The Blindboy Podcast - The History of Pigeons

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

A history of pigeons from the Neolithic period to the Napoleonic wars  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brine the shin of St Vincent in a pinprick of vinegar astringent, you innocent infant pigeons. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. I've never seen, I've never actually seen an infant pigeon. I've seen fully grown pigeons. I've seen a lot of elderly pigeons, very old pigeons. I've seen the shell of a pigeon's egg. There are a lot of elderly pigeons, very old pigeons. I've seen the shell of a pigeon's egg. I've seen a pigeon with no legs,

just scotching along with the elbows of its wings. And I've never seen an infant pigeon. I've never seen a pigeon chick. I fell off my bicycle this week. I didn't injure myself. It wasn't even painful. I very peacefully fell off my bicycle in the middle of Limerick city centre and ended up lying on my back on the footpath. Of course, I initially got a shock, it's not nice to fall off your bicycle, but my backpack broke my fall.

And when I found myself on the ground and acknowledged that I wasn't hurt, I took a look around and there weren't many people and it was quite a beautiful day and I said to myself, I think I'm going to stay here. I think I'm going to stay lying on the ground having fallen off my bike. It felt very relaxing and nostalgic to just lie on the footpath in the middle of Limerick City. If someone came along I would have gotten up but there was no one around so I said fuck it I'm lying on the ground now because I'm a grown adult. I can't voluntarily make the choice to lie down on the footpath in the middle of Limerick City. That would elicit concern from people, it would draw too much attention.

And also there's a semiotics to the act of lying down on the footpath in a city, to sitting down on the footpath. It communicates to other people. I'm not part of regular society. I'm quote unquote down and out. It's a social taboo to lie on the footpath or to sit on the footpath in a city in Western culture. And I don't mean to be facetious or insensitive, but there's an ever-growing problem of addiction and homelessness in Limerick City Centre. And something I see with my eyes frequently that's particularly heartbreaking is watching people fall into addiction really rapidly because of opiates and Xanax tablets. Because that addiction is so rapid, you can see in real time people who maybe two weeks ago were living in a house or an apartment

or maybe had a job and now very suddenly they're living on the streets and they're in the throes of addiction. One of the saddest things I saw this summer was it was a couple who were very recently homeless and they'd set up a tent under a bridge and I could tell that they were very recently homeless because they tried to make their tent a bit like a home. They'd set up pallets outside to create a little yard or a garden. They had a gas stove. And the man had this look of embarrassment in his eyes. And he would stare at everyone who passed with a look that communicated,

why are you looking at me? And then about three weeks later, I saw that same man lying down in the middle of the street, passed out, clearly because of opiates of some description, opiate tablets. Because there's warning signs, there's warning signs all over the walls where people are homeless in Limerick City. There's warning signs about certain opiates to be avoided,

like fentanyl and stuff like that, that's incredibly dangerous. And then I saw the woman a couple of weeks later, just sitting on the side of the ground, begging with a cup. And all of these human beings, who experience feelings such as dignity and self-esteem, all of those people, they have their first moment where they make the decision to sit down on the footpath. And once that happens, the rest of society interprets that as you're no longer part of society, you are out of society now. We don't view you as fully human now, and that's why we're able to walk over you, or to walk past you,

or not notice you when we walk down the road. And I tried to make the conscious decision in myself to not allow that in me, to not see people who are sitting down on the side of the road or who are lying on the road to not dehumanize these people. I give them money, I offer to buy them food when I can. If it's somebody who's in the throes of opiate addiction, they might really need, like really need something like a hat or gloves that could help them survive through the night, especially in winter. But if they're in the throes of addiction, if they have money, they won't buy themselves

a set of gloves or they won't buy themselves a milkshake, because they'll buy opiates instead. And I say milkshake because usually when I ask one of these people, do you want me to go and get you some food? They say yes. Can you get me, in the summertime it's can you get me a milkshake in supermax, and in the wintertime it's can you get me a hot chocolate, because their stomachs are fucked. And I'm not saying this stuff to brag about me being nice to homeless people or being nice to people who are experiencing addiction. I'm saying it to, I suppose, acknowledge the privilege, acknowledge my privilege as I took advantage of falling off my bike, lying on the footpath, and going,

I'm not going to get up for a bit. I can do this as a novelty, not because I have to. But now I had my excuse, I've just fallen off my bike, I've got a very good reason to be on the ground, on my back, in the middle of the city, looking up. And it reminded me of being a child. When I was a child, when there was no internet, when there was nothing on television, when I'd be bored out of my skull, I used to walk around Limerick City and only look up.

The city that can be so familiar to you that you know very well can take on an entirely new dimension when you just look at the tops of buildings. So there I was, lying on the ground, having just fallen off my bike, admiring the lovely charging windows and stonework of the buildings around me, noticing dandelions and nettles on the roves of buildings, thinking to myself, how the fuck did you get up there? The contrast of red brick against the clear blue sky, and then I noticed right above me was a telephone line, and about five pigeons staring down at me like impartial judges.

All of them the exact same size. Adult pigeons, no infant pigeons. And because I was lying on the footpath, because I was viewing the city from a new perspective with new eyes, I really started to marvel at the pigeons. I completely take pigeons for granted, I don't notice them. I walk through flocks of pigeons every single day because they don't keep their distance. They're not like other birds. They don't seem bothered by humans. They're just there all the time like

the concrete. They're not animals. They're part of a city. And looking at them up in that telephone line while I was lying on my back, I said to myself, what's your story? What's the story with G? What are you about? I got up off the ground. I wasn't lying there that long. Maybe a minute. One minute.

90 seconds at a stretch. But that's still a long time to lie on your back in the city centre on the footpath. So I got up and I went into a cafe and I ordered myself a jasmine green tea, which is green tea that tastes like flowers. I took out my laptop and started vigorously researching pigeons and it led me down a very bizarre trail of synchronicity. There's a sadness to pigeons. So the pigeons that we see every single day in our cities, they're not wild animals. Like take a crow for instance, or a roc. Like crows, they live in the city.

There's a bunch of crows, but they're native creatures, they're indigenous to Ireland. They might live in cities, but they're still a wild bird, but their habitat is gone. So they've adapted to living in cities. Same with starlings. Starlings are indigenous to Ireland, but they live in cities now. Like in Limerick, there's a street, I've done an entire podcast on it, the street's called Bedford Row. And I call this street the Birdshit District. Because at this time of year, people literally walk down this street with their hands over their face because the smell of starling shit is so strong.

Every evening, the starlings gather in the trees of the Birdshit District. Well, first, what they do is they fly, the starlings fly in the trees of the birdshit district. Well first what they do is they fly, the starlings fly into the air in a singular formation known as a marmoration. This great swirling pattern in the sky as the sun goes down where thousands of starlings fly around and they make, they all make one big shape in the sky. Sometimes they make the shape of a giant bird. Now there's a sadness in that too because it's taught that the reason that starlings all

gather and fly into this terrifying shape in the sky is because they're trying to frighten away their natural predators. Birds of prey. But a lot of those birds of prey, they're extinct in Ireland now, they don't exist anymore. So the starlings still continue every evening, frightening away a predator that doesn't exist. But then what happens is, once the starlings are finished

with their big marmoration in the sky, they all come down to Bedford Row in Limerick, thousands of them, and they perch in the sky. They all come down to Bedford Row in Limerick, thousands of them, and they perch in the trees and they chirp loudly and shit. They chirp and chirp and chirp. They're having a conversation and they fucking shit everywhere. But then this shit, which should be absorbed into the soil, or which contains seeds for plants to grow. In Limerick City, this shit just... it just goes onto the pavement, and the next morning it creates

a powerful stench of bird shit. But starlings are an ancient Irish bird. The Irish name for a starling is Druid. We don't know why starlings are called Druid in Irish. The best guess maybe is because they're so spectacular, because they're shapeshifters and because they create this wonderful visual show in the sky and they do it like clockwork every fucking evening as the sun goes down, that maybe pre-Christian

Irish Druids worshipped them in some way or they had a ritual around the starling. There's no mention of starlings in Irish mythology, but there is a mention of starlings in Ireland in Welsh mythology. There was a King of Britain called Bran, and he had a sister called Branwen, and they lived in Wales. And the King of Britain wanted peace with the Kingdom of Ireland. So Bran, the King of Britain, decided he'd send his sister Branwyn over to Ireland to marry the King of Ireland, who was called Matalwitch, in the hopes that this marriage would create peace between Wales and Ireland. And Branwyn seemed okay with this.

She was like, okay, I'll get married to the King of Ireland, no problem. But when she traveled over from Wales to Ireland, she brought with her her brother, whose name was Efnissian. And Efnissian sounded like just a fucking dickhead. He drank too much, he used to offend people, he used to get into fights. So in Ireland, the night before,

Branwynn was supposed to get married to the King of Ireland. Her brother got drunk, went apeshit, and killed a lot of Irish horses with a knife for the laugh. And this deeply offended the Irish. And the King of Ireland was like, I'm not marrying her now. So he killed her dickhead brother, the horse mutilator. And then he imprisoned Branwyn. He kept her as prisoner, he didn't marry her.

And meanwhile her other brother Bran, the King of fucking Britain, is over in Wales, assuming everything is fine. His sister is married to the King of Ireland, she's a Queen now, everything's okay, there won't be any war, and there'll be peace between Wales and Ireland. But the King of Ireland is so pissed off and offended about the murdered horses that the King of Ireland is like, fuck that, we're going to invade Wales. While Bran the King thinks that I'm married to his sister, we're actually going to invade Wales with a huge army. Now Branwyn, she's prisoner

in Ireland, locked away in a dungeon. And she knows that the Irish are going to invade Wales with a huge army and she'd love to warn her brother, King Bran, but she can't. But while she's prisoner in Ireland, a little starling shows up to her every single day. An Irish bird called the druid shows up to Branwyn every single day, and she gets friendly with this little starling. Now starlings are mimics. They can impersonate any sound, so Branwyn, while she's trapped as a prisoner in Ireland, every day, she teaches this starling how to speak Welsh and then she sends the

starling the little druid bird off over the Irish Sea to Wales and the starling arrives in King Bran's court and starts to speak Welsh and he says to the king the Irish are after kidnapping your fucking sister they didn't get married at all your brother's a lunatic he he killed a load of horses. Your sister, Branwyn, she's a prisoner. And the fucking Irish are on their way with a huge army and they're gonna kill everyone. And then King Bran says, fuck that, I'm invading them first. And he sends a massive army over to Ireland and there's a huge battle. So that's the closest story, mythology, that we have to understanding why the starling might be called druid in Irish. It's not from our

mythology, it's from Welsh mythology. But starlings, starlings are, they're native to Ireland. Even when they live in cities, starlings are wild. But pigeons, pigeons aren't wild. They're feral. Technically, pigeons aren't real. They were created by humans. Pigeons are fully domesticated animals, like dogs, that we just don't have a use for anymore. That's why they behave differently. You can walk through a flock of pigeons in a city. they don't give a shit if you're close to them. It's not because the pigeons have gotten used to humans. Like starlings live in my city. Starlings not gonna let me anywhere near it because it's a wild animal.

The pigeon is much closer to a dog. It's an animal that has been bred, created and domesticated by humans over thousands of years. Pigeons don't have a reason to fear us because they still think that we're their friends. We started to breed domesticated pigeons around the same time that we started to domesticate cats when humans began living in villages and towns 12,000 years ago. Now wild pigeons do exist, but they're not called pigeons, they're called rock doves. And all the pigeons that you see in your city, they're descended from the rock dove.

So a rock dove, which looks a lot like a pigeon, they're native to coastal cliffs in the north coast of Africa and the southern coast of Europe. Rock doves, they live high up in cliffs. They find little nooks and crannies on the side of a mountain or a coastal cliff and they make their nest in there alongside seagulls, alongside seabirds.

But what made the rock dove kind of strange is, even though you could have a lot of rock doves nesting in a cliff, they're not seabirds. Like a seagull, they live near a cliff, but they'll eat fish, their food source is in the ocean. But the rock dove would leave its nest and travel for miles inland to search for seeds and berries and then find its way back home.

It's a bird that has the capacity to travel great distances in the search of food and then find its way back home. 12,000 years ago when humans stopped becoming hunter-gatherers and humans started to farm and to live in towns and villages, these rock doves would start to show up and they'd start to eat our grain that we'd leave lying around. All of a sudden there's these new birds, you don't know where they come from, they come from a great distance, but now they're interested in human beings because we have serpilis. That's also when cats start to show up. When humans started to farm and we had serpilis and we had bits of grain,

then you've got rats and mice showing up to eat the grain, and rock doves showing up to eat the grain, and then cats came along and said, what's the crack? We're going to hang around here, and we'll kill the animals that are eating your grain. Is that all right with you? So you've got all these new birds that are traveling great distances to eat our grain, and then one day a human decides, I'm going to catch one of these birds here. Well, they're flocking around all these oats that are on the ground. I'm going to catch one of these birds and eat them.'re flocking around all these oats that are on the ground, I'm gonna catch one of these birds and eat them. So humans start to eat the rock doves.

They're like, wow, these are tasty. But the rock doves keep coming back. Because the humans just have loads and loads of grain and oats and wheat. And now they stop living in the fucking cliffs miles away, and they start to build their nests in little nooks and crannies in human towns and they stick around with us because we're a source of grain. But as I mentioned earlier there, these rock doves, their special skill was travelling for miles and miles to get food and then finding their way back home.

So someone in the Middle East, around 3000 years ago, figured out, hold on a second, what if I just tie a message to this bird's leg? I can train it to fly this message miles and miles away to another person, and then the bird flies back to me. And this becomes huge in ancient Egypt. Now you've got pigeons, homing pigeons.

They're not just a food source now. They're humanity's most reliable source of fast, long-distance communication, especially in the context of war, which is something I find fascinating. In relation to that Welsh myth that I told you there about King Bran and Branwen, you can't train a starling to carry a message across long distances. That myth is like a piece of science fiction. The myth is, wow, imagine we had this magical druid bird that you could train to fly long distances to warn somebody about an invading army before the army gets there. Imagine how many lives could be saved. Wouldn't that technology be astounding? The Welsh myth is imagining the

possibility of this but at the same time in the Middle East and in Egypt this is what people were doing with pigeons. Pigeons were utterly crucial to the advancement of human civilization. They're not rock doves anymore. Now they're pigeons. Humans have bred them into this new creature in the way that wolves aren't dogs. Pigeons are their flying dogs.

If you have the technology to transmit a message over great distances in a short amount of time, now your civilization advances to the next level. Militarily, economically, everything. So people kept breeding better and better pigeons to be faster, to be smarter, to be comfortable with being handled, to not be afraid of humans. Pigeons were bred to survive the chaos of war. Loud noises, smoke, fire. This is why they don't give a shit about living in cities. This is why they'll nest under a busy underpass.

We've bred them like dogs to tolerate the worst chaos of our civilization. Pigeons were dogs that were as useful to our ancestors as the internet. Pigeons were used in the Olympics of ancient Greece to announce the winner. In the Middle Ages, royalty would breed fancy pigeons, mad-looking pigeons with plumage like peacocks. By the time pigeons started to reach Europe, Medieval Europe in particular, they became a source of class warfare. Because in Medieval Europe, only royalty and nobility were allowed to keep pigeons.

But the royalty would be living in their castles. They kept pigeons in these houses called dovecotes. They'd use the pigeons for messaging and also for eating. Pigeon became a real fancy meat that only wealthy people ate in Europe in the Middle Ages. But the problem was, is that the pigeons would feast on the grain belonging to the poor people. So if you were a peasant, all these pigeons are flying down, eating all your food, fattening themselves up, and then the king is eating the pigeon. There was a peasant's revolt in France in 1789.

During the French Revolution, the peasants would go to the house of the Lord and demand the head of the Lord's prized pigeon. But pigeons... Pigeons were also crucial in the advancement of modern capitalism. In 1602, you have the colonial period. The British, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, they are quote unquote, discovering new lands in North America, in India. The colonial empire start to emerge in Europe. Let's just take the Caribbean for example because I spoke about this last week. So

you've got the British and the Dutch and they're colonizing the Caribbean. They're using slave labor from Africa and in the Caribbean they're using this slave labor to grow shit tons of sugar and then that's being brought back home to Europe and being sold. The emergence of a global economy. What you have then too, in 1602, is the first example of a stock exchange. The ability for members of the public to buy shares in a company. I'm going to pay a small bit of money with a bunch of other people for this English ship to go over to the Caribbean and then come back with a bunch of sugar.

And because I've bought shares in that ship, I'm entitled to some of the profits of that sugar. Even though I'm not going to the Caribbean, I'm not setting foot on the ship, I'm staying here in London. I've bought shares in that expedition and I'm entitled to some of the profits now. I'm going to buy some shares in that ship there for the sugar. I'm gonna buy some shares in that other ship there for cotton and that one over there. I'm gonna buy a few shares in that ship that's going to India and it's gonna bring back a load of opium.

So now that's the stock exchange. That's that's modern capitalism. That's the world we live in today. That begins in the 1600s with the emergence of colonialism. So let's just say you're investing in sugar. Well, if there's lots of sugar, then sugar is cheap. But if there's not a lot of sugar, now sugar is expensive. So at 1605, you're a wealthy investor. Loads of sugar is on its way back from the Caribbean, on an entire fleet of ships. There's no fear of the sugar supply, there's gonna be plenty of sugar,

so sugar shares are cheap. But there's a storm at sea, and the sugar ships are destroyed, so now there's gonna be a sugar shortage. Well if you know this information before everybody else, you can make a huge profit if you buy sugar shares while they're cheap, and sell them when they're high when there's a sugar scarcity.

Pigeons Pigeons were essential for the speedy transfer of information during the early stock exchange. If you're in the London Stock Exchange and your pigeon makes it back first with information about a shipwreck, a sugar shipwreck. Then you're about to become wealthy. The investors who were using pigeons to carry messages, they had the information first, and they could profit from selling and buying shares. The more efficient your personal system of pigeons were, the faster they were, the longer the distance they could travel, the more money you made from the stock exchange.

But this need for information, this need for instant information, which became the backbone of the accumulation of wealth and modern capitalism, this led to the modern news service. There was a Jewish man, a Jewish German man called Israel Beer Josephette. He converted to Christianity and changed his name to Paul Julius Reiter. Do you ever read the news today, any headline, and you read the story and the source says Reiter's, R-E-U-T-E-R-S. Well that Paul Julius Reiter, he established

the world's first modern news agency to service the stock exchange and banks in 1850. A reliable single source of verifiable information about everything from wars to natural disasters to rebellions, anything that might influence the price of shares on the stock market. Writers was established as the news service to be the reliable source. If it says writers, then this is true, this is verified. Well writers started off as a flock of pigeons.

The very same writers that you see today on the fucking news that started off as 45 pigeons in 1850, to very quickly and speedily deliver information about news and stock prices to serve as capitalism. The quicker you had the news, and if you could verifiably establish that it was true because it came from writers, then you can buy and sell stocks because of pigeons. So by the 1850s, the global economy depends upon the speed of pigeons. But then what starts to happen? The telegraph gets invented. The ability for humans to transmit information electronically over wires.

And now pigeons suddenly aren't useful anymore. Why would you possibly need to use a pigeon to communicate when you can instantly communicate using the telegraph? But another thing that happened with pigeons in the 1800s is they became associated with anti-Semitism. There was a massive European banking family who were Jewish called the Rothschilds, and I mentioned them last week. And they made extensive use of pigeons so that they could get information quickly and invest in the stock exchange.

In the early 1800s, the French general Napoleon, you all know Napoleon, well he was taking over Europe as far up as Russia, but in 1811 Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. Now that's huge. You've got Napoleon taken over half of Europe, so if he suddenly loses to the British, then that drastically changes the world economy. Well it's hard to know what's fact and what's myth and historians are still arguing about it. But it was said at the time that the banker Nathan Rochchild knew that Britain won the

Battle of Waterloo before anyone else because of his carrier pigeons, then went to the stock exchange, pretended that Britain lost, dumped all his shares in the stock market, started behaving as if Britain lost. Then everyone else went, well fuck it, if he's dumping all his shares, because he's, he's Rotschild, he'd know, if he's dumping his shares, then I'm gonna dump all my shares, effectively tricking everybody. And then he quickly bought back all their shares. And then everyone found out that Britain had actually won. So he made millions and millions from the Battle of Waterloo because of his pigeons, but that he tricked everybody else to sell.

So fortunes were destroyed because of this man's greed. But that then led to huge anti-Semitic propaganda about crafty, sneaky Jewish bankers and their crafty sneaky pigeons. We don't know how much of that is true and how much of it is massive anti-semitic propaganda. But Adolf Hitler believed this and he banned Jewish people from owning pigeons. But I was reading all this in a cafe, drinking my jasmine green tea, thinking about the pigeons. They were so important. And then all it took was one invention, the telegraph, and then the telephone. And we

didn't need pigeons anymore. It's like we suddenly, they made a brief resurgence in World War I, when the telecommunications equipment was blown up, both sides used carrier pigeons to transmit vital information. But all the pigeons you see today, it's like we suddenly abandoned cats or abandoned dogs. All those pigeons in our cities, they're not wild, they're domesticated animals, they're domestic animals that have gone domesticated animals, they're domestic animals that have gone fully feral, and they've never left our side because they've been bred to be our friends, they're bred to tolerate our noise and our dirt and to pick at the

scraps of our food. And the great sad irony for me is that they part on telephone cables. They part and sit on the very cables that made us not need them anymore. And now we consider them a nuisance. A nuisance that we just walk through and walk over. Now I thought my pigeon saga was over. But as I was sitting in that cafe drinking the jasmine tea, I was saying to myself, right, the only reason you're researching pigeons is because you fell on your back, you

fell off your bike, you fell on your back, you chose to stay on the fucking footpath, and you were looking up at those poor pigeons on the telephone wire. And I started to beat myself up a bit about falling off my bike because it could have been dangerous. I wasn't wearing a helmet and I was very lucky to not be injured at all. See the reason I fell off my bike is absolutely ridiculous reason. I wear glasses when I cycle because I can't see into the distance very well so I wear glasses so I can see road signs or anything that's ahead of me but for the past two weeks I'm missing an arm on my glasses

So my glasses only have one arm, which means they hang off my face Because glasses, glasses hook around your ears. So my glasses only hook around one of my ears So my glasses tilt to the right. So this means when I'm cycling, I have to tilt my head and my body to the left so that the glasses remain on my face. So I'm cycling like a fucking dickhead, slanting completely towards the left so that my one-armed glasses stay on my face. But this led to me cycling in circles a bit, so then to counter balance that, I started wearing my backpack hanging on my right shoulder with books to weigh it down.

So now I'm cycling around the place with one-armed glasses, leaning my body to the left but then balancing my weight by having a bag hanging off my right an utterly bizarre ridiculous way to cycle that will inevitably end in a fall so that's why I fell off my bicycle because I only had one arm on my glasses so while I was in the cafe I said right well I'm gonna get these fucking glasses fixed but when I went to get my glasses fixed, a bizarre synchronicity occurred that led me back to the Napoleonic Wars. And I'm gonna tell you about that right after the ocarina pause. Okay I've got my baritone ocarina this week. My stone baritone ocarina in my office. I'm gonna play this

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Their values change and past performance may not be repeated. Very pigeon-like indeed. That was the Ocarina Foss. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you marr-t, merriment, distraction, information, whatever the fuck. Please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast because it's my full-time

job. This is how I earn a living. This is how I rent out my office. It's how I have the time to research and write a big monologue essay each week. And to deliver what I'm truly passionate about, this week I'm really passionate about pigeons. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it, you can listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind By Podcast. Offcoming gigs? I'm at the Edinburgh Festival. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind Boy podcast. Offcoming gigs, I'm at the Edinburgh Festival. I'm sure if you Google Blind Boy at the Edinburgh Festival, you'd be able to get tickets to whatever the fuck it is I'm doing there. The Edinburgh Book Festival, it's the Edinburgh Book Festival.

I'm really looking forward to eating Edinburgh chip shop sauce again. I'm gigging at Electric Picnic. Come along to that. I've got a fantastic guest at Electric Picnic. That'll be good, Craig. In September, I'm in the Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival. Then November, I'm in Clare Morris up in Mayo. And then I've got a Vicar Street in November on the 19th. I'm gonna be doing an Australia and New Zealand

tour in early 25. I'll be announcing details of that next week. Really looking forward to come back to Australia and New Zealand. I think the last time I did a live podcast there was 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Which means, If I'm doing a live podcast in Australia and New Zealand in early 25, that'll be five five fucking years five fucking years Since I did a live podcast in Australia and New Zealand. That does not feel like five years. I Think I even yeah, I recorded a podcast in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney and released it in like 2020. The pandemic has destroyed my concept of time.

This October, in like three months time, this podcast is seven years old. I'll have delivered a podcast every single week for seven years straight. I'll have delivered a podcast every single week for seven years straight without missing one. I'm so unbelievably grateful. I'm so grateful to still be making this podcast after seven years. To still be earning a living. Earning a living doing what I fucking love. Something I didn't think was possible at all independently. So thank you so much to all the patrons for making that fucking possible. I've no intentions of slowing down or quitting.

I love making this podcast. Some weeks, especially when I'm busy with other projects. It can be difficult to deliver this podcast, but I never take it for granted. I always turn up every Wednesday with a brand new podcast, and I try to give it my very best and make sure whatever the fuck I'm talking about, that I'm genuinely passionate about it. And I'm really happy to say too,

that this week I've been nominated for a fucking huge award. This podcast has been nominated for a Sky Arts Award over in England and the Sky Arts Awards used to be the South Bank Show Awards which was selected by Melvin Bragg. Melvin Bragg is still involved but this year it's called the Sky Arts Awards and I think I'm the only podcast that's nominated and the vibe I got is the thing that got me nominated was my consistent insistence that this podcast is a novel. I believe podcasting to be, it's an emerging medium. It's not radio. Podcasting is a new artistic space and because of where technology is and this technology is

really only about 10 years old, I can record and edit audio with the ease and intricacy that I can edit words on a page using a word processor. So this podcast is writing. I write with my mouth and this is an endless auto-fictional novel which can only be realized by this new technology. So the Sky Arts Award nomination, it means that they're recognizing this podcast as a piece of art and it'd be nice to win the award but it's one of those ones where I'm fucking happy with a nomination. So I'm very happy to get the award, but also I have to be mindful of my self-esteem, that

I don't get too excited about the award. And I have to be mindful that I don't allow positive news such as being nominated for an award, that I don't allow that to influence my self-esteem or my self-worth in any way. I made a dinner and the people who are eating the dinner think that it's tasty. That's all this is. It's just an aspect of my behavior and it doesn't define my worth in any way. I'm no better or lesser of a person because I've been nominated for a fucking award. And one of the reasons I'm no better or lesser of a person, because I've been nominated for a fucking award. And one of the reasons I'm telling you a story this week about...

me falling off my fucking bicycle. Falling off my bicycle and choosing to stay on the footpath to stare at some pigeons. And falling off the bicycle because of a series of utterly ridiculous decisions. Ridiculous decisions that I made about my fucking glasses. Wearing glasses with one arm, tilting my body to the right and then using a rucksack as a ballast to weigh one side of my body down and then falling off my bike. That's Mr. Bean shit. That's ridiculous And I'm chosen to acknowledge and focus on that. To accept and recognize my fallibility as a human being.

So I don't let a fucking award go to my head and make me start thinking that I'm special. I'm trying to laugh at myself for being a silly bastard. That's really silly. That business with the glasses and the bicycle and the falling off. That slap really silly, that business with the glasses and the bicycle and the farting off. That slapstick silly. And that foolishness and that fallibility is just as important as the part of me that can get nominated for an award by the Brits. I could choose to shame myself over that bicycle incident.

That's really silly. I could really label myself. I could call myself incompetent, stupid, ditzy, thick, irresponsible, careless. I could focus on how I could've seriously injured myself. I could shame myself all day for being a stupid prick. I could hide the story of falling off the bicycle and tell nobody because I'm so embarrassed by it.

I could easily make those choices and have negative self-talk and flagellate and shame myself because I fell off the bicycle for such foolish, avoidable reasons. But I'm not. I'm choosing to see the humour in it. It's also quite funny. And I'm chosen to see the humor in it. It's also quite funny, and I'm really glad. I'm glad and I'm grateful that I didn't hurt myself, and I'm using it as an opportunity to start wearing my bicycle helmet again, because I don't like wearing my bicycle helmet,

but I'm gonna start wearing my bicycle helmet again, because I almost hit my head on the ground. But the thing is, falling off my bicycle hit my head on the ground. But the thing is, falling off my bicycle, because I had one arm on my glasses, and risking public embarrassment if anyone had been there to see it, that's just an aspect of my behavior, and it doesn't define me as a person.

Am I a stupid, irresponsible, useless prick because that happened? No, absolutely not. Similarly, am I somehow now better? Better than somebody else? Because I'm after getting nominated for some fancy award over in England. Am I entitled to more now? Am I entitled to be treated better? Or to be spoken about better than another human being because I've been nominated for a fancy award over in England. Absolutely not. All that is, is an aspect of my behavior.

And falling off my bicycle because I'd won arm on my glasses and get nominated for an award. Both these things are just aspects of my behavior and none, neither of them, in any way, change my intrinsic value that I have as a human being. I'm no better than anybody else. Nobody else is better than me. Because all humans have the same intrinsic value and it never changes and it cannot be evaluated against another human being. We all have the exact same intrinsic value and self-worth.

And no aspect of our behavior can add or take away from that. So that's another reason why I'm telling that. The pigeon in the glasses story. To humble myself, to keep myself grounded. And the reason that's important is it's so tempting when I receive good good news such as you've been nominated for an award over in England. It's so tempting for me to engage in a type of a narcissistic self-talk. When I fall off my bike and publicly humiliate myself, it's tempting to engage in self-flagellating

talk, you stupid useless fucking prick. Similarly, when I get good news, it's tempting to engage in narcissistic self-talk. You're fucking brilliant, you're so smart, you're so talented, you are. And I feel all the lovely endorphin hits and the feeling of approval. All this temporary pleasure that I get from thoughts like that. But all it does is it causes me to place my sense of self-worth in external achievement. And then that lead to my self-worth depending upon external achievement and then that lead to my self-worth depending upon external achievement. I am only a good or worthy person if people like my podcast or if my podcast gets

nominated for awards. It's a slippery slope and it's so easy to fall into and I say this because I'm doing this a long time I've fallen into that trap before. When I was in my early 20s, I got a television pilot on channel 4. I felt like I'd won the lottery. I placed all my worth, all my happiness into the fact that I'd been commissioned by channel 4 to write a pilot. Oh my god, I must be amazing. And then when that pilot didn't get commissioned and made into a series, I was crushed I was defeated. I was miserable because I told myself You're you're an amazing brilliant incredible person because you got a pilot on channel 4 So when I didn't get a fucking series then that meant I was a miserable, pathetic, useless person. And that's all bullshit. Complete fucking horse shit.

So did I get my glasses fixed? I did. Which is something I should have done weeks ago, rather than slanting my body to one side as I cycled. I left the...cafe where I was drinking the jasmine tea, and I said to myself, right, let's get these fucking glasses fixed. So the first thing I did was, I went down to Specsavers. But if you didn't buy your glasses in Specsavers, they just tell you to fuck off.

They're like, no, we can't fix these glasses. Why not? Because they're not our glasses, we can't fix them. And Specsavers have a monopoly in Limerick, so I was like, fuck, where am I gonna get these glasses fixed? So there was one independent opticians in Limerick they're called Fines Opticians so I went into them and I said look I'm missing an arm on these glasses can you give me a new arm and fix it?

They're like yes we can we can fix your. No problem. So they did. So I was thrilled. I felt a real sense of victory. I'm like, fuck Specsavers, fuck these big corporations, small, local, limerick opticians. They're gonna fix my glasses. So I left my glasses with them and they gave me a little receipt. And as I was looking at the receipt,

Fines Opticians, and I knew these opticians had been there for years, the name Fiennes just stuck out as being like a strange name, like Fiennes. So as I was waiting for my glasses to be repaired, I went researching the name Fiennes and its association with Limerick, and bizarrely, in a strange synchronicity,

it ended up tying back to the Napoleonic wars and anti-Semitism. So as I said, in the 1800s, Napoleon had taken over a lot of Europe and the Russian Empire. Now the Russian Empire has always been notoriously anti-Semitic. Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe have always faced persecution, going right back to medieval times. But when Napoleon took over parts of the Russian Empire, he brought some of the values and the ideals of the French Revolution with him,

which meant a bit more equality for Jewish people than they would have been afforded under the Russian Empire. But then, when Napoleon was defeated in Waterloo, the Russian Empire was restored, and with this, Jewish people in Russia were persecuted against again. Because of this, in the 1870s, there were pogroms against Jewish people in what is now Lithuania. Pogroms were like anti-Semitic lynchings where they'd run the Jewish people out of town. So in the 1870s, a small amount of Lithuanian Jewish refugees moved to Limerick City. It was like 50 families.

And they settled peacefully without much hassle. They all lived in a few houses in what is now Wulftetown Street. Well in 1904 there was this prick of a Catholic priest called John Creagh. There's a church in Limerick called the Redemptorist Church and it was just around the corner from Wulffetown Street where the Jewish community lived. And this priest, John Creagh, Father John Creagh, he gave a big anti-semitic speech. Like the Catholic Church aren't really fans of Jewish people. So he gave this big anti-Semitic speech, like the Catholic Church aren't really fans of Jewish people.

So he gave this big anti-Semitic speech, accusing the small local Jewish community in Limerick of being involved in ritual sacrifice. And then everybody in the church started to rile themselves up into a mob. And they left the church and they started attacking the small Jewish community in Limerick, which was just around the corner from the church. This is 1904. This event became known as the Limerick pogrom. I believe it's the only pogrom to ever happen in Ireland. The Jewish community were effectively ran out of Limerick City by an anti-Semitic mob, drummed up by a lunatic of a Catholic priest. 32 Jewish families left Limerick City by an anti-Semitic mob, drummed up by a lunatic of a Catholic priest.

32 Jewish families left Limerick that didn't feel safe anymore. Well what does this have to do with me getting my glasses fixed? Well one of the few Jewish families that stayed in Limerick after that pogrom were the Fines, and that's who founded Fines Opticians that were fixing my glasses. People who fled pogroms in Lithuania in the 1870s in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. So that's the bizarre story, the strange synchronicity that started with me falling off my bicycle because of my one-armed glasses. Researching the history of pigeons, it relating to anti-Semitism and Napoleon,

and then by mad chance, me getting my glasses fixed by an opticians that's directly related to the Napoleonic Wars and the pogroms of Lithuania. So that's my hot take this week that was thoroughly enjoyable to research. And something I'm unfortunately gonna have to fucking point out. I promise you someone's gonna get weird about the fact that I spoke about anti-semitism this week and didn't mention the genocide in Gaza. Someone on the internet is gonna point that out and it makes no sense whatsoever. I despise anti-semitism. I despise Nazis. I despise anti-Semitism. I despise Nazis. I despise when any group of people is persecuted because of who they are. I also despise the ethnic cleansing and

genocide that's happening in Gaza at the hands of Israel, and I'll continue to draw attention to it at every opportunity. And the reason I'm putting in that disclaimer is I know that someone's gonna point out or infer that me mentioning anti-Semitism somehow means that I'm not calling out Israel at the same time. The only reason someone's gonna point that out is because social media pushes everything towards binary oppositions. There's Jewish people who are losing their jobs and getting the shit kicked out of themselves by police

because they oppose the genocide in Gaza. Not all Jewish people represent the actions of Israel, and I have no issue whatsoever despising anti-Semitism and despising the genocide in Gaza and for all of these things to exist together as a complex spectrum of compassion and critical thinking. But on fucking social media, it pushes everything towards binary oppositions. If you were to mention anti-Semitism online, someone else will come in and say, what about

Palestine? And if you mention Palestine online, someone will come in and say, what about Israel? Are you anti-Semitic? Social media is designed to push everything towards binary oppositions, to create arguments, to generate data, to make money for the social media corporations. Whether it be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever the fuck, these platforms aren't designed for nuanced discussion. They're designed for binary opposition, turn and response combat to elicit the emotions of anger and fear, because that will keep you on the app longer, that gives the app more of your data and now the app makes more money.

And it's that simple. Alright, I'll chat to you next week. It's fucking four in the morning here. It's four in the morning for fuck's sake. Another late podcast. I've been here since nine in the morning. I've just worked a 19-hour day. Alright, dog bless.

Oh, I forgot to fucking say. Infant pigeons. Why have I never seen an infant pigeon? There's a reason. So basically, pigeons don't leave the nest until they're adults. They fledge in the nest. So you'll never see an infant pigeon unless you look into a pigeon's nest. But you're not getting near a pigeon's nest because they're descended from rock doves. So they live up in

crevices really high unless a pigeon builds their fucking nest on your window and you can see in there. So you're not going to see any baby or infant pigeons. Also bizarrely, pigeons produce milk. Now they're not mammals. They don't produce milk from mammary glands, but pigeons produce a strange type of milk from their throat that they use to feed their infant pigeons. And there's only two birds that produce this type of milk, and it's pigeons and flamingos. That's it. So that's why you don't see infant pigeons.

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