Birdshit funded the 1916 Rising, with Manchán Magan

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Drool on the toothy pool cue, you googly-eyed Fintons.

Welcome to the Plain Buy Podcast.

This week's podcast is definitely one for the regular listeners.

I'm speaking to a guest this week who's been on the podcast three times, I believe.

But I haven't spoken to them in

two years.

I'm talking about the wonderful Man Con Magan.

Man Con is a writer and a storyteller.

Harking back to the theme of last week's podcast, I suppose you'd call him a bit of an eccentric.

Man Con,

he has a passionate interest in Irish mythology and the Irish language and he goes at these areas from mad angles.

His most recent book is called Bretons and Brahmins.

It's a book about

the similarities between Indian and Irish culture, specifically Indian mythology and and Irish mythology.

Two cultures on fucking opposite sides of the world.

How could two cultures like that have anything in common?

Well, Man Khan explores this through the history of the Irish language.

Irish being an Indo-European language.

So by tracing Irish words, he's able to find similarities between

really really old Irish mythology and really old Indian mythology.

Which, in incredibly divisive times like these

that type of thinking is quite healing and beneficial because it reminds us all we're all just human beings.

Doesn't matter where the fuck you are in the world, all of us are human beings and we all came from one small group of people.

Doesn't matter if anybody looks different, if they have a different language, we're all fucking human beings.

And if you go back far enough, of course you're going to have similarities between Indian culture and Irish culture.

Man Con also, he was a wonderful help to me in my recent documentary Blind by the Land of Slaves and Scholars where I explored the pre-Christian roots of the Irish literary tradition.

Myself and Mancon had a wonderful chat about mythology while sitting in the center of a three and a half thousand year old stone circle.

So I'd like to get into the conversation with Man Con

as soon as possible because we spoke for fucking ages.

To be honest with you,

I forgot I was doing a podcast after about 15 minutes.

After about 15 minutes, I forgot that this was a podcast episode and it just turned into a really long conversation with a friend, with someone who I find incredibly fascinating.

Someone who's a lovely kind,

a kind person.

who has a vast array of knowledge and there's no pretension.

He just wants to share this knowledge with whoever wants to learn.

And I love people like that.

I love people who have humility, humility about knowledge and information.

So here's my chat with Mankon, Megan.

And if you want to check out Mankin's books, if you want to check out his podcasts, whatever, go to mancon.com.

M-A-N-C-H-A-N.com

Mankon, what's the crack?

It's good to hear you.

Great to talk to you, bye-bye.

Last time I spoke to you, I think it was a year ago on my documentary, Slaves and Scholars, and we wandered.

You and I, a drone had to videotape you and me, and we walked in circles all around the cairns in Sligo.

Well, I just, I think I machine-gunned you with a lot of facts.

You introduced me to a whole new part of this land.

Like, I thought I knew Ireland, at least the Ireland that's below the Republic, everything in Ulster, I am so, or about the six counties, I know so little about to my shame.

You brought me over to Sligo, to Carramore, to this site just outside Sligo Town that has these cairns, these dolmens everywhere, everywhere you look in everyone's back garden, the sheds built into the side of 5,000-year-old cairns.

I never even knew about it.

It just makes this Ireland, this country of ours, it's an accordion.

It can just wave, you know, move out and out and out

the more you look into it.

Yeah, so it was a total revelation for me that day.

Your most recent book, right, which has a bit of a mad title, which is Bretons and Brahmins.

Can you tell me about that?

Yeah, so about 25 years ago, I spent time up in the Himalayas in a place called Almora, which is where India, Tibet, and Nepal meet.

And I had just wanted to get my head out of everything.

I wanted to escape from the world.

So

I found myself, I was looking for a cave because I'd read about all these great,

you know, yogis and swamis and holy men used to find a cave in the Himalayas.

I couldn't find one of those, but I found a cowshed and I put myself in there for about eight months and would just

walk all day through the rhododendron forest, which is in the sort of low Himalayas.

There's this dense, tall rhododendron forest before you get to the pines.

and would just think all night long.

But the more I spent, oh, and I was drinking my own urine at the time.

There was this whole you know ayurvedic um technology or you know medicine in india this like ancient thousand year old culture believes in urine therapy i've stopped doing that since but um fair play too

yeah i wisened up um and uh i just kept on seeing all these connections between my culture back home between in other words the the the hindu language the hindi language the ancient vedic or sanskrit or ways and stories and why and what i had learnt in ireland so I wanted to find a way of conveying that to other people.

So, as you say, the book is called Brehens and Brahmins, and that's because Brehan, you know, was the Brechen law, was the old law system.

So, the Druids, the Druids, were obviously the spiritual and legal rulers of

the people who came before Christianity.

And they brought the Brehan laws, the ancient laws.

I feel silly telling you about this, blind boy, because you know it all backwards.

But anyway, just bear with me if you want to allow me.

um so the brahms were were those and that word bri the word brahm comes from bre and bre means master of mantras basically he was the person who could bring all the ancient knowledge that been that had been amassed by their people over thousands of years to the next generation they learnt it off by heart

and so the brehav or the bre

um he had the exact same role in the world and in in in the society as the brahmins did in india so actually, Brehav and Brahmin come from the same

Sanskrit root, the same Indo-European root.

I'll explain that in a second.

So, I wanted to see all those connections.

And, you know, the Brahmins are the elite force in India.

So, if we want to get a sense of what the Druids were like, in other words, when St.

Patrick arrived in Ireland in the fifth century, he was obsessed by these druids who were the spiritual and legal and scholarly elite.

And we often romanticize them now.

But actually, it's hard to know even what, like, even

if I mention the word druid to an academic, they'll stop me right there and say, you need to stop using that word.

Like, it's hard to.

What I found when I was making that documentary is I speak to all these people who've dedicated their lives academically to studying this area.

And then eventually what you find out is they're all kind of guessing.

Because it's like, we're all guessing about a time before writing that existed.

So we're trying our best.

And what you're doing is

you're guessing in a different way by trying to study the roots of language, the Indo-European roots of the Irish language, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing we do know, we know the druids existed because St.

Patrick was talking about them.

And again, we know the root of that word.

So, if we were telling you the root of the word brehav and brahman come from the same, this master of mantras, they were the people who kept the old lore in their heads in both Ireland and India.

The druid comes from druid, it's just it's a word, it's the genitive of dri, and dri in Irish is the word for the the the the the the the wizard the magic man the spurcaster and so it's just the genitive case was druid so that's why the english to ground but where it comes from two words dru in the indo-european language in other words the language from which the irish language and sanskrit and hindi all arose from and dru means immersion or immersion or total connection so the druid id is the it can also refer to the oak because that total connection to everything to all beings all essence is also the metaphor they used for that our people and actually India culture too was the was a tree you know they you know when you do yoga it's all about the spine everything goes up and down the axis of that spine so in in Celtic cultures or Irish cultures it was the the the oak tree so that that's where you get dira dira diri means oak exactly forest or something that's right yeah so did dira is the uh

is the dar is an oak tree did it is an oak wood that a vogue is an oak plain so many of the irish place names are connected to that oak and it wasn't just um it was because the oak tree was a spirit tree was a sacred tree was like an axis mundi like the indians had like the you know the yevedic indians but it was also because it was the most practical tree It was the tree that you made ink gall as you talked about in your beautiful program,

as the great calligraphy expert Tim O'Neill wrote uh talks about he was lovely all those shots in trinity of him mixing the oat goal were so beautiful yeah yeah but um so anyway so the dru is sort of so sort of it's immersion but then vid the second part of dru vid that's where the word druid comes vid is like the vedas so you know the vedas or vedic knowledge in india that just means vedic or veda it just means the wisdom or the knowledge and vedic or veda is the exact same word in irish we have idas idas means education rhyan idachas idas so even with those words i've given even with brehans brahmins and druids we see these connections one one final thing i want to say is druid if we want to get a sense of how and who the druids this scholarly class were in ireland when saint patrick came you just need to look at the brahmins today they were an elite class who had more power than other people and so they were slightly corrupt because they would use that power um you know to just boss people around so we romanticize druids as being these wonderful you you know wise guru figures, but I don't think they were particularly because we've talked in previous episodes about the goddess how everything in Ireland seems to have been about the goddess the rivers were goddesses the land was shaped like a goddess and you talk about in your program and you've talked about on previous episodes of the of the podcast and the druids are clearly a hierarchical figure in a patriarchal system.

They're all men.

There were a few drueddesses, but mostly it's male.

So there must have been a ruling class before them of women, of matriarchal, of goddess worshiping people.

That's been entirely, entirely lost.

So, something

too about what you're saying, Mancon, is

so we're talking about deep time here.

Like, to the average person, to say to them, the roots of the Irish language might actually be Indian, is it's a tough one to take on board because you're going, How the fuck does that happen?

But then, when you look at genetics,

like people had to come to Ireland from somewhere, you know, and something I find fascinating is I brought up earlier about the Caja fields.

Yeah.

So I spoke about them last week on the podcast.

There are these

an archaeological site up in Mayo called the Caja Fields.

They're 6,000 years old.

It's some of the world's earliest examples of field system of farming.

They're in the news at the moment because Mayo County Council has decided that there's not enough interest to preserve them as a UNESCO World Heritage site, which I was really pissed off with because these are, it's a deeply important site.

But when I looked into it,

they followed

Haplogroup B, I believe, is

a genetic group that come from the Levant.

And that's who they believe did these fields in Mayo 6,000 years ago.

So you can look at genetics and it's like these people came from the Levant, which is somewhere around the Middle East, and they are building farms in ireland 6 000 years ago so these people spoke something and they brought it here and though those people in the levant it's not india but it's closer to india than ireland

so true yeah so um

you know we know that all you know people came out of africa um humans did and then they learned farming they learned sort of gradually more sophisticated farming in that area where eastern europe meets western asia yeah so often sometimes people argue some scholars say it's Ukraine, interestingly, at the moment.

Some people say it's Western Kazakhstan.

Some people say Turkey, Armenia, somewhere in the Middle East, Russia.

It's basically

that whole line between Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

And then the knowledge spread.

It spread westwards the whole way through Europe and then eastwards to India.

So by like 500 BC, this Celtic language was being spoken the whole way from Turkey to Ireland.

A form of Celtic.

What do we call this, mankind?

Is it Indo-European?

Like, what would you call this Celtic language?

So let's say that's 500 BC.

That's 2,500 years ago.

That we just call it Celtic languages.

And Irish is a Celtic language.

It's one of the surviving Celtic languages.

There's one on the Isle of Man.

There's obviously one in Wales.

There's one in Brittany.

There's one in Cornwall.

Okay, so our isolation is why we have this.

Exactly, exactly.

Okay.

But that, so that's 2,500 years ago.

But that arose, that Celtic language arose from an original proto-Indo-European indo-european language so the first language that was spoken in the area where they were learning farming and so that's the language this has happened as you said before the time of the que de field so around 6 000 years ago and plus and that language moved eastwards to india westwards to ireland but not only the language so did the stories the mindset the folklore the songs everything

and that's why you can find today Christy Moore, Ireland's great folk singer, singing a song that he says he got from a traveller man, from a mink age, from a Luchtshul, you know, Luchshul's the Irish for Traveller, you know, the walking people,

that is identical to a song that you find in the Rig Veda, like India's most ancient text, which either dates from between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, different parts of the Rigveda.

So like Christy sings a song called Tipping It Up to Nancy.

And, you know, there's lines in it, give him eggs and marrow bones and make him suck them all.

Before he has the last one sucked, he won't see you at all.

So it's it's about this woman, a married woman, and she's fallen madly in love with another man.

So she goes to the local sorcerer or the local wise man to say, I need you to blind my husband so that I can have an affair with this man.

Wow.

So Christy Moore gets it from Ross Carmen Traveller, Johnny Riley.

But you get in the same, you know, from two, three, four, five thousand years ago, you get this Sanskrit version, which goes, again, a blind, a woman once having an affair she goes to her local um actually this time a statue of a goddess and asks her to blind her husband and she says give him butter and butter cakes then he'll pleasantly go blind the same idea the same story and that's because we're all the same people we all come from that same beginning We have Christy Moore singing a song today, and you have the exact same story in the Rigveda, in the Indian tradition from thousands of years ago.

I'm assuming, too, India had writing, they had writing systems like long before us.

But they had an oral tradition just like we did, too.

They had writing far older than us, but they also had the oral system going.

And they had like the, you know, the Brahmins that would keep their knowledge orally because just.

And who were the Brahmins?

Because again, I know fuck all about.

So when you say Brahmin to me, the vision that comes to my head is a cow for some reason.

Yeah.

So the Brahmins were and still are today the elite class in India.

They're the spiritual class.

And is this within the indian the hindu caste system exactly exactly okay

so um and they were identical to the druids in other words they were the poets of the society they were the spiritual rulers of the society and they had more power in some ways than the king did and as you know the druid in irish stories also had more power than the king did well the druid could could decide what stories are being told about that king exactly like almost like controlling the media or propaganda that's it so we don't want to over identity we don't want to over-romanticize either the Druids or the Brahmins, because if they were so similar, then we have a good sense of they were just an elite class in the end who were looking out for themselves, at least towards the end.

And so, you know, the top class, the top caste and class in Ireland and India, the class in Ireland was the re, the king, in India was the raja, the king.

Same word comes from the same Indo-European root word, re and raja.

The next one in India was the Brahmin.

In Ireland was the Brehav or the Druid.

Same word from the same in the root.

The next class beneath that was the Ara in Ireland.

So Ara means a minister or a noble.

So you know, in government in Ireland, the ministers are called Ara Aragus, the minister of whatever money of finance.

And then in India, it's Aryan.

And just

to say two things about that.

First, Ara in Irish, when we learn it at school, we know what it means, Arahurt De Ginegent, to care for someone.

So the Ara, they weren't some sort of elite noble.

They were the caretakers of the people beneath them and also of the land beneath them.

They were the caretakers of the land, realizing the land authority.

But that word Aryan is the real problem word.

That's the reason why my book, Brehams and Brahman, is the first book on this subject of linking Ireland and India in a long time, because amazing research was done in the 60s and early 70s by the likes of Miles Dylan, the great Gaelic scholar,

a Welsh scholar called Weiss, Brinsley Weiss.

But none of that, you know, it's known about in academic circles, but they don't talk about it elsewhere because that word Aryan.

Because during the 1930s, Hitler and the Nazi party came up with this totally wrong

idea that the Germans arose from this pure Nazi sort of Aryan people who descended from the superior race of sort of Aryan Nordic people.

And did they take this from

Indian scripture?

Yeah, so they noticed the same thing that I'm saying, that we actually, all of our people in Europe and Asia stem from the same Indo-European

speaking.

Oh my God, okay.

So they're saying that's a little bit like throughout history, you get people claiming to be the true Israelites.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because like there was Brits called the British Israelites going, we're actually the main tribe of Israel.

We are God's promised people.

So you're saying

within Indian culture, you have here's this one race called the Aryans, and the Germans reckoned, oh, that's us.

Yeah, it was just a noble class in

Indian culture.

And the Germans invented this whole idea that they came from a superior, pure,

paler-skinned race of people who migrated to India 1,600 years ago.

I mean, they were right that yes, we're all the same people, that we're all just different migrants from a culture that learned how to farm somewhere, as you said, in the Levant or turkey or russia in the middle east and moved but then they just they did they warped it to say that they were purer than everyone else and that they had a right and so since then no one can go near that um no ideology because it's an interesting thing in general man con something that i notice like

i

adore irish mythology irish folklore i feel very safe exploring this because

I go at it from a perspective of biodiversity.

Then there's other countries, like America.

If you're in America and you have a big interest in European folklore, that's a huge red flag.

People go, are you a Nazi?

I'm like, why the fuck would I be a Nazi?

I just want to learn about Film McCool.

Do you know what I mean?

Germany's similar.

Like, I was speaking to a wonderful storyteller, Claire Murphy, and she was saying that, like,

Germans just don't like talking about their folklore because of what was done to it.

You know what I mean?

So it depends.

And when I look at folklore and mythology, I don't want to find, I don't want any of this to tell me that I'm better than someone else.

I just want to learn about,

I'm a writer.

I love the fact that the landscape can inform stories.

That's all I care about.

But I'm not searching for

here's proof that I'm descended from some from some pure race.

And it's

a strange one.

Even there last week, Man Con, right?

I think it was, it might have been the Telegraph.

It was one of the right-wing British newspapers.

There was a story in one of the right-wing British newspapers that they found out that Stonehenge was actually built by that all the warring tribes, Celtic tribes of Britain, got together to build Stonehenge because they were afraid of migrants coming from the sea.

Now, someone just pulled that out of their arse.

There's no evidence for that.

Someone pulled that out of their arse and guessed what Stonehenge was for.

But what you see there is Stonehenge that exists.

Someone is creating a narrative around Stonehenge that suits with racism today.

Because in Britain, it's like the migrants are coming on raft from the sea.

So they're going, well, that's what Stonehenge was.

It was British white unity with this threat of an invader from the outside.

And it's so, it must be a difficult one for you then.

If you're saying you're finding words like Arian, going, how do I speak about this without sounding like a big racist?

Yeah, if I don't speak about it, they've won, is my idea.

Exactly.

It was actually, yeah, same with the swastika.

Swastika had fucking nothing to do with racism until Hitler got involved.

No, it was, it was, it was Kormer McNumber of the brand, The Frames, of that lovely album with The Hair's Corner, who said that to me, Moncan.

He said, You've got to do it.

Otherwise,

they've won.

It was Tyson Junkaporte, this great Aboriginal man who wrote Sandtalk.

He was the one, he flagged it for me first.

He said, Moncan, your work could be taken by the MAGA hat, by white supremacists, so easy.

And I just said, so that's why I twist to the goddess.

If we say everything about our culture comes from the goddess, most of that white supremacist movement does not work.

It doesn't work because they're fucking misogynists.

Yeah, it does not want to.

But like, you and I are guilty of this too, or at least I am.

I am reinterpreting the mythology at the moment from an ecological, almost matriarchal perspective.

Yes.

You know, when 1916, when we just, when we realized 120 years ago, that our language, our culture, having been kept alive for whatever, the language is maybe two and a half three thousand years old the stories and songs as we've seen could be five or six thousand years old um when we suddenly realized that could all be wiped out we needed to fight both to bring our culture alive through the gaelic league through colon graga but also to fight against britain with arms we had to pick the myths the mythology that would most suit that so we we we focused on the great warriors on ku cullen on finn mccoole and they became the backbone of our stories and it's really interesting interesting that at the moment we've shifted.

We've now started looking at Bridget, at this great mama, Pacha Mama, this Mother Earth goddess, who is truly ancient, who can also be found in Indian culture as well, to be said.

And this is the, you know, whatever, last year, the year before, the government made a bank holiday, a national day for this goddess.

And it just shows how we're twisting.

We no longer need the big testosterone male warrior

Finn McCool who goes out, goes around beheading everyone.

We're looking for a more harmonious, more nature-centered leader to find in our mythology.

It's just what every generation does.

They look towards the myths and find new wisdom for them in it.

And I'm explicit about it, to be honest, Mankon.

Like when I get asked,

why do I dedicate so much time to speaking about Irish mythology on my podcast?

I straight up say

there's nothing nationalistic about these stories.

These are stories about the fucking land.

Like I adore that.

Like in Limerick where I am, I I love that.

There's the river Shannon and I can tell this the story of the goddess Shannon.

And I know that just up that river near Loch Derg is Finton's cave.

Yeah.

Or sorry, Finton's grave, where mythology says some fella called Finton came on a boat with Noah and then he turned into a salmon for a thousand years to escape a biblical flood.

I like that those stories tell me about the landscape that I live in.

I like that,

like one thing that's very crucial at the moment too is

so much of our mythology is about different

festivals that occur because of seasons, right?

And we are witnessing seasons becoming kind of meaningless.

Winter didn't feel like this 10 years ago.

There's a new sweatiness, there's a new heat.

We are the first generation that's experiencing winter, autumn, and spring in Ireland as being slightly different because of climate change.

And at what point are our stories going to become meaningless?

Like if you think of

the Halloween story, the Halloween story, which

Sowhan, and you see that coming out of Onegat Cave in Ross Common.

And that story basically says that sometime around the end of October,

demons escape from the other world from this cave in Onegat.

And when the demons escape from the cave, they strip all the leaves from the trees and they kill all the animals and they cover everything in frost.

So that story there basically says every fucking year around this time winter comes.

That's what that means.

Winter comes.

It gets absolutely freezing.

You can't plant anything and you got to make sure that you have food every single year.

So that's why we have this story.

we are living right now where that story isn't relevant anymore because october 31st is bammy and sweaty and warm

do you get me i do i do and i think that's really important and it's very sad that these stories are going to not work anymore

oh beautiful and i know i was listening you if if for you people should go back to an earlier edition of your podcast where you went into that beautiful or even when you were talking to chris o'dowd and you brought up how he nagat and here's a man from rostcomen from boyle and he didn't seem to know Awenagat, like one of the most important sites in Ireland.

It's such an exciting time where we all are beginning to relearn our country.

I knew nothing about Awinagat until whatever five, six years ago.

And isn't it amazing that we can take that for granted?

That we isn't it astounding that we have this celebration called Halloween all around the world, and it's like, oh, you mean that thing that happened there up in fucking Roscommon out of a cave?

And we, and we don't even know.

We have the American version of Halloween.

And I want to radicalize people.

I want people to care about the stories that come from the landscape, that come from the art and the soil of this land,

so that we care about, I care about that river.

Like, even, I can't fucking remember now, but that bloody lake up there in the north of Ireland, the biggest lake on this island.

Look, Nay, yeah, yeah.

That's been destroyed by green algae.

You know, I went clambering for mythology around that specific lake, of which there's fucking loads.

Yes.

Because

when you tell people the stories about the lake, you care about it more.

Now it's not just a body of water anymore.

It's an important site where stories happened.

And when you tell people your stories are going to disappear, it seems to mean more than your landscape is going to disappear.

Blindboy, you know, so you're saying you're going back to the mythology of our country.

But what I've realized, and that's what I was doing, and what I'm realizing now, particularly, you know, working more with Indigenous elders around the world, they have the same stories we have.

So when you're talking about like Loch Nay, Loch Nay, and you know, it was formed, one story is that

this boy eloped with his mother from Cork.

He stops in in Newgrange, in Bruna Boyne, the greatest cairn, the greatest ritual or chamber site in Ireland, grabs horses from Angus, the god of love, and then he goes up to Lochnae, up to this great, it was a plain at the time, an open plain.

Well, it was forested and then became cleared.

And then he drops his horses there, but he forgets to bring the horses back to Ishnich, so they begin to piss.

They piss the magic horse of Angus, and he pisses so much that the whole of the lake is full.

Now, you can find the same thing in Indian tradition.

It's the Maruts.

The Maruts were these, they rode through the sky in chariots.

Again, you were talking a few weeks ago about Claum McNoyce and the magic sort of UFO or this boat-like thing in the sky.

India has the same idea.

But the Maruts ride through the chariots and then they said, there's this thing, there's this line again in the old text, the Big Veda, send down for us the rain of heaven, ye Maruts, and let the stallions flood descend in torrents.

The same idea, but horses will piss.

out of the sky and will fill the land with being.

So, you know, a few weeks ago, you were talking talking about.

Why horses?

Pace.

I wonder why horses, pace is so important.

Well, again, I mean, well, I'll get on to that in a second.

Again, a few weeks ago, you were talking about Bran, the voyage of Bran.

You know, where Bran goes off and the exact same story is in India.

It says Indian in culture or the elements of it.

So you remember Bran, he has this vision and then he decides to set off to find the land of women.

And the time, his whole time schedule, I think you were talking about with regard to Willow with this new Google, whatever.

Yeah,

I was was viewing it from a quantum lens.

Yeah, parallel universes.

So in Indian tradition, they have an idea of locas, and locas are celestial realms in the mythology in which time flows differently from the mortal world.

There's time

dilation.

Exactly.

It's these Vedic cosmologies that we were speaking about.

Exactly, exactly.

And then remember, you talked about how Mana Monanon Makleir.

So Bran goes out with his nine men, I think I had about

13 or 17.

Anyway,

he's told how many men to bring on the boat, goes off to find this voyage, this magical island of women.

And the Mananamaklear, the great sea god, comes on his chariot, um, and he intervenes, just like in the similar story in India, it's Krishna in the Maharbhat, in the great epic.

So, you know, Ireland has the Tynebo Kula, the great epic story about cattle raiding.

India, its most famous epic story is the Maharabhatta, also about cattle raiding.

Um, and in Bran, you remember his initial vision, he has this vision where where he sees the island of women then he needs to go to the voyage to find it again very common in Indian stories you'll have the main character the suddenly having a darshan experience which is an experience with the divine and then him needing to follow that vision that he that he has and again you talk about in the voyage of bran nachtan one of the people on the boat decides gets homesick and wants to go home and you know the the gorgeous women in the isle of on the isle of women say don't put your foot on the land, or if you do, you'll turn to dust.

Again, you'll find in Indian mythology, so often like that, a person will try and come back from the magical world and

the minute he does, he's gone.

This inability to exist in multiple planes at the same time.

And just one thing.

It's a phenomenal phenomenon, you know.

And do you know what the quantum equivalent of that is?

Go on.

So quantum computer chips.

So the quantum computer chip can only do its thing when it's at a temperature that's close to absolute zero.

So that's a temperature that doesn't exist on Earth.

It's a coldness that you and I can't even comprehend.

But inside a quantum computer, that's what they do.

They supercool it to this temperature that's close to absolute zero.

And only then can the quantum chip do its quantum business.

But the second that temperature rises and becomes close to what we would consider normal here on Earth, then it all falls apart.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

That's why if you see a quantum computer, they're the maddest looking things.

They look like

big copper chandeliers.

It's not what you'd imagine.

If someone brought you into where a quantum computer is, it's this big, giant, beautiful copper chandelier.

And that's all the tubes, the tubes that are needed to cool this thing down so that the quantum chip can do its thing to a temperature that's almost absolute zero.

And I believe absolute zero is a theoretical temperature, there's no way to actually reach it.

So, they bring it to as close to that as possible, and then they can start to exploit these quantum states.

And again, it just reminds me of

it, just sounds very much that there needs to be these conditions present, and as soon as anything becomes like our world or local reality, then it all falls apart.

Whoa, my God, it's great stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Remember, you were asking why horses, you were saying why horses.

Go on, yeah.

You know, in you, so Topographica Hibernica, is that your book or Garrett?

That's mine.

Well, I wrote

mine's Topographia Hibernica, but obviously, fucking, I'm taking the piss out of Gerald of Wales from the 11th century.

The horse.

So, again, I mean, you've talked about it, you've described how in Geraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales, he describes fucking the horses, having sex with horses.

Exactly.

He describes how we go in Donegal copulating with this white mare, and then he kills it as part of this inauguration ritual.

Then the horse is boiled in a cauldron, and then the king bathes in the cauldron.

And then he eats the horse flesh and he drinks the broth.

And in one way, you know, what you were trying to make clear in your book is that it was pure propaganda, it was just anti-Irish propaganda showing.

And also, the Gregorian reforms, which had come in about 50 years before Gerald of Wales, the Pope had decided, right, that the way to spot a pagan is whether they eat horse meat.

So

that's in the water then.

So if whatever tribe in Europe is eating the flesh of a horse, these people are to be considered savages and pagans.

So that's where you get Gerald's deliberate trope there.

Right.

But we know that he didn't just make it up.

You know, there was this sense that the horse represented the mare, the female horse represented the land.

So saying mulling, say, mulling this early Christian saint from the sixth or seventh century, he refers to the ritual at one point when the saint is offered this cauldron of horse flesh to eat and drink by some pagans and he he refuses and it's almost a symbol of their two by barbaric.

I'm not going to do that.

Okay, so that is a thing that existed in Irish culture at some point and maybe it was used to brand us as barbarians in, as you say, the 12th or 13th century, but it was there.

But you find the same in India.

So the Ashfameda, which is one of the grandest of the Vedic religious rites, in other words, of the Hindi or Hindu religious rites, is the sacrifice of a stallion, not a mare, but a stallion, at the inauguration of a king.

And it's recorded in numerous texts, texts, including the Shathafta Brahmana.

Brahmana is just a collection of old lore.

And both the king and the horse were bathed in the Indian tradition.

Then the horse is suffocated, and then the queen lays down and pretends to have intercourse with the horse.

So then the horse is then dismembered and used in sacrificial offerings, in other words, given to people.

Now, this in the fifth or sixth century AD, Buddha, the Buddha, Siddhartha, he condemns it, but it continued for centuries more.

Some scholars think that it went right up until the 11th century.

A very similar ritual in Ireland and India.

That is fucking mad and completely plausible.

Yeah, yeah.

Things don't change.

The key message that I want to get, you know, my next book is Ireland and Iceland, and the next book after that is Ireland and

Aboriginal stories.

The next is Ireland and Native American.

is that we all are migrants.

We're constantly moving around the planet.

You can't have any exceptionalism, any nationalism.

We are just the products of humanity that have wandered on this earth forever.

We share the same stories.

Let's have a little break there now, you spindly Vincents.

I think we'll have a break for an ocarina pause.

I'm really enjoying that conversation there with Mankon.

I don't have an ocarina now, but I do have a little strange wooden frog.

And I can play his back to make a ribbon noise.

So I'm going to do this, and you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

I can't believe they're having a gender reveal for for their dog.

No, no, no, no.

This is a breed reveal.

Oh, so.

Yeah, they're finding out the breed of the puppy they're rescuing.

So they could just be spending all their money on like pet insurance instead.

We got lemonade for Roscoe when it covered vaccines, microchipping.

We saved 90% on vet bills.

Oh, here we go.

What do you think beige confetti means?

I don't know.

That we'll never get this Saturday back?

Get a quote for any breed at lemonade.com/slash pet.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Very kind on the ears of dogs.

That was the wooden frog's back paws.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has you listened to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing.

Because this is my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living.

It's how I rent out my office.

It's how I have all the equipment in my studio.

It's how...

I don't know if you've noticed there the past while, but I have a new home studio.

The room that I record in at home, it's not a great room.

It's very echoey.

I have to really whisper into the mic when I record in this room because if I speak anything louder than a whisper then we get an echo and it doesn't sound right so I need to soundproof this fucking room I'm gonna do this by hanging a bunch of professional acoustic curtains and what they will do they're gonna deaden this room so that there's no echo at all and when I speak to you in this studio I don't have to be whispering right up to the mic.

So that's an example of something that is paid for by the listener.

When you become a patron of this podcast, you're paying for me to be able to upgrade the studio because this is it's an independent podcast.

This is an independent podcast.

It's all run by me.

I've been doing it for seven years and I adore it and I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way.

And it's only possible because this is listener funded.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it.

But the best part is, if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

You can listen for free.

You can listen for free.

Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And preferably do that on your desktop because if you sign up as a new patron on your Apple mobile phone on your fucking iPhone.

If you use the Patreon app on your iPhone, Apple will take take 30% because they're dirty bastards.

So if you're becoming a patron, please try and do it on a fucking desktop computer, please.

So now a couple of gigs.

Actually also before I get into the gigs, another thing that I'm investing in is a fucking website.

I've tried for many years to fucking maintain a blind by website that has like my bio on it.

or ticket links relevant information for people who want to find out i've always made a bollocks of it i'm jo i'm just too busy i'm too busy to be running a website and i've always it up so this year i'm literally i'm hiring a person to run a website for me

not just

not just for tickets for gigs

but also for my biography for my bio And I'll tell you the reason I'm doing this.

That documentary that I put out about a month ago on RT1,

Blind By Slaves and Scholars, that was a pretty big documentary.

That was a big RT1 documentary.

And the Irish Times, which is the Irish paper of record, did a review of this documentary.

It wasn't necessarily a bad review, but it was factually inaccurate and it really pissed me off.

The reviewer said,

Making the leap.

Blind Boy is making the leap from podcasting to to a primetime RT1 documentary.

Now I'm paraphrasing there, it's not a direct quote.

But in a disparaging way, the reviewer was suggesting that I was inexperienced at making documentaries.

So he said, it's quite a leap from podcasting to a prestige RT1 documentary.

And the thing is, yes, that would be quite a fucking leap.

Such a leap, it's impossible.

It would never happen.

Since 2015, I've made 11 documentaries on television.

Fucking 11.

I didn't even know I'd made 11 until I had to count them because of that bullshit article.

I've made six documentaries on RTE and five documentaries on BBC and one of them was like long listed for a BAFTA.

But I have to read reviews.

Reviews of my documentary in the paper of record.

which means it doesn't disappear.

A review where the reviewer can't be asked to check basic facts.

I didn't make a leap from podcasting to an RT1 documentary.

I've made 11 documentaries.

So I want a website where I can say that.

Where the next time an Irish Times journalist can't be asked to do a bit of digging, they can just go to my website and they can see, oh, he's done 11 documentaries.

Fair enough.

And then I won't have...

I won't have any permanent reviews in the National Paper of Record that portray me as inexperienced when it's actually

a factually inaccurate journalist with no editorial oversight.

I'm not being mean, but I don't know what else to call that.

So I'm investing in a fucking website.

I'm investing specifically in hiring someone who's gonna make my website and update it.

I finally give up.

No, I accept.

I'm too busy.

I can't do fucking everything.

I'm too busy to also run a website.

So hopefully we'll have a bunch of gigs on the website too.

So when I read out the gigs here on the podcast, I won't have to say to you, I'm gigging in Manchester.

I don't know where you can get tickets, just fucking Google it.

Which is what I've been doing there for seven years.

It's worked out alright.

It's worked out alright, but there's probably a better way to do it.

But in the meantime, here's some gigs.

I don't know where you can get the tickets.

You're just gonna have to google the gigs.

Here's another fucking thing.

Google's have to turn into a piece of shit.

Google's broken now.

So if I say to you, I'm gigging in Manchester, Google it.

You might get fucking a Manchester gig from three years ago.

But anyway, look, I'm gigging in Dublin next week in Vicar Street.

That's sold out.

Can't wait for that.

It's gonna be a lot of fun.

I might stay up in Dublin just to get some...

some wonderful Chinese food in Parnell Street.

Go to Parnell Street for some Chinese food and have a think about Charles Parnell.

Like we've got these we've got a terrible housing crisis in Ireland.

A rent crisis and a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis.

And then we've got streets.

Every fucking town and city has got a Parnell street.

And I guarantee you if you went to most people and said, what did Charles Stuart Parnell do?

A lot of people couldn't tell you.

Do you know what he fucking did?

He organised rent strikes all across Ireland.

Charles Stuart Parnell went to the people of Ireland and said, the landlords are exploiting exploiting ye.

Like this is the fucking 1800s.

Parnell went, the landlords are exploiting ye.

This is unfair.

Everybody, everybody in the whole country, stop paying rent.

Everybody, this is a fucking strike.

Everyone stop paying rent.

And that act of non-violent collective bargaining led to actual systemic change.

So in Dublin right now, Parnell Street is...

It's got some wonderful Chinese food.

There's fantastic Chinese restaurants on Parnell Street.

There's a lovely little Korean restaurant there.

There's a gorgeous little heavy metal pub called Fibber McGee's.

Now I haven't been there in a long time.

So I can't vouch for Fibber McGee's.

I haven't been there in about 10 fucking years, I'd say.

But anytime you're on a Parnell Street, if you go to Parnell Street in Dublin to have some delicious Chinese noodles, spend some time to reflect on Charles Stuart Parnell.

Read about him.

Read about what he did.

He organised peaceful rent strikes, collective bargaining, all Ireland that led to systemic change.

Parnell Street in Limerick is weird.

There's a chip shop on it called Luigi's, which is fantastic.

And then, oh, there's the Palestinian butchers.

People drive past and beep their horns and say, Beep, beep, free Palestine.

Actually, there's the Tarkman Grill, where you'll get very authentic Afghani food but mostly Parnell Street in Limerick.

It looks like New York.

You'd have to go there to see it.

It's just this strange little street in Limerick and because of the size of the footpaths and the red brick it looks like a small little weird piece of Brooklyn.

But when I walk down that street I always have a think about Charles Stuart Parnell.

I'm supposed to be promoting fucking gigs here, hold on.

That was about Vicker Street, was it?

Galway, Leisureland.

I just can't get over I'm playing a gaff called Leisureland.

I used to go there on school tours.

Is that the Aquedome?

Is that where the Aquedome is?

Anyway, look, Galway sold out.

When's that?

February.

Uh

fucking Crescent Hall and Drahada.

Drahada, poor old Drahada.

Oliver Cromwell sacked Drahada.

Did a genocide in Drahada.

So I'm up in Drahada in the Crescent Hall on the 21st of February.

Then I'm up in Belfast.

Nothing much has ever happened historically in Belfast.

Nothing comes to mind.

I'm in the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast on the 28th.

Then I'm in Killarney.

When I'm in fucking Killarney, let's see here.

7th of March, I'm in Killarney.

Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival on the 13th of March.

Then

this fucking limerick gig where

I can never get the date right.

Why the fuck is it in my calendar here for March?

No.

When the fuck am I in Limerick?

That's not till April.

Look, I'm in Australia and New Zealand.

That's all sold out.

In March, is it?

Yeah.

And then

this is confusing shit.

There's a Limerick gig, Limerick Concert Hall there in April, 23rd of April.

And then a massive tour of fucking England and Scotland there in June, is it?

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich.

I'm embarking on a mainland campaign.

I'm gonna drink black Protestant soup from Maggie Thatcher's tits and entertain the cracking tans.

I'll have all those details on my website when I have a website, but in the meantime, just look it up on Google.

Another odd episode this week.

Look, let's go back to my...

my phone call with the wonderful, magnificent Mancon Magin.

This is, you're getting a long podcast this week.

You're getting, if you're out for a walk, you're getting a big, long treat this week.

And that's the other match.

Did you ever hear of Doggerland?

Did you?

I did.

This is the land off Wales, isn't it?

No, Doggerland is

a really interesting one.

It's where the North Sea gas field is right now.

So it's between Scotland and Denmark.

Yeah.

So there was a stretch stretch of land, I think it was as recent as 25,000 years ago, a stretch of land called Doggerland, which was marshy.

But they found it when basically

when they struck gas and oil in that area between Scotland and Denmark, divers went down to the bottom of the sea to put the big offshore rigs there.

And when the divers were underneath the sea, they're like, what the fuck is this axe doing here?

And they're like, why are there human things at the bottom of this sea in the middle of nowhere?

And Doggerland is

so it was this vast civilization like an Atlantis.

I'm not saying they were advanced, but the people were living 20,000 years ago between Denmark and Scotland.

And what happened and what makes this so unique and terrifying?

It flooded because of one incident.

So the ice age was ending and there was this huge glacier up near Denmark and that just fell one day.

It just fell and that was enough to completely suddenly in a deluge flood all of Doggerland about 20,000 years ago and I can't I have to associate incidents like that that happened at the end of the ice age with flood mythology in every single culture.

Yeah.

There had to have literally been huge deluges that destroyed civilizations all at once.

And that's why every single culture has flood mythology.

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

When you were talking

on that episode about the voyage of Bran and Lyon MacLear, the great sea god

comes upon them and he says to them, you think you're plowing the waves, but I am riding on a meadow of flowers.

Yes.

And what that is, I think, because just from looking at other cultures, that's also a memory.

of that the land off the coast

off yeah was remembered as a land and how you get this because in ireland you you know, it's nine waves.

So fishermen will believe that beyond nine waves is wilderness, is ocean.

But it's actually called the land

for the first nine waves because people remember different areas before when the ice levels were at the water levels were at different areas.

And it's why, in a phrase like in Irish, you'll find now I only came across this insight by going to Western Australia and talking to Aboriginals there.

But in Ireland, you have a phrase,

there's a white flower on the fisherman's garden.

So

fishermen still today would see that area among that you'd go in a curricul or a navogue, the traditional canvas or skin boat.

That way area up to nine waves out is still considered land.

The ocean gods, the goddesses are only beyond that.

And then there's another word: when you're rowing a canoe or a curuch or a navogue, you will say, I'm plowing through the waves.

That's interesting, yeah.

So you're working the land.

And it's the same when

in you know, this Noel Nanop, Dr.

Noel Nanop, this great elder, this Nungar elder, Nungar Bujjar, in the land of the sacred land of the Nungar people

near Perth and Fremantle,

he says that the island, when they look out to sea and they have these, they see the wells, the wells dropping, bubbling up, then freshwater wells beneath the sea.

These are sacred areas for them because they remember their people used to gather at those sacred wells before the water was flooded.

And people used to laugh at them and think they were barbarians.

Now, the latest geological surveys are saying they were quite right.

20,000, 25,000 years ago, before this great rising of water, in fact, that was dry land.

There were whole settlements there and divers going down and finding pieces.

They're finding them around these wells because they were gathering places.

um what do you call water holes rather than wells in in australia yeah and that tells us then of course about the the age of of Aboriginal culture, because the other thing, too,

like the Aboriginal people were colonized brutally and so brutally that

the way they're spoken about in the West, they're not considered, they're not spoken about as humans, they're not spoken about as a real culture.

And this sense of, oh, they were just there.

And if you say the Aboriginal people were actually there for 25,000, 30,000 years, and their stories are this long.

It makes us, it makes the narrative of how they were canonized a lot more inconvenient and a lot more brutal, which is the truth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's, you know, there's rock art in Australia, which is 45,000 years old.

Now, some people are saying it's 60,000, but I met, I met up and talked and walked the land with Aboriginals who can still understand.

the ancient signs of their rock art from 45,000 years because it's not only a culture that was there back then, it's a continuous culture.

It's an unbroken culture.

The lore of what those symbols mean has been passed down.

Now, just about maybe two months ago, this man Tyson Yungkaporta, this elder I talked about who wrote this life-changing book called Sand Talk,

I sent him a picture of Cairn, one of the Cairns in Loch Crew, and she of Nikali, the hill of the witch in Meath, in your old castle.

And he just came back to me next day, like so excited.

Oh my God, oh my God, my God.

I can read those symbols, he says, at least from my way out of from his point he can now he's seeing that from his was that

script mankind no no it was no the it was the the spirals the circles

challenges wow yeah so you know

our owl is from whatever 400 ad these go back to five and a half thousand years they're neolithic uh uh rock art he can read them he believes from his now That's, you know, maybe he's wrong, but it's opening up a whole thing.

If we do start communicating, all of us, not just a mythology department in Ireland or an archaeological, but first in Ireland, the archaeological department talking to the anthropologists, talking to the folklorists and mythologists in Ireland, and then the archaeologists and mythologists talking to cultures all around the world and realizing not being so nationalistic about it, we might get whole new revelations so that we can understand the language of rock art in Ireland.

Either that or maybe AI could be able to help us in that

as well.

The reason I love chatting to you, Mencon, is it's because you are not an academic

um and i speak to a lot of academics and it's great crack but what i find with academics is

as soon as anything fun or mad happens in the conversation it's shut down immediately and you can't do that

you know what you're saying there might be connection between aboriginal language and culture and irish culture the average academic is just going to go we're going to need to stop there or i'm going to lose my job and that's fair enough but we also need to be, there needs to be space for lunatics to think outside the box

and space for people to have mad conversations and for those conversations to be wrong.

And if you do that enough, some of it's going to be right.

Beautiful.

And an example of it there is

those Aboriginal people who were being laughed at when they're going, beyond that ocean there are watering holes.

And scientists going, no, there's not with your silly stories.

And then it turns out when science looks into it oh they were right they have unbroken stories that go back 30 000 years and these people who we called silly and didn't believe and didn't respect they were actually right

yeah you know what i mean yeah so there has to be space for outside the box thinking and playfulness and being wrong and being mad and having fun

I think things have improved a lot in the last 10 years.

Like, fair enough, if you put a camera in front of a scholar, an academic scholar, they're not, they can't publicly go.

Oh, they're good crack off camera.

Yeah.

And they're really appreciating the work you're doing and the work I'm doing.

I can't believe the tolerance that is there for my work, you know, which isn't grounded in huge academic discipline.

It's not, I'm not pulling it from my ass.

I'm trying to base it on.

No, but you're going, you're not pulling it from your hole, but you're going, what if we look at it this way?

Yeah.

And I love that.

Yeah.

But there's huge respect for your work as well by them because of that.

And there wouldn't have been, they would have dismissed us.

The old generation would have absolutely laughed at us.

So there's a slow change happening.

And you know, it's just it's interesting to see, you know, you were talking about the Cada Fields.

It's interesting to see how

how recent the discipline of archaeology is in Ireland.

So I don't remember.

No, yeah, you

know how the Cada Fields was discovered.

This man, Patrick Cafaf, Caulfield.

Okay.

So Patrick Caulfield, he was a school teacher, a local curious curious, a national school teacher

up in North Mayo, beyond Valley Castle, in Mayo, in Bellenderrig.

And Bellender, is that what it's called?

Huh.

I need to check.

No, it's not.

Anyway, he's up beyond Valley Castle, up on the sea.

And

he's out picking ball.

He's out picking turf.

And you know the way, sometimes they used to put a long piece of wood or a piece of iron into the bog to see if they could find a bit of bog oak.

Yeah.

Bog pine.

You know, there was wood, pitch pine been or oak that had been preserved for the whatever the 5,000 or 6,000 years since that bog was laid down on top of a rotten forest.

And he's tapping away, putting the big wood down four meters down.

And suddenly he realizes he's hitting not wood, but stone.

So that's fair.

There's a rock there.

But as he goes on, he goes another meter, puts it down again, stone again, another meter.

And he keeps on doing this.

He's this way there.

He says, there's a linear, a perfectly linear stone line

four thousand or four meters beneath the bog, or maybe six, seven meters below.

And he thinks that can only be a wall.

And he knows that bog, the way bog is laid down a few inches every year, that has to be between 5,000 and 6,000 years old, maybe 6,500.

So decises, that means there's a wall here 6,000 years ago.

And he says, but there's no evidence in the whole of Europe of there being walls, of the remains of basically Stone Age walls from that long ago.

So he sends a letter down to the National Museum in about 1939.

And then the was actually a German director of the National Museum.

I might remember to tell you this story before, but anyway, the German director says, okay, that's very interesting, but rationing has just come on in the war.

We don't have enough petrol to send a car up.

But after the war, we'll send a car up.

So they send a car up in whatever, the late 40s or the late 40s.

And they have a quick look and they think, okay, that might be something.

But Patrick Caulfield, they don't have the money or the resources or the mindset to do anything else.

So meanwhile, Patrick Caulfield's son becomes of age, he becomes 17, 18.

He goes to UCD and they just opened an archaeology department.

So he goes, studies archaeology.

Within a few years later, he's the professor of the whole department of archaeology in UCD.

The first thing he does is go up to Balnderig, yet up to Mayo to do a dig on the site.

And he reveals the oldest,

yeah, the oldest bronze Neolithic or Stone Age, new Stone Age site in Europe or possibly in the world.

And there was such excitement.

This was in the late 70s and the 80s.

And I remember at one stage he wanted to go out to

St.

Patrick's Point.

What's that called?

You did it, Gorne.

You took some gorgeous photos for your website.

Oh, yes, St.

Patrick's Pargotry out there.

No, no, no.

No.

I mean, you have to leap out to her.

It's a rock spur just off the Cada Fields.

At least, I think you were out there.

I think you were.

But anyway, so Charles Howie gives him a helicopter to go out there.

The country was so excited in the 80s when we were basically uncovering day by day this Neolithic stone setup.

And not only did he find that, but near his own home place, he found a Bronze Age site.

Okay, so there wasn't as much bog.

He reveals it.

So it's not Neolithic, it's not from five or six thousand years ago, it's from 4,000 years ago or three and a half.

And there he finds the growing mounds, the growing ridges, where our ancestors, in other words, a later group of farmers.

So the people who built Newgrange and built that whole Bronze Age stone circle, they were Neolithic farmers and they had learned farming where?

That place between

Eastern Europe and Western Asia and brought their culture with them, an Indo-European culture.

Then later in the Bronze Age, more sophisticated farmers who had technology of bronze came and he finds their remains of their farming fields and they have grain ridges.

And he sees the ridges because he clears away the bog, which is, you know, this moss and dead weeds and things which have grown up

over thousands of years.

And he actually sees the ridges on the soil where they molded up to put the emmer on the einkorn, the early types of wheat.

In fact, he even finds traces of those in the land.

And that was all because of one school teacher, you know, uneducated, never beyond, you know, probably secondary school, Patrick Caulfield.

He has an inkling by prodding the land.

His son then gets an education because Ireland becomes rich enough to give people who are just, you know, from rural Ireland with national school to bring them onto college.

And then Seamus Caulfield does all this discovery.

And now Seamus's students, if you meet any student, archaeology student now from UCD, from the University of Dublin, they'll all have been taught by Seamus, but they're expanding their mind again to a whole other dimension.

It's just each generation learns and grows.

And something I'd love to chat to you, Mancom, before we go is, can you tell me about inbulk?

Because we have all these

seasonal festivals in Ireland.

that become like Christmas, Easter, all this crack.

Inbulk is coming up on the 1st of February.

Can you tell us about inbulk?

Yeah.

And again, it's so weird how in the last five years, people have gone back to these old Celtic

feast days, the cross-quarter days.

In other words, the days that are exactly between the solstice and the equinox, or four times of the year.

And there's four of them, obviously, Sawhon, Imbulk, Bjaltana, and Lunisa.

So you sort of need to start with the first one to get a sense of it.

And that's Sawhan is, as you remembered, as you mentioned, that's around the 1st of November, the first few days of November.

And it's the end of the harvest and the preparation of winter.

And it's often communicated by the fact that the Kailach, the great land sovereignty goddess, she comes through the land, again, just like the witch on her stick, on her broom,

washing away, battling away, knocking down all the verdancy, all the growth, all the

abundance of summer.

She's bringing on winter.

So the Kailach there.

Connected to the Indian goddess Kali.

Kali and Kailach has the same root word, same concept.

Durga is often the goddess of destruction in Indian, but Kali has elements of that too.

So the Khalik comes, destroys all the greenery of life.

She makes sure that the sun stays beneath the horizon for long periods of winter.

So she is darkness, she is destruction, she is death.

Yeah, you can think of her as a bad thing, as an evil force, but in fact, no.

She then transforms on, now we say it's the first day of February, but it was around the third, between the third and the sixth, the first week of February, into Bridget, into the new young spirit the new well she transforms as as a as a so she the kailuck is is uh

like an old woman isn't she exactly and she then turns into a young woman yeah because you see in in these ancient traditions like the yin-yang you know thing in india nothing is ever just one thing it's everything okay so we're now in this dualistic society as well as you were going on you know zeros and one and actually and and fucking eschatological time everything is linear and and building up towards the end that's it so there was nothing um that's such a eschalog that's such there was nothing of that mindset in the old day everything was everything everything was in that stasis that schrodinger was so interested in so the kilach um

you know brings on this destruction of of of of winter then transforms herself into the new young seed the new young flame oh wow that we call bridget she's the and imbolic can mean different things.

It either means imbullock in the stomach or in the belly.

So it's the time that

the you, the yo, the sheep, the female sheep will become pregnant.

So the lamb is in the belly at this stage.

Or it could be imblan.

Glan is an Irish word for to milk, to milk cattle or to milk.

So ble would be an old way, imle.

So it would be the time that the milk is in the teeth of the cattle.

Or also, there's an Indo-European world word, embulgan, which is budding.

So it's the time of the new growth, the new budding, the new life, the new seed.

And so,

you know, it's represented by this goddess Kailach, this goddess Bridget or Breed, who is, it says, is the same as Kailach, but it's not just zero and one.

It's not just Kailach or Bridget.

She's also the same goddess who becomes at Bialtsuna at the full blossoming time of early May.

the spirit of total growth and a full-on growth and then of the harvest in Lunas.

So she is all things.

She's basically the matriarchal goddess.

She is the land, she is the soil who gives birth, well, starts in darkness of nothingness, of blackness, of bleakness, grows a seed in her belly, brings forth new life.

So brings forth, you know, grows a seed in her belly around February when the land begins to warm and then

goes into full

abundance of May, June, July, and then the harvest time.

And again, that concept of Bridget, the word is a proto-Celtic word.

So you you remember,

we all speak Proto-Indo-European languages.

Everything except Basque and Finnish seem to be every language in Western Asia and Eastern Europe and Europe seems to come from this.

So the proto-Celtic word, proto-Celtic, was a

sub-family of Indo-European words.

Briganti is where the word Brigitte comes from.

And Briganti means high or exalted.

But in Rigveda, the Rigveda, the great, you know, collection of India words, you have a goddess of the dawn known as the Ushas, who's referred to as Bhrati, meaning exalted one, or Her Highness.

Same concept, same word.

In the same way as, you know, one of the great stories of Bridget, how we show what she was able to do about spreading the new warmth and light from the land.

Remember, she comes to Kildare,

goes to the king of Leinster and asks him,

I want a tiny bit of land to put my monastery on.

So she is the last element of the old female matriarchal culture, of that wisdom.

And she goes, by this stage, the kings have taken over the males have taken over she goes to the king says just give me enough land to have a settlement a little monastery on uh by this stage in the stories she's a christian rather than a pagan goddess so obviously the christians just um there's great you know was it you talked about this there's great stories about the pope actually in the fifth sixth century telling the missionaries go and just christianize the old stories

we know this what they did So anyway, goes to King of Leinster and the King of Leinster refuses.

So she says, can I have just enough for my cloak?

Just enough enough to cover what my cloak will.

And he thinks, fair enough, stupid woman.

And he does.

And we all know everyone in Ireland knows the story.

You've referred to it again.

If you podcast this, the cloak expands and expands to become the size of County Kildare,

which is now still the sacred land of Bridget, of the land.

But anyway, in the Maharabhata, the great epic story of Vedic, of Indian culture, there is this character called Droppid.

It's actually the principal female character.

And her five husbands lose her to the Khuarava brothers, these sort of in the gambling debt.

She has five husbands, they go gambling, they lose this beautiful woman.

So she tries to protest her legality, her morality.

But in the court, in the great assembly room, the king, the leader, says, you're now a slave.

So

you need to be stripped of your sari.

So the greatest humility will be for this Indian goddess to have her sari removed from her.

But Lord Krishna intervenes and he extends the sari.

He makes it wider and wider and wider.

So no matter how hard and how far they try to pull it off her she is still clothed the same story about the great exalted one this great goddess having the cloak protecting her and covering her beautiful wow

um and still today you know what do we do with bridget today what do i do anyway well in kildare you know you go to the local um in Kildare town, there's two wells connected to her, and so many people are coming out now to just do ritual, to stand, to sit at the well.

Also in Fahrt, Fahrt was where she was born, just outside Dundalk.

There is her place, there's a well and there's a shrine to her there.

But the nicest thing, the best thing that I like is

again, in so many Indigenous cultures, you'll find something very similar.

Bratdida is her cloak.

So in memory of her protective cloak, we put out a piece of cloth.

Traveler people, the Minkeri used to put out a white cloth.

Other people put a red and white cloth, and that's for healing.

But you put some type of cloth on a bush so that the Jew, the morning Jew, the Drucht in Irish, can land on that cloth and

it can sanctify the cloth.

And then that cloth is used for healing, for strength, all year round.

And Bridget is associated with mist.

Exactly.

Yeah.

She used to keep bees in the other world and the bees would travel through the mist.

So beautiful.

So like.

I love that.

That was the explanation for how

bees can magically fertilize flowers.

It's like, well, they belong to Bridget, and she tends these bees in the other world, but in the morning, they float through the mist and bring otherworldly magic to flowers, and that's where fruit comes from, which is beautiful.

So beautiful, so beautiful.

But also, it means don't fuck with bees, don't be fucking with Bridget's bees, which is a great idea if you're interested in biodiversity.

Don't be fucking with bees.

Totally, totally.

Now, there's a great book by Celeste Ray, who's an expert on Holy Wells

in Ireland, and she put together a collection of books about holy wells.

Okay, but one of the articles by by a lecturer in Queen's University, Belfast, I think his name was Gary Quim.

I need to check that.

But he was deciding, he was looking at the clay that is to be found in often around wells, but in sacred places, that it can be healing clay or healing soil, right?

Wow.

So he brings it into the lab and he does isolate a bacteria that actually can kill all of those bacteria that take over hospitals, you know, some of the worst strectococcus or whatever they are.

The infections.

Wow.

Yeah, the MRI, the MRS, the whatever it is um thing anyway he's doing this and it smells what is the smell i think it's a truffly smell and then he notices the next few days that the smell is on his lab coat okay so then he realizes oh my god this um bacteria likes cotton it goes to cotton and it stick impregnates itself into cotton so then he started uh

you know ripping up bits of cotton and thinking is the cotton then if it has this the whatever whatever, this type of bacteria in it, the strain of bacteria,

and that he isolated, that was never found in science before,

will the cloth then also be curative?

Will it also,

as you heal the staff things?

Now, I just read, this was an academic paper he did a few years ago, he haven't done the full research.

But imagine that actually that brought it are the little clutties, the little ribbons that we tie to wells.

If we're now going to find that somehow the dew around the 1st of February, that the conditions, the weather and humidity conditions are ideal for that bacterial strain to impregnate him on this cloth, and then the cloth actually could be scientifically healing as well as mythologically healing.

That is fucking nuts.

I know, I know.

I can't wait.

You know, I have this podcast called the Almanac of Ireland.

I can't wait to get him on the Almanac.

Like, that I just love this cutting edge where you mix mythology with science because you say, otherwise, I could lose myself up in my own hole.

But if we...

Well, it's that shit we were talking about.

You need to have people who are willing to speak about what we consider to be irrational.

Like

a lot of holy wells,

like last week,

you didn't see

the tomato bridge up in Drumcondra, no?

I saw photos of it.

So that to me, like that's just votive offerings.

That felt deeply Irish.

People, I know it's silly and people are having crack, but the tradition of we are bringing objects to this bridge.

For me,

what I think it was, like the collective unconscious,

it was young people in Dublin who are sick of what has happened to Dublin.

There's no nightlife left in Dublin.

There's no nightclubs.

It's hard to be an artist.

Young people can't afford to live up there.

And what people are left with really are restaurants that they review.

That seems to be youth culture at the moment.

They put these tomatoes on the bridge.

It happened out of nowhere.

Then someone declared it a shrine on google and then people were leaving reviews for the the pop-up tomato shrine and it felt like a pop-up restaurant version of something we've been doing for thousands of years and then i traced just three minutes up the road it is is a holy well saint catharine's well in drumcondra which is now gone but it was underneath somebody's house and we know that this well was pagan because I went looking it up.

There used to be a tradition that if you drank water from St Catherine's Well in Drumkandra, if you drank it from a human skull, it would cure your eyes of any ailment.

You know, and it's just three minutes up the road.

And I know it's a big stretch to compare young people leaving tomatoes on a bridge with the ancient practice of holy wells, but it's fucking similar.

It's there in the culture.

It felt

people knew what to do.

Come to this place, leave your votive offering.

And with vote of offerings, it's generally, I'm going to leave a little thing here to this shrine, and then you're going to solve my problem.

You know what I mean?

And when they look into eye wells, because there's a lot of these, these, you'd know the word, I'm shit at speaking Irish, the shoal well.

Exactly.

See, yeah, tubbernisool.

It's tuberna sules, right?

Zinc.

Zinc is what's it, whatever little minerals are coming up, there's a high amount of zinc.

And zinc is fantastic for conjunctivitis.

All these things we take for granted because we can walk into a chemist.

But 300 years ago, if you've got zinc coming out of the ground, you're sorted for the eyes.

Like another thing I really looked, and this is amazing, is

I might have said this to you before, but in America, around New York, Pennsylvania, when they do archaeology there and they're trying to find the site of an old,

if they're looking at old slums, slums that might be 200, 300 years old, they can tell if a slum was Irish because people collected bottles of sparkling water.

Oh, yeah, you did

an episode about this.

Yes, this was the Irish, like it's just fucking sparkling water, carbonated water.

But the Irish people were like, no, this tastes like that well at home.

And that well at home was mineral water.

It was mineral water.

That's what it might, you know, the zinc or the copper would leave a little bit zinging on your tongue.

And some of these wells were effervescent.

And the Irish people, when they met with American capitalism and they met with artificially carbonated water, they felt, I know I can buy this in the shop, but it feels really sacred.

So I can't throw this bottle out.

I have to keep this bottle.

And then you dig up land in Pennsylvania and you find all these old fucking sparkling water bottles because the Irish thought they were holy.

You know, it's amazing.

And did you, did that, the article where you were talking about that, I can't remember, did it mention about Club Soda?

Do you know this idea of the Club Orange or Club, which is an Irish thing, but Club Soda all over the world?

Did that word came from Ireland?

I did not know that.

No.

Either the Kildare Street Club or one of the clubs, the gentleman's clubs in Stevens.

That's where Club Soda comes from.

Yeah, and the Horn Doublet.

They asked for a drink to be made by Cochrane and Colchran or whatever, CNC, which was the main fizzy drinks company in Ireland, mineral company in Ireland.

And they made this drink for the club called Club Soda.

Yeah.

And now that just went over the world, but it must be connected to that in some way.

Possibly.

It's well, we've a strange little sparkling water thing going on with Ireland.

So we like, obviously, we've got the holy wells and mineral water is minerals from the bottom of the earth.

But then a really strange, complete fucking coincidence, right?

So up until about,

I think 1890, sparkling water was a serious luxury.

To get water and to artificially carbonate it was a very difficult thing to do, and it was very expensive because what you needed was

sulfuric acid and marble dust, right?

So marble is very expensive, obviously.

So if you can dust up a lot of marble, crush it down and mix this with sulfuric acid, it will release carbon dioxide and that's how you use the carbonate water.

But this was quite expensive.

So then in New York at the end of the 1800s when they were building St Patrick's Cathedral for the Irish, right,

they needed so much marble for St Patrick's Cathedral that it flooded the market with marble.

So all of a sudden marble was cheap because the paddies needed St Patrick Cathedral and then you started to see all these little pharmacies pop up where they're suddenly serving sparkling carbonated water at an affordable price because the market was flooded with marble because of the paddies who needed a church.

Wow.

Like it's that's just something a connection I spotted.

Sheer coincidence.

But

it's just mad that these same people are the ones who were hoarding sparkling water because they believe it to have religious qualities because of some fucking well back home.

And the other thing, too, is what I love is that period in Irish history where

after the penal laws, you know, being a Catholic is illegal.

So, people head off to the countryside.

You have mass rocks, and Catholicism for about two, three hundred years after the penal laws reverts back to its strange pre-Christian roots.

You know, that's where you start to see this resurgence in Holy Wells, mass rocks.

You know what I mean?

And these are no longer leaving.

These are the people who were arriving in New York, Pennsylvania, from 1750 onwards.

It's gone feral, basically.

The religion is no longer under under the control of Rome, of the Vatican, of the Pope, and it's just whatever.

It's really mixing back into whatever bush religion or pagan tradition.

Around like penal law period.

And again, of course, like I'd want to learn more about it, but one of the consequences of the penal laws is no one was allowed to write.

You know what I mean?

So you don't have literature about these.

And as well, it's illegal.

So who's going to write down about the illegal mass last night when there's literal, when there's English people in the country whose job is priest hunter.

You're not going to write about the mass that you had last night in a bush.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

We don't have evidence of it, but we do know that

that's what that kept Holy Wells alive.

That kept a lot of what we call pagan beliefs alive because you could no longer go to the church anymore.

The church didn't exist and the monasteries were being burnt down

as part of these penal laws and

wider Protestant canonization.

Good God, Blind Boy.

You blow my mind every time.

Jesus.

I'm still blowing.

Go on.

We should call it a day because we're talking for more than an hour.

Oh, golly.

Golly.

Yeah.

Oh, great to talk to you again, Blindby.

And like, congratulations on the work.

The amount of things you're unearthing.

And it's just because you are exhaustively researching new stuff that just hasn't been aired.

Like, I'm still getting over that whole thing of the bones being used, milled-up bones from hole being used to purify sugar beet right up until what the early 20th century.

I mean

well I had it I had a whole episode you see man con where my theory was that bard shit is the most bard shit is the reason that the earth has eight billion people

and and

like

fertilizer right nitrogen nitrogen nitrogen is really difficult to come by yeah if you think of nitrogen for farming you can get it from manure and you can get it from grass that you leave to rot, but you're not creating anything new.

It's already there.

So nitrogen was a very difficult chemical to get your hands on if you were farming throughout human history.

And then people figured out bird shit.

Bard shit is a wonderful source of nitrogen.

But with colonization in particular,

areas around South America near Panama.

There's entire islands there that are made entirely out of bird shit.

So colonization happens there.

And now now bard shit is being shipped all the way back to Europe and now we have a surplus of nitrogen.

Nitrogen that didn't exist before.

Now we have a surplus of nitrogen because of these barred shit islands.

And that's a limited resource like oil.

But we thought we had all the barred shit in the world.

We didn't.

There's also a theory that this bard shit is what brought blight to Ireland.

That because the potatoes are from Peru.

But then the Peruvian islands full of barred shit, that's what had the blight.

That's one one theory.

But

Europe anyway starts to depend upon islands of bird shit in South America and Central America.

And we're talking now going up until about 1860.

And around 1860, we start to run out of bird shit.

We run out of nitrogen.

And by about 1890,

the world's population had gotten to be, I think, 3 billion.

right the reason the world's population had gotten that big is because of excess of nitrogen

You have excess nitrogen, you can grow food now.

You can grow more food than you need.

So the world's population explodes to 3 billion people.

And there was the threat of a genuine global famine around 1890.

They were just going, we've used up all the bird shit.

What are we going to do?

This is when they started to dig up the likes of Waterloo.

All these sites where you had...

massive wars where there was thousands and thousands of horses buried in particular.

They started digging up all the horses' bones to get the nitrogen from them because, like with oil, we'd run out of fucking nitrogen.

And then, just by sheer chance, by sheer chance, a chemist by the name of Fritz Haber in 1901 figures out, fuck it, nitrogen is in the air.

I know how to get it.

So, for that one chemist called Fritz Haber figuring out how to get unlimited nitrogen from the air around us, there would have been global famine.

But that, that there,

taking the nitrogen from alchemy effectively that's a alchemy like alchemy is all about how do we get gold um

getting nitrogen from the air is alchemy we shouldn't be able to get it but this fritz harbour figured out with chemistry there's nitrogen all around as we breathe it i know how to make it into a powder so he did that that there we avoided global famine but then the world's population exploded far beyond what we're supposed to have because now you can grow as much food as you want because we've got unlimited nitrogen it's also what created massive bombs there'd be no huge gigantic bombs that could kill people if we couldn't figure out how to get nitrogen from the air it's the reason we have a nuclear bomb because eventually it's like how do we build a bigger bomb than what nitrogen will give us

I urge people to go back to that episode of Dior.

I think you heard it.

Oh, I did.

Oh, sorry, man.

I just told you a fucking podcast that you'd listened to.

Oh, no, no.

Well, can I tell you one element of how it affected my family with the work I'm doing today?

So you remember my Dior Rahali was Mike and Joseph O'Rahali.

He was the founder of the volunteers of the IRA.

He was also one of the founders of Gaelic League of Conrad Gaelga.

In the 1890s, he founded the Gaelic League, was one of the people fighting it.

And then he and Owen McNeill, professor, professor of Celtic studies, in 1913, in UCD, in the University of Dublin, founded the Irish Volunteers, which became the Irish Republican Army.

The reason he was, and then in 1914, he was part of the hulk gun running so he bought the majority of the guns for the 1916 uprising so that we could get our independence so that we could keep our mythology our language our stories alive the reason he was able to do that because his father had a tiny pub and shop in valley longfort a tiny little village beside listowing north kerry

and every autumn sorry every autumn yeah harvest the farmers in that whole area this is

after the penal laws the laws that had so curtailed the freedoms of Catholics in Ireland during the 18th century.

After that time, they had money.

They'd have their harvest.

There was one time a farmer in Kerry had money at the harvest time.

They'd go into this tiny pub and shop.

It's just a crossroads.

The great professor Brendan Kennelly from Trinity College, he lived on the opposite side of the crossroads.

He wrote a book called The Cook and Cross.

So the Oraley's father lives there.

Brendan Kennelly's people live on the other side.

And the farmers come in in autumn time and there's a little tiny canal leading from the Shannon Estuary, the greatest, the greatest, biggest river in Britain and Ireland, down to the back of this pump.

So, the farmers were able to go in in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and order their guano, their

gold shite.

Now, in 1994, I went to Peru and took a boat trip into one of those hollowed-out caves.

And they told me this cave had been solid, solid with bird shit or guano.

And then over those, the whole 19th century was

hollowed out.

The smell was just as bad as you referred to on the is it patrick street in limerick no yeah the birds district uh bedford row there with the starling with all the posh shops phenomenally bad yeah so he the orali's dad made his money from selling guanu and things like pitch pine and things but mainly the

way no so that's on one side he he earned so much by the time the orali comes of age he's 19 or 20 his dad dies in 1898 around and he realizes his dad has the equipment of three million euro three million million euro earned from the local farmers in this tiny

bird shit, mainly birdship, other things too.

And then that's my mother's side of the family, right?

My dad's side of the family lived in Longford and they lived by the side of the Royal Canal in Killishy, a little village, a square farmer.

My own first cousin still lived there in a house, an old farmhouse on the sides of the Royal Canal.

and with access to the Royal Canal.

So when we needed things for the farm throughout the 19th century, we'd get them sent down from Dublin.

We'd get them sent down by the mills, and it was Shackleton Mills.

So, basically, I can't remember, was it the first cousin or the uncle of Ernest Shackleton, who went down to the Antarctic?

And I have the ledgers and the lists from Shackleton.

And one of the key things that was grain and seed, but there was also guano.

There was also this, you know, and it said like Peru, uh, bird shape from Peru or something, you know, it said where it's coming from.

So, that's what kept my father's side of the family alive.

That's why they didn't die during the famine because they made money selling the guano to local farmers in Longford.

In the same way, my

actually my mum's side of the family, the O'Reilly side,

the old man did die.

You know, it was the O'Halley's grandfather died during the famine.

He was a rich local man and tried to look after local people and got one of the diseases and died.

But he still left enough of the building that his father, his son, could re-earn the three million that he then used to buy guns.

And then, right up until 1921, he was like, well, and after actually 1930s, he was

telling me bard shit funded the weaponry that was used in the 1916 rising.

Directly, Brian Boy, directly.

Fuck me.

That's fucking unreal.

Yeah.

But it's only, I would never spot it except you walking up Breadford Row and your curiosity because of your sense of smell, because the people at the fancy restaurants and wine bars not been able to eat outside.

I got killed by Limerick Council for that.

I got fucking killed because people now call that area the bard shit district.

So they fucking hate me in Limerick Council.

So I'm glad something good came out of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

You're finding it's a great bird shit funded, the fucking 1916 rising.

Amazing.

Did we look enough at Imbulk?

But if we're not, RTE, most people around the world will have access to the RTE player.

And on the 2nd of February, there's a lovely documentary about Imbulk, about this feast day at the beginning of February that is our day to sanctify the new warmth, a new life, a new spirit coming into the land.

I'd urge people to watch it

in case I messed up the facts or anything about it.

Okay.

We've chatted for fucking ages there, man, Khan, right?

So I'm going to call it a day now.

And as usual, look, thank you so much.

We could just keep talking and talking and talking.

We have to watch ourselves.

Indeed.

It's always an absolute pleasure talking to you.

You have

the things you're interested in, the way your brain works, the exact same as me.

I hope we don't sound like absolute lunatics to anyone listening in, but I love chatting with you.

Likewise, blind boy.

Likewise.

Thank you so much.

And as you know, a lot of people know about my work only through you.

The amount of people who come up to me, you know.

So God bless.

Yeah, take care.

Take care, bro.

I'll send you all the recordings.

Oh, that podcast was a hefty buy.

That was a hefty podcast.

I hope you were all able to keep up with me and Man Con because I don't know if we

give sufficient context for a lot of the shit that we were talking about.

We're both speaking about an area that we're respectively fairly nardy about and very passionate about and sometimes when I get carried away with myself like that sometimes you can forget to democratize the information to give clear explanations of what the fuck's been spoken about but if you're if you're a 10-foot declin if you're a steeple-chasing cuiva and you've listened to a lot of podcasts

Most of the shit we're talking about I have covered in extreme detail in other podcasts.

I'll catch you next week.

I'm currently busy with a very exciting project that I can't wait to tell you about.

It would be for the people of

the people in the area which is politically known as Britain.

I can't say anymore, but I'm doing that this week and it'll be great crack.

Thank you for listening.

I'll catch you next week with a hot take.

In the meantime,

rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect for a worm.

God bless.

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You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check lift.