, and there's suffering. And everybody's a human, everyone is a human, and no one likes to see pain and suffering and starving children. So capitalism comes along and says, I have a solution. I'm gonna package something that'll solve your problem. And you don't have to think about that anymore, because you've just purchased this, my fart gas lamp.
47:24 Blindboy Boatclub? You don't have to think about the starving, stinking, smelly Irish who you kinda hate anymore now. And you don't have to be afraid of their disgusting smells that are definitely gonna give you cholera, because I've just given you this stupid pole. That that sets farts on fire and now you can get on with your nice day up on the hill. So using that analysis and with enough time and distance, I can go, yeah. I can plausibly call those fart gas lamps in Sheffield totems of anti-Irish racism. I'll give you an example that's happening right now, and this is gonna seem insane. But in fifty years' time, with hindsight, it's not gonna look that insane. So Dubai chocolate bars.
48:11 Blindboy Boatclub? From about twenty twenty four to mid twenty twenty five. Dubai chocolate bars were just unexplainably massive. I have never seen anything like Dubai chocolate bars.
48:26 Blindboy Boatclub? I remember when it started and I was.
48:32 Blindboy Boatclub? I was up in a part of Limerick where you will see queues, you'll see queues of people buying drugs. You'll see that and I saw a queue of people and they were going into a shop. And they were all coming out of the shop with little blocks of tin foil.
48:51 Blindboy Boatclub? And I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Are people, what are people buying in that shop? And I went in and people were buying Dubai chocolate bars and I'd never heard of them.
49:03 Blindboy Boatclub? And Dubai chocolate bars exploded on the internet on TikTok out of nowhere. And lo, they weren't even being made commercially yet. Local shops who had the knowledge of how to make Dubai chocolate bars were making them themselves and setting them in tin foil. For like twenty quid for a small bar and people were buying it. I'd never seen anything like it. And then Dubai chocolate bars became commercial. Companies started making them. They were in every single shop. Everyone was purchasing Dubai chocolate bars just to say they had them. Everyone was obsessed with Dubai chocolate bars. But what else was happening?
49:45 Blindboy Boatclub? When Dubai chocolate bars were unexplainably viral, what else was happening? At the exact moment that Dubai chocolate bars were being sold everywhere. There was a genocide happening in Gaza and every day we were seeing on our fucking phones.
50:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Levels of violence that we're not supposed to see. We all saw horrible, horrible traumatizing things. And most of us saw so many dead people per day that eventually you had to kind of turn away from it and get on with your life, just to deal with it, because we were so powerless with how much pain and suffering. And our governments were doing fuck all. The UN was calling it out. Nothing was happening. Nothing we could do could stop it. This was relentless. There was nothing we could do. What is a Dubai chocolate bar? It's chocolate, pistachio cream. And then the most important
50:42 Blindboy Boatclub? part is that crunchy weird bit in the middle. It's a type of spun pastry called kadeif. The roots of the Dubai chocolate bar is a Palestinian dessert called knafa. It's a Palestinian dessert from the city of Nablus, Palestine. Now, most people aren't aware of that. No one purchasing a Dubai chocolate bar is aware of that. I'm sure the people in fucking Dubai, they're definitely aware of that. Dubai, a country that did fuck all to help the people of Palestine. The influencers that could have used their platform to call out a genocide,
51:23 Blindboy Boatclub? they didn't because they'd lose sponsorships. So those same influencers, they started peddling Dubai chocolate bars. So to apply that Walter Benjamin criticality to it, what does commodity fetishism do? It causes a culture. It's when a culture will consume aesthetic fragments of the thing whose suffering it's refusing to confront and trying to ignore. And my personal opinion, in the deep unconscious of society's mind, that's what the fuck Dubai chocolate bars were. It was people turning away from a genocide of Palestinians, ignoring it, pretending it doesn't exist, and soothing themselves.
52:09 Blindboy Boatclub? This inexplicably viral chocolate bar that has roots in a Palestinian dessert. In fifty years' time, with hindsight, that will seem like, it'll seem much, much less insane than it does right now. Because I know most of ye are going, I didn't fucking know that about Dubai. You're, I'm only finding out now that Dubai chocolate is based on a Palestinian dessert. I'm only finding that out now. It's actually, it's deeply intertwined. Dubai chocolate bars caused a world pistachio shortage. Did you know that pistachios are at the centre of the war in Iran that's unfolding right now? Who are the two biggest pistachio producers in the world? Iran and California. What are California doing growing pistachios?
52:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Pistachios aren't from California, they're from the Middle East. What's going on there? Well, California started to grow pistachios in, in nineteen seventy nine. What happened in nineteen seventy nine? The Iranian revolution and also the Iran hostage crisis. What? Yeah, so before nineteen seventy nine, more or less all the pistachios in the world were grown in Iran. But then after nineteen seventy nine, relations between the US and Iran and Israel really fucking fell apart. So the US put embargoes, trade embargoes on Iran. So Iran couldn't really export its pistachios to the US anymore because it was too expensive. There were, well, there was embargoes, they fucking couldn't.
53:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, at that time, they were just testing out growing pistachios in California. Tiny, tiny little industry. But suddenly the US government said, here, California, let's start growing fucking pistachios. Because we're not, we're not buying them from the Iranians anymore. And this massive pistachio industry emerges in California post nineteen seventy nine. Really controversial, by the way, because it's responsible for huge water shortages in California. So thi- this starts to boom. And then by twenty twenty five, there's two places in the world growing pistachios.
54:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Iran and California, the two biggest markets for pistachios. There's plausible accusations that at the beginning of the war in Iran, a couple of months back, plausible accusations that Iranian pistachio farms were blown up. They're just pistachio farms and they were blown up. And the Yanks said, no, they were full of munitions. There's a headline in the Financial Times just a month ago. Iran War Hits Pistachio Supplies Amid Dubai Chocolate Boom. Wait a minute. So just at the time where there's this huge US Israeli war on Iran, and there's this confection called Dubai chocolate that's based on a Palestinian dessert, which is one of the most popular confections in the world.
55:01 Blindboy Boatclub? You mean, right now? Iran can't export pistachios? And California is profiting from this massively? Now, all of the Dubai chocolate and pistachio cream that the world wants, right now at this very specific time? You mean, all that's coming from California now? Because the Yanks are bombing our... Fuck off. Go away, really? Look it up yourselves. Sheffield fart lamps, Sheffield gas destructor lamps are the Victorian equivalent of Dubai chocolate bars. I'm actually forgetting to do a fucking Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina, what do I have? Mosquito spray. From the time I almost did a gig in Thailand.
55:46 Blindboy Boatclub? But I had to cancel it because of the pandemic back in 2019. I had a number of items on my desk there and I couldn't chose, I could have chosen any of them and I've chosen the mosquito spray. And now it's after reminding me. So the word malaria, which, you know, that's what you get. The reason I have this spray is that so if I was going to Thailand to do a gig, I wouldn't get malaria. Well, I had other things as well, there was medicine I had to take, but this spray was for mosquitoes. The word malaria came from the Italian word for miasma. Miasma theory was popular all across Europe. And in Italy, they had a problem with malaria. And...
56:30 Blindboy Boatclub? What it was is there were swamps, there were swamps near Rome. Stinky, smelly swamps. They'd gotten rid of a fucking forest. They cut down a forest and there was all these swamps. And people near the swamps would get malaria and they didn't know what it was. They didn't know that it was caused by mosquito bites, by a bacteria or a plasma in the mud. They hadn't a clue about that. They assumed malaria is caused by the stink of that swamp. And malaria was their word for miasma. So, and that's why we call malaria malaria. It's, they thought it was a foul air from swamps.
57:12 Blindboy Boatclub? And then we learned, no, it's mosquitoes that breed in the swamps that are infected with this, this plasma. Or parasites. And then another thing I wanted to get on to from that. I'll never get this fucking Ocarina pause done. Cork City, in fairness to them. Cork, Cork want to build the world's smallest statue. And I'm jealous of Cork because this is the best idea I've heard in years. So Oliver Cromwell, who, Oliver Cromwell who did genocide in Ireland, who we fucking hate, right? Oliver Cromwell died in the 1600s from malaria that he got in Cork.
57:57 Blindboy Boatclub? It was called Cork fever at the time. But Cork City want to build the world's smallest statue. They want to build a statue of the mosquito from Cork that killed Oliver Cromwell, which is brilliant. But I don't think the story is true. And I think the myth that the, the. I went looking up Cromwell's death. He died from some fever.
58:24 Blindboy Boatclub? They didn't know when Cromwell died that mosquitoes bit people and caused malaria. They didn't know, years before they discovered that. They say that he died from Cork fever. It's a myth or a legend that it was a mosquito that bit him in Cork. I think the misunderstanding comes from the word malaria and the word miasma. I think Cromwell got typhoid or typhus or something like that. The other thing they say that might have killed him was if it was malaria, like actual malaria that you get off mosquitoes, which is strange because those type of mosquitoes can't survive in Cork. The mosquitoes that can, maybe they can with global warming now like that,
59:09 Blindboy Boatclub? like Rod Stewart outside my window. We will have mosquitoes that can survive the type that carry malaria. There's no way they were in Cork in the 1600s. But apparently Cromwell died because he got malaria from a Cork mosquito and refused the treatment. The treatment was quinine. Quinine is what's in gin and tonic, the tonic. And that's a cure for malaria. And apparently Cromwell wouldn't take it because quinine came from Catholic Jesuits who learned about quinine from the indigenous people of Peru. And he refused the Jesuit powder and that's why he died.
59:50 Blindboy Boatclub? All lovely stories. I don't want it to get in the way of, I'm being a cunt towards Cork. I'm jealous. I'm jealous that Cork are building a statue to the tiny mosquito that killed Oliver Cromwell. So I'm trying to piss on them. I'm trying to piss on their parade and say, I reckon that that's not true. And it arises from a misunderstanding between the word miasma and malaria, which meant the same thing at the time. Okay, Ocarina Paws, one hour into the fucking pa- who gives a fuck at this stage? Eight years.
1:00:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Ocarina Paws, I'm gonna spray this mosquito spray that's probably gone off because I've had it since 2019 and you're gonna hear some adverts for bullshit, all right? Commodity fetishism. Oh, oh, deet. That's the smell of fucking deet.
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1:02:38 Blindboy Boatclub? That horrible, horrible smell.
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1:03:14 Speaker 01 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.
1:03:42 Speaker 03 This is Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. Let's be real, getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin. In fact, about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control. Between scheduling appointments, missing work, class, or just trying to exist, it's a lot. But now O-Pill is putting birth control in our control. O-Pill's a daily birth control that's FDA-approved, full prescription strength and estrogen-free, and 98% effective when used as directed. Grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed. So if you're thinking about birth control, check out O-Pill to see if it's right for you.
1:04:24 Speaker 03 Use code GIGGLY for 25% off your first month of O-Pill at O-P-I-L-L dot com. That's code GIGGLY at O-P-I-L-L dot com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.
1:04:38 Blindboy Boatclub? That's enough of that.
1:04:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Support for the podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindboypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to it, please consider funding the podcast directly via the Patreon page. It's my full-time job, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I earn a living, it's how I pay all my bills, it's how I have the time to obsess and research over things and deliver a proper hot take. It's a listener-funded podcast, all right? So if you're into that, all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free, because the person who's
1:05:26 Blindboy Boatclub? paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model. And it keeps me independent. And it means that advertisers can't dictate what I talk about in any way. They advertise on my terms. Upcoming gigs. Berlin next month, middle of June, right? First night is sold out. Second night, literally, we're down to 10 tickets. It's probably gone already. Okay, so if you're, I'd say Berlin is gone, but chance your arm. Then Sheffield in July, Crosswires Festival. I'd really lovely, love you to come along to that. All right. This
1:06:07 Blindboy Boatclub? podcast inadvertently ended up as a giant advert for that one gig. But yeah, come along to that gig in Sheffield. It's on the, I'll check here. The start of July. I'm shit at remembering numbers or anything like that.
1:06:26 Blindboy Boatclub? 5th of July, in Sheffield City Hall, the Crosswires Festival. Come along to my podcast. And I don't know who I'm going to interview yet. I'm still waiting on suggestions from ye. Give me a shout on Instagram at Blind Boy Boat Club regarding that Sheffield gig. Then, fuck all after that, really, until that big tour in October, in England, Scotland and Wales.
1:06:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Starting on the 18th of October, a lot of these are sold out, but you will still get tickets for some. Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, that's sold out, Glasgow, as good as sold out. Gateshead, I uncovered evidence of a possible sacred grove there around Gateshead. And the name Gateshead, it's actually old Anglo-Saxon, it means goat's head. There's some shit going on there, I need to learn more about Gateshead. Lots, big, big Irish immigration there too. I'm gonna be getting into Gateshead a bit more. Just while I was doing the Sheffield research, Gateshead started popping up, especially
1:07:39 Blindboy Boatclub? around the pagan Anglo-Saxon stuff. Then I'm in Nottingham, and the first, is it? No, the ele- I'm shit at dates. I'm in fucking Nottingham sometime around October. Alright, and you'll get those tickets. fin.co.uk forward slash theblindbypodcast, and then the Sheffield tickets, Crashtwires Festival. What'll I leave you with now, that I left the Ocarina pause so late? I'll leave you with a small little story from Greek mythology, because I believe that this story, again, we're talking 2500 year old story, I believe that this story is actually
1:08:24 Blindboy Boatclub? about the history of sanitation. It's a story about the first sewers in Greek cities, and it's a story, I tell my little children this story, it's one of their favourite stories that I tell them before bed, except when I tell them this story, if they get, if they're so tired that they're hyper, I have to make them laugh. So I tell the story like this the whole time, like your drunk, drunk limerick aunt, I tell the whole story like that, about Heracles, and that gets all the energy out of little toddlers, and they laugh so much and then they fall asleep. But I'll tell you the story, the story is about, it's from the trials of Heracles, and Heracles was-
1:09:11 Blindboy Boatclub? Like a strong man in Greek mythology. And it's the story of how Heracles had to clean out a king's stables. And I love this, what I like about this story is, it reminds me a bit of Irish mythology of the Thine. Because the king in this story, whose name is, King called King Augeus, right?
1:09:35 Blindboy Boatclub? So King Augeus is this very, very wealthy king. But his wealth is, it's not just determined by the money that he has, it's determined by the, the size of the herd of cattle that he has. And that's the bit that reminds me of Irish myths, because we have a story called the Thine, which is all about the most powerful king or queen in the land is the one who owns the most cattle. And that's, that's what we had in Ireland before, before the monasteries, we were a pastoral economy based on how much cattle you owned and cattle raids and all this crack. So the King Augeus in fucking ancient Greece,
1:10:17 Blindboy Boatclub? he's surveying his land. And he's like, I am the richest king because I have the largest herd of cows. No one has as many cows as me, I'm so fucking powerful. But the problem was,
1:10:31 Blindboy Boatclub? in order to stop the, the cows being stolen, they all had to be herded into a giant stables every single night. They were locked away. But while the cows were in this fucking stable, there were so many of them, they used to shit and shit and shit.
1:10:49 Blindboy Boatclub? And King Augeus's cows would do mountains of shit in the stables that were so big that there weren't enough people. It's like a little analogy for global warming as well, there weren't enough people in his kingdom to shovel away all the shit because he had too many cows per people, fucking hell.
1:11:14 Blindboy Boatclub? This is 2,500 years. I'm only realising this now, because obviously I don't apply this type of analysis to the story when I'm telling it to my toddlers. But now I'm thinking about it going, this is about a king. It's like the world now with too many cows. And his too many cows are creating too many shit. And there's, there's more cows than people. And they're being overwhelmed with the refuse and feculence of cows, like we are with the atmosphere. So the king, anyway, Aegis, what are we gonna do with the mounds and mounds of cow shit in this shed? It's, the whole place is full of flies. This place is stinking. There's nothing we can do with this.
1:11:59 Blindboy Boatclub? And no one's able to shovel it out. So this hero comes along one day, and the hero's name is Heracles. Now, Heracles is like a heroic figure. He's, he's legendary. He's like Kukulla. And Heracles comes along to the king and says, I hear you've got a problem with your stables with all the cows. I hear there's mountains of shit and you don't have enough workers in the land to get rid of this shit. I can do it. I can do it in one day. And then the king, Augeus, is like, listen to this fucking prick. Who does he think he is that he can clear away all that shit in one day when my entire village can't do it? Who does this fella think he is?
1:12:42 Blindboy Boatclub? So Augeus then, because he's a prick, you see, this king is a prick. Augeus makes a deal with Heracles and goes, alright, so if you're so good, Heracles, you cocky fuck, you think you can clean out my stables? And then Heracles goes, not only can I clean it out, I'll clean it out in a day. I'll do it in a day. I'm Heracles. So the king goes, alright, so.
1:13:04 Blindboy Boatclub? You clean out that stables and get rid of all that shit in one day. Shovel all that shit out in one day. And I'll pay you handsomely. When the sun sets. And he agreed a ridiculous figure to pay him, like loads of money. And the king is thinking in his head, this fella's a fool. He's full of muscles, but he has no brains. And best result, he's gonna do a good job, but he's not gonna clean out all of it. Alright, there's no way he's gonna do that, so I'm gonna get a job for free here. Meanwhile, the king's son, Phileas, is listening in. Listening to this deal. And he's going, what's this deal that my dad's doing with this Heracles fellow? So Heracles says, fuck it, I'm gonna do it anyway. So he goes off to the stables.
1:13:51 Blindboy Boatclub? And encounters the giant, giant mounds of cow shit in the stables. Now, everybody's expecting, all the workers are looking, going, we've been trying to shovel this stuff. For months, and we can't budget, there's just too, there's too many cows doing too many shits, it's impossible. We can't shovel it out. But Heracles isn't just strong, he's clever. So what Heracles does is instead of shoveling all the shit out of the stables.
1:14:22 Blindboy Boatclub? He goes with his shovel and his massive strength. And he digs a canal that goes from the stables to the local river. And then he goes to the walls of the stables and busts a massive hole. And now what happens? All of the shit in the stables flows out of the stables into this canal he just dug. And then flows into the river. And what he's done there is he's actually created a sewer system. He's created the world's first sewer. And everyone around is going, oh my god, why didn't I think of that? Fucking hell, why didn't I think of that? And then rapidly, all of this shit in the stables that they couldn't get rid of.
1:15:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Is flowing into the river and washing away. And the people can't believe this. My god, he's done it. And the sun hasn't even set. So now Heracles goes back to the king and goes, there, I did it. Your stables are clean, the shit is gone. And the king is going, I meant that you had to shovel it out. You didn't say that specifically, king, you just said, get rid of the shit and I did it. Now it's all in the river, your problem is gone, where's my money? But the king is a prick. So now the king goes, "I'm not paying you the money." "What do you mean you're not paying me the money?"
1:15:44 Blindboy Boatclub? "I'm not gonna pay someone who shovels shit for a living, and he doesn't honour his deal, and it's clear now that he's a sneaky fuck." And meanwhile, the king's son Philias is listening, and he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach because he's realising, Philias is about thirteen, he's realising for the first time that his dad is not an honourable man. And Philias walks out and says, "Hold on a minute, dad, that's not fair. This man did the job that you asked him to do, pay him properly." And then the king goes ape shit and says, "Go to your room. Don't ever embarrass me like that again in public." And he has his guards get Heracles, and they throw him out of the kingdom. They throw him out.
1:16:30 Blindboy Boatclub? And then Heracles goes back to all his pals, who are a bunch of hard cunts,
1:16:37 Blindboy Boatclub? and they come back into the kingdom as this fearsome army. And all the soldiers in the kingdom just go, "We're not fucking fighting these. This is like a band of god warrior heroes. We're not fighting them." So they lay down their arms, and then Heracles and his mates walk up to the castle, and they go to the king, and they say, "You're not a just king. You're not an honourable man." Heracles snatches the crown from his head and puts it on to his son Philias. And Heracles says, "Your son is the king now, because he was the one who jumped out and pointed out that what you were doing was dishonest. So he's proven himself. He understands honour, keeping a bargain,
1:17:22 Blindboy Boatclub? preserving someone's dignity, being a decent person. This young fella is fit to rule, but not you, because you're dishonest." So he's got the crown now, he's the king. "And if you leave this kingdom and never come back, we'll spare your life." So King Aegis fucks off into the hills, and then Philias becomes the new king, and he rules with fairness and with a brand new sewer system. And obviously, I'm telling ye a version for ye because you're adults. I tell a very different version at bedtimes. But that story...
1:17:59 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm telling it because it's dawning on me that that's actually, that's a 2,500 year old story about the invention of sanitation. The efficiency of, if you have a city, or a town, or a kingdom, and everyone's doing shits, there's a way to deal with it if you're smart. And that's by digging a canal and fucking it into the river. Which works if you've got a population of 150 people, but it did not work in the 1800s in London with the Great Stink, because that's exactly what happened. All the shit was going into the Thames. Alright, that's all I have time for this week. I always say that, that was a bizarre podcast, but they're all bizarre.
1:18:44 Blindboy Boatclub? They're all strange. What are we gonna do? I'll catch you next week. Go out and enjoy the weather. In the meantime, rub a dog. Genuflect to a swan. Wink at Rod Stewart, the Foz widow.
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