The shared history of Madeira Cake, Crack Cocaine and Bicycle Repairs

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I've had an eventful week. Well, I suppose it wasn't that eventful.
I got I got two punctures on my bicycle again. I adore cycling.
I cycle everywhere. I use my bike every single day.

I cycle my bicycle as an act of humility.

And I've been doing this for years as an act of humility. I'm aware that sounds ridiculous but what I mean by that is cycling a bicycle sets me up for the day.

I

used to have a car. Fucking years ago, I drove a car and I used to dislike the sensation of of

arriving at my destination and feeling sluggish, feeling as if I hadn't actually traveled because I hadn't.

I'd sat in an armchair and pressed a button so I never liked that that tired sluggish feeling from driving a car but with cycling I'm breathing, I'm active, the wind is in my face.

When I cycle into work in the morning, I have to be mindful. I must engage in mindfulness.
I have to check in with the environment and go, how cold is it? Is it going to rain? How should I dress?

How should I prepare? Is it windy? That requires mindfulness. That requires noticing and checking in with my environment, grounding myself to a certain extent.

You got to be in the here and now, in the present moment. You ever get into a car, drive to your destination and not remember getting there.
You can't do that with a bike.

When you arrive at your destination on a bicycle, you you remember the journey because you were present. You don't get that with a car.

You can get into a car with your head up your arse and not really even notice if it's raining. I fucking love it if it's raining in the morning.

The more treacherous the weather, the more I like it. Head to toe waterproof Gore-Tex, waterproof boots.
I love cycling in the wind and rain. while also being warm and dry while I'm doing it.

I get a lovely feeling of accomplishment from that. And then just the act of cycling itself.
It's just the right amount of effort. It's not painful, it's not unpleasant, but it's not...

it's not as easy as driving a car. And then before you know it, I'm in my office with wonderful, with real energy.

The energy that you actually get from physical activity rather than fake coffee energy. And because I'm self-implied, I have to motivate myself.
I must motivate myself to work.

And if I don't, work doesn't get done.

So the reason I cycled the work, the mindfulness of preparing, the energy expenditure of the journey, when I sit down at my fucking desk, I'm now quite prepared to tolerate minor frustrations.

The minor frustration of responding to an annoying email. The minor frustration of choosing to sit down and write.
rather than scroll on TikTok.

Minor frustration becomes very tolerable because I've just cycled into work. I'm not going to procrastinate writing back to that email.
I've just cycled into work in the rain.

I'm going to answer the email. This is nothing.
I've just cycled into work in the fucking rain.

I cycle, I cycle as an act of humility and this humility, it's informed by Buddhism and humanistic psychology. When I choose to cycle into work, I'm embracing the inevitable discomfort of life.

Cycling into rain and cold and wind, accepting it, tolerating it, preparing for it. That reminds me that comfort is a luxury, it's not an entitlement.
Number two,

when I cycle I acknowledge my place in nature. I'm just a bag of bones and flesh.
I'm vulnerable to wind and rain and cold. I'm practicing self-discipline.

Getting on a bike if it's freezing and raining, that's not nice, it's difficult. But to do it anyway, that's discipline.

And when I do that, I experience it as a little victory and it builds my self-esteem. And then finally, when I cycle, I'm accepting what I can't control.

I can't control the weather, the rain, the wind, and the cold. I can't control these things in the same way that I can't control anything else in my life.
But you know what I can control?

How I respond to the weather. The choices that I make and how I dress myself.
That sets me up for the day. That's why I cycle.
It's

it's a here and now mindfulness exercise that really really stands to me. It really fucking stands to me when it comes to delivering this podcast.

Writing and delivering this podcast every single week for the past eight years without fail or writing three books in the past eight years. I have to do that.
I have to motivate myself to do it.

And if I don't, it simply doesn't get done. No one else can step in and do it for me.

Cycling every day has been a huge part of that and if you live in a city and you're not traveling massive distances, let's just say under 20 kilometers, if you live in a city cycling is going to get you to your destination fucking way quicker because there's no traffic jams.

Now if you're listening and you might be thinking Jesus Christ no blind boy, I love my car journey in the morning. I love listening to the radio or listening to a podcast.
I love my car.

Then that's absolutely fine. That's what works for That's what works for you.
But for me, I like getting a big fat raindrop walloping off my eyeball and measuring the acidity of it when I blink.

Now, cycling is fantastic until you get a fucking flat tire. And I got a double flat tire this week.
And the rate's because of Madeira Cake.

I got a... I got a sudden pang for Madeira Cake.

I grew up in a Madeira Cake household.

I've got mixed feelings about Madeira cake.

If you're...

If you're over in England, Scotland and Wales, you know what fucking Madeira cake is. If you're in Ireland, you know what Madeira Cake is.
If you're a Yank,

pound cake, you call it pound cake in America. It's a very austere type of cake.
It's almost a sweet loaf of bread. It's a very moist yellow sponge.

Nothing else really going on. It's a moist yellow sponge, just sweet enough

with a lemony drizzle about it.

When I say I grew up in a Madeira cake household,

we'd have a cake once a week.

I remember it, I remember being a fucking child. And I'd go to the bakery with my ma and stand in front of the cake counter and I would marvel.

Fucking chocolate cakes, ganaches, black forest gatto, black forest fucking gatto, the holy grail, black forest gatto.

Have you any idea what black forest gatto is when you're nine years when you're nine years of age?

And you don't know what sex is yet, you don't know what riding is, black forest gatto is all you've got.

These creamy looking pineapple cakes, chocolate logs, a violently extravagant display of various cakes.

And my ma would go to the counter and order fucking Madeira cake. The least cakey cakes of all the cakes.
The only cake. It's just fucking sponge.
And I used to go, apeshit.

I'm like, why can't we just get Black Forest Gatto? Why not? It's not even that more expensive.

Why? Why can't we just get Black Forest Gatto? And my Ma would be like, no, that's too extravagant. That's too extravagant.
If you can hear a gentle pattering there, that's the rain.

I'm in my brand new office. I adore this office.
It's it's amazing. But one of the downsides is that when it rains, it's a bit louder here.
And I'd rather just accept the rain.

I don't want to stop recording every time it rains, that'd be a pain in the bollocks.

So, back to so when I'm a child at the cake counter with my ma,

she's buying Madeira cake every time, every single time, because anything that isn't Madeira cake is too extravagant. No, that's too extravagant, we can't have that.

It was real fucking Irish Catholic shit.

Occasionally, coffee cake. She'd buy coffee cake.
Which, again, when you're nine years of age, coffee cake is a bag of shit. Just get the Black Varis Gatto.
It's there. It's over there.

It's the same price as the coffee cake. Just get the fucking Black Varis Gato.
And she'd say, no, that's too extravagant. I don't trust the cream.
That's got fresh cream. I don't trust this.

Coffee cake has got icing. You can trust icing and you can always trust madeira cake

because it's just sponge that's barely sweet with a drizzle of lemon about it so the madeira cake was purchased and after dinner on sundays

you had a slice of madeira cake with butter on it to which i would argue this is now as extravagant The butter now makes this Madeira cake extravagant. Butter

is effectively cream. It's a this is what's the difference between this slice of Madeira cake with butter and a black forest and a slice of black forest.
No, the black forest is too extravagant.

So I'd had my slice of Sunday Madeira cake with butter on it. Livid.
Livid because it didn't make sense. It wasn't even a money thing.

The black forest gatto wasn't that much more expensive than a fucking Madeira cake. It was just, it was this principle of that's too much, that's too extravagant.

You're going too far now, that's too far. And I get Black Varis Gatto once a year on my fucking birthday.
But looking back, she was probably right. There's wonderful humidity in a Madeira cake.

There's no bullshit about a Madeira cake, it's a regular cake that's been stripped of everything. It's just sponge and a bit of flavor.
It's a naked cake.

It doesn't have cream or cherries or chocolates or dilies that look like lingerie. Lingery.

There's no lingerie cake, dilies.

And Madeira cake.

Madeira cake is the, it's the cycling to work of the cake world. It's humble and simple and austere.

And every so often, I'll get a pang for some fucking Madeira cake. I will get an insatiable desire to go and buy some Madeira cakes.
That's what I did. I did that this week.

to remind myself what it tasted like but i didn't want a shitty petrol station madeira cake i wanted the real deal I wanted one that was made in a bakery so that's what I did I got on my bicycle but I knew that on the way to this bakery there's an underpass there's a particular underpass

so Limerick

this episode has taken some some very unexpected twists and turns

so limerick has

a crack cocaine problem. There's been a crack cocaine problem in Limerick for about six years.

I don't know what it is specifically, but crack cocaine seems to be the hard drug in Limerick that's causing the most issues for people who are suffering from addiction.

So in order for me to go to the bakery, the route that I have to take, I have to go underneath an underpass

where

crack dealers sell crack cocaine and also where loads of people smoke crack cocaine. Now you might be thinking, Jesus, that sounds really dangerous.
Is this bakery in a mad shady area?

No, it's just this one underpass.

And

for whatever reason, the crack dealers have decided this is where we sell crack.

And people who use crack have decided this is where we smoke crack. It's an underpass.
It's out of the way. In an area which is fine.
People just get on with their lives.

Is it dangerous in the underpass where the dealers are selling crack? No, not really.

They're professional drug dealers. This is their job.
Their job is to sell crack. Lads in their late 20s and early 30s and this is how they earn a living.

The last thing they want is attention or trouble or violence or anything at all.

So people frequently they walk underneath the underpass with their dogs, people cycle underneath the underpass while the crack dealers are just hanging out out selling crack. Nobody's happy with it.

I'm sure people would prefer if it wasn't happening. But people just go about their day and they use the underpass and they don't appear to be intimidated.

And the dealers aren't trying to be intimidating. They're minding their own business.
They don't look at people or interact

in the most fucked up way possible. I can only describe them as professional.
And then hidden away in crevices near the underpass, people smoke crack and it smells like

a dirty exhaust pipe when a car goes past and and the exhaust pipe is burnt that's what crack smoke smells like so people just they just use the underpass

walking their dogs students on bicycles a lot of footfall Every so often the guards will come down.

The crack dealers will disappear, the people who are smoking crack will disappear, and then they'll be back half an hour later. Now there's other areas of the city where it's like, don't go in there.

If you go in there, they're selling drugs and if you do go in there, you don't have any business in there, you're going to be stared at and it will feel intimidating and you'll get the message to leave.

Like a few months back, I recorded a podcast a few months back where I walked around Limerick City and told some of the history.

And while I was recording that, I was very mindful of, there's a tiny little cul-de-sac there and I know what goes on in there and I've no business being in there so I'm not going in there.

But this underpass, that's different. It doesn't particularly feel shady or unsafe because the crack dealers want to make money.
This is their place of business.

They just hang around there all day minding their own business, frequently on their phones. Young lads come up on e-scooters.

and deliver crack to them and then other people walk up and purchase the crack. Now what is kind of sad about the area is

I don't want to give away the location to this place. I really don't want to do that.
I'm not protecting crack dealers. Like I said,

the guards are there, the guards know what's happening. Otherwise, I wouldn't see them there.
I just don't, I don't want anyone listening going, oh, I'm gonna go see Blind Boy's friendly crack alley.

But right beside the area where the crack is being sold is,

I describe it as an emerging shantytown, by which I mean it's tents, it's homeless people's tents, but with a sense of permanence about them.

They're not just tents, they're building things around the tents using crates and whatever they can find. And something that's powerfully dystopian is

they're taking politicians posters like Fina Gale and Fina Fall, posters from the last general election.

And they're putting all these fucking politicians' posters underneath their tents to stop the floors from flooding.

These poor people have had their they've had their little tents out during the storms that we've been experiencing this month. And as terrible as it is to live in those conditions,

I do feel a little bit happy for them sometimes when I go past because

there's 10 or 12 people and at the very least they have a sense of place and in the evenings they light a bonfire and as dystopian as it is, they seem a tiny bit happier than the homeless people in town who just keep getting moved on and moved on and moved on and are in sleeping bags in doorways.

The people in this tent encampment that has a semi-permanence because of pallets and election posters. They chat to each other around the fire.

Now I don't want to cast dispersions on any of the people living in these tents because there's a huge homeless crisis and rent in Limerick has gone up I think 15% in the past year.

I don't want to cast dispersions on these people but given that the tents are literally beside this place where the crack is being sold I would assume that these people are also smoking crack.

But anyway In order for me to purchase the Madeira cake, this underpass was on my route. Now I know for a fact that there's a lot of glass.
There's a lot of glass in this underpass. From crack pipes.

From crackpipes that have been smashed. People who smoke crack smoke it in glass pipes.
And the HSE and certain drug charities in Limerick, they hand out crackpipes to people who smoke crack.

Now I want to make it really clear that I'm not

judging or finger wagging at anybody who's experiencing addiction, who is self-medicating for trauma.

When I was nine years of age, my biggest problem is that my ma wouldn't buy me a Black Virus cake and I had to put up with Madeira cake instead.

So I'm very aware of the safety net that I grew up with. I'm just describing a thing that's happening.
A thing that's, it's there in the open, you can see it. The drugs charities know about it.

The police know about it. We're living in a society that places profits above the

rights and compassion for people. We're living in, like I said, Limerick City rents have gone up 15% in the past year.
So now we're witnessing the trauma of addiction.

And this isn't a Limerick thing either, because Limerick has an unfair reputation.

Every city and town in Ireland is experiencing this sadness.

So I'm cycling along anyway, on my way to the bakery to purchase my Madeira cake. And then I go, oh, there's the underpass.

There's the underpass where crack is being sold and where there's loads of broken glass on the ground from crack pipes now what i'd like to do is get off my bike and then walk it through the area where there's definitely loads of broken glass but even though i said this underpass is relatively safe

i'm not walk i'm not doing that i i'd like to cycle past the crack dealers if i can I'm not going to get off my bike and then slowly walk it through the glass.

Let them mind their business and I'm going to mind my business. So I said, fuck it, I'll just take the risk.
I'll have to cycle through the broken glass.

So I do and I get to the bakery and I buy myself my austere, boring Madeira cake loaf. And when I get back out to my bicycle, lo and behold, two fucking tires.
Two tires gone.

So now I've got a double puncture. And I was livid.
That's incredibly frustrating because

bicycles are fantastic, absolutely fantastic, until you get a puncture or worse, a double puncture. So I said, fuck it.

I'm gonna have to now manually wheel this bike to the bicycle repair shop to get it fixed. There's one inside in town.
But manually wheeling a bike with a double puncture, it's like...

it's like leading a depressed horse to its death. I had to trudge through the city

with two wobbly wheels scooching along at a snail's pace all the while with this fucking Madeira cake in between my elbow like I'm breastfeeding the fucking Madeira cake because I don't have spare hands now because I have to put two hands on the bicycle Now there's a wonderful bicycle repair shop in Limerick City.

I mentioned them two years ago when they opened up

and If you cycle to work every single day, you'll know you get a lot of punctures or your mud guard comes off, your bike is going to break a lot, so you need a good repair service.

And these lads are fantastic, independent bike repair shop. I've gotten punctures at 9 in the morning, handed them in the bike.
I have it two hours later. Mud guards came off, same shit.

Incredible service. I'm thinking about how wonderful this bike service is on the way to the bike shop.
I'm crawling along, dragging this fucking bike. like a dying horse.

It's taken so long that I start to get hungry. So now I start eating, taking nibbles off the top of the Madeira cake.
Highly undignified behavior.

I eventually make it to the bike shop and I hand them in the bicycle and say there's two punctures can you sort that out? They say yes we can, that's fine. We'll have it for you and a half an hour.

Unfortunately we're closing permanently this Friday. Devastating news.
I say to them why? Why are you closing down? This place is always busy.

There's always like two or three people ahead of me getting their bicycles repaired. All the Deliveroo drivers and the fucking Uber drivers with their electric bikes.

They're constantly in and out of the shop. There's perpetual business in this place.
Why are ye closing down? We can't afford the rent.

We can't afford the rent of this building in Limerick City Centre. We have to close the business.
So now there's no independent bicycle repair shop in Limerick City.

A city with over 100,000 people, with loads of bike tracks, and loads of people who cycle. there's no independent bicycle repair shop.

Well there's one, but he doesn't fucking count because he's greedy. And I've been stung by this fucker before.
What he does is he takes on more bikes than he can handle.

So you give him your bike and say, my bicycle is broken, when can you fix it? He says, oh I'll have that fixed tomorrow. And then he'll keep you waiting three weeks.

And he never answers the phone and he doesn't answer emails. So you have to physically walk 20 minutes to his shop to see if your bike is fixed or not.

And he's done that to me three times, so I can't go to him anymore. Waiting three weeks to get your bike fixed, that doesn't count.

And then the other options are in far out retail parks. And there's two giant bike shops that are run by international bike corporations.

But they refuse to service your bicycle if you didn't buy it from them. If I went to them with a flat tire, they'd charge me 50 quid just to look at it.

And I have to order a disabled taxi to try and fit my bike into the back of it to have it taken to the retail park to even get the fucking thing fixed in the first place.

So now in a fairly large Irish city

you can't get your bicycle fixed because it's too expensive for an independent bicycle repair person to exist. What shops can afford to rent out in Limerick city centre?

Well, there's there's lots of high street shops, huge big brands and then there's loads of weird little American candy shops and loads of vape shops and shops that sell souvenirs and bongs, shops that manage to stay open but no one's ever in there buying anything and some of these shops don't even have prices on things.

and they only accept cash and when you want to buy something if you do want to buy something sometimes they'll just make the price up. They'll just make the price up when you walk in.

And not just Limerick, this is happening in lots of towns and cities in Ireland. It's happening in London too.
I did a podcast a couple of years ago about American sweet shops in Oxford Street.

And the speculation is

that some of these businesses are money laundering operations. Now, not all of them, but some businesses.

If they're just selling all these American sweets that never go off, that don't have any prices on the shelves, or if they're selling shitty vapes, not a good vape shop, but a really shit vape shop.

And it's a cash-only business and there's no prices. Well, the speculation is, is that

these businesses are somehow owned or run by criminal enterprises. And what they do is they wash money.
They wash money.

for drugs gangs and this has started to happen in Ireland because the Criminal Assets Bureau are getting really good at chasing down drug dealers' money.

So all of those crack dealers, they're part of a gang, a larger gang.

There's a few gangs in Limerick and it's speculated that the leaders of these gangs avail of the services of international gangs who own shops that sell bullshit and create fake receipts in a cash only business.

as a way to launder money for drugs gangs. And there's a lot of shops where it's how are you open? No one is ever in here.
No one's buying anything. How is this shop open?

How is this shop open when no one buys anything?

But the independent bicycle repair shop that had non-stop constant business all day can't afford the rent and has to shut down. And now we're all fucked if we want our bikes repaired.
And the thing is

If you're in Limerick City, if you live in Limerick City Center and you want to make money now, start repairing bikes out of your flat. Go down the black market drug dealer route.

If you've got an apartment, if you're handy with tools and you can do same-day repair for people who are too busy to repair their own bike or don't have space, then you're gonna make a lot of money and you're gonna have to have a little client base in your phone like a drug dealer and you're gonna have to do it all cash and you're gonna have to do it secretly.

Because we all need someone who can repair fucking bikes in Limerick City, but if you wanna go legit and open up a little shop, you won't be able to afford it because the rents are too high.

So you have to be a black market bicycle repairman. And if you're saying to me, blindby, would you not fix, would you not fix both of your tires yourself? I could, yeah.

But now I'm in the middle of town in my office, in the hallway, fixing a bicycle. It's messy, it's awkward, it would piss off.
everybody in my office and I don't have time.

This podcast isn't me whinging about I can't get my bicycle fixed in Limerick City. What I'm trying what this podcast is about is systemic collapse.

What I'm describing here is systemic collapse.

Why can I find five shops where I can buy American candy but I can't get somebody to repair my bike and if I do try to take my broken bicycle to one of the two massive multinational bicycle corporations in Limerick, they won't fix my bike because I didn't buy it off them.

So if your bike breaks down in a large Irish city, a city which is investing massively in bicycle infrastructure because of climate change, if your bike breaks down, you're fucked.

Fix it yourself or buy a branded bike from the multinational bike shop and then they might repair it if you're willing to get into a taxi and go to a retail park. What does that

extortionately high rents that means that it's not not feasible to open a bicycle repair shop even though it's successful. What does that

have to do with crack cocaine

and an emerging shantytown and loads of shops, loads of shops that sell American sweets that no one's buying? What does all of that are all of these things connected? Are they connected in some way?

And I was thinking this.

When I collected my bicycle, the lads did a wonderful job. Two punctures.
took an hour to do, that was it. Collected the bike, paid for it, reasonable price.

And I cycled off, feeling terrible that I know that that business is going to close and then anyone with a bike in Limerick is fucked. And I left wondering if all these things were connected.

And then specifically wondering, because this is just what my brain does. I wonder is it connected to Madeira Cake in any way? And it turns out it is.
quite heavily.

And I'll explain why this systemic collapse is intimately connected to Madeira Cake after the Ocarina pause. Now, I don't have my Ocarina with me right now, but what I do have are some sleigh bells.

I don't know where they came from, but I'm in the possession of sleigh bells. So, I'm gonna play some sleigh bells nice and gently, and then you're gonna hear an advert for something.

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That was the Sleigh Bell pause.

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Let's plug a few gigs.

This Friday the 28th of February I'm in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre. I believe that's sold out.

Then March 7th I'm in the iNeck down in Killarney. There's a few tickets left for that.
I've a wonderful guest. 13th of March Cork Opera House as part of the Cork Podcast Festival.

Then Australia and New Zealand tour in March and the start of April. That is sold out.
Limerick in April, that's sold out. Fucking hell.

And then off to Scotland and England. In June, right?

That's Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich in June. Those gigs are setting out really quickly.

And I know it's June and it's a good few months away. But get your tickets for those gigs.
They're at feign.co.uk forward slash blindbuy. So back to the Madeira cake.

Did I enjoy purchasing my Madeira cake this week? Yeah, it was okay.

I was just trying to rekindle a childhood memory, but I'll be honest, it feels like a fucking waste. If I'm gonna buy a cake, I'd prefer to buy a better cake than a Madeira cake.

I don't require such austerity when it comes to desserts. But what does Madeira cake have to do with the fact that I can't get my bicycle repaired in Limerick City?

What does Madeira cake have to do with

an emerging shanty town?

And I mean that as no disrespect to the people living there but I grew up in Limerick City.

I've never seen a collection of homeless people needing to build shanties, semi-permanent structures in order to live and it's happening because

there's no more social housing. There's no more social housing.
and rent is extortionate. Property prices are extortionate.
It's out of the reach of the average person.

So the Madeira cake gets its name from the island of Madeira. Madeira is an island

off the coast of Africa, North Africa, off a good bit out from Morocco. The name Madeira means wood.
It's the Portuguese name for wood. There's a reason for that.

What 600 years ago, in 1420, because of advances in sailing technology, boat technology, Portugal

found and landed on the island of Madeira, this island that was so full of forests that they named it wood. They named it Madeira.

Now in 1420, the economic system of much of Europe was known as feudalism. Land was owned by a lord or a king.
Peasants worked on the land, not necessarily for money, more to feed themselves.

And then they give a portion of what they grew or what they raised with cattle and they gave that to the lord who owned the land. The concept of work and labor, it's tied in with tradition.

If your dad was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith. You weren't necessarily a blacksmith to earn a bunch of money and become rich or escape being a blacksmith.

The way that people thought about labor and land

was quite different and tied in with tradition and a bit of religion. When Portugal discovered the island of Madeira in 1420, there was nobody living there.
There was no indigenous people on Madeira.

It was literally an island full of trees. This was new land.

Now in feudalism, land is passed down through lords and peasants and there's strict rules about who can own it and who can work on the land. But with Madeira being discovered, there's no rules now.

It's like here's a giant fucking island. Portugal said, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do with this new island?

So the Portuguese crown started giving land grants to settlers to move to Madeira, to burn and chop down all the wood. and to start raising animals there for profit.

There's no no tradition here, there's no peasant villages, no one is bound to this land, there's no list of kings who used to own this land, there's no stories, there's no mythology.

This is just new land to be exploited for profit, and for that profit to be exported back to Portugal, mostly in the form of wood.

Now, something else you have to realize about Europe in 1420: sugar was incredibly rare.

Now, humans love sweet things and Europeans would have had honey, honey from bees, but fucking sugar, sugar as you and I know it.

So sugar comes from sugar cane, which is a type of grass that came from Papua New Guinea and grew around India. In the 1400s, you couldn't really grow sugar cane.

There was a few parts of southern Spain, the island of Cyprus you could grow sugar cane but the areas where you could grow sugar cane in Europe there was fuck all. And also,

getting sugar cane and then refining that into the granulated powder that we know as sugar, that was very difficult to do and it was knowledge that was held mostly by the Islamic caliphates in Europe such as the one in Spain.

So in 1420, sugar was an extreme luxury item that only incredibly rich people could get their hands on.

But then Portugal figured out this new island of Madeira that they'd just taken over had the perfect climate and the perfect fertile soil to start growing this grass, this grass called sugarcane from Papua New Guinea.

So by about the 1490s, Portugal now had a sugarcane trade on this Madeira island. And this wasn't feudalism.
This was a new system. And it was being funded by bankers from Flanders and Genoa.

A sugar industry was emerging on this island and they were refining the sugar on the island and refining sugarcane into sugar is a very resource-intensive process.

They had to cut down all the wood to burn the wood to refine the sugarcane juice into granulated sugar. And this sugar isn't just being sent back to Portugal like a resource.

The sugar is now being sold as a commodity for profit and people are getting very wealthy from the sale of sugar. Greed steps in.
They want more profits. How do we make more money from this sugar?

Well, Madeira, like I said, it's this island just off the coast of Africa. So now you start to see this is where the emergence of the slave trade happens.
Chattel slavery. It's 1490.

America hasn't been quote unquote discovered yet.

Portugal captures slaves at first from the Canary Islands and then from the west coast of Africa and now you have forced chattel slavery working on sugar plantations in Madeira on the island of Madeira financed by bankers for the production of sugar for profit.

Madeira is seen as

Madeira is widely credited as ground zero for what we now call capitalism markets profits commodities see under feudalism crops were grown to feed people, to meet people's needs and then the king might take a share of that Whereas in Madeira in 1490, now crops are being grown exclusively for profit as a commodity.

And that's the origins of capitalism. You have slave labor.
Profit is more important than people's lives or safety. You have the utter destruction of the environment.

Eventually all the trees in Madeira, this island that's called wood, Eventually it's stripped of all its wood.

Because in order to refine sugar, you need fuckloads of wood to burn it to boil the sugar the sugar boom on Madeira by the 1530s it couldn't go on anymore because there was no wood left it wasn't possible to grow sugar in Madeira so then Portugal by the 15 fucking 30s now Portugal's thirsty this isn't feudalism anymore this is about expansion this is about colonial empire they move on to Brazil you start to see the colonization of the new world, the Caribbean, the Atlantic slave trade, colonizing, murdering, dehumanizing, destroying the environment to create cash crops such as sugar, cotton, tobacco, exclusively for profit to generate wealth at the expense of all else.

And that there is capitalism and capitalism begins with colonization and slavery. But what does the island of Madeira do?

Now that it's run out of wood and they can't make sugar there anymore.

Well, they move to wine production production because wine didn't need as much wood, it didn't need as much water, so they start growing grapes.

But here's the thing, by about 1560 the Atlantic slave trade is in full swing and Madeira is still this kind of isolated island off the west coast of Africa. The wine didn't travel very well.

When wine made it from Madeira, we'll say back to Portugal, it was a bit sour, it didn't taste right.

So what they started to do in Madeira was they got their wine and then they added brandy, which is distilled wine. They added pure alcohol to the wine.
They fortified it. But then what happened?

Certain ships, ships would be traveling from Europe, then they would stop off in Madeira and then they would go from Madeira to the Caribbean.

If they took fortified wine with them, the heat and the long journey, the long journey of taking a cask of wine all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in the blistering heat for like three months.

This gave that wine a very unique taste, a very sweet, strong taste and this became known as Madeira wine.

But as you can imagine, wine that needs to be aged at sea in the blistering heat and needs to go to the Caribbean and back in order to mature. That's very, very expensive.
That's incredibly expensive.

So Madeira wine became a fancy commodity that only the wealthiest people could afford. Now Madeira was a port of call, it was called.

So by about the 1600s, so we're talking the transatlantic slave trade here. So slaves, enslaved people,

are stolen from Africa and taken to the Americas or South America.

Often these fleets of ships, they would stop off in Madeira, the port of call,'cause think of a map of the world if you're going from Africa over to America Madeira is this island it's the last port of call before you get to America so loads of fleets of ships would stop off in Madeira for supplies and they'd get this Madeira wine now by the 1600s Britain heavily involved in colonization and the slave trade obviously Britain was very friendly with Portugal Britain and Portugal were almost like allies and Britain wasn't friendly with France and wasn't friendly with Spain.

So Britain favoured Portuguese wine, Britain favoured Madeira wine. But this was a luxury good, very expensive wine to produce.

And if you were English and you got your hands on fucking Madeira wine, you were probably associated with the slave trade. So by the 1800s,

really wealthy posh Brits, one of the fanciest drinks they could drink was Madeira wine. And this is where the Madeira cake starts to get invented.

There's no Madeira wine in the Madeira cake, but the reason the Madeira cake is called a fucking Madeira cake is because very wealthy Brits who probably made money from the slave trade would eat this lemon sponge cake in the evenings, but they'd drink sweet Madeira wine with it.

So that's where the name Madeira Cake comes from. Now, often with Ireland,

a lot of food that we

so my ma's insistence on Madeira cake that's actually a post-colonial that's a post-colonial hangover right there. So why is my ma why is my ma

an Irish Catholic who doesn't come from money? How did Madeira cake become something in Ireland that we we buy on a Sunday? How did that happen? Well it's the same as

Before I did a podcast on the Irish summer salad, okay? The Irish fucking summer summer salad, which is cold ham, eggs, bit of lettuce. You know the Irish summer salad.

But the Irish summer salad comes from the English garden salad. We were colonized, colonized by Britain, and you had in Ireland the big house, the big colonial house.

Around the 1800s, when Madeira wine was really popular, you would have had a lot of big colonial houses in Ireland.

So you have the wealthy English landlord who's probably also a slave owner with his summer house in Ireland.

And this summer house would have employed a lot of local poorer Irish Catholics as servants and maids and these servants and maids they would have witnessed the rich wealthy Brits eating the Madeira cake.

eating Madeira cake every night at seven o'clock with the Madeira wine.

And the Madeira wine never became part of Irish culture because it's just way too expensive but the fucking cake did because it's just a pound cake.

It's not that expensive really to make a Madeira cake. You're talking sugar, lemon, eggs, milk, flour.
So our love of Madeira cakes in Ireland, it's colonial self-hatred.

It's Irish maids and servants 200 years ago watching what British slave owners ate.

in their big country houses in Cork and Tipperary and then Irish people recreating that cake to mimic our wealthy overlords because our minds were colonized and you have to realize in Ireland you had these huge big plantation houses with the wealthy Brits in it and then everyone worked there and Irish people worshipped the local wealthy English person.

It's difficult to try and understand it now. But in 1918, there was an IRA fella, an organiser, an IRA organiser, Arnie O'Malley was his name.

When Arnie O'Malley was training young IRA members, he would deliberately train them on the grounds of big English houses in Ireland to rid the young men of their inherent respect for the house's owner.

One of the IRA's biggest campaigns, I'm talking, we'd say 1918 to 1922, one of the biggest campaigns was burning down the big houses, the plantation houses, as propaganda to decolonize the minds of the Irish people.

To let the Irish people know, no, these big, wealthy Brits, because just because they own the big house doesn't mean they're more important than you are.

So from that, you get things like Madeira cake.

If the wealthy Brits are eating that up in the fucking house, then the maids and the servants they copy it in their own homes. And then that ends up with me in the 1990s with my mother demanding

fucking Madeira cake on a Sunday. That's how it crept into Irish food culture.
It's post-colonial shame. It's your great-great-grandparents trying to be like the local British slave owner.

And what does Madeira cake have to do with me not being able to get my fucking bike fixed? Because the island of Madeira, that's the origin of capitalism right there.

Property currently in Ireland is being treated solely as a commodity completely removed from the needs of the people or to service the common good.

Property is now simply a thing that can be hoarded to generate profits and that's why rent is so expensive. That's why the local bike shop had to close down.

And what about the two gigantic international bike companies who won't repair my bike because I didn't buy it from them and if I bring them my bike they'll charge me an exorbitant fee.

Because personally I feel that should be illegal. If I rock up to the bike shop and say to them, can you please fix my puncture?

And they say, we can, but there's an extra charge because that's not our bike. That should be illegal.
That feels like that should be illegal to me. It feels very, very wrong.

The reason it isn't illegal is because of deregulation. Another tenet of neoliberal capitalism.
That big bike corporation's right to profit. is more important

than me having fair access to getting my bike fixed, to getting my puncture repaired.

Those people living in a shantytown, they live in a shantytown because their humanity, their humanity, their dignity, their safety, these things are less important than profits from housing as a commodity that can be hoarded.

The American sweet shops that are propping up

to wash the money of the crack dealers. Yeah, that's illegal.
That is illegal. But is that any different, really?

Than Apple or Google coming to Ireland to wash their money in fucking Dublin to completely evade tax so that the average person pays more tax than giant fucking multi-billion corporations?

Profits being more important than the common good. Profits being more important than human dignity, human needs, the rights of the community, safety, all of that shit.

The island of Madeira and Portugal. That's where the world got its first taste for unfettered capitalism.

If you are living in Limerick City Centre and you're handy with fixing things and you want to start a black market bicycle repair operation from your flat, please do and give me a shout.

There's huge demand for it. and it's needed because we're at the mercy of the market.
What should be happening? That bicycle repair shop shouldn't have gone out of business.

If Limerick City cares about the environment, if Limerick City actually wants people cycling to fucking work, if they're investing in all these bike tracks and greenways, then invest in services where people can repair their fucking bikes.

If you're one of the crack dealers and you want to go straight and you don't want to sell crack anymore,

Just stay where you are. Stay by that area and just hang around and people will show up and ask for their bikes to be fixed if you can do it.
The market is there. The market is there.

All right, rub a dog.

Genu fleck to a swan. Wink at a cat.
I'll catch you next week. God bless.

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