The miserable blood drenched history of Jaffa Cakes

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Spend a penny in the devil's drain pipe, you bendy enyaz.

Welcome to the Blind By Podcast.

It's very chilly here in Limerick City, thank fuck.

It's almost the end of November, and it's only getting cold now.

We've had a sweaty winter thus far.

It's been an unnaturally sweaty November.

Something I've really only noticed in the past

maybe three or four years.

It's become viscerally perceivable but in winter in particular

I'm noticing I'm noticing climate change in real time

the reason I'm noticing it mostly around September October is

because I have such strong memories of September and October because of memories of going back to school year after year after year repetition and routine build strong memories what it was like to go back to school.

For me, going back to school, I associate it with

an anxiety in the pit of my stomach.

I never knew why it was there.

I never knew what I was afraid of.

There was no specific theme

or fear around the anxiety.

Of course, I now know it was social anxiety.

I went from the freedom of summertime where I had three months to explore my own interests, spend loads of time by myself, to suddenly being back into the routine of school and being forced to be in a classroom all day with a lot of people and

having to socialize and obey the rules and sit still.

But I have very pronounced and vivid memories of this period because school started in September.

The first week of September was always hot.

You got your Indian summer.

Then by October,

it was freezing in the mornings and you could see your breath.

You were seeing your breath in October.

Walking to school, there's still leaves on the trees, they're getting rusty and you can see your own breath and the sky is clear.

And all my memories of Halloween night when I was a kid,

all of my memories are, I'm out at night time.

The streetlights are orange, the sky is dark and I can see my breath.

I remember pretending to smoke with the night air, holding a twig up to my mouth and exhaling like my breath was fag smoke.

I didn't see my breath once this October.

I was looking for it, I was searching for it.

Not late at night,

even real early in the morning, like seven in the morning when there's a bit of a chill.

I didn't see my breath once this October.

I've I've very strong memories of place and time for winter because of school.

Because of the feeling of anxiety in my belly that I'd have all the way through September because I'm back at school and I'm frightened for what a new year of school means.

And now and now when I walk around in October and November, something's off.

Like I'll walk through the streets of Limerick City

and I'll notice

the red rusty color of the leaves and that'll trigger a memory.

It'll trigger a memory of when I was in that exact same spot at the exact same time of year when I was 16 and memories of the music I was listening to at the time will come back to me and I'll get that nice nostalgic feeling and then take in a deep breath and I can't complete the memory.

When a smell or a sound or a place or a flash of light evokes

a pleasant memory from your past a sense of I was here before, and you feel it as a little, a comforting, warm ball in your belly.

I'm finding that circle is broken for me now.

The leaves are the right color.

The sun is at the angle that I remember.

The shadows on those buildings are November shadows.

Something's off.

What's missing is the cold, sharp, dry bang of a November inhalation.

It's been replaced with sweaty November underpants.

A strange humidity.

It's sweaty, it's sweaty, it's humid.

The fresh, chilly coldness of the November of my fucking youth that's gone and replaced with this new sweaty global warming shit and a new smell,

a new sweaty musty smell that doesn't belong in November.

And you might look out your back garden.

And you see a daisy.

And you go, fuck, that poor old daisy

thinks it's fucking March or something and frogs wake up early from hibernation when they're supposed to be going to sleep and they die because the warmth is waking their body up making them think it's it's February or March and the frogs wake up expecting certain insects to be around to eat and it's like they're not here man it's November and you've only been asleep for two weeks you daft cunt so the poor old frogs are dying and it doesn't feel nice it feels unsettling And I'm not imagining it because

later on that day I'll sit down at my computer and I'll look down at the the weather on my Windows toolbar and it will say new daily record highest temperature recorded for this day in November ever and then it's every single day it's the highest daily temperature as if it's something to celebrate.

So finally, finally this week I can see my breath rise in the air.

I can feel the chill.

I can feel the cold and now it feels like November.

Even though it's cold and cold as shit,

I experience it in my nervous system as reassuring safety because it's what's supposed to happen.

It's supposed to be freezing cold in November.

I'll take freezing cold November over sweaty underpants November any fucking day even if it means I don't have to wear a jacket.

I don't have to wear a jacket in sweaty underpants sweater.

I want to wear a jacket.

I want to be cold.

I want to see my breath.

I'm a human being.

My brain finds comfort in certainty.

My brain experiences anxiety when there's uncertainty.

And the rise in temperature is something that's something that I can consciously perceive and notice.

That's really only been happening since about maybe 2020.

What's unsettling is we might be the first generation.

in our ancestors to have to perceive this.

The predictability of the seasons and the weather and our ability to spot and predict those patterns is very closely related to human survival.

Before writing, and writing's only a couple of thousand years old, before writing,

humans relied on their close relationship with natural cycles, seasons, to organize, transmit and preserve knowledge.

to survive.

To survive.

Water,

food, shelter.

The greatest hits.

What plants are flowering?

What plants are dying?

What birds are migrating?

What animals are hibernating?

What's the temperature like?

How much sunlight are we getting?

Before global warming, before this period known as the Anthropocene, where the climate is changing because of human influence, before that, things like seasons, when animals hibernate, when they migrate, what plants are coming up.

That was our calendar.

That was our clock.

That was very predictable.

That's the natural cycle of a healthy ecosystem.

We created elaborate mythology and folklore and festivals.

We wrote the most interesting stories imaginable to preserve the knowledge of what seasons meant.

I mentioned this a few podcasts ago.

The Irish Festival of Sowen, which we now know as Halloween, contains epic stories about

on the 31st of October, evil spirits and horrifying animals exit the otherworld and strip the land bare.

So you hold a big festival with bonfires and harvest food and masks to scare off the demons.

And then after sowing, after Halloween, you're left with this winter wasteland where everything green is gone and there's no leaves on trees.

And that's the incredibly interesting story that our ancestors told each other about what winter is.

It's the aftermath of the spirits being allowed out from the otherworld for one night.

and they strip all life from the land and now it's cold and you can't grow anything.

But luckily because the seasons are predictable and animal behavior is predictable and you have your stories, you've stocked up for the winter and you know what to do.

And then what comes after sowing?

What comes after Halloween?

The festival of Imbulk around February 1st when snowdrops start coming out of the soil and garse starts to sprout.

and frogs wake up from hibernation and lay their spawn.

Then we have the fertility festival of Inbulk, all about the goddess Bridget.

And then people know when to sow their crops, when it's okay to leave their animals out.

And Halloween has its frightening, scary stories of demons from the other world stripping the land bare.

At Inbulk, you've got more positive stories about the goddess Bridget and life and rebirth.

And not just Ireland, you did the same shit all over Europe.

You did the same shit anywhere where any climate that experiences seasons.

Not everywhere in the world experiences seasons the way we do in Europe.

But in the folklore and mythology of Europe, seasons are very important.

The predictability of seasons, the predictability of animals' behaviour, and how we could form mythology, folklore, and specifically festivals around seasons and the predictability of the climate.

That determined our survival.

And now

we're the first generation where that's being disrupted.

What does November mean?

What does November mean when it's sweaty now?

When frogs wake up by accident and daisies pop up in the garden?

It feels unsettling.

It feels deeply unsettling.

And we're still

celebrating these festivals.

These festivals that are related to biodiversity and the seasons.

People dress up in scary costumes at Halloween.

No one's aware that, you know, thousands of years ago, this was essential to survival.

Winter's come and sort your shit out.

And the fertility festival of Imbulk around February.

We're still celebrating that too.

It's Easter.

It's been completely co-opted by capitalism.

Chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies.

But the semiotics of fucking fertility still survive.

It's a festival about eggs.

The human egg is fertilized to create more humans.

Easter is still about fertility.

We're talking about stories that have changed drastically but do have an unbroken unbroken lineage going back thousands of years to an oral culture.

Stories that kept us the human animal who has the capacity for language in line with systems of biodiversity and the seasons and we're the first generation where that's slipping away.

Stories that are thousands of years old are gonna not make sense anymore.

Everything's gonna be like Christmas in Australia.

Like I haven't had a good chat.

I haven't had a good chat with an Australian person yet about Christmas and I can't believe I haven't done that.

But people living in Australia of European descent celebrate Christmas at the height of their fucking summer.

And I've no idea how you do it.

I don't know how the fuck you do it.

Do you have Santa Claus?

Do you have sleighs?

How the fuck do you do it?

Like half of Ireland is living in fucking Australia.

What are you doing?

What are you doing at Christmas?

What are you doing?

Are you wearing Christmas jumpers?

You're not all coming home.

There's no way you're all coming home at fucking Christmas because it's too expensive.

What are you doing?

You mad cunts.

Are you wearing shorts?

Are you wearing shorts with antlers on your head?

Are you eating turkey?

Are you eating hot turkey and raw spuds and boiling hot gravy on the hottest day of the year?

And I'd say you fucking are because you're homesick.

The closest I've ever come to understanding it.

There's a Tim Minchin, the comedian Tim Minchin has a song about Christmas in Australia.

The song's called White Wine in the Sun.

and it's not presented ironically.

It's not directed towards anyone living in the northern hemisphere.

It's a fairly sincere song about Tim Minchin trying to enjoy Christmas even though he's an atheist and enjoying white wine in the sun because that's what Christmas is in Australia.

And there's a very strange pagan beauty to that.

A post-apocalyptic pagan beauty.

about a person of European descent trying to celebrate and continue their seasonal pagan winter festival in a very hot land where they don't belong.

It doesn't make sense and it's strange but I bet you the indigenous Australian stories about fucking December are brilliant and make loads of sense and it's just difficult to relate to it because Christmas is a fucking winter festival.

It's a winter festival but in Australia it's not because a lot of European people went down there and colonised it.

I don't know what Halloween or Easter are going to mean in 30 years.

I'm not too sure what this week's podcast is about.

I've been an incredibly busy boy.

Last week, my short film.

Short film based on one of my short stories which starred Robbie Sheehan.

That was released.

It came out on RTE1.

You can watch it on the RTE player if you like.

I'm not sure how that works outside of Ireland.

I've heard of people using VPNs to watch the RTE player.

I'm not sure.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you so much to everyone who watched it and who enjoyed it.

Having one of my short stories on screen, what I'm noticing is

some people are seeing me in a different light now.

People who, you know, not everybody is a reader.

Not everybody enjoys reading a book.

and experiencing that in the theater of their mind.

Some people prefer stories to be shown to them visually.

so the opportunity to show people my stories or one of my stories I'm unbelievably grateful for that opportunity because obviously

I've three fucking books of short stories ready to go I want to make all of those into films or into a TV series if I can but the process of it I loved sitting down with with the director James Cotter with the short story and going right how do we make this into something visual.

I adored doing that, and I'd love to do it with every one of my other stories if I get the opportunity.

So, my short film came out, my documentary that I've been making all year.

It's called Blind by Slaves and Scholars.

It's about

that shit I was talking about at the start of the podcast.

I mean, really, this documentary is about the impact that the technology of writing had on Ireland, its place in the Irish writing tradition, and what

Irish culture brought to writing as an art form because we had a rich oral mythology for thousands of years

and then in the fifth century St.

Patrick arrives with Christianity but the thing is with Christianity arriving in Ireland in the fifth century it's not just a belief system that came over Christianity brought the technology of writing.

Yes, we did have an Irish writing system called Awam and it was mainly inscribed in stones, but Christianity brought Latin script and books.

And the only reason I'm able to tell you about Samhain and tell you about Irish mythology is because early medieval Irish Christian monks used the technology of writing to preserve those stories in books.

So that documentary, it's on TV this Thursday on RT1 at

I think it's 10 past 10 on RT1 this Thursday.

I'm unbelievably happy with this documentary.

It took a year to make and it's my first time putting the podcast hug on television.

So I've been very busy doing media shit,

interviews for newspapers, radio, talking to journalists because

and I've mentioned this a million times before so in my career when you do something that's within corporate media, right?

That means television, radio, books.

If you release something on corporate media then other corporate media show up and go oh we can talk to you now if you release something on independent media corporate media pretends that you don't exist so i don't know i've i had killian killian murphy on the podcast three weeks ago do you think a journalist rang me up and said hey blind boy would you like to speak in the newspaper about your chat with killian murphy or the president of ireland the president of ireland came on this podcast no journalist or radio station rang me up to say, do you want to talk about that?

Because independent media, like a podcast, that's competition.

So corporate media, they ignore it.

It doesn't matter what you do, they pretend it doesn't exist.

But if you do something on corporate media, in this case, television, then they all ring up and they want to chat to you.

And then the consequence of that, so I get to be famous.

I'm going to be famous in Ireland for three weeks.

For three weeks, I'm going to be famous in Ireland.

And what that means is

your ma might bring me up.

You might go home and your ma might say that fellow with the bag on his head was on TV.

What we recognise as fame, fame is a media construct.

The media decides, corporate media decides who's famous and who isn't famous.

Corporate media decides who is an Irish celebrity.

There's no such thing as an Irish celebrity.

Ireland is is...

Ireland's entire population is smaller than London.

So you can have, let's say, Killian Murphy, Sir Sharon, Paul Meskel, Irish people who are famous, internationally famous, and then you have Irish celebrities, which is someone who is a celebrity in the tiny country of Ireland.

That can't really exist.

So it's constructed by the corporate media.

Like an actual celebrity, you're never really going to meet them.

They live in the Hollywood Hills.

They're miles away.

They're untouchable.

An Irish celebrity, you're in Tesco,

and that celebrity is on the front of three Irish magazines.

You see them there.

There's the magazines.

My God, they're on three Irish magazines.

And then that same celebrity is standing beside the magazines in real life because they're in the queue for Tesco and you can look into their trolley.

Because Ireland is tiny.

That's what happens.

Like, there's an Irish celebrity, an Irish celebrity up in Dublin.

Now she's a long, lot, she's been an Irish celebrity for a long time.

Nobody knows her outside of Ireland.

No one has a clue who she is outside of Ireland, but you'd know her in Ireland.

I know for a fact that this person goes to their local super value at five minutes before it closes to do her shopping when it's empty, to recreate the because like actual famous people in like Hollywood, they can literally have a shop shut down.

Let's just say Beyonce is in Ireland and she wants to go to Dunn stores.

She really wants to go to Dunn stores.

Beyonce's people will ring ahead and Dunn stores will close down so that Beyoncé can do some shopping.

That happens.

Like, I was in Dublin once, and I walked up to a bookshop.

And when I went to the bookshop, it was open, and the security guard says, Sorry, you can't come in.

I'm like, why not?

A Ben Affleck.

Ben Affleck is in Dublin and he wanted to go into this bookshop.

So it's just easier if we just shut it down for the 15 minutes that Ben Affleck is inside.

All right, so if you wouldn't just mind waiting.

So, yeah, Ben Affleck was just buying a book, and it was easier to shut the shop down because because he's properly really famous and it might even be health and safety risk to let Ben Affleck shop in there if people are going to follow him in and try and take photographs.

Because neurotypical people go mentally insane when famous people are around.

The behavior of neurotypical people around fame should be diagnosed in the DSM.

So there's a particular Irish celebrity.

famous in Ireland only

and she goes to her local super value five minutes before it closes to try and create that type of fantasy.

And she's older, so the people working in the supermarket, they just kind of, they stay open a little bit later, they'll give it 10 minutes while she walks around in the empty supermarket and gets her groceries.

But the fact is, if she turned up in the middle of the day, no one would really mind.

Now I'm not shitting on this person, I'm not looking down at them, I'm not laughing at them, but what I am saying is that the construct of fame for so long has caused that person to really struggle with their sense of self and their sense of identity.

I'm a celebrity in Ireland.

I'm on the radio.

I'm on the TV.

I can't just go into Super Value in the middle of the day.

That goes against the hyper-real version of me that you see in magazines.

It's Ireland.

I know you get invited on the radio.

You might be on the late late once again.

It's Ireland.

You're going to have to shop in Super Value.

You're going to have to go to Super Value and queue up beside the magazines that you are on like just just look at it this way like last year we had a huge scandal in ireland because our te presenters were being paid too much money and there was an investigation and a tribunal and it's all the corporate media spoke about for maybe two months speaking about these really famous irish broadcasters who earn all this money The big name was Ryan Tuberty, who used to present the Late Show.

So Ryan Tuberty was probably the most famous person in Ireland.

But have you ever heard of Jacksepticeye?

He's a YouTuber.

He's a YouTuber from Offaly.

He makes about 20 million euros a year.

His content is viewed by millions of people all around the world.

He's by far one of the highest paid Irish entertainers.

He's not famous.

If you speak to a teenager, they know who the fuck he is.

Or if you play video games, you know who he is.

But he's not famous.

You can't put Jacksepticeye on the front cover of the RTE guide and expect people to know who he is.

But yet,

he's earning hundreds of times more than these RTE celebrities.

And more people are engaging with his content.

So what we perceive as fame, who we see to be famous, it's entirely

constructed by corporate media.

So I'm going to be an Irish celebrity.

for about three weeks.

For about three weeks I'm going to be an Irish celebrity.

You're going to see me on TV, read about me in the newspaper and maybe hear me on radio for three weeks.

I've been doing this for since 2010.

Since 2010.

In and out of being an Irish celebrity.

Oh there he is, the guy with the bag, the bag fella from Limerick.

What's his name?

I don't know.

Something to do with a horse.

Then I disappear for a year and then I'm back again.

And if I wanted to be an Irish celebrity all the time, it's a game.

It's a game that you play.

I wouldn't have a bag on my head and I'd be inviting magazines around if I got a new kitchen.

and I'd probably try to have a girlfriend who also works in the media and then you get engaged and then you make your engagement really public and and that's that's the cycle that's the cycle of being an Irish celebrity it's it's an arrangement it's a game that's played with corporate media so because I've got two things out on Irish TV this month I'm going to be famous for about three weeks.

For about three weeks, I'm going to be in the newspaper, mentioned on the radio.

People who'd have no interest in my podcast podcast or my books or even know what I do just know me as that fellow with the bag in his head who had some song about a horse.

Those people are going to be aware of me again.

It's autobolics and I have to be I have to be very aware of it because it's it's a dangerous drug and it's valued very highly in society.

Like I might bump into people who I know in real life.

Don't have the bag on my head.

Bump into someone I know in real life.

And this person, they know me from school or whatever.

They don't listen to my podcast.

They They don't follow me on social media.

They genuinely don't know what I'm up to.

They possibly think I'm unemployed.

That's fine.

I actually like that.

I prefer that.

There's more humility in that.

But when, when, like right now, I've got two things on TV and you might hear me on the radio or see me in the newspaper.

Now that person from school, they see me in the street and they walk up.

And they treat me like I've just won the lottery.

Their eyes are wide and they have this strange smile on their face.

And they're saying, I heard you on the radio.

I saw you on the TV.

I read about you on the newspaper.

And they treat me differently.

They treat me like I'm a very important person.

Because these are people who listen to the radio, read the newspaper and watch television.

So in their experience of reality, I'm famous now.

And the silly smile on their face is, there's that fellow I knew from school and he's famous because I just heard him on the radio and I can't wait to tell all my family that I met him in the street.

So I have to be very mindful around my self-esteem around that because that's a huge amount of external praise.

And it's vacuous, it's meaningless, it's bullshit and it's going to be gone in three weeks.

In three weeks time when I don't have anything on television, on the corporate media.

Then other corporate media, newspaper and radio, they stop ringing me up, they stop asking to have me on the radio, they stop asking for me to do interviews for the newspaper.

And then I go back to being nobody.

Even though my podcast has more listeners than any radio show in this country, because it's independent media, corporate media have to pretend it doesn't exist.

And fame, who we perceive to be famous, it's bullshit.

It's something that's created by newspaper TV and radio.

So by January, by January, I'm going to bump into someone I haven't seen in eight years.

And they're going to go back to thinking I'm unemployed.

And that's fine.

I prefer that.

That's fine.

The one thing I do like about being on radio and TV is my ma does love it.

My ma really likes it because

my ma's older.

My ma's in her 80s and all her neighbors are older.

So her neighbours, they haven't a fucking clue what a podcast is.

They don't know what I'm doing.

But if I'm on the on TV, if I'm on TV or in the newspaper, then my ma's neighbours find out about it.

And then her, her elderly neighbours call to her door.

giving her praise because her son is on TV or whatever.

And my ma likes that and I like that because my ma likes that and specifically what's very important to my ma is it's whether or not I appear in the local newspaper a newspaper called the Limerick Post which is it's a free newspaper that everybody gets in the door and it's just for Limerick and I've been in the Limerick Post twice this week so now when my when my ma goes to the shop

she's a legend All her friends are coming over talking to her because they've seen me being written about in the the local newspaper that came in their doors.

So I like that.

I allow myself to feel happy about that because that has nothing to do with my self-esteem or my ego or how I see myself or how I would like others to see me.

It's about my ma and it's about my ma and her social circle.

And my ma likes it when her friends are coming up to her saying, wow, you must be so proud of your son.

So I wanted to tell you the story this week.

I missed a live radio appearance this week.

I missed a fucking live radio appearance this week.

Because I wanted to call over to my ma and hear her tell me stories about the neighbours, about what the neighbours were saying because I was in the local newspaper, because I was in the Limerick Post.

But when I called to my Ma's house,

she was babysitting my brother's dog.

The dog's name is Willow.

I wouldn't call Willow a puppy.

You know when

You know when a dog is a dog, but it's still a puppy.

So it looks like a dog, but it has the rubberiness of a puppy.

That's where Willow's at.

Still has that immaturity.

So I call to my ma's house and I take off my shoes because she got a new rug and this dog Willow is running all over the fucking house.

And I sit down to have a cup of tea with my ma and she has a packet of Jaffa cakes.

Now I adore Jaffa cakes.

I fuck I love Jaffa cakes so much that I don't buy them.

I don't purchase Jaffa cakes.

If I buy a packet of Jaffa cakes, I'm just gonna eat, I'll eat them all in a day.

They're too nice.

You can't you can't just eat one Jaffa cake and I don't want to eat an entire chube of Jaffa cakes.

So I just I don't buy Jaffa cakes.

I don't purchase them.

Jaffa cakes are things that happen to me.

That's my rule with Jaffa cakes.

Life will direct me towards situations where Jaffa cakes are present and when that happens, then I'll have some Jaffa cakes.

If you don't know, everyone knows what a fucking Jaffa cake is.

It's a biscuit-sized little piece of sponge covered in chocolate with delicious orange inside.

And you put it into your mouth and it dissolves and you immediately want another one.

And they're perfect.

They're amazing.

They're sweet but not too sweet.

There's the complexity of orange against chocolate.

The softness of the sponge.

One of the greatest confections available.

to humankind and I think everybody would agree with that.

So I'm sitting down at my ma chatting having great crack drinking tea.

I put away I'd say five Jaffa cakes.

I stopped myself after five.

My Ma's got the newspaper out.

I'm there in it.

My article's in the local Limerick Post newspaper.

She's so happy.

She wants to cut it out.

She's thrilled.

She's got a scrapbook.

My ma's got a scrapbook of every time I've ever appeared in the print newspaper.

And she loves this.

And then I look at my watch and I go, fuck, I have to leave, ma.

I'm on the radio in like an hour.

I'm on live radio.

And I'm recording this from a studio in Limerick.

It was one of the big radio.

I'm not going to say it.

It's one of the big radio stations in Ireland.

And I was due to be on fucking live interview.

And I was going to be recording it from Limerick.

So I said to my ma, I have to fucking go.

This is live radio.

You don't fuck around with live radio.

When you're on, you're on.

And it's live.

And the whole country is listening.

So I have to go and do this, right?

So I have to leave, man.

But there's like, there's like six Jaffe cakes left.

And as I'm leaving, my ma's trying to force the fucking packet of Jaffa cakes on me.

Saying, take the Jaffa cakes.

And I'm like, I don't want the fucking Jaffa cakes.

Don't be giving me the Jaffa cakes.

Take the Jaffa cakes.

And I'm like, why?

And she's like, I can't keep the dog away from him.

Willow, the little puppy, is mad for Jaffa cakes.

And little dogs aren't supposed to eat chocolate.

So please take the Jaffa cakes.

And I said, I'm not taking the Jaffa cakes.

Because if I take the Jaffa cakes, I'll eat them all in the taxi.

I'm going to eat the rest of that.

I'll have eaten 12 Jaffa cakes.

I don't need that.

I've already had six.

I cannot take these Jaffa cakes.

Put them in the fucking bin.

Put them in the bin.

Keep them away from the dog.

Put them up somewhere high.

So I put my shoes back on, ran out of the fucking house.

Got into my taxi to go to the radio station.

Taxi drops me off.

And it was very quick.

And I've got 40 minutes to kill before I go to the radio station.

So I go into a coffee shop.

But as I'm walking into the coffee shop,

something feels strange in my feet.

It feels squelchy in my fucking shoe.

It feels warm and it feels squelchy.

So immediately I'm thinking, the puppies after shitting into my shoe.

I've got dog shit between the sole of my shoe and my sock.

That's what's happening in my foot right now.

I can't smell it because it's a puppy.

Maybe it's only a small bit of shit, but there's shit inside my shoe.

Inside my shoe, there's shit.

Dog shit.

And I'm in a coffee shop.

So I decide, right, I'm going to get my coffee and then I'm going to sit down.

Very quiet coffee shop, not many people there.

Get my coffee, I sit down, and then I decide, okay, I'm going to very carefully remove my foot from my shoe so I can investigate the dog shit that's all over my socks now.

So as I pull my foot out under the table,

I was careful about it.

As I pull out my foot, I look at my sock.

I see the brown, immediately I think, alright, it's dog shit.

And then I put it out more, oh no, it's not.

It's a Jaffa cake.

Okay,

not ideal.

I'd rather not have a Jaffa cake mashed into my fucking sock and inside my shoe.

But it's a hell of a lot better than dog shit.

So then I'm like, why the fuck is there a Jaffa cake inside my shoe?

Ah, okay.

So Willow the dog.

who loves the Jaffa cakes,

she must have taken a Jaffa cake, chewed on it, slobbered on it, whatever, and then jettisoned this Jaffa cake or the remnants of it into my shoe.

And then when I was leaving and arguing about Jaffa cakes, I stuck my foot into the shoe without thinking.

And now that's why I'm in this situation right now in the coffee shop.

Okay, what's the solution?

So I take a sip of my coffee and then I decide, I'm going to go into the bathroom now.

I'll throw away this sock.

I'll clean out the inside of the shoe and I'll just carry on the rest of my day wearing one one sock.

It'll be fine.

So that's exactly what I do.

But while I'm doing it,

and here's the interesting thing about Jaffa cakes.

They're so tasty and they dissolve so easily.

You eat a Jaffe cake but you don't savour a Jaffa cake.

You don't notice a Jaffe cake.

There's a word called quaffing to quaff something.

To eat something so rapidly that you almost inhale it.

You quaff Jaffa cakes.

Jaffa cakes are quaffable.

The only way to eat a Jaffe cake is to quaff it.

You don't fucking chew it, it just, boom, give me that Jaffa cake.

And when I was cleaning the Jaffa cake out of the inside of my shoe in the fucking bathroom of Acosta,

I was mindfully engaging with a Jaffe cake for the first time.

I was noticing the sponginess of the cake.

The slight darkness of the chocolate.

It's not full-on milk chocolate.

There's a bit of a darkness to it, but it's not dark chocolate.

And then the amber, sticky translucence

of the Jaffa bit, the fucking orange bit, the orange jelly, and the wonderful aroma of that sweet orange aroma.

The humility, the humility and the act of cleaning a mashed Jaffa cake out of my shoe.

It gave me the tingles.

It gave me the artistic tingles.

I became very focused on finding out the history of Jaffe cakes.

I just had a feeling that there's a story in there somewhere.

So Jaffe Cakes were invented in 1927 by McVities.

McVities weren't, they weren't a huge company at the time.

I think they were Edinburgh-based.

But they invented the Jaffa Cake, which

it's a sponge base

covered in chocolate, and in the center is a sweet orange jam.

It's a very clever idea.

The recipe hasn't changed.

It's perfect.

Interestingly, McVitie's never copyrighted the name Jaffa Cake.

So anyone can make Jaffa cakes and sell them as Jaffe cakes if you want.

Jaffa cakes are also legally considered to be a cake.

There was a big argument about this in the 90s because biscuits had to pay tax but cakes didn't.

So in 1991, I think McVities went to court to prove that even though Jaffa cakes are sold as biscuits and they're biscuit size, this is in fact a cake and this cake should not be subject to vat.

And the way they proved it is they baked a giant Jaffa cake.

They made a huge Jaffa cake and went into court and sliced it up and said eat that and tell me it's a biscuit you prick.

And the judge ate the slice of the giant Jaffa cake and said, this is in fact a cake.

That's not a biscuit.

I know it looks like a biscuit, but this is legally considered a cake.

So, now Jaffa cakes are not subject to VAT.

The real thing that fascinates me around Jaffa cakes is

so they're invented in 1927, right?

We take fruit for granted.

We take we live in a world of globalization.

You know, I'm gonna do an ocarina pause now before I get into fruit history because I want it to be uninterrupted.

I'm gonna play my ocarina, and you're gonna hear an adverb for something.

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.

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.

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That was the Ocarina pause.

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

If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, joy, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com forward slash the blindboy podcast because this is this is my full-time job this this is what i love doing this is what i love doing i love showing up here each week writing a podcast putting it out i don't have to think about tv radio newspapers any of that fucking bullshit i can exist here quietly following my passions doing what i genuinely want to do for ye my wonderful listeners and it's fully independent fully independent i'm not even not thinking thinking about fucking advertisers.

Nobody.

I'm here following curiosity and passion and I adore this.

It's nice to make a TV documentary once every two years.

Lovely experience.

So thank you to all of my patrons.

You're the reason that I can show up here every week to do this podcast.

You're the reason I can afford to do this podcast, rent out my office, purchase the equipment to make the podcast.

Thank you so much.

And if you'd like to become a patron, all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee coffee once a month.

That's it.

If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint or a coffee?

If you would, you can via the Patreon page.

But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

You can listen for free.

Listen for free.

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

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It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness.

And if you are becoming a new patron, right, a new patron, don't do it via the the Apple app on your iphone because apple are dirty pricks and they're going to take 30 that's a new rule so if you're becoming a new patron please go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast on your desktop if you can and then apple won't take 30

they don't even pay tax the fucking pricks okay upcoming gigs last night was my last gig of 2025.

I was in Vicker Street in Dublin.

That was sold out.

So if you didn't get a ticket for that, there's a new Vicker Street gig in January on the 27th.

Come along to that.

My Vicker Street gigs are incredible fun.

So, come along to those.

February on the 9th, Leisureland in Galway.

That's gonna be fun.

I have a cracking guest for that.

21st of February, Drahada.

28th, Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre.

Australia sold out.

And then fucking June 2025, my big giant tour of Scotland and England.

I don't think Wales.

I was in Wales.

Scotland and England, right?

June, what have we got here?

Starting on the 30th.

Oh, it's the end of June.

Starting on the 31st of June.

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

and Norwich.

I'm gigging in all those places and if you want to find tickets for my those fucking gigs it's fan.co.uk forward slash the blind by podcast and those gigs are selling quick.

Right back to the history of oranges.

Let's start talking about oranges.

We take fruit for granted today.

We take exotic fruit for granted.

Fruit that is grown far away from us right now.

We take it for granted.

I can walk into Tesco or Super Value right now and queue up with a lot of RTE celebrities.

I can buy a pineapple.

I can buy dragon fruits, I can buy bananas that have been shipped from Central America.

I've done entire podcasts about the history of bananas, can't remember the name of that podcast, I've done a podcast called Pineapple Folly about the history of pineapples.

Exotic fruits that were grown in hot parts of the world for most of human history.

These were luxury fucking goods that only kings and queens could get their hands on.

You can't grow a pineapple in Honduras in the 1700s and then take that pineapple by ship to England and expect it to be ripe after six weeks.

That doesn't happen.

And you can't grow pineapples in England because it's not hot enough.

Bananas, we should not be able to purchase bananas.

Bananas come from Central America.

They're brought over on ships.

Why are we able to buy bananas?

Because of globalization?

because the workers in Honduras are exploited, they're paid nothing.

Like you look at the history of America and Central America and bananas, you ever hear the phrase banana republic?

A banana republic is a name for a Central American country where giant fruit corporations with help of US intelligence and US military have inserted a right-wing dictatorship just so that bananas can be sold cheaply.

A lot of pain, a lot of misery, a lot of violence, a lot of exploitation goes into the history of why you and I are able to buy exotic fruits in our local supermarket and these things are affordable and everyday objects.

Oranges were once a luxury item.

Oranges...

Like my da, my dad grew up in West Cork.

He was born in the 1930s.

And my da used to tell me stories.

When he was a child, him and his brothers, right?

They had an uncle called Jimmy.

And Jimmy, whatever the fuck he'd done, Jimmy had travelled somewhere.

He'd traveled outside of Ireland.

And my dad's Uncle Jimmy had tasted an orange.

He had tasted an orange at one point in his life.

This is Ireland in the 1930s.

So when Jimmy would visit my dad and his brothers, all they would do is ask Uncle Jimmy, what does an orange look like?

What does an orange taste like?

What's an orange?

Now Uncle Jimmy, he can't pull out photographs of an orange, he can only describe it.

And then one day, Uncle Jimmy was so pissed off with these little kids who wouldn't stop asking him about what a fucking orange is.

He just turns around one day and he takes out his pocket watch, one of those old shitty gold pocket watches, and he says to the kids, my dad and his brothers, that's an orange.

There it is.

There you go, you see?

That's what an orange is.

It's this thing.

My dad and his brothers, they're kids.

They don't know any different.

So if Uncle Jimmy produces a pocket watch and said, that's what an orange is, they believe him.

So then one day, Uncle Jimmy falls asleep in his chair.

And my da

and his brothers silently creep up and start trying to eat his pocket watch because they think it's an orange.

Uncle Jimmy goes fucking apeshit because the children have chewed his pocket watch and broken it.

It ended with my grandda pointing a shotgun at Uncle Jimmy because both of these men were in the IRA.

Ten years previously they were both fighting the Black and Tans.

They were shell-shocked lunatics.

So my dad used to tell me that story about when he was a child he didn't know what a fucking orange was.

He did not know what an orange was in free state ireland in the 1930s with economic protectionism we weren't importing oranges if we were maybe they were going to dublin and some very posh people were eating them oranges were grown in spain in the islamic caliphate bitter oranges they're not very nice to eat they're the ones that go into marmalade these oranges were valued within the within islam within Arab and within Muslim cultures.

Bitter oranges were used medicinally.

If you look at the layout of cities in Spain like Seville and Córdoba, you look at the layout of the medieval cities, you'll see that the city layout was designed around irrigation for orange groves.

That's how important oranges were.

And when you go to Seville now or Cordoba, still, these bitter oranges grow in the street.

But still, even like 500 years ago, 600 years ago, bringing a lot of oranges from Spain, because Spain's not that far away.

Bringing a lot of oranges from Spain, they would say England.

That was really difficult.

The oranges would go off, they'd rot, they might crush, they weren't very easily transportable.

So what they'd do is they'd dry the orange peels.

So bitter orange peels that would make it to England.

And that's where marmalade comes from.

That was the only hope of getting a little taste of this wonderful citrus fruit called an orange.

It was through marmalade and the preserved peel because you couldn't just bring a shipload of fucking oranges over from Spain in 1470.

Fresh oranges were a luxury commodity which had to be transported in small amounts very carefully to the richest of the rich.

A good way to find out what fruit

were luxury items or very heavily fetishized in medieval times is to look at paintings.

Look at paintings because fruit was used in paintings frequently to symbolize wealth or fertility, opulence and status.

One of the most famous paintings in the world.

It's called the Arnal Fini Wedding, painted in 1434 by one of the Dutch masters called Jan van Eyck.

Incredibly famous painting.

You mightn't know it by me just saying it.

But if you saw, if you saw the Arnal Feene wedding, you're going to go, ah, that one.

Okay, one of the really famous ones.

Beautiful painting.

It's a man and a woman holding hands.

Your man looks a bit like Vladimir Putin.

The woman to the right of him, she's pregnant, she's wearing green.

What makes this painting really famous is if you look right behind them, there's a mirror, a concave mirror, and if you look closely into the mirror,

Van Eyck has painted himself painting the painting.

which for 1434 was revolutionary because you're starting to see the artist, the artist as the subject of a painting.

There's a hubris there, there's an arrogance.

I'm Van Eyck and I painted this painting and there's me.

You can see my reflection painting this painting.

I'm breaking the fourth wall.

This painting knows it's a painting because there's me painting it.

And he was also flexing skill because the technical ability to paint himself so small.

It was really difficult.

And he was able to do that because Van Eyck also painted lockets.

People used to have tiny, tiny little lockets and he would paint a tiny painting in there.

So he was flexing his skill.

But if you look at the Arnolfini wedding, right, and on the left of the painting, these are two very, very wealthy people getting married in 1434.

Just to the left of the fella, who looks like Vladimir Putin, underneath the window, what's there?

A couple of little oranges.

That's the fruit that was chosen for this painting.

So that tells us, in 1434, putting a couple of oranges in your painting, you might as well be showing off your Lamborghini.

That's your wealth.

These people are getting married and they're so wealthy that they've got a couple of oranges on their wedding day.

So we take fruit like oranges for granted.

We take this, because of globalization, we have quick and easy access to whatever fruit we want.

This was not always the case.

Oranges in Western Europe, in Britain, were very difficult to come by, hard to transport.

Up until the middle of the 1800s, what changed in the 1800s?

There was a city in Palestine called Jaffa.

This city is now Tel Aviv in Israel, but once it was called Jaffa and it was full of Palestinian Arab people.

As I mentioned growing oranges, the growing of oranges had been practiced for centuries, for centuries in Arab communities and in Islamic communities.

And in the Palestinian city of Jaffa in the mid-1800s, the farmers there developed a new type of orange.

This was known as the Shamoti orange that came from the port of Jaffa.

What made the Shamoti orange very special is it had incredibly thick skin, it was very sweet, it wasn't bitter like the Spanish oranges that you make marmalade from.

It was a sweet orange with thick skin and it was juicy.

And this Palestinian orange from the mid-1800s could be transported all around the world using steamships.

It didn't go rotten, it didn't crush under weight.

This was a hardy, thick-skinned orange that you could deliver easily anywhere in Europe.

One of the first examples of the globalization of an exotic fruit.

It exploded during the Crimean War where it was exported up to Ukraine to feed the soldiers who needed vitamin C.

It led to an economic explosion in the Palestinian city of Jaffa, right?

There were orange groves everywhere.

This was a big deal.

People in Europe wanted oranges and now they could get them at a relatively affordable price because these oranges could be transported easily.

Now they were still kind of expensive.

They were fancy enough, but they weren't only something that kings and queens could eat.

Middle class people in the 1800s could afford an orange now and again.

because of the Jaffa orange, this Palestinian orange.

So Palestine in the city of Jaffa became very prosperous.

This was an international hub of trade.

But Palestine at the time would have been part of the Ottoman Empire.

So then World War I breaks out, the Ottoman Empire loses, and now the Middle East, the Middle East is carved up in 1916 between French and British interests as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Terrible news for the Middle East.

1917 the Balfour Declaration is signed.

This is an agreement between Britain and the Zionist movement to establish Palestine as a homeland for Jewish people.

In 1920, Palestine stops being part of the Ottoman Empire and it becomes mandatory Palestine.

It's a British territory and it's a British territory until 1948.

And British Mandatory Palestine, it was British territory in agreement with the Zionist movement where Britain would colonize Palestine.

with European Jewish people.

This was good news for the Jewish people who had been experiencing pogroms around Europe and it was brilliant news for the British because now they had a military outpost in the Middle East.

And I'm going to quote again Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Palestine in 1920.

He said,

Our aim is to create a little loyal Jewish ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.

So that was always the plan for Palestine.

It becoming an independent country called Israel in 1948, that wasn't part of the plan.

But it was was always the plan that that area would be a western military outpost for the extraction of oil resources and to serve western power dominance first Britain and France now America so mandatory Palestine under the control of Britain that's when you start to see the colonization of Palestine with European Jewish people and Britain deliberately wanted lots of of European Jewish people in Jaffa in the city of Jaffa for these people to work in the orange industry, the thriving orange industry.

And for a period in the 1920s, there was this thriving Palestinian orange industry where you had Jewish people and Palestinian Arabs working alongside each other, growing oranges from Jaffa.

So skip forward about four or five years, 1927, back to the start.

McFitis, a biscuit maker.

in Britain.

McFitis realize, Jesus, everyone loves these fucking oranges, these Jaffa oranges now.

Everyone's mad about this flavor.

How can we take this Jaffa orange flavor and put it in a biscuit or a cake so they invent the Jaffa cake?

But now,

the only reason that McVities were able to make Jaffa cakes is that Jaffa oranges were now incredibly cheap.

Why were they incredibly cheap?

Because Palestine in 1927 was owned by Britain.

Britain was colonizing it.

And Britain was colonizing Palestine.

The way it colonised everywhere else.

They weren't doing it in a nice way.

The Black and Tans in Ireland,

these terrorist British forces who laid waste to Ireland in the 1920s, when the south of Ireland won independence in 1922, where'd the Black and Tans go?

They went to Mandatory Palestine.

Britain sent those same Black and Tans to Palestine.

I'm serious.

My grandda in West Cork, when he was in the IRA, in 1921, he was involved in a thing called the Kilmichael ambush.

They shot 17 soldiers in the auxiliary division.

This is West Cork 1921.

Their leader Hugh Tudor left Ireland and became a founder of the Palestine Police like a few months after the Kilmichael ambush.

That's how close the Ireland Palestine thing is.

Like my granddaughter fired bullets at lads who ended up there.

as police of the British Empire in Palestine, doing to Palestinian Arabs what they'd been doing six months ago in fucking West Cork.

So the British formed the Palestine police, very similar to the RIC, the auxiliaries, the Black and Tens, to brutalise the Arab population the way that they did the Irish population.

But now the Palestine was under British control by 1927.

It became about extracting resources to benefit Britain only.

and that included the gigantic huge Jaffa orange industry.

So the indigenous Palestinian orange industry went from something that was profitable for the people to now being a model where the people who are growing and selling the oranges, the Arabs in Palestine, are completely being exploited and all profits are channeled towards Britain.

And now people in Britain can buy Jaffa oranges for fuck all because the people in Palestine who are growing them are being exploited.

And that's why McFitis, that's the reason.

that McFitis in 1927 were able to buy cheap Jaffa oranges to make their Jaffa cakes.

So Jaffa cakes are dripping in blood.

The Black and Tans, the Black and Tans went down and took the oranges and said, those are ours, grow them, we're taking the profits, that's what we do, we're the British Empire.

And then the Jaffa orange, it went on to become a symbol of Zionism, a symbol of Israel.

So this British mandatory Palestine, that was 1920 until 1948, where it was a British territory.

In 1948, all the Jewish people that had immigrated to Mandatory Mandatory Palestine, they now fought the Brits for independence and the country of Israel was born.

So 1948, the Brits are gone, you have this new country called Israel.

We're the Jewish state, we're a home for Jewish people.

Then all the Arab countries around go, no, you're fucking not.

Now that the Brits are gone, we're going to have a crack at this.

So then Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, they start a big war with Israel.

Israel win, then you have the Nakpa and the Nakpa was the forced expulsion of Palestinian people from their lands.

Ethnic cleansing 1948 and the orange growers of Jaffa were expelled from their land and they were made refugees and Jaffa stopped being Jaffa became part of Tel Aviv and the orange industry and the Jaffa orange became a symbol of this new state of Israel.

It became a symbol of Zionism.

And Jaffa oranges were a huge export for Israel in the early days of its independence.

And the rich history of Palestinian industry, of the orange industry from the 1800s, that history is downplayed.

It's forgotten as part of the colonial project of Israel.

Like in 2015, in the area that was Jaffa, in a street, the locals managed to uncover a sign, a sign that was hidden behind layers of paint on a building.

And all this sign was, it was a business sign for a Palestinian orange company that existed in the 1920s.

And the people there were like, there,

that's our proof.

We told you, we used to grow oranges here.

This was a big Palestinian industry.

All we have is stories from our grandparents orally.

But now, look at that sign on the wall from the 1920s.

That's the proof.

That was a Palestinian family and they had a huge orange company.

There it is.

So the colonial erasure.

of the Jaffa orange industry.

That erasure was so successful that in 2015 you've got Palestinian people going, look, look at that sign from the 1920s, there's your proof.

These aren't just stories.

There used to be a big orange industry here.

So that's the story of Jaffa cakes.

So I spent a while in the coffee shop having cleaned the Jaffa cake out of my shoe, learning all that.

And then I missed my radio interview.

I missed my live radio interview.

I didn't show up because I was far too engrossed in the history of Jaffa oranges and Jaffa cakes.

I forgot I was too focused, too focused on that hot take.

And I'm better off because if I had rushed to the radio station, I'd have just talked about oranges for no reason.

I don't think that radio station is going to call me back anytime soon, to tell you the truth.

So I'm incredibly busy.

This is all I've got time for this week.

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

In the meantime, rub a dog, kiss a swan, genuck to a robin.

Get a look at my documentary on RTE One this Thursday called Blind by Slaves and Scholars.

It will be on the RTE player afterwards.

And get a squint at my short film.

Did you read about Arsene Fogarty?

That's also on the RTE player if you want to see it.

God bless.

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.

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.