The Blindboy Podcast - The Fart Lamps of Sheffield are vestigal totems of anti Irish descrimination

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

A history of sanitation and sewers during the industrial revolution  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cleanse the bend in the hen, you sedentary Evelyn's. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you are a regular listener, you know the crack. I'm sitting here in my office in Limerick City, in the middle of a very glorious heatwave.

An unnatural heatwave, unfortunately. today is the hottest 26th of May on record and yesterday was the hottest 25th of May on record so I have to parse that dichotomy when I'm trying to enjoy the fucking beauty the leaves and the trees are all young

they're all a couple of weeks old things are as green as green can be I went for a cycle yesterday down by the river I nearly started crying I nearly started crying with the just the majesty of the evening swarms of mayflies

glistening off of this slenty fucking pinky orange evening sun heat battering up off the tarmac getting quenched by this this cool river breeze that's carrying the smell of flowers

that want to fuck each other so I'm in my office now looking out at it but also wanting to be outside in it so if the weather is nice where you are, I would ask that go and listen to this podcast on a little walk. Have a nice

little mindful walk and listen to this podcast. I've got a hot take for you this week. It's a thread of inquiry. So as you know, in about six weeks time, on the 5th of July, I'm going to be gigging over in Sheffield as part of the Crossed Wires Festival,

which is a podcast festival, at Sheffield City Hall. And the reason I'm doing that gig is my larger tour of England, Scotland and Wales in October. I was just really disappointed that Sheffield wasn't on that tour. I love Sheffield and I was pissed off that I wasn't. I did Sheffield last year and I was just annoyed that Sheffield wasn't on my tour this year. So I said, fuck it.

I'll book a standalone Sheffield gig this summer separate to my tour. So that's what I'm doing. But as I've mentioned the past few months, algorithms are changing on social media. So if you want to tell people that you have a gig on, you can't just, like, Twitter's gone. You can't post like just a poster on Instagram because no one will see it.

So if you're plugging a gig now or plugging anything, you have to make a video, you have to do a reel in order for people to find out about your gig. So the promoters for my Sheffield gig were like, will you do a video? Just do a little video on anything. Instagram please to promote the Sheffield gig, which is grand. But I hate just posting a video and the content of the video is what's the crack here's

a gig come to it? I really dislike doing that. So my job this week has been thinking, okay, if I make a little Instagram video to promote my gig in Sheffield, then I want to make a video that everyone will want to see whether the fuck you're going to the gig or not or even give a shit about it. I do that, then I'm okay with it. But this process of figuring out what I'm going to make

a video about, it led me down a wonderful rabbit hole. I started listening to things that I love about Sheffield. I have a fondness for the abandoned Debenhams. Because it reminds me of Limerick's abandoned Debenhams. Can't do a video about that.

The number one thing I do love about Sheffield is it is my personal opinion that Sheffield Cathedral, which is in the middle of the fucking city, was once the site of an Anglo-Saxon, pagan, sacred grove. The reason I think this is because, so Sheffield Cathedral is this absolutely gorgeous, massive cathedral that's about a thousand years old. But in the eighth century, at the site where the cathedral is now, they found this, this old, this old, stone, Anglo-Saxon cross.

It's called the Sheffield Cross. It's not in Sheffield anymore. You have to go to London to see it in the British Museum. And this cross, too, they only found it in the 1940s. And it was, someone had found like this, this eighth century fucking carved stone cross. And they found it in a cutlery workshop because Sheffield was massive with the Industrial Revolution. so someone had found this ornate stone cross hollowed it out

and was using it to quench molten hot cutlery in water so it had become, it wasn't sacred anymore it was being used in a very utilitarian way which is sad because it shows a people who are completely colonised by the Normans and disconnected from their pagan past whereas in Ireland but our ancient artefacts

the people didn't know what they meant but they understood they had They believed that they had some type of power, like the book of Dorrell, which would be a 7th century illuminated manuscript. This was found in the 1800s. It's like a thousand years later. It was found in the 1800s. And a farmer had it. And the farmer couldn't read it, but would use it to dip into his cattle's trough to ward off illnesses in his cattle.

So it still possessed a magical power to him, even though he didn't know. know how old it was or how important it was. But in Sheffield the Sheffield Cross was just a very conveniently sized piece of stone that was being used in a cutlery workshop up until the 1940s. I love this old stone cross because of the art on it. It almost looks Irish but it's not. It's something different. The patterns are Marcian, which was the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Marcia.

It's like a Celtic cross. all the designs are leaves and vines. And that's, it's really strange and it's Anglo-Saxon. And the pre-Christian Saxons, when they were in the forests of Germany, they used to worship trees. The way that in Ireland, pre-Christian Irish people would worship at holy wells. And then when Christianity came in, they'd build a church near a holy well. Saxons and then the Anglo-Saxons, their pagan mythology and belief was around the worship of

trees and woods and sacred groves of trees. And I fucking love that because I like any, I'm fascinated by any religious belief that's connected with biodiversity. Christianity took that from us. Christianity was like, no, God made the earth like the Garden of Eden for humans to exploit. I'm much more interested in beliefs that fear and venerate nature, because then that means that we as humans then have a stories and culture based around respecting the environment rather than exploiting it. So because Sheffield Cathedral had this 8th century Anglo-Saxon cross that has leaves on it, I tenuously believe that that means it was a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon sacred Grove. What am I basing that on? Fuck all. Vibes. Because in Ireland, we just know. Like, I made a documentary on this shit.

This is the one that I won the award for, where I was consulting like experts and scholars. But in Ireland, you just find an old church and the church is 5th century or 6th century and they are right beside it. You have a well, a holy well. And then you can read about that specific well or find mention of of it in old Irish texts. So we know, okay, before Christianity came, people worshipped these wells, or these wells were very important, then Christianity came along and they built the church beside it.

The ground became consecrated, and Christianity assimilated itself into pre-Christian beliefs. I prefer saying pre-Christian than fucking pagan, because pagan is, it's a slur almost. So based on that, might might be. My vibe is that Sheffield Cathedral was built on an ancient Anglo-Saxon sacred grove. I'm not an expert, so I can't, I can't assert that. I'd love to speak to someone like Professor Ronald Hutton about it, who might know the crack.

I've gone deep into the research online. I can't find anything that confirms that belief. And unfortunately, unlike Ireland, it's hard. hard to go deep into the history of pre-Christian Britain, even place names and stuff. When the Anglo-Saxons came over, the Roman Empire collapsed, but in Ireland we were writing shit down, we were writing our mythology down, we were holding onto these things in books. There's a poverty of this information when it comes to England. So I was like, fuck it, I can't do a video about that.

I can't do a video about my theory about the Sacred Grove in Sheffield Cathedral. Sheffield, by the way, today has more, it has more trees per capita than any other city in the United Kingdom, I believe, which is pretty cool. But the other thing that Sheffield has, more than any other city in England, is its concentration of fart lamps. Before I get onto the Sheffield fart lamps, I want to draw attention to what's happening in my office right now. So the sun is setting outside. Beautiful. all that fucking lovely May evening sun where it's very strong but at a harsh angle

and you get long shadows. I have a false widow spider living on my window on my office window and the only reason I'm aware of this false widow is because the past week when it gets to this time in the evening the false widow

it's a little spider but the size of a euro it's shadow the sun hits the spider and casts its shadow on my wall massive. So on my wall this spider's shadow is about the size of my hand. I caught, the spider's name is Rod Stewart. I'm a huge fan of the early efforts of Rod Stewart. When he was with a band called The Faces,

listen to a song like Gasoline Alley, Some of the best country blues you'll ever fucking hear. And I was, I was in my office listening to early Rod Stewart when I noticed the projection. of that spider's shadow on my wall so I said fuck it well he's called Rod Stewart now and he gets to live on my window well she

she because it's a female false widow the false widow is Ireland's only venomous spider it's not from Ireland they're from the Canary Islands and the reason it's there on my window just with its web trying to catch some flies living its life

it's because it's so hot over the past 15 years false widows have become naturalised in Ireland the temperatures have risen and now the false widow is up there on my window going well fuck it I'm in the Canary Islands what the fuck do I know I'm a spider it's a little indication of climate change

it's supposed to be too cold for that spider to survive but no now they're becoming naturalised it's gotten hot enough for them I suppose this does tie in with Sheffield fart lamps so briefly a fart lamp is it's a meat thing destructor. They're old Victorian lamp posts that they burn on gas from the sewer and they came about in British cities around the Industrial Revolution. And why Rod Stewart, the false widow, is relevant to this conversation is, I suppose another thing I could speak about with Sheffield is the

the peppered moth. Moths, they are pure indicator species. for the human impact on the environment for a couple of reasons. Now, moths are everywhere, aren't they? Moths are... I call them autistic butterflies. Butterflies are nautypical

and moths are autistic. When a butterfly comes into your house, you almost feel embarrassed. You feel honored when a butterfly comes into your fucking house. You want to make it a piece of cake. You want to offer it. tea. When a butterfly comes into the house, everyone goes quiet and marvels at how delicate it is and graceful it is. And if you're lucky, the butterfly might come in and stop on your kitchen

counter and gently flap its wings and everyone is like, oh my God, what a graceful social animal. And then a fucking moth comes in and it's chaos. You can't predict what they're going to go. They're in a consistent state of they're stimming. They bounce off walls. So you don't know whether they're going to hit off your head or not. And then if there's a light, the moth becomes obsessed. Just a hundred. If there is a light on, you're not going to guide that moth out of your house like you can with a butterfly. You're not going to be able to catch it gently like you can with a butterfly.

If there's a fucking light, the moth just goes nuts and focuses on that light and nothing else. Highly artistic behavior out of the moths. And then if you dare, try and touch it. Just even a gentle tap. All this fucking dust. A little dust comes off its wings. You're like, what are you doing?

What are you doing? And then it's too late then. You've permanently damaged the moth. So if there's a moth in your gaff, you just have to turn off the lights, go to bed, leave a window open and hope it's not there in the morning. Highly delicate creatures.

Highly sensitive creatures. Not attuned to human interaction in any way. Butterfly, different situation. Open the window. gracefully pirouettes out, Ariana Grande. But moths only started doing that when humans created artificial light. That's what I mean when I say moths.

They're indicators of human interference in the natural environment. There's mention of moths flying towards candles in the Bhagavad Gita, which is a two and a half thousand-year-old Indian manuscript and they speak about moths being obsessed with flames, the human-made flame. So scientists, only in the past 15 years, I think it is, went to figure out what the fuck is going on? Why are moths obsessed with light bulbs and candles and flames?

What's going on here? And what they found was, moths use light to navigate. They tilt their backs towards a light source. So the light source is supposed to be the sky. So that's how moths know the difference between up and down. They read light. But as soon as humans came in with artificial light sources, in particular electric light,

it completely disoriented the moths. So moths are effectively, they're autistic animals. There's nothing wrong with the moth. They're overstimulated and disoriented by an environment that we've created for them. Moths were an in. indicator species of the human impact on the environment of climate change. And also, Moth thought as about the theory of evolution, one year before Charles Darwin published on the origin of species in 1859, and it relates to Sheffield and I tell you why.

So if you look at the industrial north of England, so you can draw a shitty line from Liverpool cross to Manchester, across the Sheffield. That was the heart of the Industrial Revolution. By the 1830s, that's when humans started burning lots and lots of coal and filling the atmosphere up with the carbon. The heat that I have outside my window right now. The reason that that fucking false widow is up there, Rod Stewart is up at the window right now.

The fact that today is the hot is. May 26th that Limerick has had, you can trace all that back to the industrial north of England in the 1800s. And what happened with the moths was the forests that surrounded Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield had a population of moths and they were called the peppered moth. So the peppered moth is not very remarkable looking. It's its wings are are white with black patterns, but I wouldn't even call them patterns, it's speckled. So it's a white and black speckled moth. The reason they're that color is because of the trees that they'd live on in the daytime.

So remember I said earlier about moths and their sensitivity to light? Moths are nocturnal. They like being out at nighttime when it's completely dark and the only source of light might be the moon up there. So what the peppered moth used to do, let's you say 1820, in the forests surrounding Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield.

The moth used to just chill out on a tree. Okay? Sleeping on a tree. But that tree would have lichen on the bark. You know when you look at a tree and there's growth on the tree on the bark,

there's lichen. like a moss, but it's not always green. Well, the lichen on these trees was like a grey, black, speckled lichen. So the moth, the peppered moth, would just chill out on those trees and its wings would be completely camouflaged against the lichen on that tree. So if a bird is flying by, it's not going to see that moth. And that moth can just chill out on the daytime and sleep on that tree and no bird is going to see it

because it's perfectly camouflaged. But around 1848, naturalists who would go out collecting moths, collecting butterflies, they started to notice that these moths were changing colour. They were no longer finding

peppered moths that had that familiar black and white speckled pattern on their wings. These moths were disappearing and they were being replaced with the same moth but with a different colour wing the new moths that they were finding

were black or dark brown and in 1848 they couldn't understand why they're like what the fuck is happening it's the same moth but why are they all black now what's going on all the moths are black where the black and white one's gone

this doesn't make sense but they recorded it and they didn't know why and it took more than 100 years later in the 1970s a geneticist called Barnard Kettlewell started to get

interested in this started to get interested in the sudden appearance of black moths around Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool in 1848 and here's what had happened

so the Industrial Revolution which was so new all of a sudden you have these new cities these new giants cities full of hundreds of thousands of people churning out smoke and carbon and pollution and noxious chemicals into the air. The pollution from the English cities in the north was dissipating out into the countryside like a miasma. And remember that word miasma because it's relevant to the

fart lamp discourse, which I'll get onto later. So, soot from coal and sulfur dioxide was descending upon the forests of the north of England, the forests that were once worshipped as sacred groves by the Anglo-Saxons, this sut was descending upon the trees. And it was killing the lichen. So that moss, that lichen that was attached to the trees, the pollution was killing it. So now the trees just had exposed bark.

Suddenly all the peppered moths who were chilling out in the daytime relaxing on the fucking trees. Now they don't have camouflage anymore. And the birds are thrilled, the birds are going, fuck yes. Look at all those dark trees and all those white moths

sticking out like a sore thumb. So the birds started to eat all the moths now, the white and black moths because they could see them. But the tiny number of fully black moths which was rare, the small number of them,

they didn't get eaten by the birds. They survived and they got to procreate. And then over the course of like 10 or 20 years The white and black peppered moth disappears and now you just have all these black moths because they can camouflage themselves effectively on the trees that are ravaged by pollution

but the peppered moth phenomenon as interesting as it is I couldn't do, I couldn't make a video about that as one of my favourite things about Sheffield because it's not unique to Sheffield it was a north of England Industrial Revolution phenomenon not just the north of England. It happened in North America too

with the Peppered Moth, which drew my attention back to the fart lamps of Sheffield. So about six months ago, seven months ago on this podcast, I was gone over to London. It was to receive an award and I didn't know whether I was going to win this award or not.

And as I've mentioned before, I don't like focusing on awards, on external validation. So I made the trip about visiting the last, the last functioning fart lamp of London. And I went and I found it in an alleyway behind the Savoy Hotel. But afterwards I learned it's a replica. It's not the real deal. It's not an actual Victorian sewer gas destructor lamp.

That's what a fart lamp is. So in the 1800s, in cities in England, because of the industrial revolution, because of the amount of jobs, because civilization was changing, cities expanded rapidly. They expanded at a rate that the infrastructure of the cities could not keep up with. This created all sorts of issues. Housing, overcrowding, poverty, addiction became a thing. Crime started to explode.

The ills of society, of modern society, stuff that we now just take as normal. These things came about when capitalism forced humans to live in unnatural, overcrowded situations in rapidly expanding cities. Something which was tested massively too were sewer systems. So all of a sudden you have a city like Sheffield. In the 1750s, Sheffield had a population of 7,000. So that's a little village. 100 years later, Sheffield had a population of... of 135,000 became a city.

So it rapidly exploded in population in a very short amount of time because of the Industrial Revolution, because of steel being made in Sheffield. The sewer system, people's waste from toilets, cess pits was made very rapidly and without planning. See, you have all this sewerage in pipes and canals underneath the city, but this sewage then decomposes

and it produces gas. Methane, sulphur dioxide, farts. Fart gas underneath the city. And that gas would just come out of the ground and the whole place would stink. Like really badly. London had the same situation. The year of 1858 in London was known as the Great Stink.

1858 was called the Great Stink because you had this rapidly expanding city and then an inadequate sewer system and a collection of gases that made the whole place stink. It shut down the government for a summer. The houses of Parliament were so smelly

that people couldn't go in there. So inventions, people started to come up with inventions to solve this. There were these big pipes, pipes that were come up out of the ground and the gas could dissipate from these pipes but that was still fucking stinking. Sheffield had a lot of,

unique situation in that it was a rapidly expanding industrial city but there was a lot of hills. So the gas would accumulate underneath hills and become particularly concentrated. So this new invention came about the end of the 1800s called the sewer gas destructor lamp. Now what I love about the sewer gas destructor lamp is that it's like an early form of renewable energy. It's a light post that harnesses that same gas from the sewer, farts. And then the gas goes up the light post and it's lit in a flame and the light on your street is provided by farts, by farts that are on fire. I love that, I find it fascinating. I viewed it as isn't that incredibly forward thinking?

Because, like right now, global warming, it's not just burning fossil fuels. It's also, like cattle. Cattle create a huge amount of gas, carbon dioxide and methane in particular. From their farts, there's a couple of billion cows in the world, and their farts are enough to heat the planet. Methane will heat the planet a lot more than carbon dioxide will. Another thing that cows do is they, a cow urine patch, cows will all piss in the same area of a field. And when they do this, their piss leaches into the soil and it creates nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas.

But nitrous oxide is, it's a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. So when nitrous oxide gets into the atmosphere, it really traps in, here. eat. So cow urine patches. There's so many cows. And the thing is cows are not nature. That's the thing. Cows don't exist. Cows are not real. There's no such animal as a cow in nature. We created that animal. Cows. Cows come from an animal caught an aurook, which was a type of wild cattle that lived in herds around the Middle East. But we domesticated those and created the cow. And it's It's a cow to an auroch is like a pug to a wolf. So when billions of cows piss on the earth and fart, that's industrial pollution. We might as well be burning coal. It's the same thing. They create a lot of gas, methane from their farts, nitrous oxide from their piss.

And then the decomposing matter of all the dairy that they produce. So it's a lot of gas. And one of the most forward-thinking approaches at the moment that science is doing. is trying to see how can we harness all that gas that the cattle industry makes and burn it for fuel. It's going up into the atmosphere anyway. How can we make bio gas from this and make it useful? And biofuels are seen as an alternative to fossil fuels.

When it comes to industry, as far as I know right now, trucks, airplanes and big ships, battery and solar right now, it's not powerful enough. to power these big industrial vehicles so they do need fuel and biofuel made from the waste from the cattle industry is a plausible substitution. The gas is being created anyway, it's gone up into the air, why can't we harness it? So are gas-destructor lamps were the Victorian equivalent of this. They took gas from decomposing human shit and

piss and farts and turned it into a lamp that had a flame that could light a street. And Sheffield has the highest amount of these lamps left. Sheffield has around 30 of them. I think six or seven are still operational. And I went looking for these lamps.

And I found them all on Google Maps. And not only that, there's a running route in Sheffield City, a running route where you can visit all six operational Sheffield's sewer gas destructor lamps. So I'm thinking, brilliant. Isn't that class?

Isn't that worth celebrating? But when I looked at all the locations and went on Google Maps to visit each and every one of these sewer destructor lamps in Sheffield, I noticed a couple of things. Most of them are at the top of hills. Okay, fair enough, the gas collects underneath hills.

But then I started to look at the houses around them. And I thought to myself, when these lamps were put there in the Victorian period and the Edwardian period and I looked at the houses around the lamps I went these houses would have been

you'd have had to have a bit of money to live in a house like this in the Victorian or the Edwardian period these looked like middle class houses why are all the sewer destructor lamps in Sheffield only in neighbourhoods where the people living there

would have had some money would have been upper middle class what's going on here and then that led me down a fucking rabbit hole I now viewed the lamps very differently they are vestigial totems of anti-irish racism now I know what you're thinking

he brings it all back to the Brits doesn't he he brings it all back to the Brits and colonialism doesn't he I fucking do and I'll tell you why so just behind where I'm doing that gig in Sheffield Sheffield City Hall literally just behind it There's this, an area, and the area is known as the Crofts, right?

Now when you go there now, nothing special. Couple of office buildings, a few apartments. In the 1850s, that area was called Little Ireland. It was a fucking slum. It was a poverty-stricken slum that was so full of Irish immigrants that it was called Little Ireland. Now 1850, what's happening in 1860? Well, from 1843 up until 1848 you have the famine, the genocide, the famine in Ireland, where our population dropped from 8 million people to 4 million people. The ones that didn't die emigrated.

A load of... You're talking the poorest of the poor here. The Irish immigrant in 1847 would have been the equivalent of the people trying to... to reach Britain now on boats, the people who it is socially acceptable in fucking newspapers to say that those boats should be blown up. The dehumanising language that's used against people from Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia, that was Irish immigrants in 1850. We were the main, we would get to Liverpool and Irish people would try and find jobs in

factories and the Industrial Revolution and this led to the huge working-class Irish populations that you see in the north of England, people would walk from Liverpool to Sheffield. And when they got the Sheffield, they'd settle into the Crofts, into Little Ireland. These people are escaping unbelievable oppression, fucking famine, they're dying. They're sick, they have typhous, typhide, cholera. they become untouchables centered around this Crofts area where there was a high level of criminality

drunkenness addiction and then also little industries people making cutlery people making tools but attitudes at the time from the British ruling class was that if someone was sick and poor it's because God decided that it was a judgment I'm just going to give you an 1848 quote from a fella called Charles Trevelyan

who was an English civil servant I believe whose job it was to oversee aid during the Irish famine but he said about the Irish the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and turbulent character of the people the judgment of God sent this calamity

to teach the Irish a lesson so the Irish are sick and dying and full of disease and filth and poverty and all of the disenfranchisement of society they are this way because we're just fucking bad inferior people and God decided this and there's nothing

you can fucking do about it you just have to put up with us and that followed us wherever we went and it followed us to Manchester to London and to Sheffield just a couple of minutes down the road from the area of the crafts you've got the Sheffield-Colarah monument which it's when there was

a cholera epidemic in Sheffield than 1832. The Irish were blamed for that of course. In the 1800s, medicine, this is how I'm getting to the fart lamps. Medicine wasn't at a point where people understood what disease was, didn't understand what bacteria were, pathogens, viruses. The idea of there's actually tiny organisms that you can't see with the eye, but this is what causes it. illness, that was nuts. Didn't exist, it was insane. Instead what you had was myasma theory. My asthma theory basically was disease is a thing, we can see it, it's all around us, but it's caused by bad smells. So if in 1850 and you're a middle-class doctor, English doctor in Sheffield, and you go into an area like the Crofts, little Ireland, you step into an

overcrowded slum where there's no toilets. The people are subject to racism so they're disenfranchised, they don't have opportunities, they don't have a social net, they can't climb upwards. They're highly traumatised because they came from fucking Ireland where they're colonised, highly traumatised because they're escaping a famine. You have all the recipe for social collapse. Crime, addiction, violence, vice, everything follows. and the whole place fucking stinks and everybody is sick everybody is dying of typhus and cholera

diphtheria and typhite but then the middle class doctor walks in there and goes it fucking stinks here as well all these sick bit fucking stinks because everyone's shitting in the mud it stinks here the Victorians conflated correlation with causation it was a sanitary determinism

The Irish are full of disease and they're like this because they stink. And anywhere the fucking Irish are, it's stinking. And if you can, if you, I had a friend of mine who went down to the crafts last week and he caught cholera, he caught cholera from the smell. Like think of a plague doctor. That old terrifying image of the plague doctors where they look like a crow. They wear this mask with their eyes covered and this big long, black beak and then inside this beak was stuffed with strong smelling herbs like lavender

and mint. It wasn't about keeping out germs, it was about preventing, you can't smell. Just don't smell the poverty that these people are in and then you won't catch the disease. They didn't know the plague was being caused by a fucking flea, an infected flea. Or that cholera is being caused by drinking water, drinking water that's not sanitised and that's infected with cholera. They didn't understand that. So my asthma theory was, disease is caused by a vapour,

a foul-smelling vapour in the air. Why? Because look at this slum. It smells like shit, and they're all sick, so it's the smell. And this didn't just happen to us in England. Like over in New York, in the late, 1890,

there was a woman called Mary Malin from Tyrone, and I, again, very poor Irish immigrant to New York. She became known as typhide Mary because she carried typhoid, but she was asymptomatic. So she had no symptoms. And she was working in wealthy houses as a cook. And they couldn't understand how the fuck are all these posh people getting typhoid? This area is clean, it doesn't smell, there's no myasma here, what's going on? And through Mary Malin, who became known as typhoid Mary, that's how we discovered asymptomatic carriers of disease.

people who can carry a disease but show no symptoms. It was the miasma theory that caused them to miss that. So myasma theory. Disease, we don't know what bacteria is, we don't know what viruses are yet. So disease is caused by bad smells. Bad smells from the poor, especially the poorest immigrants, the fucking famine Irish. This became a moral panic. A little bit like, during the COVID pandemic when people thought that

5G towers were emitting COVID. A moral panic based around fear that wasn't backed up by science, just a feeling. Or the earliest, earliest stages of the pandemic where Asian people, Chinese takeaways were getting fucking attacked because people associated the early stages of COVID with. This is Chinese people who have this. I've found some academic journals, history journals, discussing that, the Sheffield gas-destructor lamps. And the gist that I'm getting is...

There was a moral panic around the stench of sewer gas in the Victorian period. And this was exploited by capitalists who wanted to sell sewer destructor lamps. And this is why they were being put in wealthier middle-class neighbourhoods. And there was a couple of different companies

competing to make. the best sewer destructor lamp, but because they were competing capitalistically to sell their fart gas lamps, they were releasing pamphlets with disinformation about the dangers of this miasma. Whenever there was an outbreak of typhoid or cholera like you had in 1932 or diphtheria or anything, it was blamed on the stench of the Irish. Coming from Little Ireland, the stench of sore gas that you smell when you're in the city centre of Sheffield around Little

Ireland you cannot have that stench popping up on the hills in the more middle-class areas because as soon as that smell gets up there everyone's going to get hit with cholera so they started marketing these fucking lamps that burn the gas so that you don't smell it and they worked they worked in capturing sore gas and burning it so that you wouldn't smell it in your nice middle-class neighbourhood they worked in that respect, but they didn't do anything to stop the spread of cholera, because cholera had nothing to do with the smell of farts.

But also they become a sign of a nice neighborhood. In the way that, so if you're going around a city today, signifiers of middle-classness, not someone being massively wealthy, but a person having a few quid in their pocket, it's no longer about the size of that person, person's house because houses are financialised. So even the smallest little house, a house that

used to be a council house a hundred years ago could be worth half a million quid in most cities today now. So the signifier of wealth now is solar panels and electric vehicles and batteries. If you're in a neighbourhood and it's ex-council houses or ex-terrest Victorian council houses and you see solar panels on the roof, then that signifies, oh, this is a middle-class neighbourhood. Gas destructor lamps in the Victorian period were a bit like that.

This is our middle-class neighbourhood. There's no smells around here. There's no fucking paddies around here either because there's no smells. You can't have paddies anywhere there's a gas destructor lamp. It was a way for the Nouveau-Riche English of Sheffield to signify how separate they were to the filthy dirty Irish

who couldn't climb the social ladder who were down there in the crafts living in their own shit like pigs so the gas destructor lamps of Sheffield now have taken a new meaning on for me they're totems of anti-Irish Victorian racism that's what they are to me now

I know that's tenuous I know there's going to be some English people rolling their eyes at me I know I sound like a bit of a lunatic there's a bit of autism going on in here the old pattern recognition This is a hot take. That's a very hot take.

But when I formalise this hot take, I'm drawn from two things. The first one that I always draw from is that folkloric way of reading the landscape and allowing it to tell me a story. Before we had the technology of writing, every mountain had to have a story,

every tree had to have a story. And you constructed the memory and histories of your people through the landscape. That's the oral tradition. The Irish oral tradition, that's what the phil I used to do. That lake over there is not just a lake

because in that lake there was a fish called the salmon of knowledge. But you see that fish's name was Fintin. And Fenton wasn't always a salmon because before he was a salmon, he actually came over to Ireland on Noah's boat and see now you're telling the whole history of Ireland because someone asked you a question about a lake.

That's the oral tradition. That's what I'm doing with the fart lamps of Shakespeare. I can visit six lamps and tell you the story of the Irish famine and colonisation and anti-Irish racism. And I'm doing that because I like the crack of doing it. But the other thing I'm doing is I'm drawing on on... There was a Marxist critical theorist called Walter Benjamin and Benjamin used to... He would get seemingly disconnected cultural objects and place them beside each other until they reveal some type of hidden truth. And also the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism, right?

So those fart gas lamps, private companies built those competing fart gas lamp makers competed with each other to sell them. Through a fucking commodity fetishism, a culture will consume the aesthetic fragments of the thing whose suffering it's simultaneously refueling. using to confront. So you have a situation in Victorian Sheffield where there's a big huge slum full of starving, dying Irish people and there's cholera epidemics and there's suffering. And everybody's a human. Everyone is a human and no one likes to see pain and suffering and starving children.

So capitalism comes along and says, I have a solution. I'm going to package something that will solve your problem and you don't have to think about that anymore because you've just purchased this, my fart gas lamp. You don't have to think about the starving, stinking, smelly Irish who you kind of hate anymore now and you don't have to be afraid of their disgusting smells that are definitely going to give you cholera because I've just given you this stupid pole that sets farts on fire and now you can get on with your nice day up on the hill. So using that analysis and with enough time and distance I can go, yeah, I can plausibly call those fart gas lamps in Sheffield, totems of anti-Irish racism.

I'll give you an example that's happening right now and this is going to seem insane. But in 50 years time, with hindsight, it's not going to look that insane. So, Dubai chocolate bars. From about 2024 to mid-2025, Dubai chocolate bars were just unexplainably massive. I have never seen anything like to buy chocolate bars. I remember when it started. And I was up in a part of Limerick where you will see cues, you'll see cues of people buying drugs. You'll see that.

And I saw a queue of people and they were going into a shop. And they were all coming out of the shop with little blocks of tin foil. And I was like, what that? What the fuck is going on here? What are people buying in that shop? And I went in. And people were buying Dubai chocolate bars

and I'd never heard of them. And Dubai chocolate bars exploded on the internet on TikTok out of nowhere. And they weren't even being made commercially yet. Local shops who had the knowledge of how to make Dubai chocolate bars were making them themselves and setting them in tinfoil.

for like 20 quid for a small bar and people were buying it I had never seen anything like it and then Dubai chocolate bars became commercial companies started making them they were in every single shop

everyone was purchasing Dubai chocolate bars just to say they had them everyone was obsessed with Dubai chocolate bars but what else was happening when Dubai chocolate bars were unexplainably viral

what else was happening at the exact moment that Dubai chocolate bars were being sold everywhere there was a genocide happening in Gaza and every day we were seeing on our fucking phones levels of violence that we're not supposed to see we all saw horrible horrible traumatising things and most of us saw so many dead people per day that eventually you had to kind of turn away from it

and get on with your life just to deal with it because we were so powerless with how much pain and suffering and our governments were doing fuck all. The UN was caught on it out. Nothing was happening. Nothing we could do could stop it. This was relentless. There was nothing we could do. What is it to buy chocolate bar? It's chocolate, pistachio cream. And then the most important part is that crunchy weird bit in the middle. It's a type of spun pastry called Cadeif. The roots of the Dubai chocolate bar is a Palestinian dessert called Kenefa. It's a Palestinian dessert from the city of Nablus in Palestine. Now most people aren't aware of that.

No one purchasing a Dubai chocolate bar is aware of that. I'm sure the people in fucking Dubai, they're definitely aware of that. Dubai, a country that did fuck all to help the people of Palestine. The influencers that could have used their platform, to call out a genocide, they didn't because they'd lose sponsorships. So those same influencers, they started peddling to buy chocolate bars.

To apply that Walter Benjamin criticality to it, what does commodity fetishism do? It causes a culture. It's when a culture will consume aesthetic fragments of the thing who's suffering

it's refusing to confront and trying to ignore. and my personal opinion in the deep unconscious of society's mind that's what the fuck Dubai chocolate bars were it was people turning away from a genocide of Palestinians

ignoring it pretending it doesn't exist and soothing themselves inex this inexplicably viral chocolate bar that has roots in a Palestinian dessert in 50 years time with hindsight that will seem like it'll seem much less insane than it does right now

because I know most of you are going I didn't fucking know that about Dubai I'm only finding out now that Dubai chocolate is based on a Palestinian dessert I'm only finding that out now it's actually deeply intertwined Dubai chocolate bars cause a world pistachio shortage did you know that pistachios are at the centre of the war in Iran

that's unfolding right now who are the two biggest pistachio producers in the world Iran and California What are California doing growing pistachios? Pistachios aren't from California they're from the Middle East What's going on there? Well California started to grow pistachios in

1979 What happened in 1979? The Iranian Revolution and also the Iran hostage crisis What? Yeah so before 1979 more or less all the all the pistachios in the world were grown in Iran

But then after 1979, relations between the US and Iran and Israel really fucking fell apart. So the US put embargoes, trade embargoes, on Iran. So Iran couldn't really export its pistachios to the US anymore because it was too expensive. Well, there was embargoes. They fucking couldn't. Now at that time, they were just testing out growing pistachios in California. Tiny, tiny little industry. But suddenly the US government said,

Here, California, let's start growing fucking pistachios. Because we're not buying them from the Iranians anymore. And this massive pistachio industry emerges in California post-1979. Really controversial, by the way, because it's responsible for huge water shortages in California. So this starts to boom. And then by 2025, there's two places in the world growing pistachios, Iran and California, the two biggest markets for pistachios. There's plausible accusations that at the beginning of the war in Iran a couple of months back,

plausible accusations that Iranian pistachio farms were blown up. They're just pistachio farms and they were blown up. And the Yanks said, no, they were full of munitions. There's a headline in the Financial Times just a month ago. Iran war hits pistachio supplies amidstations. Dubai chocolate boom. Wait a minute. So just at the time where there's this huge US-Israeli war on Iran and there's this confection called a Dubai chocolate that's based on a Palestinian dessert which is one of the most popular confections in the world, you mean right now? Iran can't

export pistachios and California is profiting from this massively. Now all of the Dubai chocolate and pistachio cream that the world wants right now at this very specific time you mean all that's coming from California now because the yanks are bombing

a fuck off go away really look it up yourselves Sheffield fart lamps Sheffield gas destructor lamps are the Victorian equivalent of Dubai chocolate bars I'm at forgetting

to do a fucking ocarina pause I don't have an ocarina what do I have Mosquito spray from the time I almost did a gig in Thailand, but I had to cancel it because of the pandemic back in 2019. I had a number of items on my desk there and I couldn't chose, I could have chosen any of them and I've chosen the mosquito spray and now it's after reminding me. So the word malaria,

which, you know, that's what you get. The reason I have this spray is that so if I was going to Thailand to do a gig, I wouldn't get malaria. Well, I had other things as well. There was medicine I had to take, but this spray was for mosquitoes. The word malaria. It came from the Italian word for myasma. Myasma theory was popular all across Europe. And in Italy, they had a problem with malaria. And what it was is there were swamps, there were swamps near Rome, stinky smelly swamps.

They'd gotten rid of a fucking forest. They cut down a forest and there was all these swamps. And people near the swamps would get malaria and they didn't know what it was. They didn't know that it was caused by mosquito bites, by a bacteria or a plasma in the mat. They hadn't a clue about that. They assumed malaria is caused by the stink of that swamp. And malaria was their word for my asthma. So, and that's why we call malaria malaria.

It's, they thought it was a foul air from swamps. And then we learned, no, it's mosquitoes that breed in the swamps that are infected. with this plasma or parasite and then another thing I wanted to get onto from that I'll never get this fucking Okerina pause done Cork City in fairness to him

Cork Cork Cork want to build the world's smallest statue and I'm jealous of Cork because this is the best idea I've heard in years so Oliver Cromwell

who Oliver Cromwell who did genocide in Ireland who we fucking hate right? Oliver Cromwell died in the 1600s from malaria that he got in Cork. It was called Cork fever at the time. But Cork City want to build the world's smallest statue.

They want to build a statue of the mosquito from Cork that killed Oliver Cromwell, which is brilliant. But I don't think the story is true. and I think the myth I went looking up Cranwell's death he died from some fever they didn't know when Cranwell

died that mosquitoes bit people and caused malaria they didn't know years before they discovered that they say that he died from Cork fever it's a myth or a legend that it was a mosquito that bit him in Cork I think

the misunderstanding comes from the word malaria and the word myasma I think Cromwell got typhide or typhus or something like that the other thing they say that might have killed them was if it was malaria like actual malaria that you get off mosquitoes which is strange because those type of mosquitoes can't survive in cork the mosquitoes that can

maybe they can with global warming now like that like Rod Stewart outside my window we will have mosquitoes that can survive the type that carry malaria. But there's no way they were in cork in the 1600s. But apparently, Cromwell died because he got malaria from a Cork mosquito and refused the treatment. The treatment was quinine.

Quinine is what's in gin and tonic. It's the tonic. And that's a cure for malaria. And apparently Cromwell wouldn't take it because quinine came from Catholic Jesuits who learned about quinine from. the indigenous people of Peru and he refused the Jesuit powder

and that's why he died. All lovely stories I don't want it to get in the way of... I'm being a cunt towards Cork. I'm jealous. I'm jealous that Cork are building a statue to the tiny mosquito that killed Oliver Cromwell so I'm trying to piss on them

I'm trying to piss on their parade and say, I reckon that that's not true and it arises from a misunderstanding between the word my asthma and malaria. which meant the same thing at the time. Okay, ocarina pause. One hour into the fucking path.

Who gives a fuck at this stage? Eight years. Ocarina pause. I'm going to spray this mosquito spray that's probably gone off because I've had it since 2019 and you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit, all right?

Commodity fashion, fetishism. Oh. Oh. Deat. That's the smell of fucking deat. That horrible, horrible smell. That's enough for that. Support for the podcast

comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com, forward slash the blind boy podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you marth, merriment, entertainment, distraction,

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Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model. And it keeps me independent. And it means that advertisers can't dig. take what I talk about in any way. They advertise on my terms.

Upcoming gigs. Berlin next month. Middle of June. Right. First night is sold out. Second night. Literally we're down to ten tickets. It's probably gone already.

Okay, so if you're... I'd say Berlin is gone, but chance your arm. Then Sheffield in July, Crossed Wires Festival. I'd really love you to come along to that. All right. This podcast is. inadvertently ended up as a giant advert for that one gig.

But yeah, come along to that gig in Sheffield. It's on the... I'll check here. The start of July... I'm shit at remembering numbers or anything like that. Fifth of July in Sheffield City Hall, the Crossed Wires Festival. Come along to my podcast and...

I don't know who I'm going to interview yet. I'm still waiting on suggestions from Yee. give me a shout on Instagram at Playing by Boat Club regarding that Sheffield gig Then fuck all after that really

until that big tour in October in England, Scotland and Wales starting on the 18th of October A lot of these are sold out but you will still get tickets for some Brighton Cardiff Coventry

Bristol Guildford London that's sold out Glasgow as good as sold out Gateshead I uncovered evidence of a possible sacred grove there around Gateshead and the name Gateshead, it's actually old Anglo-Saxon it means Goat's Head.

There's some shit going on there. I need to learn more about Gateshead. Lots big, big Irish immigration there too. I'm going to be getting into Gateshead a bit more. Just while I was doing the Sheffield research, Gateshead started popping up, especially around the pig and Anglo-Saxon stuff. then I'm in Nottingham and the

the first is it no the 11th I'm shit at dates I'm in fucking Nottingham sometime around October alright and you'll get those tickets Fane.coma UK forward slash

the Blindby podcast and then the Sheffield tickets Crossed Wires Festival what I'll leave you with now that I left the Okorina pause so late I'll leave you with a small little story from Greek mythology because I believe that this story

again we're talking 2,500 year old story I believe that this story is actually about the history of sanitation it's a story about the first sewers in Greek cities and it's a story I tell my little children this story

it's one of their favourite stories that I tell them before bed except when I tell them this story if they get if they're so tired that they're hyper I have to make them laugh so I tell the story like this the whole time like your drunk

drunk Limerick aunt I tell the whole story like that about Heracles and that gets all the energy out of little toddlers and they laugh so much and then they fall asleep but I'll tell you the story

the story is about it's from the trials of Heracles and Heracles was like a strong man in Greek mythology and it's the story of how Heracles had to clean out at king's stables and I love this what I like about this story is it reminds me a bit of Irish mythology of the town because the king in this story

whose name is king called King Argeus right so King Argeus is this very very wealthy king But his wealth is it's not just determined by the money that he has, it's determined by the size of the heart of cattle that he has. That's the bit that reminds me of Irish myth, because we have a story called the town, which is all about the most powerful king or queen in the land is the one who owns the most cattle. And that's what we had in Ireland before the monasteries. We were a pastoral economy based on how much cattle you owned and cattle raised. and all this crack. So the king Audius in fucking ancient Greece he's surveying his land and he's like I am the richest king because I have the largest herd of cows. No one has as

many cows as me. I'm so fucking powerful. But the problem was in order to stop the cows being stolen they all had to be herded into a giant stables every single night. They were locked away. But while the cows were in this fucking stable, there were so many of them, they used to shit and shit and shit. And King Argeus's cows would do mountains of shit in the stables that were so big that there weren't enough people. It's like a little analogy for global warming as well. There weren't enough people in his kingdom to shovel away all the shit because he had too many cows per people. Fucking hell.

This is 2,500 years. I'm only realising this now because obviously I don't apply this type of analysis to the story when I'm telling it to my toddlers. But now I'm thinking about it going, this is about a king. It's like the world now with too many cows and his too many cows are creating too many shit.

And there's more cows than people and they're being overwhelmed with the refuse. and feculence of cows like we are with the atmosphere. So the king anyway, Aegeus, what are we going to do with the mounds and mounds of cow shit in this shed? It's the whole place is full of flies, this place is stinking. There's nothing we can do with this.

And no one's able to shovel it out. So this hero comes along one day and the hero's name is Heracles. Now Heracles is like a heroine. figure. He's legendary. He's like Cochullen. And Heracles comes along to the king and says, I hear you've got a problem with your stables

with all the cows, I hear there's mountains of shit and you don't have enough workers in the land to get rid of this shit. I can do it. I can do it in one day. And then the king, Audius, is like, listen to this fucking prick. Who does he think he is that he can clear away all that shit in one day when my entire entire village can't do it. Who does this fella think he is? So Argeus then, because he's a

prick, you see, this king is a prick. Audius makes a deal with Heracles and goes, all right so, if you're so good Heracles, you cocky fuck. You think you can clean out my stables. And then Heracles goes, not only can I clean it out, I'll clean it out in a day, I'll do it in a day, I'm Heracles. The king goes, all right so, you clean out that stables and get rid of all that shit in one day, all that shit out in one day and I'll pay you handsomely when the sun sets and he agreed a ridiculous

figure to pay him like loads of money and the king is thinking in his head this fella's a fool he's full of muscles but he has no brains and best result he's going to do a good job but he's not going to clean out all of it alright there's no way he's going to do that

so I'm going to get a job for free here meanwhile the king's son Phileas is listening in, listening to this deal. And he's going, what's this deal that my dad's doing with this Heracles fella? So Heracles says, fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway. So he goes off to the stables and encounters the giant, giant mounds of cow shit in the stables. Now, everybody's expecting, all the workers are looking, going,

we've been trying to shovel this stuff for months. And we can't budget. There's just too many cows doing too many shits. It's impossible. We can't shovel it out, but Heracles isn't just strong, he's clever. So what Heracles does is instead of shoveling all the shit out of the stables, he goes with his shovel and his massive strength and he digs a canal that goes from the stables to the local river. And then he goes to the walls of the stables and busts a massive hole.

and now what happens all of the shit in the stables flows out of the stables into this canal he just dug and then flows into the river and what he's done there is he's actually created a sewer system he's created the world's first sewer and everyone around is going

oh my god why didn't I think of that fucking hell why didn't I think of that and then rapidly all of this shit in the stables that they couldn't get rid of is flowing into the river river and washing away. And the people can't believe this. My God, he's done it. And the sun hasn't even set. So now Heracles goes back to the king and goes there, I did it. Your stables are clean. The shit is gone. The king is going, I meant that you had to shovel it out. You didn't say that

specifically, king. You just said, get rid of the shit and I did it. Now it's all in the river. Your problem is gone. Where's my money? But the king is a prick. So now the king goes, I'm not paying you the money. What do you mean you're not paying me the money? I'm not going to pay someone who shovels shit for a living and he doesn't honour his deal and it's clear now that he's a sneaky fuck.

And meanwhile, the king's son Phileas is listening and he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach because he's realising, Phileas is about 13, he's realizing for the first time that his dad is not an honourable moment. man. And Phileas walks out and says, Hold on a minute, Dad, that's not fair. This man did the job that you asked him to do. Pay him properly. And then the king goes ab-shit and says,

Go to your room. Don't ever embarrass me like that again in public. And he has his guards get Heracles and they throw him out of the kingdom. They throw him out. And then Heracles goes back to all his pals who are a bunch of hard cunts. And they come back into the kingdom as this fearsome army. And all the soldiers in the kingdom just go, we're not fucking fighting these. This is like a band of God warrior heroes. We're not fighting them.

So they lay down their arms. And then Heracles and his mates walk up to the castle. And they go to the king and they say, you're not a just king. You're not an honorable man. Heracles snatches the crown from his head and puts it onto his son, Phileas. and Heracles says

your son is the king now because he was the one who jumped out and pointed out that what you were doing was dishonest so he's proven himself he understands honour keeping a bargain preserving someone's dignity

being a decent person this young fella is fit to rule but not you because you're dishonest so he's got the crown now he's the king and if you leave this kingdom and never come back we'll spare your life

so King A just fucks off into the hills and then Phileas becomes the new king and he rules with fairness and with a brand new sewer system and obviously I'm telling ye a version for ye because you're adults I tell a very different version at bedtimes

but that story I'm telling it because it's dawning on me that that's actually that's a 2,500 year old story about the invention of sanitation the efficiency of if you have a city or a town or a kingdom

and everyone's doing shits there's a way to deal with it if you're smart and that's by digging a canal and fucking it into the river which works if you've got a population of 150 people but it did not work in the 1800s in London

with the great stink because that's exactly what happened all the shit was going into the Thames all right that's all right that's I'll have time for this week. I always say that. That was a bizarre podcast, but they're all bizarre. They're all strange. What are we going to do? I'll catch you next week. Go out and enjoy the weather. In the meantime, rub a dog. Genuflect to a swan. Wink at Rod Stewart, the Falls Widow.