What pulling our pants around our ankles can tell us about structuralist theory and oral storytelling

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Cry with Nile of the Nine hostages, you sausageless Costigans.

Welcome to to the Blind Buy Podcast.

If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode of this podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

We're nestled in the comforting breast

of autumn here in Limerick City.

The leaves are going all rusty.

There's a healthy wind and a freshness to the air.

I have a thirst for lairs

underneath my jacket.

And I was walking up up Henry Street Henry Street the other day

lovely powerful breeze coming up Henry Street up from the river and I bumped into

bumped into someone I hadn't seen in

fucking 15 16 years maybe longer

fellow I went to school with who would have been in my class

His name is Jerry Soft

and it was lovely to see Jerry Soft.

I hadn't seen him in fucking years and turns out Jerry listens to my podcast.

And he said to me, I was listening to your podcast a couple of weeks ago when you were talking about your time back in school.

Not last week's podcast, but the week, two weeks ago, I think, I spoke about

being in secondary school and the class that I was in.

And Jerry Soft.

He was just like, fuck it.

Yeah, I had forgotten about all of that.

I'd forgotten about the different characters in school and all of that stuff.

And it really brought me back.

And then he said to me, because like when I fucking seen him, and we're middle-aged men now, when I seen him and I hadn't seen him in 16, 17 years, I went, oh my god, Jerry Soft!

Jerry Soft!

So he said to me,

I don't know why I'm called Jerry Soft.

Do you remember from back in school why the fuck I was called Jerry Soft?

Because

I got the impression that he didn't like it.

That at the time in school,

he didn't like the nickname Jerry Soft.

That this was embarrassing, and

even now, as

middle-aged men, that I'm still calling him fucking Jerry Soft.

So he wanted to know.

He was asking me, why?

Why did ye all call me Jerry Soft?

Why was that my name?

And he also said he said the one person who's going to fucking know is me.

because of my mad memory.

And I loved being asked that question.

A A

because when I saw Jerrysoft I'll be honest I'm like oh fuck is this going to be small talk?

Is this going to be small talk or is the conversation going to be something of substance that I can enjoy?

And it wasn't small talk it's like why why am I called Jerrysoft and I relax in those situations because now I have something to speak about

and I was thinking yeah why the fuck are you called Jerrysoft?

Why did we call you that back in school, Jerry Soft?

And I felt that wonderful feeling of flaw come over me.

It felt like cleaning out the attic and finding a beautiful toy from childhood that you'd forgotten about.

And all the little moments of memories that you had with that toy come back.

And I said to him, Jerry.

Well, I have to start by talking about Claude Levi Strauss.

So Claude Levi Strauss was this...

He was a structuralist.

He was an anthropologist, right?

But his thing was structuralism.

Structuralism.

Strauss's big idea when he was looking at like human societies or human folklore was that

humans derive structural meaning through oppositions, binary oppositions.

Raw versus cooked, life versus death, night versus day.

That

Under the structural sense, humans derive meaning.

A thing's meaning meaning doesn't come from itself but it comes from what it isn't and the first thing I said to him I said Jerry

as far as I can remember we didn't call you Jerry you weren't called Jerry soft because you were soft because you see to be called soft meant that you were weak meant that you were a coward I said no one ever called you Jerry soft as an insult you were just Jerry soft but I said here's the thing remember Jerry hard and his nostrils flared like he was smelling a silent fart.

There were two Jerries.

We had two Jerries in the fucking classroom

and for

second year and third year we started to call him Jerry Jerry Soft in fifth year

In fucking there was no fourth year by the way.

Well fourth year was transition year which I wasn't allowed to do because I was too bold.

So you went from third year straight to fifth year.

But anyway,

we'd two Jerrys in the fucking classroom and there weren't that many people in the classroom.

There was maybe 15, 16.

So it was actually really annoying that there were two Jerrys.

It was...

You'd end up calling them by their full names or you'd chance Jar or you'd chance Jerry.

It was a difficult thing.

But I said to him, what about Jerry Hard?

You remember Jerry Hard?

And he's like, yeah, I do remember Jerry Hard.

I said, that's why you're Jerry Soft.

It's not that you were soft.

It's we had Jerry Hard.

So because he became Jerry Hard, you then had to become Jerry Soft.

Not that you were soft, it's that he was Jerry Hard.

Because we had Jerry Hard and Jerry Soft back in school and I said to him, Do you remember why Jerry Hard became Jerry Hard?

And just taking it back to the Claude Levi Strauss, that that there is pure fucking structuralism.

Right there.

Jerry Saft did nothing other than exist.

Alright, he was easygoing.

He was sound.

But he had respect.

He was nice.

But because...

Jerry Hard, there was two Jerrys.

That was the issue.

Jerry Hard did some shit that made him be called Jerry Hard.

So, then Jerry's other Jerry had to become Jerry Soft.

Binary opposition.

His nickname is purely structural, right?

He didn't earn it.

It doesn't describe him as being soft.

No meaning is derived from Jerry Soft's behavior.

It's oppositional.

It's in binary opposition to Jerry Hard.

Jerry Hard was Jerry Hard because he did some hard shit.

but then I had to explain why Jerry Hard was called Jerry Hard now I'd forgotten about all this stuff but it was flowing back to me quite wonderful

and so Jerry hard was called Jerry Hard

because in fifth year

he got into a feud with a fella called Pulle Pants

now I can't I couldn't explain

Jerry Hard without explaining pulley pants or why Pulley Pants was called Pulle Pants.

So we're in fifth year.

So we're like 15, 16.

But Polypants, who was a lunatic,

got his name when we were

like 10, 10 years of age.

At the age where you start talking to girls and it's a little bit nervous,

the little blossomings of

I won't even say being interested in girls, but when girls become something that you're nervous around.

when lads start wearing jail in their hair, 10 years of age.

There was one summer.

This had been the 90s.

There was one summer.

It was very fucking hot.

Man United.

I know nothing about soccer, but I do know that this year Man United were very popular.

And Limerick had a Man United shop.

So, anyway, this one summer when it was very hot, we're 10 years of age, we're kids.

Lots of people were wearing full kits.

Man United fucking top, jersey, man

shorts, okay.

Polypants, who was a lunatic of a young fella, created an endemic of pulling people's pants down.

And because people were wearing, like young fellas were wearing full kits, they wouldn't be wearing underpants.

So when PolyPants pulled your fucking shorts down, your dick was out.

Now,

when you're 9 or 10 and you start putting gel in your hair, that's when you get integration.

Integration between the fucking sexes, right?

Up to that point when you're a child, your friends are only little lads.

And then the girls are separate groups.

But at nine or ten in the summer, that's when there was a small bit of integration.

When the lads would...

You'd be in a field.

You'd be in a fucking field.

The lads are over at this site.

And the girls are over at that site.

And you're still kind of scared to get together.

And there's always one brave lad who kind of walks into the middle or walks over to the girls to speak to the girls and pulley pants used to target him

and he did it about five times over the summer

that when a

when a poor fucking young fellow would go over and talk to the girls pulley pants would run up behind him and rip his shorts down and then there's his willie.

Everyone is confronted with his willie.

I saw so many.

It was a summer of children's Mickeys.

There's no other way to say it.

It was

a pandemic.

It was awful.

It was fucking awful.

Poor Yumphel has gone up talking to the girls for the first time, and Puddy Pants runs up from behind, rips his fucking shorts down.

And it's over.

That's it.

It's over now.

There's no comeback.

And I'm so sorry for laughing, but it was incredibly funny that just the visual comedy of us.

You see, if

nodity isn't funny,

but when

there's no way to be dignified when

you're when you're wearing a t-shirt,

when you're wearing a t-shirt, when you're wearing a t-shirt,

and then it's just your dick and arse out,

you look like Donald Duck.

You can't.

There is no way for a man or a boy, if you're wearing a t-shirt, right?

And you're nude from the waist down, it's instantly foolish.

It's instantly foolish.

Nude, not the naked body, who cares?

Naked from the waist down with a t-shirt.

It's either Donald Duck or toddler who won't go to bed.

Instant hilarity.

Even when you feel sorry for the person.

That was the thing.

You'd feel more to fight for the young fella who was having it done to him.

You couldn't stop laughing.

It was too funny.

Pully Pants was an expert.

He was like a ninja.

He'd just appear from nowhere and just

pants down.

Nothing.

And he's gone.

Really good at it.

And it was fucking awful.

It was look like Jesus Christ.

I never got done.

I didn't get caught with it.

But he did it to about six fellas and he was hard as well.

He would fight.

So so nobody would stop him people people protested but no one really like

gave him a beating to go stop pulling people's pants down so that summer you lived with the the threat the threat of pulley if pulley pants is around and he sees just fucking watch it because he's gonna pull your fucking pants down and your dick is out in front of the girls and that's just how it's gonna be so everyone

People had to stop wearing shorts that summer.

Straight, that was the thing.

And because I remember it being really hot and then having to wear jeans with a belt and being really fucking pissed off because I wanted to wear my shorts, but it's like no fucking way.

So I put an extra hole in my belt to make it real tight so that if pulley pants tried it, it just wasn't happening.

So he got the name Pulle Pants when we were fucking 10 from doing that one summer.

And pulling pants down was a thing.

That's what young lads do.

Like that was a thing.

Pulling pants down.

I'm sorry, i just can't i'm thinking back to every time it was really funny whenever what happened it was genuinely funny but like

he'd do it to people

boss stops in the shop speaking to people's mouths but usually when when kids would pull another lad's pants down They wouldn't go the full shebang.

But this fact, he was operating under his own rules.

And

terrifying.

So he got called pulley pants for that.

And I was saying all this to Jerrysoft on the fucking street in Henry Street, but it also I couldn't tell him about pulley pants without talking about a fella called Granny.

I couldn't fully contextualize pulley pants, there were layers to us.

That was the first, the first summer that I put my tongue into a girl's mouth was the summer of pulley pants.

And I must have been 10, maybe.

It was this memory that reminded me actually of pulley pants.

So

I was 10 and like I said, it's the first time that the group of boys are talking to the group of girls and all this shit.

And then dare start to happen.

And then,

like you're children, like.

So

I didn't know what shifting was.

Shifting is when you kiss a girl with tongues.

I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know it was something I wanted to do.

It wasn't something I thought about.

It didn't make sense to me.

But usually

there was always some some girl or some boy who had all their siblings, and they were the ones who said ye have to shift, to ye have to shift.

No, it would catch a boy, kiss a boy, that was it.

So we'd managed to ingratiate ourselves with the group of girls and there was interaction, mutual interaction between both gangs in a field, really, really sunny.

And

one of the they said the lads had to run away and then one of the guards had to chase you and she would catch you and then you had to kiss with tongues and that happened to me a guard caught me and then it was like you have to go and fucking kiss with tongues now i was a bit young to be honest because i don't think i wanted to do it i didn't understand the point of it i didn't understand the and literally when it was said to me you've to shift what does that mean you put your tongues into each other's mouths and move them around i learned about it there and then.

But I wasn't going to say no, because if you say no, you were going to get called a fridget.

So I had to do it anyway.

And then usually, you see, the girl and the boy have to go somewhere into a bush behind a wall and then shift.

But my memory was we couldn't do that because of fucking pulley pants.

Pulley pants was there.

So

none of the girls were picking pulley pants.

Like, you have to make a choice.

You can either be

the fella who's excellent excellent at pulling other boys' pants down or you can kiss a girl.

You can't have both.

And I think he was a bit jealous of that.

So if two, if two people were shifting, puddy pants is running straight up and pulling down the boy's pants to see if he was getting a spanty or not.

So I remember my memory was having to go off with this girl.

to put my tongue into her mouth somewhere.

We couldn't do it behind a wall, we couldn't do it into a bush.

We had had to go into these public toilets that had a door that you could lock.

And I remember, I remember it being mad.

The fuck am I doing with my tongue in someone's mouth?

But then I also remember being distracted by how tight my trousers were, and my trousers were tight because fucking pulley pants.

I had to tighten the trousers extra tight because of the pulley pants threat.

Now I was saying all this to Jerry Soft, but the thing is, the girl whose mouth my tongue was in,

she had an older brother, and his nickname was Granny.

Now, this was actually highly relevant to the Jerry Hard, Jerry Soft thing, and I tell you why.

So, her older brother was Granny.

I didn't know Granny, he was significantly older, like maybe 15 years older.

My brothers knew Granny,

and my brothers used to talk about it.

So, this, her brother,

was so

he used to love giving people headbutts.

Now this is probably going back to the late 1970s.

Because

this granny story is from my brothers.

Her brother used to headbutt people so much and was so was so hungry for headbutt.

He was like the pulley pants of headbutt back in the 70s.

So this fella, Granny.

If he was around, he might just headbutt you because he was so curious about headbutting.

He was so prolific a headbutter that in the area of Limerick in the late 70s, head-butting someone became known as a granny and I knew this because my older brothers would talk about it, they'd say, oh that fella got grannied or he'd throw a granny at him.

Imagine head-butting people so much that the name of a headbutt changes to become your nickname.

Now I don't know why he was called granny, that's the thing.

But a headbutt for a while was called a granny because this young fellow was headbutting so many people.

And what I loved about that was

that's almost not structuralism.

That that's called an eponym, an eponym, where a personal name becomes the label for the thing, like

like a sandwich, sandwich.

The fuck is a sandwich?

Well, it's it's a piece of bread with shit in the middle that's named after the Earl of Sandwich.

Or

to boycott, to boycott.

So up in Mayo in the 1880s, there was an English landlord called Charles Boycott, an absolute fucking prick, a coloniser, an exploiter, would exploit people through rent.

And then the Irish got together up in Mayo, like the Land League, and said, everyone ignore this man, this landlord that's making everyone's lives miserable.

Refuse to work for him, refuse to serve him in shops, ostracize him completely, a collective effort to ostracize this person and get him where it hurts, in the pocket.

It's non-violent, they can't arrest you for it, let's all do that.

And that became known as a boycott.

A boycott, because what the fuck does boycott mean?

It's named after Charles Bycott.

So in the late 70s, in Limerick, amongst my brothers and their friends,

a headbutt was a granny, because this young fellow granny was so prolific a headbutter.

But anyway, fast forward to the 90s, and now my tongue is in his sister's mouth and my pants are up really tight with a belt on because of pulley pants who might jump in at any moment pull my pants down and then my dick is out now i was delivering all of this at jerry soft in the street and then i went jerry what what does this have to do with jerry hard

so now we're back in in in fifth year in school in my class and there's two Jerrys in the class we're all 15-16 and like I said, there's Jerry Soft and Jerry Hard.

Jerry Hard got the name Jerry Hard because by the time we were teenagers,

Polypants was a fucking lunatic.

He wasn't a bad person, but he was hard as nails.

Really, really hard.

And he'd had this feud with Jerry Hard, who wasn't Jerry Hard yet, he was just Jerry.

And

Polypants, his da,

was a plumber.

So one day when we were about 15 or 16, Polypants started bringing a spanner into school.

Like this long

10-inch metal fucking spanner.

And it was so...

It was so strange that it was intimidating.

It wasn't a knife.

It wasn't a weapon.

It's a fucking spanner.

And that made it way more...

That was the thing with Limerick.

When people were saying, stab city, stab city, this, oh, Limerick was full of knives.

The person who had a knife was not a threat whatsoever.

The person who would carry a knife with them was never ever going to use it.

They were showing off.

Because you see, the person who has a knife is aware that they could get caught with that.

And if you get caught with a knife, it's a definite weapon and you get in trouble.

So the type of people who were actually capable of using a weapon would never have a a knife with them.

Like I used to have a knife when I was a teenager.

Like your friend would, your friend might go off to Spain and if your friend came back from Spain, they could get like butterfly knives and flick knives.

And I had

a butterfly knife that I used to carry around with me.

And I wouldn't show it off.

I wouldn't use it as a weapon.

I wouldn't try and intimidate anyone with it.

It was...

I have a fucking cool knife.

Do you want to see it?

Do you want to see this cool butterfly?

It was a tie.

It was a tie.

I'm not advocating the carrying of knives here, but I'm trying to illustrate.

I was the type of utterly harmless young fella that happened to have a butterfly knife for crack.

Even though that was illegal and that was probably part of it.

The scarcity of a butterfly knife.

And that was a prized possession.

That butterfly knife.

Actually, how did I get that?

I got that off a fella whose father used to repair house alarms.

And his da opened up a house alarm box once and that butterfly knife was was in there.

So he gave it to his son.

And then I bought that off his son.

And his son didn't have a nickname.

But his son...

his son spent two years in school lying about having a girlfriend who was a hair model which was a brilliant lie because

he was thinking if if i if i say that my girlfriend is a model model no one's going to believe that but if i say she's a hair model then people might believe it And there was no phones, there was no pictures, there was nothing.

So if someone said they had a girlfriend that you haven't met in a different part of the city, you just had to go along with it.

And he bizarrely didn't get a nickname for that behavior.

But anyway, the people who might actually use a weapon would have a tool with them because they're thinking, if I get caught with a spanner, then I just tell the fucking policeman when he searches me, oh yeah, my dad's a plumber.

Of course, I have a spanner.

My dad is a plumber.

And that's what made the choice, Pully Pants' choice, to start coming into school with a fucking spanner.

because he was gonna hit Jerry with it because of their feud.

Like they were, they were fighting frequently.

And when he started bringing the spanner, we all were like, oh fuck,

he's actually gonna do something with this, but he wasn't.

It was just a very clever move out of Pulle Pants, where the psychological impact of the spanner was like, Annie cunt with a spanner is a lunatic, he's actually gonna use it.

But then

Jerry,

his dad was a, I think he was a carpenter or a joiner or something.

Jerry then started bringing, he started bringing a chisel, a big long chisel, a sharp chisel into school.

Now nothing was happening.

Do you know what?

It was a bit like

they didn't,

yeah,

it was a bit like mutually assured destruction.

So during the Cold War,

you had the arms race.

So you had the Soviet Union was getting all of these nuclear weapons,

and the United States was getting all of these nuclear weapons.

And it was this arms race of nuclear dominance until eventually they had so many nuclear weapons on both sides that it made nuclear conflict almost impossible.

Mutually assured destruction.

If you fire your nuclear bombs at us, we'll fire all of ours, and then everything's gone, so there's no point.

And the

when Jerry Hard brought in that fucking chisel

and PoliPants had the spanner, there was no fight.

They couldn't fight because if they did fight, it meant a chisel and a fucking spanner in the schoolyard.

And with all due respect, that wasn't going to happen.

It was a show.

And that's how Jerry Hard got the name Jerry Hard.

And we weren't even thinking about the other Jerry.

Weren't even thinking about it, but it would just naturally happen.

The months pass and you walk into the class and you go, is Jerry around?

Do you see Jerry anywhere?

And then someone goes, Jerry hard.

No, no, Jerry soft.

And what I love is it perfectly illustrates Claude Levi Strauss's structuralist theory that we need these binary oppositions to form meaning.

Like an analogue watch.

A watch that's a watch with a hand, right, that moves.

We call that now an analogue watch.

But we only call it an analogue watch because digital watches became a thing, digital watches.

So therefore the watches that aren't digital become analog watches.

But do you think people were calling analog watches analog watches before digital watches?

No, there was just watches.

There was just Jerry's.

A landline.

What the fuck is a landline?

Well, mobile phones became a thing, a phone that you that was mobile.

So now all of a sudden you have to call the phone that's at home a landline.

Before mobile phones, it was just phones.

Smartphones.

You know, we all use smartphones now, like your fucking fucking iPhone, whatever, whatever has apps on it is a smartphone.

Before the iPhone,

it was just fucking phones.

And now if someone has a phone that is not a smartphone, you call it a brick phone, a brick phone, or even a barner phone.

So I said, don't be worrying, like, we weren't, no one was taking the piss out of you.

You were just called Jerry Soft because he became Jerry Hard and there were two Jerrys and that's just what happens.

No one actually thought you were soft, you just weren't coming into school with a chisel.

And then Jerry Soft laughed.

His middle-aged man laugh.

And then he said, well, what if I'd have come into school with a chainsaw?

What would I have been then?

And then I said, I thought about it.

Do you know, he'd have been Jerry Hardhard.

That would have been the rules.

If he'd have out-harded Jerry Hard, he'd have become Jerry Hardhard.

So there would have been Jerry Hard and Jerry Hardhard.

But what I really enjoyed about the chat was

it was an example of pure oral culture oral storytelling

Jerry can't go to the library or go on to Google and ask why was I called Jerry soft and no one ever wrote it down

he had to find a person who would remember me mr.

Autism and would recount it to him But when I'm recounting it to him, I can't consult any text.

Nothing's written down.

So I have to recall from memory and explain it orally.

But I can't just explain.

I can't just explain Jerry soft without explaining Jerry hard.

And then I'm talking about Pulle Pants and on back in the 1970s talking about fucking Granny before I was born.

And even the little detour about my butterfly knife where I couldn't speak about the context of this

weapon.

without almost giving it a legendary status and a story behind it.

This legendary weapon was found inside a house alarm and was given to me by a boy who lied about having a hair model for a girlfriend.

And it reminded me of

Irish mythology, Irish

pre-writing oral Irish mythology.

And what I mean by that is

it's a form of storytelling called the genealogy of names.

In fact, there's a 14th century tract manuscript called The Fitness of Names, which is

300 Irish nicknames from the 1500s and the stories of how those nicknames came about.

Actually this is a big area.

So let's have a little ocarina pause before I progress into this.

Okay I don't have an ocarina this week.

Let's not get into why I don't have an ocarina.

What have I got?

Two Korean chopsticks.

We've got a lovely little Korean restaurant in Limerick now called Vico Vico.

So here are two Korean chopsticks.

I'm going to hit them off each other.

You're going to hear an advert for something, all right?

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That was the Korean chopstick pause there.

You would have heard an advert for some shh.

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So, I'm stupidly busy this week.

I'm too busy.

I made foolish decisions.

I booked three gigs in the space of eight days.

And I really should not have done that.

I should have had more empathy.

for my future self.

But they were amazing gigs and I loved doing them.

Cause I do I love getting out and seeing you.

I just fucking love doing it.

Um, and in an act of not having much empathy for my future self,

I'm thinking of doing a blind by podcast festival in Limerick.

This is the thing I'm tying around with.

I don't know when, but it's something I want to do.

And I want to pick the podcasts that I would have at this festival.

So,

if just if there's any, if I was to do a fucking podcast festival, what podcasters would you like to see at this festival?

Give me a DM on Instagram Dline by Ball Club upcoming gigs I only have one more gig this year actually

my last gig of of 2025 is in mead in mead trim in mead on Halloween night which is a month away.

Well, it's not it's 30 days away fucking Halloween night.

I'm playing at the polka Festival, a Halloween festival.

And

I'm gonna try and get a guest.

I'm gonna try and get a guest who knows a thing or two about Halloween and the folklore of it.

There's very few tickets.

This is a small little gig, very few tickets for this gig.

But if you wanna have a bit of crack on Halloween night, come to me to the polka festival, 31st of October.

And then I don't have any more gigs until 2026.

I kinda try and avoid gigging in December for sure because of the threat of Christmas parties.

Sometimes people come to a live podcast as part of an office Christmas party and I know they think they're doing something nice and bringing their office to a live podcast.

It's disastrous because what happens is I'm there doing a live podcast, which is me and somebody else speaking on stage.

And all of a sudden now there's 10 people from an office, two people like my podcast and eight people are on a night out and they want to talk to each other.

So

Christmas parties are so destructive to a live event, especially a live podcast, I kind of don't gig in December just in case.

So my next gig really is fucking

January there, the 23rd of January.

I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal.

Lovely Waterford.

Can't wait to get back there.

February 26th, back in Vicar Street on the 4th of February.

Then Belfast on the 12th of February, I'm up in the Waterfront Theatre.

Galway on the 15th of February, I'm in Leisureland.

I'm already, oh, I'm booking fucking too many gigs for myself.

I'm a stupid bollocks.

And then I've Killarney at the Ineck on the 28th of February.

So I'm after giving future me a granny into the bollocks there for February 26th.

That is...

that's a lot of gigs for one month.

I always speak about trying to have empathy for your future self when you're planning anything.

Like I'm good when it's like next week or tomorrow.

If I want to procrastinate a task, some annoying emails, and I want to put them off, I say to myself, no, think about future you.

Think about you tomorrow.

Does he deserve?

to be inundated with these emails when you already have work on do them now as an act of compassion for your future self i'm shit at future compassion when it comes to six months away so this week i should not have booked three gigs in eight days very foolish very difficult to get my podcast out when i do that and in february i'm going to be in the same fucking position but come along to those gigs anyway right you can get those tickets as little christmas presents if you like a fucking england as well october

26 like a fucking year away but still a tour of england Scotland, and Wales.

Last week, I accidentally said that I had a gig in Leeds.

I apologise.

I'm not gigging in Leeds.

I read the wrong list of gigs.

I read out the wrong list of gigs.

I'm fucking shit at promoting gigs.

I'm terrible at it.

Promoters want to choke me to death.

But it has to be done.

I'm not gigging in Leeds.

And in October 26, I am gigging in Brighton, Cardiff, Warwick.

Where's that?

Coventry.

Coventry, Bristol,

Guildford,

London, Glasgow, Gates Head.

Let's get a bit of Gateshead in.

I learned about Gateshead.

Nottingham, right?

Fan.co.uk forward slash blindboy.

I have just met my contractual obligations to promote my gigs this week.

Not Leeds.

I'm so sorry.

And there were so many whimpering Yorkshiremen.

There was Yorkshire people in tears going, Why no Yorkshire?

Why no Yorkshire?

I'm sorry.

I love a bit of Yorkshire,

even though you don't

hard to get a decent cup of coffee in Yorkshire.

You love shit coffee, don't you?

You love instant coffee up there in Yorkshire.

And I know what you're thinking.

I know what you're thinking.

We like Yorkshire tea, great tea, fantastic tea.

But

I

won't do it this podcast, but I need to speak about

witnessing the collapse of England and Scotland and Wales based on the standards of hotel breakfasts.

A post-Brexit thing.

I will not get into it now because it's too big.

We'll save it for another podcast.

But I need to speak about it.

Okay, back to the podcast podcast.

So the first half I was speaking about.

genealogy of names, how I'd met Jerry Soft and he asked me why am I called Jerry Soft and I told him and it reminded me so much of Irish mythology.

Particularly the fitness of names.

A way of telling stories orally that's like

P

as a story structure when you tell stories orally it's like you're taking an onion apart this multifaceted layers.

Well, you're called this because of that but I can't tell you why this is called that without telling you this and it goes on and on and on and it's very different to how a story might be written down.

It's a form of storytelling that's actually in line with systems of biodiversity.

How can I tell you about what a bee is

without telling you about the bee's relationship with the flower?

But then I can't talk about the bee's relationship with the flower without explaining what paternation is.

And then I can't explain paternation without telling you about

the relationship that flowers have with the soil, but then I can't talk about the soil without the rain and the sun.

but then I can't talk about the sun without talking about the universe.

Oral stories follow

an ecological structure.

It's a system.

It's systemic.

Writing is data.

It's a bit more linear.

You can go back, you can go forth, you can read something again.

Like heroes in Irish mythology, they always have nicknames.

So for instance, Coo Cullen.

Who was Coo Cullen?

I can't tell you who Ku Cullen was without telling you, well, his name actually isn't Cookullin.

That's a nickname.

His real name was Satanta.

Why is he called Ku Cullen?

Well, Satanta was a young boy of about 10 or 12, but he was hard as nails.

He was no ordinary boy.

And one day, Satanta was playing harling in a field with some other boys, and he was just beating them.

He was flying all around the place really fast.

superhuman strength then he got into a fight on the playing field and he he beat like six other boys.

And there was a fella called Colin, who was a blacksmith, was watching this.

And he was like, oh my god, who was that young fella there?

He's going to be a great warrior.

My god.

And then Colin says, who are you?

I'm Satanta.

Wow.

Well, I'm Colin, the blacksmith, and I'm really impressed with you.

You're going to be a great warrior.

Why don't you come visit me?

So Colin goes back to his forge.

And then Satanta goes, Oh, I'm going to go visit Cullen now.

And he does.

But Cullen, whatever happens that night, Cullen forgot that he'd invited Satanta.

And when he hears the noise outside, he lets loose his hound, his big scary dog, and the dog attacks Satanta.

So Satanta gets his Harley and the slitter, which is a ball, and then he fires it, and it goes into the dog's mouth.

and then kills it, this really legendary dog of Cullen.

And then Satanta feels really guilty that he's just killed Colin's dog.

So he says to Cullen, you know what?

I'm gonna take this dog's place and I'm gonna guard now.

I'm your guard dog now.

So then Satanta becomes Ku Cullen, which means hound of Cullen.

And that story is written down, I think the 7th century.

7th century in this thing called the Varba Skahaga, which is the words of Skahuk.

But that's written down because it was oral beforehand.

Or like,

I don't know if your name is O'Neil, if your name is O'Neil, and you're like, why is my name O'Neil?

Well, then you can go, well, O'Neil means from Niel.

Who the fuck is Niall?

But he's not just Nihil, he's Nile of the Nine hostages.

Nihil of the Nine Hostages?

How?

What type of fucking name is that?

How do you get a name like that?

Nihil of the Nine Hostages?

Well, thousands of years ago, there was this king in Ireland called Oked Mogmedon, and he had a wife called Mogfind.

She was from Munster.

And the king and the wife, they had three sons, okay?

And Mogfind, like, I think

they're middle-aged at this point, all right?

The king is maybe in his forties or fifties.

Mogfind is probably in in her 40s or 50s too because her sons are a bit older.

So

the king and Mogfind have three sons.

And mogvind is like well one of my three sons is definitely going to become king next definitely but then

the king kidnaps a princess the daughter of a saxon king an english saxon king which you put this story maybe 1500 years ago because the saxons are about so the king kidnaps this this girl And now she becomes a covel, what's called a covel, a female slave.

Her name is Karen, spelled C-A-R-E-N-N.

Karen Cast of, which means Karen with the curly black hair.

So

this young girl now gets pregnant by the king.

She gets pregnant.

And now Mogfind, the king's wife, is like, fuck this.

No fucking way, no way.

If she's pregnant, if she has a son, then that son might become king.

Now you might be thinking there, but that's a bit mad.

Why would she give a fuck about that?

She's got three sons already and the oldest one of them is going to become king.

No, that's not how it worked in pre-colonial Ireland.

There was a system called tannistry.

It's where we get the word tarnishta from today.

Tarnishta is second in command to the Taoiseach, to the Prime Minister.

So anyway, under the system of Tannistry in pre-colonial Ireland,

It didn't matter that the oldest son didn't necessarily become king.

The best son became king.

The son who was most worthy of it became king, which is quite different to say British monarchy.

And obviously, I don't think they were very concerned about what the British monarchy would call illegitimacy or a bastard.

It didn't matter that the king got this covel, this slave woman, pregnant.

That didn't matter.

If she had a son, that son had an equal chance of becoming king to his wife's three sons.

So the wife Mogfind is very upset, very upset.

So

she basically tries to get this this young slave girl Karen to miss Carrie she makes her do backbreaking labor because Karen's a slave she's a slave she makes her do backbreaking labor in the hope that she's going to miss Carry but she doesn't and she gives birth to this little boy called Niall so Mogfind is like fuck it's a boy and she's the queen she's like I'm not having this slave girl's child

possibly taking the place of one of my sons to become the next king so she's like have him killed have him killed he's not allowed in the kingdom and then karen is like well i'm not going to kill my little baby so she goes what if i just banish him instead is that it is that okay and mogvin goes okay get rid of him so karen gives little baby niall to a poet a poet who lives up in the woods and this poet

raises Niall with a love of poetry and knowledge and literature and nature and all the stories of the land.

And Niall then grows to be a boy who's mad fucking smart, really wise.

Poet's name was Turner Akis.

So then when Niall comes of age and he's a teenager, his da, the high king, who already has three sons, which are one Mogfind, the da's like, hold on a second, I had a fucking baby son there about 13 years ago, where the fuck has he gone?

And then Karen says, well,

Mogfind wasn't happy with the fact that I was having a son, so him I gave him to a poet I didn't want him to die I just gave him to a poet so the high king says go and find him then if my son is off living with a poet he's 13 now bring him back because the king was old he was dying and remember it's the system at tannistry so the king is look I'm ready to die bring back my son Doesn't matter that Isma was a slave.

He's my son, bring him back.

And he's going to have to compete with my three other sons from Magvind.

And they're going to compete.

And the winner will be chosen by the goddess of sovereignty.

The the goddess of the land.

Then we'll decide.

Nature will tell us who is to be the next king.

So it's winter, and the king says to his four sons, right?

It's cold.

I need you to fetch fire.

Go and find fire.

There's a sacred well.

And if you go to this sacred well, you will get fire at this well.

But the well is guarded by the kylock.

The well is guarded by a very powerful and dangerous hag.

Okay, so you're gonna have to defeat this hag if you wanna get the fire from the from the sacred well.

So all four brothers head off in search of fire at the sacred well and the three brothers that belong to Mogfind,

they're older and they just go to Niall, who the fuck are you?

And then Niall says, my father is your father, I'm your brother.

And then the lads go, all right, okay.

Dah, dah got your one Karen pregnant, his covel.

Right, okay.

And they're not threatened by Niall at all, because he's the runt he's a little kid and they're big strong older brothers and then they start asking him questions see the brothers had grown up in the castle and they were trained in fighting and and how to be warriors and they say to young nihil can you use a sword did you did you train how to fight and nihil goes no said but what what did you do i i lived in in the forest with a poet so the lads are like This fellow hasn't a hope.

The Kylak is just going to kill him.

He's not even a threat.

He's a child.

So they all get to the fucking well anyway, and it's guarded by the hag, by the Kylak, this big, dangerous hag.

And the Kylak,

the winter goddess.

She's so scary and so terrifying.

The three older brothers are just paralyzed.

They don't even know how to begin to fight her.

She's that terrifying.

And then young Niall is like,

I learned the lore.

I learned the lore because I was raised by a poet.

I know the stories.

And the stories are that the Kylock, the big scary goddess of winter,

she transitions into the beautiful goddess of summer and spring, Bridget.

So that big scary Kylak over there, I know she's scary, but she'll reveal herself as Bridget

if you just go at it the right way.

And the right way isn't to go up and fight her.

So Niall walks up to the bit, the big, the hag, the the scary Kylock

and kisses her fully is what the manuscript says.

So he fucking shifts her, he kisses her tongues and he's only about 13 and then suddenly the Kylock transforms into the sovereignty goddess, into beautiful Bridget the goddess of summer.

And she says him, this fella, I choose him.

He is to be the next king.

Because you see, in those days,

the king was married to the land.

The king was married to the goddess of fertility, the land goddess.

And really what that story is telling us about this fella called Niall who lived 1500 years ago.

Winter would have killed people.

Like this is 1500 years ago in Ireland.

This was serious business.

You couldn't grow food.

It was pastoral, the economies were based on fucking cattle.

You had to make it through winter.

So Niall Niall did something.

He got fire, he kept people warm, he stored food.

Whatever Niall did, he took his people through winter into summer and there was a bountiful crop and there was plenty.

And that's what that story means.

Because the

hag turned into the beautiful goddess, I know that that's the Kylock, the goddess of winter, turned into the goddess of summer.

That's my reading of it.

So Niall anyway becomes king and he becomes a a famous king, a very powerful king.

And when he becomes king, he's legendary.

He becomes renowned for military power overseas, for raiding, especially along the coast of like Britain at this point.

The Romans are fucking gone.

So Britain in the 4th, 5th century, it's Anglo-Saxons, warlords.

It's not the unified might of the Roman Britain.

So Niall is king.

He becomes great at hostage taking.

Taking hostages.

Going in with a boat, but a bunch of hard cunts.

Going into a kingdom and then stealing somebody important.

Could be the king, could be the king's daughter, could be a brother.

Stealing a person of importance for ransom.

Probably because Niall's ma was a covel.

She was a Saxon princess who was stolen and lived as a slave.

And if this sounds terrible, it was fucking terrible.

The culture probably would have been brutal.

Pre-colonial Ireland, you had all these petty kingdoms, you didn't have towns,

people moved pastorally with cows, you had an economy that was based around cattle, you had huge amounts of cattle raiding, and then hostage taking with all the raids.

So the taking of hostages meant power.

It meant, I effectively control this other kingdom because I have something something they cherish and value.

And they better do what I say because if they don't, then I'm gonna hurt this thing that they value.

So I have power over that other kingdom.

So Niall became so legendary at raiding and taking hostages

that he took hostages from five hostages from Ireland, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Mead.

And then he took four hostages from abroad.

He took hostages from the Britons, which is probably the Wales, the Saxons, England, the Franks over in fucking France, and then the Scots.

So at one point Niall had nine hostages at once, which meant effectively he had leverage and power over nine kingdoms as far as France.

Like Jerry Hard with the fucking chisel.

This was so hard that he became Nihil of the Nine hostages.

But then what happens when you're taking hostages?

People don't like it when you're taking hostages.

It's not a nice thing.

So he ended up with a lot of enemies.

So Niall, even though he was given hostages back, or there was tribute paid for the hostages, or ransom, whatever you want to fucking call it, Niall couldn't really move around because he'd upset quite a lot of people.

So he was eventually killed in Scotland.

He'd been killed in Scotland by someone who had a grudge because it's like you stole my granddad there about 30 years ago.

But this was up in Ulster.

I think it's where you get the red hand, the red hand of Ulster, which bizarrely is...

the loyalists have tried to take it now but the red hand of Ulster is the O'Neill dynasty.

So anyone who came from Nile

became O'Neill of Nile.

So if your name is O'Neill,

if you were on O'Neill 800 years ago and you couldn't read or write,

you'd have met a filler, you'd have met a poet.

Or a fucking druid if you want to call him a druid, but we didn't call him druids.

You'd have met a person who could hold the lore in their mouth, mouth, who could remember the stories and you'd say to him why am I called O'Neil?

And then that person would have told you that story and they'd have gone on and on and on and on and told you that story orally.

And I reckon these people were neurodivergent because it requires a neurodivergent brain to be able to remember all that stuff.

Well it doesn't require it but it really fucking helps.

And that's that O'Neill story, like that's oral culture written down by monks in the 9th century.

It was first written down in

I think called the adventure of the sons of Okud Mughmadon that's the first time it was written down in the 9th century because it mentions Saxons and shit like that we know that

it's based sometime around the 5th and 6th century so it existed in the mouths of poets for four or five hundred years before someone decided to even write it down and it tells us too about the importance of poets and lore keepers in

early Irish society because

you know Niall was sent off to live with poets he was sent off to train with poets his brothers were in the castle learning how learning how to use weapons but he was sent off to the woods to learn about the lore to learn the stories to learn about nature and that's what made him powerful to be clever same with fion mccoole fion mccoole was a kid with too many questions that his parents couldn't answer so they said fuck that go and live with a series of poets until eventually he encounters the salmon and knowledge.

But you also see the poets writing themselves into the stories.

Like, if the poet is the person who raises the legendary king, then the poet is really important in society.

So, if you were on O'Neill and you asked a poet, why am I called O'Neil?

they'd tell you that story.

And it's hard to know how much of that story is historically correct because it's existing orally and then it's written down by monks and you can never trust the monks.

But they did DNA tests in 2006.

They studied the Y chromosome of Irish men, which is the one that's passed from father to son.

And they found that 21% of men in the northwest of Ireland can trace their lineage to one man

about 1500 years ago.

And because of the concentration of these men in that area and then the history of the O'Neill dynasty, it strongly suggests that Niall of the Nine Hostages was a real person, was a real king, and was actually that powerful.

And also, what it says is this Niall fella had a huge amount of children with multiple women, lots and lots and lots of women.

And given what we know about Irish society 1500 years ago, you have to assume that this was

there might be some truth there in that the story about his ma effectively being a kidnapped slave who operated as a covel as our concubine to his da that maybe this was niall was just a a prolific prick who

stole women and coerced them into sexual slavery and genetically one in five irish men in the northwest of ireland in the 2006 study they found came from one fella most likely nihil of the nine hostages is the closest

historical parallel we have with that one person.

Now I covered a lot of this stuff, slavery and early Irish society, in my documentary, which is literally called The Land of Slaves and Scholars.

One thing I'd like to

correct there, when I said maybe seven, eight hundred years ago, if you met

a filler or a poet or a druid, even though we don't say druid, if you met that person and said, I'm an O'Neill, why am I called O'Neill?

they might tell you that story about Night of the Nine hostages orally.

We don't know that

because all we have is when it was written down in the 7th century.

So who's to say it wasn't all made up by the monk who wrote it down?

Because that's when writing came to Ireland.

Powerful families like the O'Neills, they would be the ones paying for this.

They would fund the monastery and now it's like write my fucking lineage on paper so that I can have a lovely story that goes back to a fella called Niall who was chosen by a sovereignty goddess to be the king.

But I reckon it did come from earlier oral culture because there's too many mentions of the the O'Neill dynasty across multiple texts and then you've got just these little oral storytelling motifs like even the mention of the the goddess's sovereignty of the land which point to something pre-Christian.

So I pulled all of this podcast out of my hole this week.

This wasn't very planned

because I was a foolish boy, foolish boy, and I booked too many fucking gigs.

I booked three gigs to a car within eight days.

And that includes travelling.

And then also, my BBC radio show came out this week, Grounding, which you can get on BBC Sounds, I think, if you live.

If you live anywhere where the queen is on your fucking money.

So this week, if I haven't been gigging or travelling to gigs, I've been doing promotion and interviews for the BBC thing and I've had very little time to prep a podcast this week and I'm kind of burnt out.

I am I'm getting a little bit of autistic burnout from all of that because

it took me 90 minutes to put my shoes on this morning because I was thinking about snails.

I know that sounds bizarre but yeah I was thinking about snails so much

that the

The act of completing the task of putting my fucking shoes on just didn't happen, right?

Because I was thinking about I was thinking about about snails and how snails use

snail mucus the trail that a garden snail leaves

they studied these and they found it actually communicates huge amounts of information about

the snail's health and its genealogy and i thought about how snails trails are so similar to oric oral culture and irish mythology in particular So that was enough of a...

that thought

meant I couldn't put my shoes on for 90 fucking minutes and that that there is pure autistic burnout

where I lose the the skill the the grounding mindful skill of

I know it's great to think about snails right now but you have to put your shoes on so let's put the shoes on first and then park the snail thoughts for a more appropriate time I lose the

the discipline to be able to do that when I kind of experience burnout which I get when I'm quite stressed and another

when I met fucking, I started this podcast off talking about meeting Jerrysoft.

So I met Jerrysoft, unplanned conversation in the street.

That wasn't a taxing conversation to me because there was no small talk.

I just gave him his genealogy at him.

So this is why you're called fucking Jerrysoft.

But when the conversation was over, he said to me, why is your jumper on back to front?

And then I looked down.

My jumper was on inside out.

I was wearing a fucking jumper.

It's violently inside out.

Violently.

All the seams, all the tags sticking out, the fucking, the brand backwards, all shebang.

When it was when Jerrysoft pointed it out to me, I was like, yeah, that's pretty fucking back to front, isn't it?

How the hell did I leave the house like that?

And as soon as that happened, I went, right, okay, you're getting a little bit of barn out.

I didn't notice that my jumper was on back to front.

So that's all we have time for this week.

I'd like to call that a phone call, but I don't know, was that a phone call.

Like I did, I pulled that podcast out of my hole there.

By which I mean I was so busy with gigs, I didn't get my two or three days to sit down and do rigorous research.

So most of the information in this podcast, I just pulled from memory.

So hopefully nothing is incredibly inaccurate.

But anyway, I'll catch you next week.

I don't know what with, but in the meantime,

rub a dog, genuflect to a swan,

wink at a sparrow, dog bless.

Forgot to do the cases last week, by the way.

Completely forgot because I was in a fucking rush.

So here's more cases.

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