The Blindboy Podcast - The History of Food Poisoning

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

The historical relationship between food poisoning and anti Irish discrimination  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Perose the eunuchs shoes you swoony oonus. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If you're a new listener, please consider going back to an earlier episode. There's nearly 400 fucking episodes at this point. There's a vast, ever-expanding ocean of my podcasts for you to dip into. So this week, I've got food poisoning. I think I'm over the worst of it. Yesterday, I was ballaxed, completely horizontal,

roaring fever, delusional, completely dehydrated, but even to drink a sip of water, it took about 15 minutes of thinking about drinking the sip of water to actually get the energy to do it And then when I drank the sip of water, I'd get sick. You've all had food poisoning and I miss Johnny Maher's gig. Johnny Maher was gigging in Limerick on Monday night in King John's Castle. One of the reasons he was doing this fucking gig is because he listens to this podcast and he wanted to do a gig in Limerick.

I never got to gigs. I've been looking forward to this for fucking months. So I didn't get a chance to see Johnny playing or to hang out with him and have a bit of crack. He gave me a shout out on stage, told everybody I had food poisoning. My brother was at the gig and then my brother told my mother and then my mother rang me up and was like why didn't you tell me you were sick and I'm delusional from fever going what how do you know I'm sick and she goes Johnny Maher told everyone you're sick at King John's castle and I had one of those those intense late night fevers we are drifting in and out of reality so that was very challenging information to receive.

But I didn't tell my mother I had food poisoning. I don't want her fussing. I don't want her worrying. So I'm very disappointed. I missed Johnny Maher's gig in King John's Castle. The last time he played limerick was 1984. So I was supposed to hang out with him. But he texted me and he said that he went down and visited Yarty's coach. He did the Yarty's coach pilgrimage, which, if you're a long-term listener to this podcast, you'll know about the significance of Yarty's coach. It's an area in Limerick, down by the river, where an otter called Yarty A'Hern lives, and it's the spiritual home of this podcast. And people who listen to this podcast, they visit Yachty's couch.

It's even on Google Maps as like, as a fucking tourist destination. So Johnny went to Yachty's couch to look for the mythical otter, and I find it gassed because I'm a huge fucking Johnny Maher fan, I'm a huge Smiths fan. And the Smiths have an album from 1986 called The Queen is Dead and on the front cover of this album the Smiths are all standing outside a building that says Salford Lads Club. The name is so prominent that some people even call the album Salford Lads Club and it's a youth club in Manchester and people who really like the Smiths, they go and visit Salford Lads Club and it's a youth club in Manchester and people who really like the Smiths they go and visit Salford Lads Club and when I first did a gig in

Manchester 12 years ago or whatever I went to Salford Lads Club I went and did the Salford Lads Club pilgrimage so I was incredibly disappointed to not get to see Johnny Marr perform in Limerick or to take him to Yarty's couch. But that's how bad my fucking food poisoning was. Last night I was like, ah fuck am I gonna have to go to hospital? Am I gonna have to go to fucking hospital? Because I'd gotten so dehydrated that it didn't feel safe. So I couldn't keep anything down. Fuck food. There was no food happening, but even... I was trying to take the teeniest, tiniest sips of water so that it was absorbing into my mouth

Rather than me drinking it because then I'd have gotten sick. So today I'm still fucked. I'm over the worst of it I'm able to drink fluids. I can't eat yet. I don't think I'm gonna chance eating until tomorrow able to drink fluids. I can't eat yet. I don't think I'm going to chance eating until tomorrow. So I'm just drinking Dioralite all day long to stave off the dehydration and the fever and the aches and pains. Actually, if I had gotten to meet Johnny Maher and gone for a walk with him to Yerty's coach, I'd have probably explained the history of Darrolyte to him because it's relevant to several of his interests. Bizarrely, the history of food poisoning and our response to it is inextricably linked with the history of Ireland and colonisation.

So first off, I'm going to assume most of you have gotten food poisoning at some point. If you've never gotten food poisoning, you're very lucky. In my experience, food poisoning, it's the worst acute affliction that a healthy person can get. So I mean, calls, flu, these afflictions that if you're healthy, you kind of just expect this is going to happen at some point that I'm going to have to deal with it. Like getting stung by a wasp. It's going to happen. Food poisoning is the worst. I think, you know, chest infection, ear infection that's pretty fucking shitty, sore throat, bad dose of the flu. These are deeply uncomfortable.

I try to avoid these at all costs, but I take it in a heartbeat over food poisoning, especially when it's like, oh, I'm shitting and puking at the same time. Right, how are we going to figure this out? Food poisoning is unpleasant on a spiritual level. It makes you assess what it is to be alive. But throughout the past two days, I'm consistently reflecting on how fortunate I am to have a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in, and a toilet to get sick into whenever I need, and unlimited access to clean water. It's those basic factors that make this manageable, things that I take for granted,

because immediately I'm thinking about, even in my own city of Limerick, there's a lot of homeless people. What do the homeless people do when they get food poisoning? Because they do. The other thing I mentioned, so last night, I seriously considered

do I need to ring the hospital. I was delirious with fever, dreaming about drinking just the tiniest bit of water. I'd never wanted to drink water more in my entire life. I hadn't gone for a wee in like 12 hours. And even when I drank water, I couldn't really keep it down. And generally that's the point when food poisoning becomes dangerous, when it becomes an existential threat.

Luckily I didn't need to ring the hospital. This has been the second time that I've gotten food poisoning, which was I almost need to ring the hospital level. Just when I got to that point, it turned a corner and I managed to drink like a shot glass full of diurelite and then I could feel energy coming back. Still really unwell, but not like fantasizing about what it would be like to lift my head off the pillow. We are very, very lucky historically and also if you live in the global north, if you live

in a wealthy society, if you're part of the global 1%, we're very lucky because food poisoning, it kills, it literally does kill. There's a person now in the Congo or in Palestine or in Yemen, it was the exact same food poisoning that I have and they're going to die today because of poverty, because of a lack of infrastructure, because they can't drink diurelite. If it gets really bad they can't ring up the hospital and go on a very simple drip to replace their fluids. Food poisoning kills people through dehydration. It's not going to kill me because of money.

The other thing we're really lucky about is food poisoning is quite rare. There's a lot of regulation and laws in place to stop food poisoning happening. I know how I got my food po- well anytime I've gotten food poisoning, there's two things in common. It's always in the summer and it's always when I'm exceptionally busy. So right now, I'm making a documentary, I'm working really late nights, doing voiceover work, so I'm too busy to cook my own meals from scratch. I'm eating ready meals from supermarkets that you heat up yourself. And then the other factor, in Ireland, in summertime, Irish shops don't know how to deal with hot weather.

90% of the year, Ireland is fucking freezing. Then you get a week of hot weather and the shops they leave their fucking food go warm for too long. Last time I got food poisoning I was writing my second book and I got a Caesar salad in Starbucks in the middle of June. Big mistake, stay the fuck away from salads in Ireland in June, just stay the fuck away from them. Unless you June. Just stay the fuck away from them unless you're preparing it yourself You're washing the leaves yourself. Just stay the fuck away. Don't bother We don't understand food hygiene and fucking hot weather. I even made a mental note that last time

I said remember when you got food poisoning when you're writing your book and you were too busy to make your own food Do you remember the Starbucks lettuce never do it again? So I didn't. So what did I do this time? I went into Don's on Sunday and got one of their ready meals. It was at Don's stores, own brand, beef burrito bowl. And bear in mind, I'm literally purchasing this, with food poisoning in mind. I literally looked at the date and then went to the back to get the ones that are more in date that they keep at the back. It was well in date, followed the instructions, heated it up in the microwave, did everything perfectly, and that's what gave me food poisoning. And I know it did because everything else that I ate I shared with other people. So what happened

is someone left the ready meals and duns out for a little bit too long in the hot weather, and even though it was in date, the bacteria grew. And I got E. coli or Salmonella or something, I don't know, or Norovirus. Definitely one of the bad ones. So I'm very, very unlucky. That's a strange thing to happen. I reckon it's down to down to Irish people Not understanding how to deal with warm weather. Like the time I remember being in Spain once where it's hot all the time Remember it started raining once in Spain People started panicking people were slipping on the streets a queue of taxis emerged Nobody knew what to do. Nobody was dressed appropriately.

The footpats weren't made out of the right type of stone to accommodate rain. But I tell you what, I'd have no bother ordering a fucking salad in Spain in 50 degree heat because I know they have their shit together. Their shops are fucking air conditioned with no air conditioning. Sure, I was in the same Duns. Duns are never going to sponsor this podcast. But I was in the same duns. Duns are never gonna sponsor this podcast. But I was in the same duns. Roastin' hot inside there, cause they don't have air conditioning. And all the bananas are sweaty. The bananas, bananas are inside in their bags. Sweating.

Sweaty bananas. Kiwis looking like testicles. I'm not buying a bag of lettuce beside the sweaty bananas and kiwi testicles. I thought the beef burrito bowl was safe inside in the fridge but I guess not. My point is, sell by dates. These food regulations, these things exist in a wealthy society to keep us safe from food poisoning that could genuinely kill us. Milk. from food poisoning that really could genuinely kill us. Milk, like milk, milk can be deadly but the milk that we drink you know it's pasteurized which means

that it's super heated so that the bacteria are killed and then cold and they're sell by dates so you know whether it's fresh or not. Now there's an interesting bit of history around sell byby dates and milk in particular. This is one of those ones where we don't know if it's an urban legend or if it's fact. It's probably somewhere in the middle because there is a huge amount of fact to it. Apparently the Chicago gangster Al Capone is responsible for sell-by dates. The first product that had a sell-by date was milk. Now Al Capone, he was a gangster in America in the 1920s when alcohol was illegal during prohibition.

So he was a giant drug dealer, except the drugs that he was dealing was alcohol. And Al Capone had a massive massive multi-million dollar underground operation where he supplied huge parts of America with alcohol when it was illegal which meant that he owned a fuckload of equipment for bottling and for putting labels on bottles and when prohibition was ending and alcohol was becoming legal, Al Capone was like, oh fuck, if they make alcohol legal, then I can't make money from it anymore, what am I gonna do?

So he got into the milk-bottling business and he lobbied the local government in Chicago to put sell-by dates on milk bottles because he was the person who owned all the equipment that could put the sell-by dates on milk bottles. So there's an incredibly plausible theory that Al Capone was responsible for the first sell-by dates. So according to the World Health Organization, 420,000 people die every year due to food poisoning. The vast majority of these people live in the global south, in poverty. So the reason that I'm here recording a podcast, I'm recording a podcast, the reason that I am recording

a podcast while having food poisoning is because of money and not necessarily the money in my pocket. It's because of the roof over my head, my access to sanitation, to a toilet, a sewage system, access to diurelite, access to a hospital if I need it, my pre-existing health and rigor that I possess because I exist in a wealthy country and because of my unlimited access to fresh drinkable water. All things that we completely take for granted that we consider to be a given. But millions of people around the world don't have these, this infrastructure, this financial infrastructure and social infrastructure and these people die when they get food poisoning.

Because it's actually really serious. The dehydration is incredibly dangerous. And what makes it not dangerous is wealth. And this is where Irish history and colonisation comes into it. And where Limerick specifically comes into it. Because like I said, if I didn't have food poisoning yesterday, and I actually got to go for a walk with Johnny Maher down to Yarty's couch,

I'd be telling him about the history of food poisoning. So in the 1800s, in Ireland, three diseases were endemic. And those diseases were cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, all of which are forms of food poisoning. Now we don't hear about these diseases anymore. You don't hear about cholera, dysentery and typhoid anymore because they don't really exist in the global north. What solves those diseases is money. Money is what solves those diseases. Dysentery, cholera and typhoid still exist in the global south in places that exist in poverty. So in Ireland in the 1800s, you're

talking about the famine, the great potato famine. For my English listeners, this wasn't just a period where the potato crop in Ireland failed. It's much more than that. Ireland was being colonised by Britain and about 200 years before the famine of the mid-1800s. You're talking about the penal laws. So a set of laws and social structures that prevented native Irish Catholics from owning land receiving an education, speaking the Irish language, systemic racism,

specifically to ethnically cleanse the country of native Irish Catholics through complete enforced poverty, generational poverty and death. So by the 1800s you have generational poverty and death. So by the 1800s, you have incredibly dirt poor people with no land, no possibility of owning land being completely exploited by English landlords and surviving exclusively on the potato crop. So then when a potato blight came a disease to the potato crop, people starved and the famine was enforced.

The closest parallel would be what's happening right now before our eyes in Gaza. There's a famine in Gaza right now. Israel aren't allowing any aid in. They're attacking any aid that comes in. They're not providing aid. They're shutting off access to clean water. They're doing everything in their power to create conditions of famine, disease and death with the goal of ethnically cleansing the population so that the land can be colonized. That's what happened in Ireland in the 1800s.

People starved. Aid was not provided. The price of food, like I don't know fucking bread, carrots whatever you have that was inflated so much that poor people couldn't afford it. Food that was being grown was being grown for export to be brought out of the country and sold. Those exports were guarded by the military so you have a population that is in extreme poverty, no access to resources, starving during a famine, and consistently migrating around the country

to find somewhere safer. So with this starving, weak, poor population, you get a perfect breeding ground for food poisoning without being crude, diseases where you shit yourself to death. All the water rapidly leaves your body and you die of dehydration. So one of these foodborne diseases was called dysentery. So when the Irish were starving during the famine there was very little aid. So the British weren't providing the Irish with food, they were taking food away. Any aid that we received came from outside. One group of people that helped the Irish with food, they were taking food away. Any aid that we received came from outside.

One group of people that helped the Irish and sent us food were indigenous American tribes, the Choctaw Nation. These are Native American people in the 1800s, people with their own problems, people who were being colonized by the Yanks. They sent us $5,000 worth of cornmeal and this was distributed to the starving Irish people.

But the Irish, we didn't know what the fuck Indian meal was. We didn't know what this cornmeal was. So because the Irish didn't know how to prepare this meal properly and they were already sick and starving, it led to what was called starvation dysentery, bloody flux, a type of extreme food poisoning that killed someone in like 48 hours. Now that's a big claim there so I just want to let you know I'm referencing a professor, a history professor in UCC called Lawrence Geary. Another form of food poisoning that killed thousands of people in Ireland was cholera. Cholera came from India. It's a particularly deadly

type of food poisoning that spreads through unsafe water. Again, something that we take for granted today. Cholera spread throughout Europe in the 1800s because of the British colonization of India. But cholera destroyed Ireland during the famine. The poverty, the sickness, the dead bodies, the lack of sanitation, the lack of storage, the lack of access to pumps and wells, clean drinking water, the lack of able-bodied strong people who had the energy to maintain a clean well led to outbreaks

of cholera. And then the other disease was typhoid, a type of salmonella. All three of those diseases, high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, death through dehydration. So long story short, between 1841 and 1851, that's 10 years. Roughly one million people in Ireland died and one million people left as refugees. The people who left as refugees, they went to America, they went to Liverpool, they went to Manchester, and they brought with them Typhoid, Cholera, and dysentery. Now you're talking about hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants all arriving at once. The ships they arrived in were also breeding grounds for disease.

People died on these ships and were just thrown overboard. These were called coffin ships. But these diseases became associated with Irish people and in England and America Irish refugees were associated with disease and it led to massive waves of anti-Irish racism, which is something that's so difficult to comprehend now in 2024, because we have the rise of racism in Ireland. Now, we have Irish people being racist towards refugees, when the very fabric of our history is being those same fucking refugees. Gangs of far-right thugs were waiting in Liverpool, Manchester, New York, ready to attack impoverished

Irish refugees. All of it drummed up by the wealthy press at the time. The thing is, in the mid-1800s, medicine was not at the stage that it is right now. And society believed that people who got sick got sick because they were morally degenerate. Like, there was a fellow called Charles Trevelyan. Charles Trevelyan was a British politician in Ireland. His job, his literal job, was to oversee famine relief. So if there was any charity coming into Ireland to help the people that were starving, this fellow, Charles Trevelyan, he decided whether it happened or not. And his quote about the famine

was, the judgment of God sent this calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and char- turbulent character of the Irish people. So that's 1846 I think. So that's Charter Travelling. Middle class to upper class British politician basically saying that famine that's happening in Ireland, that's actually God punishing them because they're degenerates. And then you start to see the same messaging happen in Liverpool, Manchester and in America. When the famine Irish refugees start to reach Liverpool and Manchester in 1847. Now you've got tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand Irish people in the inner city slums of

Liverpool and they're all dying of typhoid, dysentery. And Colara, the Liverpool Medical Officer of Health in 1847, William Henry Duncan was his name, he said that the Irish are turning Liverpool into a city of the plague. But if you have a refugee population, no education, no possibility of getting work, living in inner city slums, coming from multi-generational poverty, you're also going to get addiction, you're going to get criminality, gambling, vice. The things that we see when you have community trauma and social inequality and the trauma of poverty.

And then you get a lot of diseases too. But the medical belief at the time was not that it was this poverty that was creating the conditions for disease, but rather it was the fact that the Irish were drinking, fighting and fucking. That's why they got the disease, because it was a punishment from God. Because that's where diseases come from in the 1840s. Diseases are things that happen to bad people, and bad people are poor people.

We're seeing a resurgence of this type of belief in America now with an ideology called prosperity theology. It's a type of Christianity that's popular amongst wealthy Trump supporters. And the root of it is, it's a view of Christianity that states that extreme wealth is something that God throws at morally good people. It runs directly in the opposite direction

to we'll say liberation theology, which is a South American concept, which is Christianity as kind of a socialist thing. This prosperity theology is good people are wealthy. It's how those big, giant American super churches, it's how they justify their wealth. Our churches were $10 dollars because God throws money at good people. So society believed that in England and America in the 1800s, where it was like poor people have disease and they die of diarrhea because they're morally degenerate and God is punishing them. And us people who are wealthy and rich and don't get these diseases,

that's because God is rewarding us. So the Irish immigrants in Liverpool, in Manchester, they start to become associated with these terrible diseases, these forms of food poisoning, these food borne, more specifically something that you and I don't have to worry about at all, food-borne, more specifically, something that you and I don't have to worry about at all, water-borne diseases, food poisoning that you get through unsafe water. Irish immigrants become associated with these diseases because of their social conditions and this leads to massive anti-Irish racism. Those people are unclean, they're disease spreaders, keep them away, kill them. So you get riots, you get beatings, you get the shit that you're seeing in Ireland, happening to refugees that are coming to Ireland. You get the shit that's happening to refugees

coming to Ireland the past two years, that's what you get happening to our great great grandparents and all of it drummed up and exacerbated by the media. So this reputation of the Irish as being diseased people it also took hold in America where hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees arrived suddenly and lived in the slums. In America cholera, dysentery, typhoid were mostly diseases of the poor, and it was very convenient and lazy to have the belief that this is God's punishment for drinking and fucking and fighting. But then something strange started to happen in the upper echelons of society in New York. Rich people in New York, really wealthy people, start to

come down with typhoid. Typhoid like cholera, waterborne disease, a form of food poisoning, diarrhea that will kill you stone-dead from dehydration and is generally a disease that takes hold in communities of extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure. So a lot of very poor Irish immigrant women got jobs as maids in the houses of wealthy American people. And there was an outbreak of typhoid in these really wealthy New York families. And three people died. And the wealthy people couldn't understand why is this happening to us? Why are we getting Thai fight? We're not from the slums. We're not Irish. Why are we getting Thai fight? So now that wealthy people in

New York were getting Thai fight, the experts started to take it seriously. They started to investigate. And they found that there was a woman by the name of Mary Mallon. Mary was born in County Tyrone and she emigrated to New York and she worked as a chef in the houses of some of these really wealthy people preparing their food. And they found that Mary Mallon, this Irish woman, she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. You remember that from Covid. Someone who can carry the disease, but they have no symptoms themselves.

Mary Mallon was the first time that medicine was like, Oh, fuck, we didn't know that could happen. So she'd been working as a cook in all these wealthy people's houses, and she'd carried this typhoid. It's a type of salmonella, she carried this and she was infecting the rich people through the food that they ate. Now the press loved this, they called her Typhoid Mary. In America she became the face of Irish people as carriers of disease and she was treated

very unfairly, she was quarantined against her will in an island off the Bronx, kept in prison effectively. Now in fairness, she promised people she wouldn't cook again. They let her off the island, then she changed her name and started working as a cook again for a bunch of wealthy people and started another tie fight outbreak amongst the rich people in New York.

But when tie fights started to impact, when did this fucking, you know, typhoid, this form of food poisoning, started to impact the wealthy people of New York? It led to a bit more critical thinking, an understanding of bacteria, an understanding of contamination. Oh wait, maybe these horrible diseases aren't punishments that God does to very poor people. And when all these wealthy New Yorkers started getting typhoid from their kitchens and their food preparation, it led to advances in public health. It led to policies, standards and regulation in food preparation to prevent the spread of pathogens that cause deadly types of food poisoning like typhoid in wealthy countries

where these regulations can be put in place because of the financial infrastructure and to round this story off because I started it by saying had I been able to meet Johnny Maher and take him for a walk down by Yurtley's couch and tell him about the history of food poisoning, I'd tell him about the history of derelite. So what all these food poisoning diseases have in common is the rapid expulsion of fluids from your body, whether it's from your mouth or your arse, and that quickly leads to dehydration and that's what kills people.

By far, the most important drug in the world for saving people's lives are oral rehydration solutions. That's what diurelite is. It's a very simple mixture of clean water, salt and sugar. And it rehydrates the body very rapidly when you're in danger of dehydrating. When I was very bad last night and I was delirious from fever and my mouth was dry and I had no energy, once I got that shot glass of diurelite, that's what turned me around. Not to be dramatic, but that's what saved my life. Well that was invented by a man from Limerick. See, one of the strange things with Ireland's huge history of poverty, disenfranchisement, inequality and trauma, we also have medical breakthroughs.

In the 1700s in Limerick, there was such violent gang fighting. So many people had their brains bashed out of their heads with sticks. That a sergeant from Limerick called Sylvester O'Hadarone pioneered modern brain surgery during the period of the troubles in the north of Ireland from 1970s up to 1990s we'll say. There was advancements in war surgery because so many people had been the victims of bombings. And in Limerick in the 1830s, there was a doctor by the name of William Brookhawk Shotnessy who'd spent time in India and he had watched as cholera spread through the British Empire all the way back home to Limerick and had watched so many people die from extreme diarrhea and he hypothesized that I reckon

what's killing these people is dehydration and that if we can have a solution of clean water, salt and sugar. This will rapidly absorb into the person's bloodstream and rehydrate them quickly. It might save their life. And he went even further. He suggested, what if we put it directly into their veins? What if this person who's sick and dying from diarrhea, what if we got this rehydration solution and pumped it directly into their veins? And what he'd done there is he'd invented intravenous therapy. He'd invented a drip.

See last night, if my food poisoning had gotten so bad that I was ringing up the hospital, I'd say to him, with bad fucking food poisoning, I haven't gone for a piss in hours, I'm really dehydrated, I can't keep down any fluids orally. The hospital would then put me on a drip, and in this drip would pretty much just be diurelite. And that simple solution of clean water, salt and sugar is one of the most important medicines in the world. Since the 1970s it's been considered an essential drug by the World Health Organization. And even though still like hundreds of thousands of people die every year from food poisoning, a lot of these people's lives are saved because they have access to this oral rehydration

solution. And bizarrely, one of the ways that this diurelite oral rehydration solution gets to the most remote porous parts of the world is via Coca-Cola. So basically Coca-Cola is one of the most ubiquitous products in the world. You could be up a mountain in the equator, in a tiny village, 20 hours away from any other village, and there'd be a tiny shop, and in that shop,

they'd be selling bottles of Coke. So does this organization called Cola Life, and what they do is they place packets of oral rehydration solution into the spaces between bottles of Coke. And then this life-saving diarrhea medication finds its way to the most remote parts of the world so that people experiencing the poverty of the global south don't actually die from the food poisoning that me and you get to take for granted is just a

terrible experience and that comes from Limerick City that comes from my city in the 1830s and that that's what I would have that's the story I would have told the Johnny Maher on a walk to Yarty's couch had I been had I not had debilitating food poisoning and had I been able to go for a walk with him because I guarantee you too, William Brokaw Shatnessy, he also would have walked that path because the Yachty's Couch Path that's been active in Limerick for fucking hundreds of years that hugs the river. So I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna leave it at that this week.

This was a short podcast 35 minutes and I hope you'll excuse me because I literally I do even though I don't sound it I'm fucking dying of food poisoning at the moment I've got a fever and I'm on the mend but I'd really love to just get back to bed and have a rest and I reckon tomorrow I'm gonna be be perfect. And the reason I did this week's podcast is one of the things about food poisoning that I enjoy is that it's so horrible. It stripped me of everything. It stripped me of my ability to lift my head off the fucking pillow. There's so much suffering over a small amount of time that it forces me to reflect on how

lucky I am to be able-bodied, to be healthy, to have a roof over my head, to have sanitation, to have clean water, and how unbelievably lucky I am to have this job, to have this job that I fucking adore, where I can follow my passions, explore research, explore my creativity. And a huge part of my day today was me saying to myself, you're sick, you're sick, don't do the podcast, you're sick. Just go a week without doing the podcast. And then I asked myself, are you able to do the podcast?

I reckon I can. It's not gonna be pleasant, but I can give it a go. Yesterday, no way. Not when I couldn't lift my head off the pillow. But today, I have a bit of energy. So if I can deliver the podcast, I will deliver the podcast. So that was it.

And now I'm gonna go and collapse. There will be, there's gonna be another bonus podcast this week too, to make up for this being 35 minutes. So I'll drop a bonus podcast before the weekend or at the weekend. I fucking nearly forgot the ocarina pause now. I did forget the fucking ocarina pause. I'm just gonna spray this lemon spray and you'll hear an advert for something.

This episode is brought to you by FX's The Bear on Disney+. In Season 3, Carmy and his crew are aiming for the ultimate restaurant accolade, a Michelin star. With Golden Globe and Emmy wins, the show starring Jeremy Allen-White, Iowa Deberry, and Mattie Matheson is ready to heat up screens once again. All new episodes of FX's The Bear are streaming June 27th, only on Disney Plus. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility. Moving you moves the world. Alright, there would have been an advert there.

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forward slash the Blind By podcast. And the only gig I have to plug, fucking Cork Podcast Festival. I don't know when it is, September or something. It's the Cork Podcast Festival. I don't know when it is. September or something. It's the Cork Podcast Festival. It's not that hard to find on Google. So I'm gonna be in the Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival. In two months or something. Alright, dog bless. I'll catch you later on in the week with a bonus podcast. I'm not gonna blow kisses at you because I've got fucking food poisoning. It's not pleasant. I'm very sweaty. Dog bless. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions, at Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success.

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