The Blindboy Podcast - The History of Bog Bodies and Botox

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

I explore the connections between Robbie Williams hair wax, botox and bog bodies  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Batten down the hatches, you temporary Matthews. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I'm recording this on Sunday the 21st of January. It's night time. I'm trapped in my office and Storm Isha is raging outside. Biblical wind and rain is thrashing against the window of my office. Hopefully you won't hear it. It can get slightly noisy because I've got a strip of

rubber, a thin strip of rubber on the seal of my office window to give me an extra layer of insulation from sound so you don't hear the sound of traffic and the sound of a city outside when I'm recording. But tonight the wind is so aggressive, it's causing that strip of rubber to flap and generate a buzzing sound. Starmacia is quite literally queefing in my window, and I don't mean to be vulgar or misogynistic when I say that. If it was a hole in the window, and I'd plugged it with something and the wind passing through this hole replicated the physical mechanics of a fundament or a sphincter then I would say that storm Asia is is farting in my window but no it's a long strip of rubber which

is literally flapping with a low frequency so So I think it is, it's more accurate and respectful to notice and take ownership of the fact that I have a queefing window right now. Fulvic undulations are at play. It has nothing to do with the naming of the storm, Storm Isha. Although storms, storms that have female names kill more people. And they did some research into this. And it's because people take storms with female names less seriously. Misogyny is something to be aware of

when responding to a storm. So hopefully, hopefully it won't be too loud and it won't disturb the podcast. I also have a limiter on my microphone which digitally masks background noise. But right now in Limerick there's a status orange wind warning, which is quite an extreme wind warning. wind warning. Storm Force 10 winds up around the north west of Ireland on the west coast, Galway and Mayo. They've got a status red warning right now which according to Irish meteorologists is rare and very dangerous weather conditions from intense meteorological phenomena. I hope everybody is keeping safe.

I'm imagining, I'm imagining the west coast of Ireland right now. I'm imagining the cliffs off the Aran Islands and up around Mayo. The mighty Atlantic Ocean thrashing against these huge cliffs. What about the seagulls? about the sheep what about the fucking puffins there's loads of little puffins and the islands off the west coast of Ireland and I'm thinking of them right now burying underground that's what puffins do

burying underground keeping themselves warm as the storm rages around them the last time I remember a wind and a storm that was this aggressive, it was about this time in 2019. I remember it because where I was living at the time, as I looked out my kitchen window, out the back garden, behind my back wall was this barren, untouched, industrial land full of old trees, sandwiched between retail parks and a wild city horse.

Lived in that little bit of abandoned land, a piebald pony. Someone used to show up every so often and give bales of hay to the pony to eat. But effectively, the pony just lived in this strange, barren, industrial land behind my house by itself. And I remember this one morning looking out the window, and some of the trees were knocked over because of the storm the night before. I remember seeing that creamy white flesh exposed on the tree because one of the boughs broke off and the horse got very excited by this. The horse started eating all the bark off this tree and I was in my kitchen just transfixed it was quite peaceful it felt voyeuristic it felt voyeuristic

because the horse the horse thought that it was eating the tree in private and it didn't know that I was looking and I took great pleasure and enjoyment in observing how playful and enthusiastic and curious the horse was with its lips and its big yellow teeth as it stripped away all the bark from this tree. At one point it even got up on its hind legs to really strip this bark away and I started think, is the horse taking revenge on this tree? Because the tree got battered by the storm, is the horse like kicking it when it's down? And then I started to think, oh no, the poor horse must be starving. This horse must be really hungry if it's resorting to eating the bark off a tree but apparently no that's not the case.

When a horse eats the bark off a tree that's a sign of privilege. Horses don't usually strip trees of their bark but when they do it's because they're kind of bored. They're searching for textural excitement. It means that the horse is very well fed They're kind of bored. They're searching for textural excitement. It means that the horse is very well fed. But it's getting tired of eating the same food all the time. Because even though this horse was left to its own devices.

Like I said someone was feeding it hay regularly. So the horse was bored of eating hay all the time. So wanted the excitement and texture of crunching down on bark. I read about this behaviour and apparently it's the same as when humans put croutons in our salad. Like you're eating a Caesar salad, you know. A load of fucking, a load of lettuce, that lovely cheese sauce that's in there. And then, mmm, what's that? A crouton? Fucking class. But that's what the horse was doing. That's what the horse was doing when it was relishing the bark from this tree

with its lips and its big long teeth. So like I said, this was like 2019. And I remember looking at the horse and then my phone started ringing, you know? And I kind of didn't, I wanted to keep looking at the horse. I didn't want to go then my phone started ringing you know and I kind of didn't I wanted to keep looking at the horse I didn't want to go answering my phone but I took my phone out of my pocket and

I looked down and the number that was ringing it came up on my phone as Los Angeles I don't know anyone in Los Angeles so I'm like I better pick it up so if it's Los Angeles so I'm staring at the horse eating the bark off the tree. I pick up the fucking phone. I answer it. I go, hello. And then the voice says, hello, this is Robbie Williams. And I'm like, what? What do you mean it's Robbie Williams? And he's like, it's Robbie Williams. I'm like, Robbie fucking Williams? Like famous Robbie Williams? He's like, yeah, it's Robbie Williams. Now I kept staring at the horse eating the fucking bark off the tree I became overwhelmed with just how surreal the situation was and by the way did this actually happened I did a podcast

about it in 2019 when it did happen so Robbie Williams was ringing me out of the fucking blue because I'd been tweeting things about him that were inaccurate. Because I'd been tweeting things about Robbie Williams that were inaccurate. There's a kind of an urban rumor in Ireland that Robbie Williams's hit song Angels was not written by Robbie Williams but was co-written by an Irish songwriter called Ray Heffernan when Robbie Williams was drunk at a house party in Dublin in the late 90s. Now I did a whole podcast on this story. I think it was like February 2019

so I'm not going to go into all the details. But it's a thing. Robbie Williams' biggest song, Angels, there's an Irish songwriter called Ray Heffernan and he says, I was on the lash with Robbie Williams in Dublin in the 90s and we wrote Angels together and he paid me off. And that's Ray Heffernan's side of the story. And then Robbie Williams has a completely different side of the story. And that's why he was ringing me. Because unbeknownst to me, Robbie Williams was a completely different side of the story. And that's why he was ringing me.

Because unbeknownst to me, Robbie Williams was a fan of my podcast and followed me on Twitter. And in fairness to him, he was ringing me. Because he was saying, I actually like your work. And I don't want you blind by thinking that I'm the type of person who goes nicking songs. Which was nice of him. But of course I couldn't take any of this in properly because I'm the type of person who goes nicking songs, which was nice of him. But of course I couldn't take any of this in properly because I'm staring at a horse, slowly stripping the bark from a tree. And instead of listening to Robbie Williams on the phone, talking to me,

I kind of just want to tell Robbie Williams about what I'm looking at, as he cold calls me from Beverly Hills. I wanted to say, can you stop a minute there Robbie? I'm in Limerick City and I'm voyeuristically staring at a horse that doesn't know he's being looked at as he uses a wind ravaged sycamore tree as the culinary equivalent of crotons beside an industrial estate and what I found so wonderfully synchronistic about this incident was, so Rob, like I don't know Robbie Williams. I'd never spoken to him before. Robbie Williams to me is a very, very famous man, a superstar. That's what he is. And Robbie Williams was in the boy band Take That. And Take That were a huge part of my childhood and when I was growing up

you had Take That and you had Bison and I just found it synchronistic here I am speaking to Robbie Williams while voyeuristically looking at a horse eating the bark off a tree but then the first time I met Keith Duffy

from Bison we were in Edinburgh and me and Keith accidentally, voyeuristically watched a man masturbating in an apartment across the way from our dressing room. Again, that's 100% true. I've got a podcast episode with Keith Duffy from Bi-Zone where we speak about this in detail. This happened. This isn't fiction. My two interactions with the biggest boy bands of my childhood both involve involuntarily, voyeuristically

staring at a horse enjoying the trunk of a tree and a Scottish man enjoying the trunk of his flute. But what made me, I kind of forgot everything that happened before the pandemic, to be honest. It's a weird thing. Since lockdown, I've forgotten a lot of like anything before 2020. And when the storm happened today, it made me think back to that horse and that tree. Oh yeah, and fucking Robbie Williams

rang me. Fuck, that was mad. And then that made me, it made me think of Robbie Williams again. And then I went and looked at that documentary, the documentary that's on Netflix at the moment about Robbie Williams. And I have to say, I adored it. It was fucking beautiful. It's a beautiful study of fame, the spectacle of fame, mental health, addiction. What I took from a lot of it was like Robbie Williams comes across as just a fairly down to earth, normal person. And from the documentary I could tell that he had great difficulties separating the human Robbie Williams from the famous Robbie Williams the one that's on the billboards that's up on stage that's been written about in newspapers and he struggled with this greatly and in particular he struggled a lot with bad reviews from the press or nasty words from the press.

He really, really took it to heart. It really, really hurt his sense of identity and fuelled addictive behaviours and he describes himself like here he is on top of the world playing to crowds of 90,000 people receiving all the love and adoration in the world and yet the human Robbie Williams felt utterly miserable and would find himself chasing stimulation through substances and it may

I wished after I saw the documentary I wished that when he rang me up that time I wished I did talk to him about the horse I wished I did actually talk to him and say Robbie can I stop you a second I'm looking at a horse eating the bark off a tree and this horse is doing this not because it's starving or in need of anything, but because it has all its needs met. This horse has all the hay it could possibly want, but it's eating the bark on this tree as a stimulant. It's looking for the stimulation and excitement. It's a stimulating behaviour, and this reminds me of how you describe addiction. So I do have Robbie Williams' email address.

And I might give him an email one of the days when things cool down. Because this documentary is after going fucking huge. It's like one of the top trending documentaries on Netflix. And he's back doing loads of gigs. So maybe when things get quieter I might send him an old email. And say Robbie would you like to come onto the podcast for a chat. Worst he can say is no but throughout this Robbie Williams documentary the format is very good. It's just it's Robbie Williams now sitting on a bed looking at a laptop of old footage of himself and whenever'd cut back to footage of Robbie Williams

from the early to mid-90s, I kept getting distracted by his hair. He had the wet look, it was called at the time. His hair was slick with wax and looked wet. And you don't see that anymore. You don't see wet look hair anymore. Ross Geller and friends used to have wet look hair all the time too. And so much time has passed since the fucking 90s that it just looks jarring and strange. You don't see it as a style anymore. You literally just go, why is that man's

head wet? And it was distracting me from the documentary a bit because it made me think back to when I was like a kid, when I was a teenager, a young teenager. That's what we used to do. We used to have wet look hair. You had to. There was no choice. Every lad in school had to have wet look hair. We used to use, we used to use wax called Dax. Dax wax. It was obligatory. There was blue Dax wax and red Dax wax. And I now realize that Dax wax is, it is an American hair product for Latino and African American men. But in Ireland in the 90s, it was for boys. I don't know how a Latino and African American hair product became the ubiquitous hair pomade for young lads. I couldn't stop thinking about it and I was there at home, kind of going,

I'm bored. And then I remembered, I think I still have a fucking tin of red Dax. So I went up to my bathroom and searched around inside in a cupboard and lo and behold, there it was, red fucking Dax. I'd never thrown it out. There's certain products that you just don't throw out you take them with you. Vaseline, Pseudocreme, Fix VapoRub and Red Dax. I'd taken this Dax with me while I moved around. There's a good chance I bought this fucking red Dax in 1999, lads. There's people, that's, that's 25 years ago. There's people listening to this podcast now who are younger than 25. So curiosity got the better of me.

And I said, I'm not leaving the house today. So I reached into the tin of red Dax and I put it in my hair. I put it in my hair and I gave myself the wet look in private. If you're 23 years of age, I put something in my hair that's older than you. So I gave myself a wet look hair with red dachs just to feel something, just to remember what it was like, just to be nostalgic with my follicles, like the horse eating the bark off the tree. And the smell of it. That lovely, I wouldn't call it lovely. It's kind of beeswax with a distant hum of cheap aftershave. And I thought back to all the drama, all the fucking drama that used to be created amongst teenage boys when I was growing up because of red and blue dacks.

So blue dacks was a bit like Vaseline. Blue dacks is the softer one. If you want real wet looking hair, you used blue dacks. It was effectively Vaseline. And then you had red dacks. Red dacks was hard. That's why I still have it. Really, you had red Dax. Red Dax was hard. That's why I still have it. Really, really hard.

Hard wax. And when you put it in your hair, it fucking stayed there. It stayed there. It was like rubbing candles into your head. And if the weather was cold, your hair kind of turned plastic. Because I remember that from school. Your hair went tough

and hard and plastic. And then in the summer, the wax would melt off your head and you'd have a greasy, shiny forehead. And every lad when I was a kid had a real shiny forehead. And when I was looking at Robbie Williams in that documentary, he had a shiny forehead from Dax in his hair. And if you used blue Dax, you were soft. You were a sissy. But if you used red Dax, then you were hard. Only the real men wore red Dax. They'd make fun of you if you wore blue Dax. I never got to the bottom of why that was. I never understood that. I never got to the bottom of why that was. I never understood that. Red Dax was just more masculine.

I think it had something to do with the semiotics of cigarettes. When I was a child, everyone smoked cigarettes. It's just what you did. You don't see nine-year-olds smoking cigarettes anymore. You just don't see it. But when I was a kid, you'd see nine-year-olds smoking cigarettes. There was nothing else to do. And if you smoked silk-cut blue, people would make fun of you. They'd call you a pregnant woman. Are you a pregnant woman? Why are you smoking silk-cut blue?

So you had to smoke silk-cut red or maybe silk-cut purple. And silk- cut red were really, really strong, short, horrendous, horrible cigarettes. So if you wore blue Dax in your hair and smoked silk cut blue, you were a pregnant woman. But if you had red Dax and smoked red silk cut, then you were a hard man. After a while of walking around my house with all this red Dax in my hair, I started to feel uncomfortable. I started to think that I can't believe I used to do this. This is horrendous. Every time I touch my hair, my hands are full of wax now. I need to wash this out. And then I remembered. You couldn't really wash out red Dax. This is very, very thick hair wax. there's nothing like red dax there's no other product like it

it kind of shouldn't go in your hair there was only one surefire way to get it out of your fucking hair you had to wash your head with washing up liquid that's what we did as children we smoked cigarettes and washed our hair with washing up liquid

and listened to the prodigy eventually wet look hair just fell out of fashion. All hair gel, hair wax, even brill cream fell out of fashion and it was because of one cultural moment. See we lived in a monoculture back then. We didn't have as much competition as you would now with smartphones. So if a film came out that was really popular, everyone went to see the film and you saw it once and just spoke about it for months and it became monoculture. And there was this film from, I think about 1999-2000, called There's Something About Mary. There's a scene in it which would have been referred to at the time as a water cooler moment. which would have been referred to at the time as a water cooler moment.

Before smartphones, before the internet, before you had the ability to pull up a YouTube video and look at something over and over again, you saw a film or a TV show once, there was a moment in it, and this was called the water cooler moment. It was the thing people spoke about in the offices around the water cooler or in the schoolyard in my case. So there was a big scene in this film, there's something about Mary, where the actor Ben Stiller has a wank and then when he ejaculates the sperm goes on his ear and he can't find it

and then Cameron Diaz takes the sperm from his ear and puts it in her hair because she thought it was hair wax. And then she has this quiff made out of cum. This was a defining cultural moment of the late 90s. Before 9-11, this is all anyone spoke about was Cameron Diaz's quiff. From that moment on, you couldn't wear any hair wax, you couldn't wear brill cream, you couldn't put any product in your hair because everyone went, aha, he's after wanking in his hair. That's what ended wax, brill cream, pomade. That got rid of the wet look that ended it. And I only realized that today when I was trying to wash this fucking wash the dacks out of my hair and as I was washing the dacks out of my hair with the

washing up liquid making sure not to get into my eyes and just noticing Jesus I've got dishes that need more washing up liquid than this this, it's a lot of work getting all this wax out of my hair. This is tough going. It did make me think about the, the resilience, the resilience of hair wax. And it made me think that like, Jesus, if I died with all this red dachs in my hair, this wax that's been in this tin since 1999 unscathed. It would probably survive on my corpse long after I decomposed and that got me thinking about the earliest example of hair wax in human history. In 2003 up in Meath in Ireland archaeologists found two perfectly preserved bog bodies that were 2,300

years old, mummified remains of two men. In Ireland we have peat bogs, soggy soil and turf and these environments are acidic and they're anaerobic so there's no oxygen in these bogs and a benefit of this is that we often dig up things in bogs such as wood or leather textiles and human remains things that should decompose, that never really decomposed, because of the acidic soil and lack of oxygen, perfectly preserving things that are thousands of years old. We really only started finding these things in the 20th century, because after World War II,

when there was rationing on things like coal from the UK, Ireland started to exploit our peat bogs. Ireland started to, like Bordnemona, really started to dig up our peat bogs for turf, for fuel. So as this large-scale excavation of peat bogs happened, we would find bog bodies, these preserved ancient people. And in 2003, we found the best examples, the best preserved examples. And they're on display in the Irish National Museum, I think, up in Dublin.

They're incredible. But the perfect preservation of these two men, it was able to tell us a hell of a lot about Irish history 2,300 years ago that's that's a long fucking time that's a long time we don't have writing from that period this is 300 years before the fucking birth of Christ long time ago the interesting thing with bog bodies in Ireland is most of the bog bodies that are dug up, they tend to be people who were murdered very, very violently and ritualistically. The reason that archaeologists think this is the case is because bog land, you can't do much with bogland you can't raise cattle there

because they'll sink can't grow anything there so bogland in Ireland doesn't have much use other than to dig it up for turf so at 2300 years ago bogland would often have been on the borders of territory

Ireland was made up of many many little kingdoms and bogland would often border a kingdom so they found some interesting things about these men, these bog bodies the first thing they noticed is their hands were perfectly preserved to the point that they could see their fingerprints and they noticed that these men's hands contained no marks and their nails their fingernails were very well manicured so this let the archaeologists know okay these lads that were violently killed and tied up their hands were tied up they didn't do manual labour, so they were probably quite wealthy,

quite important people. The other thing they noticed, one of them had their head smashed in with a club, hands tied behind his back. The other one had been stabbed repeatedly with hazel sticks and stuck into the ground and decapitated. Both of these bog bodies, called Clannic Cavan Men and Old Crahan Men, both of them had their nipples cut off. And this is very interesting because they found other bog bodies with nipples cut off. Bog bodies that aren't 2,500 years old, ones that might be 600 years old. And there's a theory about this. The theory is that in pre-Christian Ireland, right, pagan Ireland, the local king, the king

in whatever little area, that king, when they became king, they married the land. The land was the goddess, the goddess of fertility. And when you became king, you married that land. Nipples, particularly on men, were quite significant in pagan Irish society. Even in, so these lads that were dug up, right, that's 2,300 years ago. So these lads that were dug up, right, that's 2,300 years ago. But you can read the Confessions of St. Patrick, writings that St. Patrick wrote himself in Latin. And St. Patrick wrote these in the year 500. So that's 1,500 years ago.

St. Patrick wrote in the year 500 about some Irish sailors who tried to make him suck their breasts as a sign of submission and Saint Patrick wrote that day I refused to suck their breasts because of my reverence for God they were pagans and I hoped they might come to faith in Jesus Christ this is how I got to go with them and we set sail straight away. So you have there St. Patrick writing down in the year 500 AD, sucking of nipples was a sign of submission amongst men in pre-Christian Irish society. Like today, if this still existed today, it'd be like our politicians and stuff with their suits they'd be wearing their suits and then there'd be two holes in their suits for their nipples to stick out and instead of

shaking hands with businessmen and politicians you'd have to suck their tits so the theory is that these bog bodies had their nipples cut off because they may have been local kings. They may have been kings in the area and if there was a bad harvest or animals died, crops didn't grow, then these kings' marriages, their marriage to the earth goddess had failed and there was some connection between the male breast of a king and the relationship with the earth goddess. So because the crops failed they think these two wealthy men were executed violently and their bodies were dumped outside the border of the land into useless, unfertile bog land, into the bog as a sacrifice to the earth goddess because the man had failed to get her, the king had failed to get her pregnant

effectively and give fertility to the land of which he was king. So he was violent. They were both violently executed ritualistically as a sacrifice to the Earth Goddess. And their nipples were cut off so that they could never ever be king in this life or in the other world. But something I find really fascinating about these two bog bodies that they dug up in 2003, very close to each other and executed at the same time. One of them was mad tall, like six foot six, which is exceptionally tall now, but 2,300 years ago, that man was a giant. But then the other dude was only five foot tall. But if you look at his corpse in the museum, he's got a mad haircut. He's got really long hair that sticks out and points

upwards like a punk. Now the theory is that maybe he was insecure. If he's hanging about with this cunt who's six foot six and he's five foot tall, maybe he was trying to make his hair really, really tall so that he didn't look as short. But they analysed his hair and they found hair wax. They found hair wax in the hair of this bog body that's 2,300 years old. And it was made from resin, from pine tree resin, which could only be sourced in the forests of the southern part of Spain. So the wax, the hair wax in that bog body's hair lets us know that the people of Ireland 2,300 years ago were trading with the people in Spain. And there's your evidence, which is phenomenal, because the hair wax wouldn't rot. And that there

is the earliest example, the earliest evidence we have of wet look Dax wax in human history. Bee's wax was used for ancient haircuts. Another product that was used for ancient hair as a wax or a pomade was known as lanolin. Lanolin is an oil that's secreted in the skin of sheep. And as I hear Storm Aisha battering the window there outside, I'm thinking about the Aran Islands. I'm thinking about the Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland, just off Galwayway who have a red weather warning right now and they're getting murdered by the winds at the moment, they're getting murdered by Aisha. But the Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland, that's always been a harsh environment right

there on the Atlantic with a strong culture of boat building and fishing. And lanolin was very important to the people of the Aran Islands. A traditional form of clothing from the Aran Islands is the Aran sweater. This is now mostly fetishised by the tourism industry. But Aran sweaters are indigenous to the Aran Islands, and they're woolly jumpers. They're woolly jumpers with very specific Aran patternsers are indigenous to the Aran Islands. And they're woolly jumpers. They're woolly jumpers with very specific Aran patterns on them. But they were working clothes. They were clothes that fishermen wore.

And you might be thinking, Jesus, some fisherman 200 years ago who's out now on the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean with a storm going like Isha out there trying to catch fish. How was a woolly jumper supposed to protect that fisherman? Well, what makes Aran sweaters so unique is the wool which came from the sheep was unscoured, which means it retained its lanolin. It retained the oil of the sheep's skin. And the type of sheep that were used in the Aran Islands were particularly oily sheep. The wool produced was known as bonine. So a real traditional Aran jumper. It's waterproof. It's waterproof because

it retains that lanolin oil, that oil that was used for hair wax. It's present in the iron sweater, so it's actually waterproof. And these iron sweaters were often crocheted by the fishermen's wives. And if you look at an iron sweater, they're real chunky sweaters. Real iron sweaters have got various different types of patterns woven into them and these patterns are symbolic they're not just beautiful for the sake of it so some iron sweaters might have kind of a honeycomb pattern woven into it and this was to look like the honeycomb in a beehive and bees who were seen as very hard-working efficient insects. So the wives would weave these honeycomb patterns into the iron jumper so that the fishermen would work diligently like bees and catch fish. Other patterns looked like ropes or cables which would have been important instruments to

the fishermen or you might see shapes that are like lozenges or diamonds diamonds meaning riches that hopefully go out you go out there and have a bounty and bring in riches of fish but also the patterns are reminiscent of the type of indigenous Irish art that you might have seen carved in stones that are thousands of years old or the type of patterns that are present in manuscripts like the Book of Kells. The same pagan fertility relationship with the landscape that you see in the bog bodies with their nipples, you also see it in the iron sweaters. A sense that the land isn't there to be fully exploited,

but it's that the sea and the fish, they're not in your control, they belong to the earth goddess. And you might need talismans or charms in order for the earth goddess to bestow bounty upon you rather than nature just being a thing you completely exploit. And you know manliness, fertility, strength, virility. I had on this podcast a few months back David Cohn who was single-handedly rediscovering the ancient Irish tradition of lifting heavy stones and he found that in areas in the west of Ireland, around the Aran Islands, the lifting of a heavy stone was a rite of passage for a man. They were sometimes known as testing stones.

When a man could lift this rock, this big stone, up to a certain height, then that was the test. Then he was strong enough to go out there on a boat in the middle of Storm Isha and be able to hold on to the rope while the sail is being blown by the wind another theory about

iron knitting patterns is that certain sailors or fishermen not only would they have iron sweaters or Ganses as they would have been known, not only would they have had Ganses knitted from but pants and also socks and they don't know whether this is mythology or fact but some people think that certain iron socks would have been knitted with patterns that were unique to each individual sailor or fisherman so that their body got lost at sea. The

body might decompose but the Aran socks with the lanolin protecting it wouldn't and you could identify the body by the pattern woven into the socks. But the Aran islands were always viewed as an area that's so far west and so barren that it was almost uncontacted and untouched by British colonization. Like in the 1850s, the Royal Irish Academy, they all went out to the Aran Islands these would have been wealthy Irish Protestants in the 1800s who had money

and privilege and the time and the safety to fetishise Irish indigenous culture they viewed the Aran Islands and the Aran fishermen as Aboriginal, indigenous uncontacted Irish people, where you could go and get a sense of a magical world that's completely untouched.

They fully fetishised the Aran Islands. William Wilde, Oscar Wilde's da, used to take people out there on sightseeing trips, looking at the natives. This is beautifully summarized in James Joyce's short story The Dead which I did a podcast on a couple of months back but James Joyce's short story The Dead which is written and set around 1912 or 1913 I think. It's about a dinner party in Dublin with some very wealthy, upper-class Protestant Irish people. And the theme of Irish independence, Ireland being free from Britain, was very much in vogue. And one of the wealthy patrons at this party says to the main protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, are you going out west for your holidays? Are you going to the Iron Islands? Are you going out west for your holidays? Are you going to the Aran Islands? Are you going to connect with the indigenous Aboriginal,

the real culture of the land? And Gabriel Conroy wasn't that interested and she called him a West Briton. So the Aran Islands was seen as a holiday destination, an area of pilgrimage where wealthy people from Dublin would travel to with the sense that what they're doing is connecting with a real Irishness but actually what they're doing is treating the

treating the local people in the Aran Islands as noble savages viewing them not as humans but as wild animals to be observed and learned from but in the Aran Islands, this lanolin, lanolin, the wax, the oil from the sheep, it was extracted and it was used to waterproof things and it was used as a hair gel to waterproof the hair and the face. So these are just some of the thoughts that struck me while I was looking at Robbie Williams's wet look hair from 1994.

Before I continue I think we'll we'll pause the story now and have a little bit of a an ocarina pause. I don't have my ocarina of course because I'm inside my office but what I do have I think I might have I might have mentioned this book before but it's so good I'll mention it twice. I think I might have mentioned this book before, but it's so good I'll mention it twice. You're always asking me to recommend good books about Irish mythology. And a really, really good one, even though it might be hard to find because it's out of print. But it's recent enough, it's maybe only 15 years old. There's a book called Over Nine Waves, a book of Irish legends,

translated and written by Marie Heaney, who I believe, I think she might have been the poet Seamus Heaney's wife, or sister, wife I think, but the book Over Nine Waves, a book of Irish legends by Marie Heaney, it's just a wonderful book of Irish mythology, with quite a fucking unique translation of the stories excellently written

so I'm going to hit myself into the head with that and you're going to hear an advertisement for something, okay? On April 5th You must be very careful, Margaret It's the girl Witness the birth Bad things will start to happen Evil things Of evil

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A very crisp wallop. Um, quite a sturdy book. So it doesn't have that snap on it. That was quite a pleasant book to hit myself into the head with. Over Nine Waves by Marie Heaney. If you can get it, do, but it's hard to find. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast.

I adore making this podcast. I fucking love it. The joy that it brings me to have this much freedom, this much freedom to do whatever the fuck I want to do and to know that ye like it and listen to it. Sometimes I just get frightened and anxious knowing that one day it will end because I can't possibly think of a better job. I can't possibly think of something that's so perfectly suited to who I am and what I love doing. I adore making this podcast and it's my full-time job. I'm very lucky to say that this is what I do for a living.

This is how I rent out this office. It's how I pay my bills. And the reason I have the time and space to deliver the best podcast that I can possibly deliver each week is because of patrons. It's because of patrons of this podcast who pay me money. It's that simple. So if you like this podcast, if it brings you entertainment, joy, solace, relaxation, whatever the fuck, if you enjoy the podcast and you listen to it regularly, please consider paying me for the work that I put into the podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.

If you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You listen for free. Listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free everybody gets a podcast i get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and make sure that if when you are signing up for the patreon become a paid patreon subscriber because recently they've introduced free subscribers.

I think that's just a way for Patreon to get your email or something, but I don't see any money from that. So if you are subscribing to Patreon, become a paid subscriber. And also, I get so many fucking DMs. I get about 100 DMs a day on Instagram. And I try to answer as many as I can.

So sorry if I've missed any of your DMs. But one thing I want to say about the Patreon. You're not going to get a quicker response from me. If you mail me on Patreon. Because I don't want to have a Patreon. Where people. I want everyone to get the exact same podcast and the exact same experience. I want to try and be egalitarian and I don't want to respond to people quicker on

Patreon just because they're paying me. I don't want to do that. I want, if you pay the Patreon, you're not getting anything different to anyone else. I want to try and keep it equal. But if I'm not responding to DMs on Instagram, I'm blindbybowclub on Instagram, give me a follow. I try and respond to as many DMs as I can, but I get about 100 a day. Let's plug a couple of gigs. My next gig is on the 6th of February in Oslo in Norway,

where I'm going to be doing a live podcast and I cannot wait to go to Oslo and just experience a place and a culture I've never been to before and I can't wait to come to my lovely Norwegian listeners and do you a podcast come along to that, it'll be crack then on the 8th

and the 9th I'm in Berlin first night in Berlin is sold out couple of tickets left for the second one and the 9th I'm in Berlin first night in Berlin is sold out couple of tickets left for the second one 20th of February I'm in Derry 23rd of February I'm up in Killarney can't wait for that then March 7th and 8th tiny little gigs down in Sea Church in Cork

very small venues, very few tickets I just love that little podcast festival that they have down there in Sea Church in Cork. Very small venues, very few tickets. I just love that little podcast festival that they have down there in Sea Church in Cork. Beautiful area. So I'm going down doing that. And then a huge big fucking tour of England, Scotland and Wales in April. Right. Newcastle, Glasgow, Nottingham, Cardiff, Brighton, Bristol and then my biggest ever live podcast in the Hammersmith Apollo in London on the 1st of May so come along to those please. So I'm still trying to figure out the theme of this week's podcast as I've been going along the narrative of this story that I've been telling, it's very much being informed by the path of Storm Aisha.

I know that much. If you were to take a map of Ireland and you start with the beginning of this podcast, I start down in Limerick looking at that horse and then Robbie Williams rings me and then if you look at the map and the path of Storm Isha she's gone from Limerick

in a crescent shape up Ireland, then she hits about Meath where the bog bodies are and then she circles right around and gets real heavy and hard up there around the Aran Islands and Mayo above it.

So this week's narrative is definitely driven by the path of Storm Aisha. And I love that from an Irish oral storytelling perspective, to have the narrative of a story driven by the path of a storm. That feels right. But also what's driving the narrative is there's that tension there's that conflict in there because of fucking Robbie Williams' hair gel and I like to think that

the Dax wax I'm following the path of Storm Isha up Ireland but you know what if I had a head full of red Dax it doesn't matter how strong Isha's winds are, they wouldn't move a hair on my head because red dachs is so strong. I'd be frozen.

My hair would be frozen in that storm. So the Aran Islands is getting a red, a red warning from Isha at the moment. Her strongest wind is finishing up there. Aisha at the moment. Her strongest wind is finishing up there. And just above the Aran Islands you have the area of Mayo, which is also in a red weather warning. I want to talk about Gráinne O'Malley,

or Grace O'Malley as she's known, the Pirate Queen. Irish kingship was quite patriarchal. It was quite patriarchal. You know, even when I was speaking there about the bog bodies 2300 years ago and the men are having their nipples chopped off and the fertility with the land but around the 1500s you had the O'Malley clan the kingdom of O'Malley which was of O'Malley which was up around Mayo and around the Aran Islands. This was a seafaring clan so they weren't like they were petty kings it was it was a petty Irish kingdom but they weren't concerned with the land they were concerned with the sea and Grace O'Malley was a pirate.

And Grace O'Malley was a pirate. She raided and she robbed ships. And she was the matriarch of her clan. In 1590 she raided the Aran Islands and burnt them. You see, in the 1500s, 500 years ago, yes, Ireland was colonised by Britain. But by the 1500s,s British power it was really only concentrated around the area of the pale

around Dublin and its surrounding areas but everything beyond the pale everything beyond the pale to the west that was the fucking wild west and the Brits didn't have full control and you still had petty kingdoms and Gaelic Irish

lords and you had indigenous culture and even though the people were Christian you still had a lot of pagan beliefs. Nipples were getting sucked in the 1500s lads and Britain didn't like this. Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII's daughter, she didn't like this. They didn't like that there was this land that they wanted to colonise and they only really had power around Dublin and everything outside the pale. It was a different culture, different language that was rebellious and that wasn't loyal to Britain. And it was Queen Elizabeth I with the Tudor conquest of Ireland where you started to see real colonization, deliberate genocide, eradication of people, culture, language,

customs and replacing people with planters, with colonists. From about the 1600s onwards that's when Irish history starts getting really really sad and one of the last powerful Irish chieftains was Gráinne O'Malley the pirate queen who controlled all the seas up there around the Aran Islands and around Mayo and around Westport which is getting battered heavily right now by Isha. Gráinne O'Malley was feared and ferocious and a brilliant negotiator and a brilliant political mind. If you fished off the west coast of Ireland you paid tribute to Grace O'Malley and her clan but one of the issues with Grace O'Malley, Gráinne O'Malley, is... most of the historical records of her were written by the

English, which is quite strange. And you don't see much mention of Gráinne O'Malley in the Irish manuscripts and the annals. But what we do know is that she travelled to England and sat down and had a meeting with Queen Elizabeth, which by itself is kind of strange because you wouldn't imagine that Queen Elizabeth is going to meet with some Gaelic chieftain, but she did and Grace O'Malley refused the bow because she didn't recognize Queen Elizabeth as the ruler of Ireland and for her to have gotten away with that meant that she had, she had real power that the Brits were afraid of. But something I find fucking fascinating, something I find fascinating that ties in with the theme of this podcast. Which I'm not fully sure what this podcast theme is.

I know I'm following the path of Storm Aisha. And dropping bits of history along her path. And I know because of Robbie Williams, I'm wearing dacks in my hair. And my hair won't move with the wind because of the strong wax in my hair. But the last place on my journey is Westport in Mayo. Westport

in Mayo is where Storm Isha ends the night. That's the strongest part of the tale. Westport in Mayo tonight is under a severe red warning from Isha. Westport is also the seat of Grace O'Malley. Grace O'Malley, the Pirate Queen and the O'Malley Clan. Their stronghold was Westport, a port town in Mayo.

And they held their own there with forts, controlling the western seaboard. The last time they did it was 500 years ago. Now here's the little mad connection I see. And I'm imagining myself on a ship with the wind blowing in my face. I'm imagining the fishermen going back hundreds of years. And I'm imagining the O'Malley clan up there on ships hundreds of years ago. With storms like Isha blowing into their faces. And I'm on that ship and I've got red dacks in my hair and my hair doesn't move.

When I was younger and I used to make funny faces, my ma used to say to me, if you make that funny face and a strong breeze comes, your face is going to stay like that forever. Your muscles in your face will freeze and be stuck like that forever. And I'm thinking about Grace O'Malley on a ship and all the fishermen and their faces freezing, their expressions staying frozen. I'm going to take a little detour to Germany in the 1820s. Mysterious outbreaks of diseases happened in the 1820s in Germany and parts of France. Entire villages all at once would get this very rapid disease where their muscles would freeze. The muscles in their face would fall limp.

Their legs would freeze. And then they'd all die. And no one knew what the fuck this was and no one knew why it was happening. And the disease became known as sausage poisoning because what they found was when anyone in Germany in the 1820s ate spoiled pork sausages they would get this sudden, quick, deadly disease where their facial muscles would freeze and they'd die. Now what this was was botulinum toxin. It's a deadly form of food poisoning. Botulinum toxin is one of the most deadly toxins on earth. But why did it just start popping up in the 1820s? Because of the Napoleonic Wars,

people were trying to preserve meat, specifically pork, for longer. Smoked sausages and also canning, early forms of canned food. Botulinum toxin has been around for forever. But when you try and preserve meat in an anaerobic environment, in an environment that doesn't have oxygen, then botulinum toxin flourishes. If you put meat in a

can and it's not canned properly, it's not pasteurized, the bacteria isn't killed then botulinum toxin will flourish the bog bodies bog bodies are human flesh you bury a bog body in an anaerobic environment where there's not oxygen if you dig that corpse up when it's fresh and you eat it there's going to be botulinum toxin in it because it's an anaerobic environment. So from the 1800s onwards in Europe people were getting botulinum poisoning. Botulinum toxin targets the muscles in the body. That's why the people who were getting poisoning, their eyelids were drooping, they couldn't move the muscles on their faces, their facial expressions were freezing and then

they'd die. Deadly poison. But botulinum toxin is also where we get Botox. Botox injections are very, very common. When someone gets a Botox injection on their face, what you're doing is in a very controlled way, making certain muscles in your face paralyzed, freezing your expression. Batchelinium is one of the most deadly poisons known to man, but just the tiniest amount is Botox and it paralyzes the muscles on your face and then you look younger. It'll freeze your face. It'll freeze your expression just like a sailor at sea. Here's the mad connection that I see. Gráinne O'Malley, Grace O'Malley, her stronghold, her home was in Westport in Mayo. That's the end of our journey for this podcast. That's where Storm Aisha ends up, up in Westport in Mayo.

Right now, all the Botox in the world is made in Westport in Mayo. There's a US pharmaceutical plant in Westport in Mayo called Allergan. And every single bit of Botox in the world, the Botox that goes into Kim Kardashian's face. If you get Botox, anyone, anywhere in the world, it was made in Mayo, Westport. The same anaerobic conditions that lead to bog bodies and botulinum toxin. It all ends up in Westport as Botox being injected into the faces of rich people who want their expressions frozen. And here's the most fascinating thing that I find about Botox, because Botox is widespread. Lots of people get Botox injections. Now I'm not saying Robbie

Williams had Botox injections in this documentary at the start of the podcast. He had Dax wax in his hair. That's not what I'm saying. Maybe he did. He's a rich man in Hollywood. Quite possible. But when you inject Botox into one of the muscles of your face, it reduces wrinkles, gives you a younger appearance, but you are literally paralyzing the muscle in your face. That's what Botox does. But when you paralyze the muscles of your face, that's what Botox does but when you paralyze the muscles of your face it means that it makes facial expressions difficult frowning smiling being surprised you're literally paralyzing some muscles so you're not going to be as facially expressive as you were before you got a Botox injection but

psychologists have done studies on people who've received Botox injections. They did the first study in about 2015 and the most recent one in March of 2023. They found that people who were receiving Botox injections were gradually losing the ability to empathize with other people. See, humans humans we mirror other people's emotions. If you are speaking to someone and they smile or they frown whether you know it or not we kind of mirror those emotions with our own faces

unbeknownst to ourselves. But if you're speaking to someone who's sad or someone who's surprised or happy and because you have Botox injections in your forehead you're no longer mirroring the emotions of the other person because some of your facial muscles are paralyzed and this is based on on research and proper research and studies they found with MRI scans that people receiving Botox treatment eventually had a reduced ability to read other people's emotions. A reduced ability to identify if another person is sad or angry or happy or surprised. Empathy, that's empathy. Empathy is the capacity to know what another person is feeling and to understand it. So Westport in Mayo, the final destination of Storm Isha, with her wind that will freeze your face, the home of Grace O'Malley,

is the only place in the world where Botox is made. And Westport is responsible for people losing the capacity to empathise. And they haven't done long term studies yet. But I mean Jesus. Anyone with a cursory grasp of psychology will tell you. If you lose your ability to empathise with other people. And to recognise emotions in other people. You'll eventually lose your capacity to recognise your own emotions. Your intrapersonal emotional intelligence. And that's not a great recipe for solid mental health.

So that's this week's podcast. I don't want to be, I'm not shaming anyone for getting fucking Botox injections. I'm sure it's grand. What I'm doing is, isn't that fascinating? I'm sure it's grand. What I'm doing is. Isn't that fascinating. I just love all those little strange connections. And I enjoyed. I enjoyed telling you a story.

Where the narrative was driven. By the path of a storm. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime. Kiss a wasp. Snuggle a puffin. Feed bark to a horse. Don't eat gone-off sausages. rock city you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.