How I humiliated myself in a Canteen full of Accountants

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Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

If this is your first ever Blind Buy podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode.

Some people even begin at the start.

To familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

Cause I have a feeling this week's podcast is going to have a very strong flavor to it.

I want to tell you a story which involves hair dye,

cherry tomatoes and lemons.

I got up very early this morning.

It's Monday.

I got up really early to go into my office to begin writing and recording this week's podcast.

But before I embarked on that process, I wanted to do two things.

I wanted to dye my hair and buy some lemons.

So first off, the reason I'm buying lemons,

I was gifted a wonderful bottle of bourbon whiskey at Christmas time.

Wild turkey bourbon.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Now I don't really drink anymore.

I don't binge drink.

I get drunk maybe three times a year now.

I'm getting too old.

The hangovers aren't worth it.

It's guaranteed three day hangover now if I get drunk.

So I don't really get drunk anymore.

So instead I enjoy alcohol as a one-off tasty treat,

as a complex food stuff, rather than a drug that makes me feel a certain way.

And I had a little sip of whiskey last night and I thought, fuck it, I'd love a whiskey sour.

I haven't had a whiskey sour cocktail in a long time.

A whiskey sour is one of the best cocktails that you can make at home by yourself.

All you're looking for is whiskey, sugar, an egg white and the juice of a lemon.

Shake that with ice and you have a wonderfully tangy, zesty, interesting cocktail.

A good cocktail should always taste like what a celero tastes like in a dream.

So last night I decided, fuck it, I'm gonna have a whiskey sour tomorrow night.

Now as a side note, I don't use egg white, I use chickpea juice.

I know that sounds strange, I'm not into the idea of raw egg white in my cocktails.

And occasionally, occasionally when egg white is present in your cocktail, it smells of the sulfuric loneliness of low tide.

So I use chickpea juice instead, the juice from a tin of chickpeas.

And most bars today when you ask them for a whiskey sour they're actually giving you chickpea juice instead of raw eggs.

So last night I decided I'm gonna have a whiskey sour tomorrow night so I'm gonna buy lemons.

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna buy lemons.

And then when I'm finished buying lemons, I'm gonna dye my hair.

So you've no business knowing about my hair because I wear a plastic bag on my head, but underneath my plastic bag, I've got hair, I've got black hair, and this hair is going grey, so I like to dye this hair.

I'm not ready to go grey yet, so I like to dye my hair, and I'm pretty good at it.

So my plan this morning, before I was to begin my workday, was I was gonna purchase some lemons, and then I was gonna go into my office and dye my hair, and then wash my hair in my shower that's in my office.

Things didn't go to plan.

A very bizarre situation unfolded which led to me being embarrassed in public.

Before I tell you what happened,

I suppose I want to speak about.

So you know that I'm on the autistic spectrum.

And it's called the spectrum because like two people can be autistic and yet be completely different.

But I'm I'm diagnosed three years now and I I know where I fit on the fucking spectrum.

And it's very it's very comfortably within the

eccentric artist territory.

What I mean by that is like I'm convinced that

a huge amount of artists are scientists and creative people throughout history.

A lot of these people also exhibited strange odd and eccentric behavior and it's where you get that cliché of the mad scientist.

or the crazy eccentric artist or poet.

I reckon these people were neurodivergent.

Like I have an older brother and he went to art college in Limerick, the same art college I went to, but he went to this art college in the 90s.

And he had a painting tutor by the name of Jack Donovan.

Now Jack Donovan, he was a bit of a legend of a Limerick painter.

He died about 10 years ago.

Probably one of my favourite all-time painters.

And it's just a coincidence that he happens to be from Limerick.

But Jack Donovan was a deeply unique painter.

With tons of humor in his paintings.

He used to cut up bits of magazines and stick them in the canvas and do these very strange, almost sexual paintings that subtly alluded to

abuse in the Catholic Church and he was painting these paintings in in the sixties and the seventies.

He'd cut up pornographic magazines that were literally illegal, like illegal in Ireland at the time.

Dirty magazines had to be smuggled in from England.

But he'd caught up like dirty magazines and paint around them and have priests and cardinals in rooms with all these noddy women.

But it was done in this very surreal, funny way.

Someone I would have loved to have had on this podcast as a guest, but he died before this podcast.

And I adored his paintings growing up because

his work showed me how humour can fit within art, how you can have comedy existing alongside serious ideas.

And not many people know of Jack Donovan's paintings outside of Limerick, but he was my brother's tutor in art college.

And my brother used to come home and tell me stories about him.

And by all accounts, he was a lunatic.

He was a deeply eccentric man.

And my family would ask my brother, tell us more stories, tell us more stories about your mad art tutor.

And there was one particular story where Jack Donovan used to wear, you know, like a fisherman's cap, like a bucket hat, a bucket hat.

So Jack Donovan used to wear this bucket hat all the time.

But bucket hats are kind of floppy.

And he didn't like the top of his bucket hat being floppy.

So underneath his bucket hat, he would place a sock, like a sock that you put on your foot.

He'd put that on his head underneath the bucket hat to prop it up at all times.

Then one day these other tutors were visiting from another college.

And they were women.

They were from Italy.

That was it.

They weren't Irish.

They were from the continent.

And when they walked into the studio space, Jack Donovan said hello to them individually by taking off his hat to each individual woman.

But

instead of it being, you know, doffing your cap as a sign of respect when you're saying hello to someone, they're looking on in horror because what they see

is a man in his 70s slowly revealing a sock parched on the top of his head to each one of them.

And then and then

they didn't know what to make of it because they're from like Italy, so they assumed that this was some Irish way of greeting people.

That when you meet an Irish, an old Irish man, he takes his hat off to show you the sock that he keeps on his head like a fucking bird in a nest.

And my brother used to tell us that story, and my whole family would laugh at just the sheer ridiculousness of that story, and the fact that Jack Donovan didn't seem to be aware of how absurd that was.

And I used to find the story funny, but also, I'd be like, I'd do something like that.

That's the type of shit that I do.

I consistently embarrass myself, like, consistently do utterly bizarre, eccentric things, weird behavior.

It's not that I don't have control over it, it's like I get myself into these situations.

I've probably told you this one before, but I remember being about 14 or 15, and a friend of mine was trying to impress a drug dealer.

Now what I mean by that is

like 14-15 year old boys and they're obsessed with being tough, obsessed with being hard.

So one of my friends knew a fella that was set in hash.

And because this fella was set in hash, that meant he was really cool and rebellious and tough.

So my friend wanted to impress him.

So we're all like 14, 15.

And I get a phone call on my house phone and it's my buddy ringing me going, I can't remember the drug dealer's name, let's call him Cla.

So, my buddy rings me on the phone, and he's like, I'm here with Cla and Cla has an ounce of hash.

It might have been a nine bar.

It could have been a nine bar.

Now, a nine bar, that's the size of like a book.

A nine bar is you're definitely going to jail amount of hash.

I don't fully remember.

An ounce is like the size of a Mars bar.

Well, in my day, in my day, these weights were just names.

You went by size.

People didn't have digital scales.

So I remember hash ounces as being the size of a Mars bar.

Ounces of hash now are like the size of a fun-size Mars bar.

I saw one a year ago.

So my buddy's on the phone, and he's like, I'm here with Cla.

And Cla has an ounce of hash.

And he needs a house to cut it in.

And I happened to have a free house at the time.

My parents were gone away.

Now I should have said, no,

no, the drug dealer can't come to my house to cut an ounce of hash.

No, that can't happen.

But I didn't say that.

I said, of course, you can bring the drug dealer over to cut his drugs up.

Because at that time, I'd become obsessed with the concept of suntans.

It was very hot.

It was like June or July, and it was very hot.

Now, I wasn't into like getting a suntan and looking darker.

I'd become fascinated and obsessed with the idea that the sun is this distant star millions of miles away.

And if I lay down still with my clothes off for long enough then this distant star can change the color of my skin and I thought that was just amazing so I became obsessed with the concept of suntans so why did I say yes when my pal rang up and said can I bring clad to your house can I bring clad to your house to cut up some drugs Why did I say yes?

Because I was thinking about suntans.

I was thinking about suntans too much.

So also, because I was obsessed with suntans, I wanted to get the best suntan.

So I

was so I'm 14.

I covered myself head to toe in olive oil.

Olive.

Olive oil in tiny underpants.

So I went back out the back garden in tiny underpants covered in olive oil to lay flat to let a distant a distant star irradiate me with its light that takes nine minutes to travel from the star to my skin and then after about 15 minutes, I hear a knock at the door and I go out and answer the door.

And it's my buddy, and Cla, the big cool drug dealer.

It was like 19 or 20, with his hash ready to cut it up in my house and use my microwave.

And my buddy was all like, you know, I'm going to impress Cla now.

I'm going to give him a house to cut his hash in.

But what he'd really,

what he'd done is he'd brought his cool drug dealer friend who was trying to impress

to a house where

a 14-year-old boy just answered the door in his underpants, glistening from head to toe

with a big red body on me, and Claire just walked away.

Claire just walked away.

I don't know what the fuck is happening here.

I don't know what this is.

I just want to cut up this fucking ounce into 10 spots.

That's all I want to do.

Why is there...

Why is there a glistening naked child?

Whatever the fuck is happening here is potentially more illegal than softening an ounce of hash in a microwave.

But like I know I was 14, but that's mental.

That's that's mental behaviour on my part.

And I I don't fully remember, but I'm sure I was mercilessly bullied over that.

I had to have been.

I brought Cla over to his house to cut hash and he answered the door in his underpants covered in oil.

You're not getting away with that, as a teenage boy.

You're not getting away with that behaviour without a decent slagging.

And if I was trying to explain myself, I'd have made it worse.

Ha ha, he answered the door of his house, covered in oil, in his underpants.

Well, actually, did you know that it takes nine minutes for light from the sun to reach my back garden?

That's not going to improve anything.

But I'd consistently do shit like that.

Completely outside of my control, outside of my awareness.

Afterwards, I'd go, fuck me, that was mental.

And I can make a little note.

Don't answer the door covered in fucking olive oil.

And I won't do that specific thing again.

But then something equally as bizarre will pop up in six months time.

And that's how you get it.

that's how you get a reputation as as an autistic person for being eccentric.

I'm aware now that I've diverged heavily from my initial story about dying my hair and purchasing lemons.

But eccentric behavior that's outside of my awareness is a pattern throughout my life.

And when I got diagnosed as autistic, in terms of the spectrum, that one there is that's a big peak.

That's a big peak for me.

It's not the worst.

I'd rather eccentric behavior than being overstimulated by lights, we'll say.

I tend to keep to myself.

I get overstimulated by social interactions with people, so I'm a bit of a loner.

I've non-stop, intense, feverish curiosity, which I fucking love.

But a consequence of that is what's called eccentric behavior.

Throughout my life, I tend to find myself in situations where I'm publicly embarrassing myself, where I'm doing something

that's considered strange or odd, out of the ordinary.

And this act draws a lot of public attention.

And this is called eccentricity.

And the thing is with eccentricity, it doesn't harm other people.

I end up doing things that are quite embarrassing, embarrassing things that end up

with public ridicule.

And it's a pattern throughout my life.

And I don't like it.

I'd love to change it.

But the more normal I try to be, the more mental I come across as.

And it's one of the reasons I just keep to myself.

It's one of the reasons I try to avoid people.

So it happened to me again this morning.

A pretty fucking bad one.

And the older I get,

the older I get, though, the more humiliating it is to be honest.

So ye all know that I work in an office building.

Not like...

an artist space or a creative space.

I rent out an office.

I write and record this podcast in an office, in a building full of other offices, accountants, lawyers, all this type of shit.

And I do this deliberately because I find it easier to be creative in an incredibly boring and strict environment.

Which I suppose in itself, I suppose that's a bit eccentric.

But it works for me.

Nobody knows who I am.

I'd say one or two people might.

If anyone tries to talk to me, I just make up a fake job.

But I've been renting this office for nearly three years now and I fucking love it.

And I come here, I do 9 to five, nine to five in this office.

And I do this to give myself routine and discipline.

But the office has a very large shared canteen area that everybody goes to.

At about 8.45am this morning, I walked into the canteen area, as usual, to make my morning coffee.

The whole place was very busy.

Accountants, solicitors, office workers, all sitting down to eat their breakfast.

Big open space.

I don't take much notice I want to make my coffee, but about 15 steps in,

I get that familiar feeling, that familiar feeling of being seen, loads of eyes on me.

Not a very nice feeling.

And then I notice I'm being stared at.

I'm being stared at by strangers.

And the stares they're giving me, it's a mixture of

fear and a hint of disgust.

And I know this feeling and I'm thinking, oh fuck, what have I done?

What have I done?

And I'm beside the the coffee machine and while I'm beside the coffee machine I look to the microwave and in the microwave and then I see in the glass of the microwave I can see my face and something's not right so I walked into a canteen full of office workers this morning with my hair

so jet black that it was almost blue My entire face covered in hair dye like a fucking coal miner while holding a bag of lemons.

Now nobody laughed.

Nobody laughed because I don't know anybody there.

These people are strangers.

It's a floating office situation.

People come and go all the time.

If people knew me, then it would be a really funny situation.

Somebody would crack a joke.

I'd explain to everybody what had happened and it'd be this wonderful huge joke.

But no, nobody knows who the fuck I am.

I don't know who they are.

It's a Monday morning.

People are grumpy.

And all of a sudden, some cuns in the middle of the canteen with a face like a coal miner holding a bag of lemons it really didn't feel nice at all it felt really embarrassing and humiliating because

because of the the silent looks of fear and disgust so i got the fuck out and went back up to my office i took out my phone and i looked at myself in the selfie camera and like yeah my face was just covered in smudges of hair dye and my fucking hair was boot polish like i'd gotten a lot of boot polish and put it in my hair like ridiculous, like a wig.

And then I noticed my hands and it's like my fucking hands are jet black.

And then I look at my lemons.

The lemons are fucking black.

And I felt, I felt like shit.

I really felt bad because I was left with the question of how the fuck did I do this?

How did this happen?

This is absolutely nuts.

How did this happen?

How did I not notice this?

How did this how did I walk into a canteen like this?

And you're listening and you're probably thinking, thinking is he making this up is he making this up for the crack and like no if if you're on the the autistic spectrum or neurodivergent and one of the issues you struggle with or one of the issues that you flag or one of the things that makes you get a diagnosis is what's called eccentric behavior then this type of shit happens and especially when shit like that happens frequently and it brings in negative attention and you don't want this stuff happening.

Like some people might do crazy shit for attention.

It could be your friend on a night out, does really dangerous things, climbs to the top of a lamppost and everyone's really worried about him and it's a possible cry for help.

Then other people, they might just be larger than life, outgoing.

Their claws are very eccentric, full of tattoos, piercings.

a very eccentric personality that's deliberate and works for that person in a social situation.

But eccentricity for neurodivergent people can be a bit different.

So I don't want that.

I really, really don't want to walk into the fucking canteen covered in hair dye holding a bag of lemons.

I don't want that at all.

I want to be invisible.

I don't like being looked at.

I don't want to be looked at so much that I wear a plastic bag on my head.

And I suppose even that's a bit eccentric.

Like if I...

if I died and someone was to recall a memory of me in 30 years, they'd probably say, Blindbuy tried to be taken seriously as a writer of literature, but this didn't happen because he insisted on wearing a plastic bag on his head.

Which I suppose is a bit nuts.

When I think of it that way, when I think of it that way, that's a bit eccentric, alright?

But

I don't see my plastic bag as eccentric at all.

I see it as perfectly rational.

Sometimes I'm on television.

Sometimes I'm on television as part of my job.

Why the fuck would I want to be recognised in the street?

Why would I want to walk into a restaurant and have strangers go, oh, there's that guy I saw on a thing?

I think wanting that is eccentric.

I think needing and wanting that type of attention from strangers, I think that's the strange thing.

And wearing a plastic bag in my head allows me to avoid all of that.

so I can just have a really nice simple quiet life.

That to me is perfectly rational.

Sensible.

I consider that to be sensible, but I am aware that society at large views that as strange and odd and difficult.

Like, that was something that got me diagnosed.

Because

I'm going to assume a neurotypical person would simply

cave to the social pressure, the social pressure to conform and not wear a plastic bag in your head.

Even neurotypical people who don't want to be recognized in the street, they just go, ah, fuck it.

I'll put up with it.

It's part of the job.

What am I gonna do?

Wear a bag in my head?

That's ridiculous.

You can't do that.

I don't really have that part.

I genuinely believe

the bag is the best option.

And

I don't think I emotionally take on board the public shaming that I receive.

I don't think I fully take it on board.

Like, it's not pleasant, but it's not enough to make me change my behavior.

So that's a really crucial difference.

Neurodivergent people, autistic people in particular, are actually trying really hard to blend in and to be as normal as fucking possible.

And in the process of trying to be a normal person, you end up doing something very odd, feeling like shit afterwards.

And then that repeated experience causing you to become a kind of an isolated person and developing a social anxiety.

Like ADHD people, I believe, have very similar struggles to this, engaging in eccentric behavior.

Dyspraxic people.

People who are dyspraxic, clumsy, falling over all the time, falling over in public, uncoordinated, going to shake a person's hand, missing, hitting them in the balls.

You can have some autistic people, and the way that they speak is considered eccentric.

They might speak very high-pitched or monotone.

There's loads of autistic people who they've got American accents and they've never been in America.

Or

no eye contact,

hand movements, a lot of shit that's outside of social conventions that brings unnecessary attention, ridicule, bullying.

And then as you grow older, when it comes to something like social anxiety, I'm like, do I actually not want small talk with strangers?

Is it really that bad?

Is it really that difficult?

Or have I made a langer of myself so many times in the past that I now associate

social interactions particularly with strangers that I now associate this with feeling embarrassed and humiliated.

I don't get anxiety attacks anymore but when I did my specific fear was losing control in a public place doing something mad in a public place doing anything in a public place that would draw negative attention towards me and the fear of that was enough to give me anxiety attacks.

And if if you're seen as an eccentric person, people don't dislike you.

Your friends won't dislike you.

Some people even see it as funny.

And your friends can view you as

an entertaining person, an entertaining person who says and does ridiculous things.

But then other times

you can find that your friends, like they have a party and you're not invited to it.

in case you do something embarrassing.

Or the big one, weddings.

And I stopped going to weddings about 10 years ago.

A good way to find out if you're neurodivergent or eccentric is when you're invited to a wedding and you haven't been seated with any of your friends.

You see that all your friends are up near the bride and groom where you believe like that's where you should be.

I'm supposed to be up there with all my friends

but you are sitting at a different table surrounded by people you've never met at the far side of the room, and then you realise, oh, I'm sitting at the lunatic table.

I'm at a table full of misfits.

When the bride and groom were deciding where everybody's gonna sit, they were left with a lot of eccentric people who might behave in embarrassing ways.

And now they've had to get all of these people and put them at one table, which is kind of away from everybody else.

I told you this before, but I got invited to a wedding once.

Now I was sitting beside some cunt who had a pet ferret, a pet ferret with him called Angel.

He brought a ferret to a wedding and bizarrely wouldn't, didn't call it a ferret, called it a fart.

Like some inside owl lad ferret handling language where you don't call a ferret a ferret, it's a fart.

Nothing against him, but he was nuts.

And he probably thought I was,

I probably thought I was nuts as well.

He had his ferret.

and I probably really needed to speak about the Norman invasion.

But neurodivergent eccentric behavior will eventually lead to social rejection and it doesn't feel very nice.

So I stopped going to weddings.

I don't want to find out where I'm sitting.

You don't want me talking to your uncle about how corn flakes were invented to stop people from wanking.

But regarding the incident this morning, and my hair is fucked by the way.

My hair is...

I've really dyed my hair too much.

So I'll be wearing a hat for about a week and a half.

I've washed all the hair dye off my face.

Thank fuck.

That came off very easily.

My hands are still dirty.

Like I understand how ridiculous this is.

Like I write comedy.

I appreciate how absurd and funny it is to accidentally arrive into a canteen full of accountants holding a bag of lemons with hair dye all over my face.

Like I know that that's really funny.

That that's really ridiculous.

I know that that's

unacceptable behavior in a canteen, bizarre, strange, whatever you want to call it.

I'm fully aware.

I'm fully aware of all that.

The bit that can baffle me is, how did I let that happen?

How did that happen?

And it's that process there.

It's the how did that happen.

That's the autistic spectrum bit.

I really don't want that to happen.

So when it does happen, when it jumps out and I find myself in these situations, I feel like shit.

It's like I should have avoided this.

How the fuck did you, you stupid fucking prick, how'd you do that?

How hard is it to not do How hard is it to just look into the mirror first?

Why'd you even get like that in the first place?

And if I'd have just walked into the canteen and it was just,

all right, that fellow's after making a bollocks of his hair dye and the hair dyes on his face.

If it was just that,

that would be...

That would be less embarrassing.

People could contextualize that in the moment and go, oh, I see what he's done.

That's embarrassing.

And they'd go back to their breakfast.

It was the fucking lemons.

It was, I was holding a little net of lemons, and that's borderline, that's comedic, that feels deliberate.

And that tipped it over into absurd territory.

It looked like a costume now, like it was something deliberate, something very strange to do on a Monday morning.

So I want to speak about how this happened.

And this is actually difficult to speak about.

Because it's ridiculous, because it's so silly and ridiculous.

it's very difficult to relate to.

But it's also not really something that's spoken about or understood.

And it's difficult to find literature around it.

And when I was saying earlier about my place on the spectrum, I fit quite comfortably into the eccentric artist.

Even before I got diagnosed with autism, my family would have said, oh, he's one of those mad artists.

That's him.

Very creative, but mad.

And not mad in a bad way, in the eccentric way and I'd read all these stories about artists and strange behaviors that they engaged in like fucking Georgia O'Keefe famous fucking abstract artist famous for living in like absolute isolation in the in the deserts of New Mexico wearing smocks an almost monastic lifestyle Francis Bacon like he had a studio that was so messy and so cluttered that nobody else could walk into it.

Francis Bacon's studio was so insane looking, so messy, that they preserved the studio and now they display his studio perfectly in galleries as an art piece itself because it's so messy.

Anyone who's NeuroDivergent would relate to that.

Andy Warhol used to wear silver wigs all the time.

We write it off as these people looking for attention.

I don't think so.

I think these people were NeuroDivergent.

And this is also what informed their originality in their work and their focus.

It's a brilliant book called Dead as Dorna's written by Anthony Cronin.

And it's the biography of three Irish writers, three legends, Flanner Bryan, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and the friendship that the three of them had drinking in the same pub up in Dublin.

And if you read that book,

They're all lunatics, deeply eccentric, strange people.

I don't think it was deliberate.

I I don't think these people were looking for attention.

And I'm not in any way comparing myself to the aforementioned artists at all.

But if anyone in that canteen, like if I died tomorrow and in a few years, people in my office building found out that I was blind boy.

If someone went to them in 10 years and was like, oh, do you remember him?

Oh yeah, yeah, blind boy.

What was he like?

Oh, he was mad.

What you mean?

Oh, he used to walk around the canteen.

He'd walk around the canteen covered in covered in ink and die holding a bag of lemons.

He was nuts.

You see what I mean?

You see how a story like that could get out of hand?

And then you become the eccentric artist.

The eccentric artist who walks around canteens, covered in die, holding a bag of lemons.

And I can actually, I can explain, I can explain how and why that happened.

So that's what I'm gonna do.

Even this podcast episode is eccentric.

What the fuck is this about?

30 minutes in.

30- we're 30 minutes in.

It's taken me 30 minutes

to even begin

begin to explain to you.

To even start explaining.

How did I end up in a canteen full of accountants?

Covered in hair dye holding a bag of lemons.

So even that even that's even that's a bit strange.

So I got up for work this morning, like I said, early.

And before I was gonna sit down at my desk in my office and prepare this podcast, I had two jobs.

I was gonna buy some lemons for my whiskey sour tonight, and then when I got into the office, I was going to dye my hair.

So, the first thing I did, supermarket was just open, nice and early.

First customer in the door, I went and I got my bag of lemons.

I purchased the lemons and I walked out the door of the supermarket.

But as I walk out the door, I see on the ground on the tarmac a strewn punnet of cherry tomatoes and these cherry tomatoes immediately arrested all of my attention for a very specific reason.

Over the weekend in Dublin this very strange phenomenon happened involving cherry tomatoes.

So as you know from last week's podcast, there was a cold snap in Ireland.

It was freezing.

And there's an area of Dublin City called Drumcondra and on the Drumcondra Bridge which is just over the Royal Canal there was a woman called Sarah Maria Griffin and she was walking home via that canal and she noticed on the bridge someone had left some cherry tomatoes.

Some cherry tomatoes on the bridge frozen glistening in the frost.

Very strange and out of place but something about it felt right so Sarah took a video of this on Instagram and it quickly started to go very viral.

Just bare little cherry tomatoes left on a bridge in Dublin.

Frozen.

And first I want to point out Sarah Maria Griffin.

She's a brilliant writer.

She writes fantasy and she has a new horror book coming out soon called Eat the Ones You Love.

And I want to be conscious to give her a plug because

her tomato video went globally viral and I'd love to see her sell a few books out of it.

So anyway, there's this bridge in Dublin in Drumcondra and someone has left some cherry tomatoes on it and Sarah Maria Griffin's video goes viral and then what starts happening is other people start visiting the bridge and looking at the tomatoes just fucking tomatoes on a bridge in Dublin and in a matter of hours people on TikTok are speaking about the cherry tomato bridge and then someone names it on google as the cherry tomato shrine

and people start flocking to this little bridge in Dublin and bringing cherry tomatoes and placing them on the bridge, singing songs to the tomatoes, taking videos of themselves.

The next morning there's several news articles about it.

The cherry tomato bridge has become a strange cultural phenomenon.

Within about 12 hours, hundreds of people turning up with cherry tomatoes to place them on the bridge and then leaving reviews on Google Maps about the shrine, about this new cherry tomato shrine that has popped up.

And it's all, it's so silly.

It's all so silly.

It's irrational.

It doesn't make sense.

But also if it doesn't make sense, then why are

why are hundreds of people showing up out of nowhere to deposit tomatoes on this fucking bridge?

There's no history of tomatoes.

to do with drumcondra.

Tomatoes don't mean much to Irish people.

There's no reason behind this.

there's no great symbolism, it just feels right.

And for the people that are turning up and depositing tomatoes and offering up tomatoes, they're just having crack.

But also it feels like a little protest.

Now I don't want to be accused of reading too deep into the situation, but when hundreds of people together agree upon a thing, a cultural act, you can't really view it in isolation.

I see it as a little fun protest.

The people depositing tomatoes at the Cherry Tomato Bridge, they're all young people.

They're all in their 20s, early 30s.

Dublin is gone to shit.

No disrespect to Dublin.

I love Dublin.

I love Dublin people.

But people can't afford to live in Dublin.

Music venues are closing down.

There's no nightlife in Dublin.

It's very difficult to have a vibrant art scene in Dublin.

because poor artists can't exist in Dublin unless they live with their parents.

There's no no spaces for artists, there's no spaces for music.

Unfettered capitalism, landlords, investment funds over the course of the past decade have sterilized the cultural heart and soul of Dublin.

And the only thing that's really left are little restaurants, little pop-up restaurants.

When I look at Dublin youth culture, I'm talking the culture of people in their 20s now.

I'm not seeing a lot of music content, art content.

It's all

a new Korean restaurant opened up.

A new chicken wing restaurant opened up.

This pizza place closed down, but now there's a pop-up sushi joint.

Have you tried these tacos?

I love food and restaurants and food culture.

I fucking adore it.

But from what I can see in Dublin,

It's the only thing left.

A new pop-up Korean chicken wing fucking shop that'll be closed in six weeks.

That's the only thing left.

And the young creative people, instead of making music,

are reviewing spice bags on TikTok.

There's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with restaurants.

There's nothing wrong with pop-up Korean chicken wings.

But it's a fucking shame that that's the only thing that appears to be left.

And I can textualize...

The phenomenon of the cherry tomato bridge within that.

You've all hundreds of young Dublin people going into the shop buying ponnets of cherry tomatoes and offering them up to this bridge which they're calling a shrine and then having crack and singing to the tomatoes and having jokes and then leaving reviews of the pop-up tomato shrine shrine bridge.

It feels like absurd protest.

Now if I went there and asked any of those people, are you involved in an absurd protest?

A protest about how shit Dublin has become?

All of those people are going to go, no,

no, it's it's not that deep.

We're just having crack.

It's the cherry tomato bridge.

All right, everyone's coming here and you bring tomatoes.

I don't know.

It's fun.

Yes, and that's true.

But there has to be a why or else it wouldn't feel right.

It wouldn't make sense.

The video of cherry tomatoes on a bridge wouldn't have gone viral.

The feeling of offering cherry tomatoes to the bridge.

Wouldn't feel right.

It wouldn't be funny.

So meanwhile I'm back in Limerick this morning outside the shop with my little bag of lemons and I'm looking at cherry tomatoes on the ground in Limerick and I stop and look at them because I think to myself, oh my god is someone trying to start the cherry tomato trend here in fucking Limerick City because someone tried to do it in Brooklyn last night.

Someone put cherry tomatoes on the Brooklyn bridge.

But what has me standing in Limerick staring at the cherry tomatoes on the ground and taking out my phone and now I'm taking photographs of the cherry tomatoes in Limerick?

What has me doing that is the other thing that fascinates me about the viral pop-up shrine that has happened over the weekend in Dublin, which this is going to go out on Wednesday.

It'll be gone by then.

This is a pop-up shrine where hundreds of people are bringing cherry tomatoes and putting them on a bridge.

It's a fucking pop-up shrine.

The practice of bringing objects to a shrine and leaving them there.

That's a very, very Irish practice.

Very fucking Irish.

That goes back to pre-Christian times.

That's pagan.

That's what's called a vote of offering.

When you come to a shrine or a holy statue or a sacred well and you bring an object and leave it there, it's an offering to the shrine.

And that's deeply ingrained in Irish culture.

And what I find really fascinating is on that bridge in Drumcondra where people are leaving the cherry tomatoes, I know for a fact that three minutes up the road is a little place called St.

Catherine's Well.

Three minutes walk up the road.

St.

Catherine's Well.

It's an ancient pagan well where people would drink water from a human skull.

The well isn't there anymore.

Now it's someone's house.

The well was lost for years and it sprouted up in a person's kitchen.

It's called St.

Catherine's Well, but before it was a Christian well, it was a pagan well.

And the reason that we know that it was a pagan well is because the tradition of drinking the water from a human skull, which is fucking mad, that's pagan shit.

And I don't like using the word pagan.

I don't like using that word pre-Christian.

Just around the corner from the Cherry Tomato Bridge, three minutes walk, there just so happens to be an ancient, indigenous, sacred well, a healing well that healed the eyes and healed coughs, in particular whooping cough.

And I know about this well because I research sacred wells.

And I research this shit for fun.

But I always knew about about the Drumchandra, St.

Catherine's well,

because of the tradition of drinking the water from a human skull, which is quite pre-Christian.

It suggests that this particular well, which is actually a spring near the River Talca, this particular well, had significance before Christianity, before the year 400.

So it could be thousands for thousands of years, Irish people may have visited this site as a sacred holy shrine and given it vote of offerings.

And the purpose of a votive offering in Ireland, when people would visit sacred wells.

Often with sacred wells in Ireland, there was often a blackthorn bush growing from the well, and people would go to the well and go to the tree that grows from it.

and they'd tie little bits of cloth or ribbon to the tree.

And the purpose of the offering is to heal.

So for this little well in Drumcondra it was an eye well and a cough well so people would go there give it a vote of offering and say I offer this to you well

via the power of the other world now cure my cough and this is also how I view the Cherry Tomato Bridge in Drumcondra just around the corner.

I posit that the folk memory of the Irish people the collective unconscious and the folk memory in our culture, the folk memory of the people of drumcondra who have a a sacred well in their neighborhood that's now hidden underneath someone's house it's not there anymore it's underneath someone's house the people of drumcondra have a folk memory of giving volk votive offerings to a shrine and and that's what we're seeing here on the drumcondra bridge people are they're bringing vote of offerings of little cherry tomatoes and i think what what they're asking back

they want dublin Dublin back.

We offer these tomatoes to you, this bridge, this bridge that's above the Royal Canal.

We offer to you this bridge, these cherry tomatoes.

Can we have Dublin back?

We're sick of the only thing being new pop-up restaurants that we can review.

We're sick of that being the only thing.

So take these tomatoes and give us back.

A nightclub, maybe?

Or

affordable rent, affordable housing, some art spaces.

Am I reading into it too much?

Maybe I am.

But

that's the job of an artist.

I went to college to train in that specifically.

To look at a viral phenomenon that popped up out of nowhere of hundreds of people visiting a bridge and

depositing tomatoes for no apparent reason.

To look at that.

and reverse engineer it and figure out why, why is that happening?

What does it say about culture?

Why might it be happening?

That there is that's artistic inquiry.

It doesn't mean that it's true.

And I'm aware that it's also a little bit cringe.

It's a little bit cringe to think about something so frivolous and to extract that much complexity from it.

So as of this morning, there's thousands and thousands of cherry tomatoes.

deposited on this bridge, the cherry tomato bridge, the cherry tomato shrine in Trumcondra.

Thousands of tomatoes.

And I reckon by the time this podcast goes out on Wednesday, people will get bored and they'll stop depositing tomatoes on the cherry tomato bridge.

Here's what I predict.

Tomatoes have seeds.

These tomatoes are all falling down onto the railway tracks and along the banks of the Royal Canal.

Which is a line from a very very famous folk song, The Owl Triangle.

The Owl Triangle went jingle jangle down along the banks of the Royal Canal.

Well those cherry tomatoes are currently jingle jangling down the banks of the Royal Canal.

And you can't put thousands of cherry tomatoes on the banks of the Royal Canal and one of them not turn into a tomato plant.

So I reckon, I reckon this is going to cause a strange population of Dublin tomato plants to sprout along the banks of the Royal Canal.

And that's not necessarily a good thing because tomatoes aren't native to the banks of the Royal Canal.

But it has to happen.

Tomatoes grow in Ireland.

You can grow tomatoes out your fucking back garden.

So I reckon we're all gonna forget about the the pop-up tomato shrine.

We're gonna forget about that.

It'll be like a Korean chicken restaurant that disappeared.

And in a year's time,

more five, six years' time, there's gonna be these little tomato plants all along the Royal Canal.

And people won't be able to explain why they exist.

And American tourists, American tourists, who know the song song The Owl Triangle, they're going to go and visit the banks of the Royal Canal.

And they're going to wonder, why didn't Luke Kelly mention all these fucking tomato plants when he sang that song?

But what I also, what I also enjoy about the Cherry Tomato Bridge phenomenon is

this podcast I'm speaking about eccentricity.

I'm speaking about strange bizarre behaviors.

that if you're neurodivergent these things can become a problem but the cherry tomato bridge that's an example of socially acceptable, eccentric behaviour.

Like if I did that by myself last week,

it's Mr.

Autism here, and

I feel like creating a shrine of tomatoes at a bridge.

If it's just me doing that, then that's highly eccentric, strange behaviour.

But what you witnessed with the Cherry Tomato Bridge as an act of protest or carnival, even

that's deeply eccentric, strange, silly, funny behaviour, but absolutely socially acceptable within neurotypical rules and for a small period of time completely normal, completely normal.

Similarly, if I decided I want to start drinking water from a skull because it has healing properties from another dimension, I'm going to

be on eccentric, I'm going to get sent to fucking jail.

But in Drumchondra, There's a well there called St.

Catherine's Well and our ancestors believed that if you drank this water from a human skull you could cure your cough because the water comes from a parallel dimension.

So I thought about all of these things while I stared at the the punnet of cherry tomatoes on on the ground outside the shop in Limerick City as I held on to my my punnet my little my little bag of of lemons and as I took photographs of the cherry tomatoes in Limerick I got a lot of them on my fucking shoes.

So I ended up with cherry tomatoes on my shoes.

Tomatoes are a cunt to wash off your shoes.

They're very stainy and full of little seeds.

So as I'm outside the shop holding my bag of lemons, I'm like, fuck.

Fuck, my shoes are full of tomatoes.

How am I going to clean this off?

So I turn around.

Because it's early in the morning.

I see trolleys full of newspapers.

And they're the newspapers that they're throwing away, yesterday's newspapers.

So I go over to the trolley full of early morning newspapers to clean the cherry tomatoes off my shoes with the newspapers.

But as I start doing this,

I start saying, Jesus, I haven't read a physical newspaper in a long time.

And I start thumbing through the newspapers and seeing interesting stories.

So I clean off my shoes and I decide, I'm gonna take a couple of free copies of the Irish Times, yesterday's Irish Times that they're throwing out, and I'm gonna take this back to my office and read this newspaper while I dye my hair in the office.

So that's what I did.

Fucking 50 minutes here and no ocarina pause.

The story's not even finished.

It's time now for an ocarina pause.

This episode is mental.

This is a really strange episode.

Even by the standards of my podcast, this is an odd episode.

This is what I mean about trying to honestly explain the difficulties of eccentricity for NeuroDivergent people.

Even doing that creates more eccentricity.

I don't have an ocarina in the office this week, so I'm gonna play an empty bottle of Coke Zero.

Fuck, there you go, now.

Free ad for fucking Coke.

The cunts.

I'm gonna play this plastic bottle, right?

I'm gonna blow into it, and you're gonna hear an advert.

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?

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That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

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A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

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Oh, yeah.

Sounds like a distant ship.

That was the plastic bottle pause there.

You would have heard an advert.

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, enjoyment, distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast.

This podcast is my full-time job.

It's how I earn a living.

It's how I rent out this office that I'm in that I'm recording in.

It's how I pay all my bills.

It's how I have the time and space each week to write and deliver this podcast.

So if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a patron.

This is a listener-funded podcast.

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

That's it.

For the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, you get four podcasts.

But you don't, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it.

You listen to the podcast for free.

Listen to the podcast for free if you want.

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

So everybody gets a podcast.

I get to earn a living.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And please, if you are signing up as a paid subscriber on Patreon, try and do it through the desktop.

Don't do it on the Apple iPhone Patreon app because Apple take 30%,

which is they're greedy bastards so don't do it that way.

Upcoming gigs Vicker Street there on this month.

I think that's sold out ladies and gentlemen.

27th I'm pretty sure that's sold out but again check for tickets if you want sometimes people give tickets back.

Galway Leisureland the 9th 2nd of what?

9th of February Galway Leisureland.

That's looking almost sold out too.

A lot of people bought tickets at Christmas you see.

Drahada Crescent Hall 21st of February.

Tickets going for that.

Belfast Waterfront Theatre, 28th of February.

There's some tickets left for that, but that's nearly sold out.

Then March the 7th, INEC down in Killamley.

That's...

that's doing alright.

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

Australia tour that's sold out.

And then

I give the wrong date for my fucking Limerick gig last week.

I give the wrong date for the Limerick gig last week.

It's the 23rd of April.

I'm in Limerick at the University...

UL.

The University Concert Hall out in UL.

Biggest gig I've ever done in Limerick anyway.

Then June.

Big giant tour.

Big giant tour in June of fucking England and Scotland.

Really looking forward to that.

Looking forward to...

The summer is a nice time.

June will be a good place.

A good time to be over there.

I got to English country pubs between gigs actually

if anyone wants to recommend any decent country pubs so i'm going to list out the tour here that's what i do but between gigs when i'm traveling on the road i say to my tour manager get me a decent see the thing is

in england right and and scotland scotland and wales too you've got wealth in the countryside we don't have wealth in the irish countryside you don't find

like wealthy villages in the Irish countryside because he colonised us, because the wealth was extracted from Ireland.

But over in fucking England, you've got, there's posh people living in the countryside and you've got these gorgeous little villages, amazing little villages in the middle of the country with wonderful gastro pubs.

We don't fucking have that in Ireland.

Our countryside is like this big wheezing

industrial donkey.

But in England, you've got these gorgeous little pastoral villages in the middle of the countryside where very wealthy people live with fantastic country pubs that serve wonderful food.

So I'm going to list out my tour here in June over in England and Scotland.

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York.

Can't wait to go to York.

Good Viking city.

London, East Sussex, and Norwich.

Right?

A lot of that is setting out really fucking quickly because of Christmas, okay?

Go to fane.co.uk forward slash blindbuy if you want to get tickets for any of those gigs.

But also, please recommend to me any transitionary country gastro pubs between those locations.

I can't wait to get bollocks deep in the English countryside in June.

I want some John Constable shit.

That's what I want.

So, back to the purpose of this podcast.

Trying to explain to ye

how did I end up in a canteen full of accountants

with my face covered in hair dye holding a bag of lemons so after staring at and thinking about the tomatoes for like ten minutes and thinking about votive offerings and pagan wells

I walked into tomatoes and then I cleaned off the tomatoes with the newspapers but then it's like fucking free newspapers brilliant so I took two free newspapers with me to my office got into the office, ready for a day's work.

I put my lemons down on my desk, the lemons that I'd purchased because I'm making a whiskey sour tonight, put the lemons down on the desk, and then I said, right, time to dye my hair.

So I prepare the fucking hair dye, black hair dye, as usual.

I prepare it and I rub it into my head.

Okay.

I've done this, I've done this loads.

I know how to do this.

Now it's in my hair.

All I gotta do is wait 15 minutes and after 15 minutes, I then go to the shower and I wash it out of my hair, and everything's fine.

But what happens is I crack open the newspaper.

And now I'm marveling at the newspaper because I'm like, fuck it,

I haven't read a physical newspaper in a long time.

And now I'm getting distracted by stories.

So one story that I see really pisses me off.

So there's an archaeological site called the Que de Fields, C-E-I-D-E Fields, and it's up in Mayo in County Mayo, right?

Now this is a this is a deeply deeply important archaeological site not just for Ireland but for the fucking world and the headline was Cai de Fields ditched as possible world heritage site due to lack of public support so the Cay de Fields up in Mayo was to be put forward as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Mayo County Council decided not to do this not to preserve it because of lack of public support.

They said

this really fucking annoyed me.

So the K de Fields is an ancient farm.

It's 6,000 years old, right?

It's older than the pyramids in Egypt and it's up in Mayo.

It's one of the earliest archaeological sites for evidence of human farming that we have in the world.

It shows that it appears that Ireland was doing field system farming two and a half thousand years before the rest of Europe.

Farming is hugely important to human civilization.

Farming is we were hunter-gatherers for like 30-40,000 years and then we settled down and started farming and from this we started to domesticate plants, animals ourselves.

So one of the earliest pieces of evidence of human beings transitioning from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers is in Mayo.

It's in Mayo.

It's called the Que de Fields and it's older than the fucking pyramids, 6,000 years old.

And it's just up there in Mayo.

And the fucking pricks in Mayo County Council can't be arsed having it preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of lack of public interest.

So now immediately, immediately I'm thinking about this intently and I get up and I start pacing up and down my fucking office really really quickly thinking about how I can s how can I solve this problem?

How can I solve this problem for Mayo County Council?

If Mayo County Council are saying that the local people aren't interested in a 6,000 year old archaeological field, well what can I do?

What idea can I come up with to engage the people of Mayo?

Well the first idea that came into my head was okay Mayo, what does the name Mayo mean?

So Mayo is a county up in Ireland in the fucking the northwest.

The name Mayo means plain of yew trees.

So because that's Mayo's name, right, in Gaelic, in fucking ancient Irish, because that's Mayo's name, that tells us that Mayo at one time was a gigantic forest full of yew trees.

Yew trees are class, they live to be like a thousand years old.

But there's no fucking yew trees left in Mayo.

So that means they were all deforested.

So maybe there's a connection.

The name of Mayo suggests that there was once a great forest of yew trees.

They're gone.

But you also have evidence of the world's earliest fucking farm.

The world's a 6,000-year-old farm.

Maybe those two things are connected.

Maybe those two things are connected.

The world's...

earliest farm a field system where they had to cut shit down in order to have fields and the fact that you're called plain of yew trees and there's no trees anymore maybe those two things are connected could you connect those two things together and get the public interested?

And then I start thinking, no, no, it needs to be sexier.

It needs to be truly democratized.

How do you get the people of Mayo interested in this 6,000-year-old field?

In preserving it?

And then I thought, okay, here we go.

Mayo.

All of the world's Botox.

All of the world's Botox happens to be made in Mayo.

I mean all of the world's, I've spoke about this on a podcast about six months ago.

Every single piece of Botox, right?

Every famous person that you see who has Botox in their face, that came from Mayo.

They are directly injecting a piece of Mayo into their face.

There's a pharmaceutical plant in Mayo called Allergan and they make every single piece of Botox in the world.

Botox, if you don't know, it's like a muscle relaxant, but you can inject it into your face and it relaxes your muscles and people use Botox so that they can look younger and reverse aging.

It's a preserving drug.

Well, it's a poison.

It's a poison that comes from botulinium toxin.

Botox was discovered after the Napoleonic Wars.

Botulinium toxin, it grows on meat that's poorly preserved in anaerobic conditions.

So when canned food became a thing after the Napoleonic Wars, people used to get poisoned with botulinium toxin.

It was also known as sausage poisoning.

There was these sausages that were being made in Germany like 400 years ago.

I don't know the date off the top of my head.

They were making these sausages anyway and there was a bunch of botulinium toxin in them and everyone who ate the sausages, their muscles went limp.

The botulinium toxin before it killed them made all their muscles limp.

So that's what people inject into their fucking faces.

This toxin that makes your muscles limp but used in just the right way into the right muscles in your face.

That's Botox.

And every piece of Botox in the world is made in Mayo.

So why don't Mayo County Council draw a connection between Botox from Mayo preserving the faces of the rich and famous and then UNESCO preserving a 6,000 year old farm that you fucking have in Mayo.

So I'm pacing up and down my office.

I'm in full fucking autistic hyper-focus spiral at this point.

I'm stimming and pacing up and down.

I have no idea what's going on because my mind is focused exclusively on trying to get Mayo County Council to preserve a fucking 6,000-year-old field.

You can guess what's happening.

I'm rubbing my hands through my hair.

I'm doing all this.

I'm rubbing the fucking...

First off, I'd say about 45 minutes have passed.

I was supposed to take the dye out of my hair 30 minutes ago, so now it's jet black.

I'm so intensely focused on the things that I'm interested in and really happy and joyful and most importantly pacing.

When I'm thinking, when I'm focused I pace up and down.

I pace up and down really really quickly in my office and I flap my hands and I move my hands and that's known as stimming and that's the part of being on the autistic spectrum that people see and they think wow there's a crazy person.

So I only do this in private but that doesn't feel crazy to me.

When I pace up and down and flap my hands that means I'm thinking about something really really fucking hard.

When I do that, it's like I'm unlocking extra RAM in my brain to give me more power to focus on an idea.

But also, when I get that way, even though I experience it as joyful,

I lose awareness.

I lose awareness of everything that's happening around me.

I lose the concept of time.

I won't notice if I'm hungry.

any of this shit.

So I'm basically thinking really hard about Mayo and Botox and 6000 year old fields because I've been triggered by a newspaper and I'm pacing up and down my office.

I've forgotten completely, completely forgotten that there's dye in my hair that should have been washed out 30 minutes ago.

I have no awareness that it is now jet black to the point of blue.

I've no awareness that while I was pacing up and down, I was rubbing my fingers through my hair, rubbing my face, covering my entire face with black dye.

No awareness of this whatsoever.

Because I'm just thinking about Mayo.

I'm just thinking about a fucking 6,000-year-old field in Mayo.

Then I decide, oh, I need a coffee.

Then I see my lemons on the table and go, better take my lemons downstairs to put them in the communal fridge.

And then I find myself in the canteen.

I find myself in the fucking canteen.

With black hair dye, dye all over my face, holding a bag of lemons.

And that's how how that happens that that's how that shit fucking happens that's how extremely odd eccentric behavior happens when i get so utterly distracted by an idea or a thought that i'm very very passionate about

very joyful experience when that happens

I can lose a lot of self-awareness in the moment and if I'm not careful I'll do something bizarre like that and that's what happened this morning and it wasn't nice.

It wasn't nice.

And it wasn't just the story about Mayo that distracted me.

There was another, there was an agony ant column in the Irish Times that distracted me as well.

But I don't have time this week to read out the Agony Ant column.

And I might actually make this a two-part podcast.

Because it was a woman who wrote in the Irish Times Agony Ant.

And her question really impacted me and I wanted to jump into the newspaper and answer it and I couldn't do the question justice by just pinning it at the end of this podcast and also

I think I'm getting a bit tired.

I came in to work at 8am this morning and now it's 3am so I've been going non-stop and I think I deserve a well-earned sleep.

This was a very strange podcast.

I don't even know what I'm going to name this podcast.

This was a scattered one, but I hope you took something from it.

And I'm not experiencing barn out in case anyone is wondering.

My mental health is very good at the moment.

I'm very, very happy, getting good sleep, getting lots of exercise.

I'll catch you next week.

I'll be interested to see if the tomato bridge is still relevant next week.

I doubt it.

I say it'll disappear.

I'd like anyone up in Drumcondra over the next few weeks to please keep an eye out for any tomato plants that might sprout up.

I reckon that's a thing that's gonna happen on the Royal Canal.

In the meantime, rub a dog, genuflect towards a swan, wink at a worm.

Dog bless.

I'll catch you next week.

Scratchers from the California Lottery.

Players, 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.

Group health insurance can put businesses in a tough position.

With rising costs and plans that don't fit everyone's needs, now a new form of employer coverage called an ICHRA or ICRA can help.

ICRAs make costs predictable with stable pre-tax contributions and they make health plans personal because each employee can pick any planning carrier that meets their needs.

Get coverage you control.

Learn more at ambetterhealth.com/slash ICRA.